Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 100.djvu/195

Rh of energy, enthusiasm or, in short, "genius." The most interesting of these essays are those devoted to Spanish and Italian literature, treated as they are in a manner highly instructive, perspicuous, and comprehensive. Besides these, we have biographical papers on Brockden Brown, the amiable novelist of Philadelphia, whose stories of "Wieland" and "Ormond" are still popular with lovers of excitement—on Sir Walter Scott, whose character and writings are commented upon with admiring respect,—on Molière and Cervantes, the great exemplars of foreign wit and humor. There are also reviews of Washington Irving's Conquest of Granada of Bancroft's United States, of Madame Calderon's Mexico, of Chateaubriand's English Literature, and of Allan Cunningham's Scottish Song. Altogether, these essays, various indeed in merit, and sometimes common-place in thought and expression, make up a very readable volume—the information and quiet diction of which will be often turned to, with a grateful sense of relief, by readers exhausted and satiated with the perusal of "fine writing,"—a commodity whereof the supply is at least equal to the demand, not only in our own wayside literature, but still more emphatically in that of Mr. Prescott's fatherland.

—You have probably read in the public journals of late, more frequently than formerly, accounts of collisions, and even serious contests between the gold-seekers and the native inhabitants of California. This collision was inevitable; partly because the hope of discovering more productive gold-fields drove the miners still further into the eastern mountains; partly, because many of them wished to escape in the mountains, that have not yet been subjugated to any authority, from the monthly tax of thirty dollars, which has been imposed for the last two years on every gold-seeker who is not an American citizen. And, finally, because in the plains between the snowy mountains and the Pacific the Americans possess a great numerical superiority over the foreigners; and they regard the latter as unwelcome interlopers in the gold land, which as they say, originally belonged to themselves, they treat them with accordance. How frequently had I opportunities, during my stay of nearly two years in the Californian gold mountains, to discover that this hostility of the Americans towards us was not merely expressed by slight outbreaks of temper, but at times produced serious battles between them and us, so that a campaign on a small scale was often enough being carried on in the mountains.

These are the chief causes that drove us foreigners ever deeper into the eastern mountains, and which had induced my comrades and myself to take up our abode on a plateau at no great distance from the river