2.-The Life of Captain John Smith, the Founder of Virginia. By W. GILMORE SIMMS, Author of "Life of Marion," "History of South-Carolina," etc. New-York: George F. Cooledge & Brother. 1847. We take up a new book from the pen of Mr. Simms, not only with the confidence, warranted by the character of his past performances, that there is good in it, but with a grateful feeling towards the author for the manly perseverance that has so strongly marked his literary career. He has met many difficulties,-far more than usually beset the path of the author, and he has surmounted them all, with a patience of labor and a firmness of will, that are of themselves as certainly the evidences of superiority as they are the means of success. It should be added too, that his reputation is the simple result of what he has done. It is no gift of a literary cotery, whose members combine on the principle of mutual insurance, and make reputations for themselves by echoing and re-echoing each others praises from so many invisible coverts along the world's highways, that the unsuspicious public is made to believe it hears the noise of a mighty fame. There is a hightoned pride of character in Mr. Simms, that has kept him far above such artifices. He would not accept reputation thus stolen,-the goods of success thus swindled from the public. Hence he has not only had no aid of a cotery to manufacture fame and ability for him, but being not of them, he has been treated as an enemy,-a free trader, and of course a foe to the true art and mystery of regularly initiated book-making and author-making. He may well be proud of his success amid such difficulties, and we too are proud not only of what he has done, but of the unsullied manhood which he has guarded as a possession better than fame, through his whole career. The volume before us is one of great interest. Inevitably, this Captain John Smith, as the first successful leader of English colonization, not only in this continent, but in the whole world, must have a strange and peculiar hold on the race, which, following in his wake, has since planted the seeds of many empires on the waste places of the earth. As the man who first opened the gate for this prodigious flood, he must have a marked place in history. But his life, now for the first time fully and fairly set forth, shows that his position was not assigned him by accident,-was not won by a fortunate chance. Never did a man work with intenser earnestness, or with a broader, brighter intelligence;-never did leader, against more numerous or greater obstacles, with means as weak and followers as vicious, achieve a success more brilliant, by mere force of labor, wisdom, genius and heroism. We have used no idle word here. Every one of the four qualities was eminently his. For labor, there was no limit to his activity, his patience, his humility. He was ever a man of good counsel, full of prudence, of expedients suited to the occasion, of large plans in which he saw clearly the right beginning, the best means, and the full consequences. And all this extraordinary superiority of mental vision, showed itself in the very outset of his career, when he was scarcely a man in years, and showed itself most vividly when the emergency was most sudden and most exacting. This is genius. As for his heroism, the whole period of his active life is prodigally strown with daring adventures and brilliant achievements. A foreigner and an adventurer in Transylvania, he was ennobled at the age of twenty-three, for a series of exploits against the Turks, worthy of the brightest days of chivalry. And his active career, signalized by the founding of a new empire in North America, closed when he was little more than thirty years old. He was the first explorer of the coast of New England, gave it its name, and by the ample information which he carried back and published, paved the way to its colonization. But we have no room for the full development of this noble character, and can only invite the reader's attention to the volume in which, at last, ample justice is done to a man who displayed every high and dazzling quality of leadership and personal heroism that have given fame to Cortez and Pizarro, and whose whole career is unsullied by a single act of perfidy or cruelty. We might point out some blemishes in the author's execution of his work, but they are trifling at any rate, and we have followed the current of his narrative with so much pleasure and sympathy, and felt at the conclusion of it that he had so well effected his object of bringing fully into light all the impressive and noble lineaments of his hero, that we have no disposition to speck our praise with petty censures. His Life of Captain Smith will address itself to every generous heart, and if it does not increase the reputation of the author, it will prove that he knows well how to preserve what he has so worthily won. SOUTHERN QUARTERLY REVIEW. No. XXIV. OCTOBER, 1847. ART. I.-The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America. By JOHN JAMES AUDUBON, F.R.S., &c. &c., and the Rev. JOHN BACHMAN, D.D., &c. &c. New-York: Published by J. J. Audubon. 1846. BIRDS are the type of aspiration. They address the imagination. They appeal to what is exulting and exalting in us: "As birds within the wind, As the fish within the wave, As the thoughts of man's own mind, Animals or quadrupeds, on the other hand, are types of the sensuous life. They appeal to our material, lower and purely animal instincts. The indices of passion, they prefigure and embody individually, those attributes which in us are expressed and modified in unity. The bird has wings, and, like the imagination or the soul, triumphs over time and space. It lives in the pure ether, all its modes and associations are those of the soul's life. Even its impulses are those of cold and clear intellection. When it "strikes" it kills. The quick, fierce promptitude of appetite knows no pause. It never dallies with its prey to gloat upon its agonies, or warm its hunger upon the action of fear in the struggles to escape, as do the cat tribe and many others of the quadrupeds. With it, to feel is to do, and to do quickly. Veni, vidi, vici, is the accepted motto of fiery, VOL. XII. -NO. 24. 24 keen, victorious thought. The beastly and vicious sluggards of action, are those who creep to conquer. They are always like the tiger when he misses a leap-they slink off with their tails between their legs, and may then be kicked with impunity by any body who chooses: but if they happen to hit the prey, they torture it and revel over its death, through the movements of a hideous ecstacy. The beast is crushed by its grossness, and in its highest moods is a crawler with its belly in the dust. Even in the exultings of its passion-in the murderous bound upon its prey-it must shake the earth from off its claws. It is "of the earth earthy" and is associated with the viciousness, the baseness of filth and dirt. However nice it may be, however intact of the habitual soil, it may keep its "pelage," yet are its appetites thirsty for blood, like the absorbing earth, and its passions, lingering deadly, but sure as the revolving seasons. It may be said that we have taken extreme cases; but we assert, without hesitation, that there are no carnivorous birds who linger over the destruction of their prey, and no quadrupeds who do not. We admit that in the genera Canis, Vulpes, Fiber and Mus, we have cases in which the prey is very quickly destroyed; but in these instances, though rapid as they are, there is always an accompaniment of angry grumbling which shows that the appetite for devouring is increased by resistance to death. This is not so in birds. When they strike it is for the death. There is no intermediate ground. They kill and swallow-sometimes, as is the case with most of the fishers, they do not even wait to tear, but deglutate alive. As with the higher intellect, alimentation is with them a means, not an end--life has higher blisses for them— they eat to live, while the animal lives to eat. The joy of wings, of sunshine and of singing-of battle with the wind and storms-of rocking on the wave of forest tops-or swinging with the bound of waters, is to them the nobler purpose, while the beast licks thirsty chops forever, and with baleful eye, glares always the insatiate lust of ravin, through the smiles of peaceful nature. Nevertheless, for all this, it must be confessed, that as yet animals more closely approximate our sympathies-appeal through more numerous traits of consanguinity to our interest than birds. This, though honest and honorable, is somewhat humiliating to a transcendental pride. They who would sillily have the human all spiritualized, forget that such conditions belong to a remote development, or the other life; that, linked as we are here with the material, it is as brave of us, and as necessary, that we should be true animals, as that we should be true angels. Our mingled being can as yet be neither one nor the other wholly, but must wisely compound between the extremes, and be simply what we are--men! As men, then, all the venerable past is sacred to our memory, as the cheerful future is to our hope. The youth of humanity, in which the material or passional life predominated so much over the spiritual, was just as excellent and as noble as its present condition. Although fanatics may regard this proposition as crude and profane, it is, nevertheless, absolutely true, that beginning with germination, every stage of development to its highest point, is equally honorable and to be honored. Is the flower with the sun-light on it more to be regarded than the first pale leaf which struggles to the air from out the gloomy foldings of the earth? Is the great tree, bending beneath the ruddy weight of fruitage, more respectable in God's economy of progress, than the small dark seed from the entombment of which its proud show is the resurrection? It is the weak mistake of imperfectly developed and partially educated minds, that all the past of human development has been monstrously brutal, and that all the present is "evil entirely," and filled with unutterable wrong; that as for the future-if their schemes and theories would only be accepted-the whole basis of things and action must be upturned, and the world be proven to have been all wrong, since the fiat went forth, "let there be light!" This is only one and a very harmless phase, of that transcendental presumption which assumes man for the centre, and reasons out to God! We can hold no very ferocious animosity to such pretensions, so long as they continue to render themselves harmless by their own extravagance. We admit, fully, as even such people could desire, that our human life. is contaminated with "all ungodliness and worldly lusts," but we assert that these are as much the consequences of that order of developments, which it has pleased God in his wisdom to institute for society, as the yearly sloughing of its bark from the tree-the autumnal fading and dropping of its leaves; or when it has approached maturity-the fall of its flowers in spring-the summer ripening, is of that |