Part 9

I could find no fossils in this rock. In regard to the metallic ores, I would observe, that I discovered sufficient indications of their existing in Virginia in quantity sufficient to justify a more accurate examination. Iron abounds in almost every part of the western section of the state. Traces of copper, lead, manganese and chrome, have also been discovered near the Blue Ridge; and the gold of Orange County is equal to any found in the Carolinas or Georgia.

I have never seen any thing that exceeds the richness and variety of coloring of the serpentine of the Blue Ridge. This mineral is easily cut, and the fineness and closeness of the grain renders it susceptible of a high polish. At Zoblitz in Saxony, several hundred persons are employed in its manufacture. Besides the minerals belonging to the Talcose formation, and generally accompanying serpentine, are many of them valuable in the arts--for instance, steatite, (soap stone,) talc, chromate of iron, clorite slate, and native magnesia. A geological survey would, most probably, lead to the discovery of most of these minerals.

I could make large additions to this communication, but for the fear of trespassing upon your patience. I will, therefore, close my observations with noticing two instances of want of confidence in the mineral productions of your own state, which I am persuaded that a geological survey would tend to correct. I met many wagons loaded with sulphate of lime (gypsum,) from Nova Scotia, being taken to the interior to be used as a manure; but I did not see one wagon employed to bring carbonate of lime (common lime stone,) from the inexhaustible quarries of the great valley to any other district to be used for the same purpose. In the beautiful and flourishing city of Richmond, I observed the fronts of two stores fitting up in the new and fashionable style with granite (so called,) (sienite,) from Massachusetts, while there exists in the James river, and on its banks, in the immediate vicinity of the town, rocks of a superior quality, in quantities amply sufficient to build a dozen cities.

I have the honor to be, sir, Your obedient servant,

PETER A. BROWNE.

_To his Excellency John Floyd, Governor of Virginia._

LAFAYETTE.

The following tribute to the memory of Lafayette, having been transmitted from Paris for the purpose of being published in some American periodical, the gentleman by whom it was received, has requested that the same may be inserted in the Messenger.

He breathed not the atmosphere of cities at his birth; he was born on the mountain top; he inhaled with the breath of life, the breath of liberty. Though sprung from a lordly race, he was the people's friend; and, under every trial, he displayed the inborn dignity of man.

Rich too he was, but lucre was not his idol; and his liberality was as unbounded, as his heart was generous. At that season of life which, to common men, is a time for pleasure and dissipation, he heard and obeyed the holy call of freedom.

Far off, beyond ocean's bounds, a young and promising nation was struggling for its rights. He felt, as if instinctively, the part allotted to him on the stage of life; and he became America's adopted and beloved son, when in his native land, his name was scarcely known.

On returning to France, he found her laboring under mysterious warnings--of good or evil he knew not--the foreboding pangs of political convulsions; and he put his trust in the cause of humanity, because he judged of other men from himself.

But vain was his boldness and wisdom in council; in vain did he beard in their very den, the infuriate demagogues; a bloody pall was spread over his devoted country; he gave her up in despair, and the dungeon of Olmutz closed upon him as a tomb. When a brighter day arose, his freedom was stipulated as the most glorious trophy of his nation's victories. But the hurricane had swept the ancient fabric from the earth; not a vestige of it remained, so dreadful had been the storm. All the powers of the state were centred in one man; a man of selfishness and pride, who aimed at absorbing all wills in his own. And in sooth he did this, with one sole and great exception. The instinct of freedom, which was as the vital spark in our great citizen, kept him aloof from the man whose empty and ephemeral triumph is stained with the blood and tears of every nation. He retired to his paternal fields; and at a time when the sword ruled paramount, he guided the fruitful ploughshare.

Liberty was no more; and by a hard but just retribution, it was made the rallying word of nations against us. Then fell upon our country unheard of disasters and defeats; after which dawned a milder reign. He now reappears upon the public stage; he comes to heal our wounds, to rekindle in our hearts the love of liberty. He devotes himself to the task with a zeal unceasing, enlightened by long-tried experience, inspired by a pure and upright heart, and animated by a spirit of self denial never equalled. In the prosecution of this noble attempt--he dies!

He was one of those men who, at far and distant intervals, appear in days of degeneracy to arrest the right of proscription against virtue.

He disdained power, he despised riches, he abhorred corruption. He wished that all men should be happy and free.

Yet in the age of barefaced egotism, and under the reign of fraud and knavery, such disinterestedness and candor must inevitably be deceived; therefore is it that our political jugglers sneer at this great and good man--their grovelling minds understand him not.

But his name, pronounced with reverence in both hemispheres, is become the watchword of mankind laboring to be free; and it will stand for ages, as the brightest symbol of humanity.

Thy soul, oh Lafayette! was a pure and glorious emanation from that GOD in whose bosom thou now hast found a resting place. He alone can reward thy manifold virtues, thy constant love of humanity, thy inexhaustible charity, thy piety and truth. Thou art blessed in Christ.

ALEXANDRE DE BOINVILLE.

_Paris, May 1834._

For the Southern Literary Messenger.

PINKNEY'S ELOQUENCE.

Hear you this triton of the minnows?--_Coriolanus_.

"Yet Mr. Pinkney is not an eloquent man; he is convincing, to be sure--and that is to be eloquent in one way; but he would be more, and fails." "Nothing can be further from eloquence, if by eloquence be understood any thing that is persuasive, beautiful, dignified or natural, than the declamation or reasoning of William Pinkney." "His best speeches are a compound of stupendous strength, feeble ornament, affected earnestness, and boisterous turbulent declamation." "But God never meant him for an orator; he has no property of mind or body--no not one, calculated to give him dominion in eloquence."

As old Doiley says in the farce, when told that "gold in the balance of philosophy was light as phlogisticated air," this must be deep, for I don't understand a word of it. The above are extracts from a work, in which the author undertakes to deny to Mr. Pinkney the praise of eloquence. No kind of composition confounds me more than criticism, and especially that sort which pretends to develope the characteristics of some distinguished orator. If one

should So get the start of the majestic world

as to "bear the palm alone," we feel a very natural curiosity to know what was his appearance, his manner, and peculiar style of eloquence; but alas! in the hands of the critic, he assumes so many shapes, that the imagination is absolutely bewildered, and we turn away in despair of finding out what the man was like. The critic like the newspaper, contradicts himself at every step. One sentence tells us what another denies; and we rise from the perusal of his sketch jaded and worn out with the variety of contrariant ideas which have passed through our brains. I am no critic, and heaven forbid I should ever belong to that cold hearted fraternity, who more often pervert taste than improve it; but I cannot forbear contesting the truth of this writer's assertions, and declaring that he seems to me to be a Lilliputian about the body of a Gulliver.

It has been said of Demosthenes, "that he has been deservedly styled the prince of orators. His orations are strongly animated, and full of the impetuosity and ardor of public spirit. His composition is not distinguished by _ornament_ and splendor. Negligent of the lesser graces, he seems to have aimed at the sublime, which lies in sentiment. His action and pronunciation are said to have been uncommonly _vehement_ and _ardent_. The Archbishop of Cambray gives him the preference to Cicero, against whom he makes the objection of too much _ornament_." According therefore to this author, if Wm. Pinkney was not an orator, it follows that Demosthenes was none; because their style of eloquence seems to have been alike in almost every particular, except that Pinkney aimed at _ornament_, of which Demosthenes had none and Cicero too much. If speeches, characterized by _stupendous strength_, and _turbulent declamation_, and _convincing argument_, are neither "persuasive, nor dignified, nor natural," then was not Demosthenes persuasive, nor dignified, nor natural, and of course he was no orator according to this definition. If ornament be a fault in Mr. Pinkney, he had it in common with Cicero; but perhaps the author may say that Cicero attained what Pinkney only aimed at. Hear him then again on the subject of ornament, so passionately loved by Mr. Pinkney. "Bring him in contact with a truly poetical mind, and his argument resembles a battery of colored fire-works, giving out incessant brightness and reverberation." It would seem then that ornament is not a common trait of his eloquence, but a glitter which is effected by attrition against poetical minds. It is then that he draws upon the inexhaustible stores of beauty laid up in his mind, gathered from the writings of Shakspeare and others, and retained by the force of a powerful memory. He has no fancy of his own, but uses the fancy of others. Then surely he is so far superior to Demosthenes, whose eloquence was thought to border on the hard and dry; alike impetuous, vehement, stupendous and convincing with him, and superadding a relish for the beauties of poetry; not aiming at any _ornament_ of his own, but contented with what suggested itself in illustration of his argument from the pen of others. Then how is he feeble in ornament? But again; if there be nothing of dignity or nature in Pinkney's _reasoning_, how is it discovered that his mind is "_adamant clamped with iron_," [a poor conception, and suiting the ideas of a blacksmith better than a belles-lettres scholar--for the iron adds nothing to our thoughts of the strength of adamant;] that it is "a colossal pile of granite, over which the thunders of heaven might roll," &c. &c. It is useless to quote the rest of the unmeaning fustian of the sentence.

After all this avowal of stupendous strength of argument, we are told in a subsequent paragraph, that say what we will of Mr. Pinkney's argument, he the author, never saw him yet--no never, pursue his argument steadily for ten minutes at a time. Then how can it be so overwhelming and convincing? Nothing lessens so much the force of argument as a perpetual aberration from the subject. Again; "God never meant him for an orator; he has no property of mind or body," &c. &c. Not to say any thing of the presumption and impiety of determining for God, I would ask what are the _bodily properties_ of an orator? This writer has not condescended to define them, although he dwells at large upon such as he thinks cast discredit upon Mr. Pinkney. It is scarcely necessary to observe that Demosthenes was ungraceful in figure and action; and that not only _orators_, but very wise and learned men, have been repulsive in their persons, their features, and their manners also. Though Cæsar and Cicero were exempt from defect in this respect, as far as I remember Demosthenes stuttered--Socrates was bald and flatnosed--Anthony a rough soldier--Lord Chatham's eloquence was forcible, but uniform and ungraceful--Fox was a fop of Bond street, and wore high heeled morocco shoes. Mr. Pinkney therefore may, without reproach, be a "_thick, stout man, with a red fat English face_," and Mr. Fox will keep him in countenance as a fashionable man. The facetious Peter Pindar has said, that

Love hates your large fat lubberly fellows, Panting and blowing like a blacksmith's bellows;

but I never heard that oratory did.

In the next breath we hear that "Mr. Pinkney has a continual appearance of natural superciliousness and affected courtesy." _Continual_--and yet afterwards "his manner is exceedingly arrogant and unpropitiating;" and his deportment had been already described as "_brutal, arrogant, full of sound and fury, accompanied by the rude and violent gestures of a vulgar fellow_." One moment he is a giant, not only _metaphorically_, but in sober truth, if we may judge from his stentorian lungs, which have caused the author's whole system to jar--and from those violent gesticulations, which indicate uncommon personal strength;--the next, he turns out to be only five feet ten, and a petit maitre, and affectedly courtly and conciliatory; and yet "nothing could make a gentleman of him; he can neither look, act, _speak_, sit, nor _talk_ like one." Notwithstanding all this scurrility and abuse of Mr. Pinkney's person, the author is not yet exhausted, but lavishes more upon his intellect. "The physical powers of Mr. Pinkney," he says, "are to my notion, strictly correspondent with his intellectual ones; both arc solid, strong and substantial, but without grace, dignity or loftiness." Loftiness! the same man who has such "prodigious elevation and amplitude of mind," "and both have _a dash of fat English dandyism_." I confess myself wholly at a loss to comprehend what the fat dandyism of the intellectual powers is. A man's mind might, by a forced metaphor, be said to be dandyish, perhaps; but a _fat mind_, is a solecism in words wholly inadmissible, I think. "His style of eloquence," it is added, "is a most disagreeable and unnatural compound of the worst faults of the worst speakers." "He is said to resemble Lord Erskine as he was in the day of his power: it is a libel on Erskine, who was himself a libel on the reputation of his country as a speaker." "The language of Mr. Pinkney does resemble that of Lord Erskine; his reasoning is about as forcible." If the term style here be the manner of speaking appropriate to particular characters, I have shown that the censure is equally applicable to Demosthenes, the prince of orators, who, in addition to his vehemence, was so ungraceful in his motions, that it was necessary for him to practice with a naked sword hanging over his shoulder; and therefore to compare Demosthenes to Lord Erskine is a libel on Lord Erskine, himself a libel on his country as a speaker--and _argal_, as Shakspeare says, Demosthenes is inferior to English orators. If, again, the word style mean the manner of writing with regard to language, these sentences would involve a contradiction, and Mr. Pinkney is like and unlike Lord Erskine at the same time.

Yet why do I talk of Demosthenes? In the following sentences the author admits that Mr. P. copied too closely after Cicero and Demosthenes. "He desired to be eloquent; he thought of Demosthenes and Cicero, and his heart swelled with ambition. He remembered not that he was to be a lawyer, and that Demosthenes and Cicero were declaimers. He who should look to move a body of Americans in a court of justice by the best thundering of Demosthenes, would only make himself ridiculous." Very true; and this may certainly prove that Mr. Pinkney might have been a greater _lawyer_, by bending the whole force of his mind to that one pursuit; but it has nothing to do with the premises. The ground is here changed; this is not the point to be proved--not the quod erat demonstrandum. The point to be proved is not the _propriety_ of displaying eloquence before a jury, but that Wm. Pinkney was never meant by God for an orator; that he has no property of mind or body to make one. This is assuredly the scope of the extracts. Had Mr. P. not aimed at _ornament_, his ashes might have passed undisturbed by the author, who allows that he was decidedly the greatest _lawyer_ in America, but is very angry that he was not the greatest in the world. In spite of all this, however, Pinkney "pursued his way like a conqueror, and had well nigh established himself as the high priest of eloquence in America." Why, what a stupid, blind, misjudging race we must be, to think of choosing a man for our high priest of eloquence whom God never meant for an orator, and who had no property, not one, of mind or body, for his business--and never to awaken from our folly until this writer tore the urim and thummim from his breast. "The giant," he says, "is gone down like a giant to the household of death," and there should at least have escaped the imputation of baseness which deserved shooting. How _giants_ die, I pretend not to know; but imagine such giants die pretty much like other people; and it seems to me perfectly ridiculous to talk of a man's dying like a giant. At that awful hour, the littleness of the greatest genius is a subject of melancholy reflection. I will only add that I know nothing of this writer. If his object was to guard us against the mischievous effects of a false taste in eloquence, he cannot be angry with me for wishing to guard against the equally bad effects of a false taste in criticism.

NUGATOR.

THE DANDY CHASTISED.

In this metropolis a real, downright exquisite is rarely to be seen. Curiosity may be gratified by a good description of the animal as exhibited in other places. The following communication is from one residing in a city much more fashionable than ours. Its author seems well informed in the science of æsthetics; and it is to be hoped that he will exert himself to correct mistaken impressions as to the beautiful. Further notices by him may be beneficial.

C.

Among the follies and vices of mankind, there is nothing more remarkable or ridiculous than the continual effort, among all classes and kinds of people--savage, civilized, and pseudo-civilized--to increase or impart beauty and comeliness to their forms and features. Through what various and opposite means is this cherished object pursued! This savage tattoos his cheeks--that smooths and oils them, and would esteem the gratuitous tattoonry of the small-pox a graver misfortune than all the pain attendant on the disease.

The Indians on our Western border are wont to assume the character of the bear, the panther, or some "other interesting beast of prey," and place their ambition in enacting the look and conduct of such beast to the life--and "to the death."

The belle of that age is surrounded by a vast circumvallation of hoop--of this, is pinched into a narrow breastwork of steel and whale-bone.

To cramp the feet into unnatural littleness is now the sad task of those who, to be beautiful, are willing to suffer the tortures of the thumb-screw--or the toe-screw, (it matters not.) The fashion changes, and long pointed shapeless boots deform the human foot.

In no age--in no condition, can men and women be persuaded that God Almighty has made them well,--albeit he hath "made man after his own image," and woman much better than man.

They must fall to reforming their forms by some fanciful deformity.

But the innovation stops not here. Thus far it might be borne. The human form cannot be wholly changed by all the ingenuity of vanity and fashion. It must still retain its principal attributes, and lose not all its lustre. Not so with manners. They are more plastic. From fashion and human folly they accordingly suffer most. Fashion is the sworn foe of nature, and in this field there is no natural bound to its triumphs.

On the face of the earth, or in the waters, there is no animal to my feelings so wholly hateful as a modern exquisite: a wretch that has put off his natural aspect to put on a clay mask, hard, ungainly, inflexible, of lifeless mud--which no Prometheus could vivify: a thing which can boast neither the humor of the monkey, nor the fierce respectability of the wild beast,--not the usefulness of the tame--still less the dignity and bearing of a man.

Sometime since, after sauntering an evening through a ball room, in which some such caricatures of men were existing, I went home and vented my rage in the following doggerel:

The Indignant Rhymes of a Natural Proser.

Oh! Muse, assist me in my strain! Your Museship I would entertain With a poetic flagellation: Assist me Muse, to lay the lash on, With pen formed from a dog-wood switch, Fit to chastise a dunce: with pitch For ink, and bull's hide parchment handy; Now aid me, Muse, and we'll chastise a dandy.

That petty, puny, paltry, pretty thing-- In form a wasp, but destitute of sting; Vain as a peacock, soulless as a gnat, Brainless as soulless, finical as flat: Of apes the ape most awkward and most vile-- Jackall of monkeys, and without jacko's wile. The jackall serves none but the noblest beast, But this base thing takes lessons from the least. As Egypt's sons did bow the knee of yore, And worship apes, the eternal God before-- He, in god image framed, with godlike mind, Would be a god--of Egypt's monkey kind. A traveller sage! Europe he hath explored-- His mistress fashion, and an ape his lord. No dignity finds he in native man, Acting and thinking after nature's plan; No wisdom, save in artificial fools-- Nature's apostates--slaves to senseless rules: No beauty sees he, save in gold and lace, A made up figure, and a painted face; And no politeness, save in mere grimace.

Go! thou vile satire on the human race; Go! _on all fours_, and seek thy proper place: Go! thing too mean for any mighty ill-- Go! petty monster, "pay thy tailor's bill."

For the Southern Literary Messenger.

PLACED WITH A ROSE UPON A LADY'S CHEEK.

Roses on roses I bestow; Bright rose! to brighter roses go-- Bask in the sunlight of her eyes, Nor dread their fires; the dews which rise In pity for a heart that grieves, Will shed reviving coolness on thy leaves.

QUESTUS.

_Norfolk_.

For the Southern Literary Messenger.

THE ALLEGHANY LEVELS.

The following description of a part of Virginia and Maryland, seldom visited and but little known, may have sufficient interest to deserve a place in the columns of the Messenger.

The country alluded to, is in the northern part of this state, and comprehends that corner of Maryland included between the North Branch of Potomac and a line due north from the Fairfax stone, at the head spring of that stream, to the Pennsylvania line; and also a portion of the territory at present in dispute between the two states; Maryland claiming as her boundaries the South Branch of Potomac and a meridian thence to Mason and Dixon's line,--while the first mentioned limits only are acknowledged by Virginia.

A short notice of the origin of these conflicting titles might, perhaps, be interesting to some readers; but in addition to our lack of complete information, the limits of this sketch will not permit it.