Southern Planter

JOSEPH BONAPARTE.

The Count de Survilliers, (says the National Gazette,) lately paid a short visit to Washington. We are glad to learn that he was received there by the President and other chief members of the government with the kindest and amplest courtesy. They welcomed him, not as a political personage, but as an enlightened & amiable gentleman, whose deportment and dispositions during his residence of seventeen years in our country have entitled him to the esteem and best offices of every citizen—one who had occupied thrones with the spirit of a liberal, and systematically endeavored to promote the improvement and happiness of the great body of the people. The "equanimity with which he has borne the loss of royal grandeur, and his long exile from France, without an abatement of concern in the affairs of the French nation—the respect, regard and just conception with which he has viewed and represented the institutions, social and political, of the American republic—the perfect adaptation of his feelings and social to those of American life—the munificent but unostentatious use which he has made of his possessions—are circumstances which individualize him in our estimation among sojourners, and induce us to make that public mention of his character, and such an incident of his reception at Washington, which we would avoid in ordinary cases of a private nature.

It becomes all Americans, and public writers particularly, to abstain from commemoration or adulation of mere rank, power or opulence, present or past; but at the same time, to honor conduct, principles and purposes which render either of those adventitious attributes most beneficial and truly splendid—to signalize worth when it is peculiar and exemplary—to indulge a degree of gratitude for sentiments, sympathies, testimony and compliances that are exceedingly rare on the part of foreigners in behalf of the democratic communities of the western world.

It might be deemed a proper hint to any one of the very critical and fastidious gentlemen or ladies who come among us from abroad—sticklers for monarchy and emblazoners of European condition and manners—to say to them—“There is here an ex-king, who has ruled in Spain and Naples, of comprehensive education and mature age, of sagacious and observant mind, of great affluence—a brother of Napoleon, a brother-in-law of the Monarch of Sweden, and uncle to princes and dukes—who has passed more than three lustres in our country, travelled repeatedly over a large part of its surface mixed with all its circles, seen in detail all its classes and forms of society—but who takes no airs whatever; has suffered no disgust nor inconvenience; even admires much in American modes and notions, and in the genius and operation of our institutions; and who believes what he does not hesitate to proclaim, that the American people are more moral, informed and fortunately circumstanced, than any other, either cotemporary or of any former age." We do not say that he has learnt to desire a democratical government for France, nor would we intimate that any foreigner should prefer our system to royalty for any of the monarchical countries of Europe; we suppose the hint simply as a caution against early, arrogant and sweeping condemnation; we put the modest or prudence of the common critics on its guard—there being such an individual to be adduced for comparison with themselves, and to give countenance to discoveries and statements and modes and sensibilities the very reverse of theirs, whether expressed orally alone, or on tablets, or in letters, or in formal books, or articles in the London Quarterly and Blackwood's Magazine.