and commodious houses, hanging, as it were, upon the declivities of mountains, or seated in the midst of verdant dells, "looking tranquillity." These with the various tints of vivid green, interspersed with rich and diversified fields of grain-the silvery buckwheat, golden rye, and glittering ranks of corn-with numerous flocks and herds browsing the sun-clad hills, or ruminating beneath umbrageous trees, form a perfection of landscape calculated to gratify the most fastidious taste, and to amuse and charm the most capricious and glowing imagination.

Were the efforts of Art combined with those of Nature, and regulated by the dictates of an improved taste, this highly favoured place would burst upon the enraptured traveller with all the potent charms of magic or enchantment. The bath which is most inviting and consequently most used, is situated in a beautiful vale opposite to, and about two hundred and twenty feet from, the mansion house, at the extremity of a grove of lofty beach trees: near it is the chalybeate spring, perpetually flowing from a rock into a white marble reservoir: there is connected with the above mentioned, another plunging and one shower bath. In an adjoining meadow there is also another plunging bath and chalybeate spring, rather more highly impregnated than the other.

The transparent bath is surrounded by a stone wall twelve feet high; the bath itself being eight and a half feet square, and four feet nine inches deep: the bottom of fine blue gravel, through which, in a variety of places, the rising of the spring is visible.

The principal house for the accommodation of visitors is a frame building one hundred and six feet in length, and thirty six in breadth, erected on the side of a mountain, in a north east direction from the mansion house, and distant from it about one hundred and twenty yards; the upper story is divided into ten small rooms, and the lower floor into a central dining room, sixty by twenty six-feet, with a handsome parlour at one end, and two bed rooms at the other: underneath are kitchens and a billiard room; along the whole front of the middle story is a portico nine feet wide. This large building was erected for and occupied as a military hospital during the revolutionary war; it has since been plastered and rendered a comfortable dwelling.

The prefixed view was taken from the upper part of the mountain, on the side and near the base of which this house stands; the roof and upper story are seen: the house on the right hand is the old mansion house, opposite to which are the grove and bath; and the buildings between the two houses are stables; that in the meadow and in front of the long house is a bathing house. Pickering creek runs through the meadows in front of both houses.

It is remarkable that on this Farm which consists of one hundred and sixty acres, there are seven mineral springs, all chalybeate, and nearly of the same strength; and that no others have been discovered in the county. The hills surrounding the springs now in use are chiefly of granite, in a great variety of combinations; the principal are felt-spar and quartz, interspersed with mica, and small particles of fibrous schorl.

The diseases immediately affected by this water, it being a pow erful tonic, are rheumatic and nervous affections, palsy, hysteria, epilepsy, obstructions of the liver and spleen, and all complaints which are accompanied with general languor and debility.

A.

MR. BURKE'S IMITATORS.-FOR THE PORT FOLIO.

As the season is now advancing when the sun, moon, stars and comets are to undergo an annual levy to contribute their respective quotas towards the embellishment of our country's honour, it may not be improper to indulge in a few reflections on an occasion so illustrious. The anniversary of our national existence is usually celebrated with all the splendor that the solar system can confer, when nicely wrought up into metaphors. I beg leave to declare in the outset that I have no objection to a revival of the "decree of Augustus Cæsar that all the world shall be taxed," if the revenue can be appropriated to purposes so laudable. If the solar system is capable either by metaphor,

or otherwise of adding any thing to our national dignity, imperious necessity demands such a subsidy. This license is the more indispensable as the emperor of France is about appropriating the planet we inhabit to his own exclusive enjoyment. It is a well known maxim of common law, that he who takes the freehold is fairly entitled to the emblements. As his imperial majesty therefore claims the earth in fee simple, all metaphors, similies, images and allusions derived from earth may fairly be considered in the light of emblements and do of right appertain unto the owner. To this cause I impute the strong partiality of our anniversary orators to resort to celestial bodies to bespangle their panegyrics. As his imperial majesty has never laid perpetual claim to the celestial regions, or has never taken possession of them, our orators may exercise a custom, which as Blackstone informs us was recognized by common law, that authorised paupers to glean on the premises.

As this is the season for the resuscitation of such metaphors, I think it proper to make a few remarks on that species of composition. First I beg leave to enter a complaint, in behalf of Edmund Burke, that whatever licences our orators and others think proper to take with "bodies celestial" they have no right to consider Mr. Burke as one of that number. These gentlemen, however, regard his page as common property as the firmament, and borrow from him with the same prodigality; nay what is more inexcusable they take his very words and divert them from their original purpose. Burke inveighs against the administration of his country, and our orators make him guilty of treason by inveighing against the country itself. Burke moreover applauds a government consisting of king, lords and commons; our orators make him utter identically the same panegyrics on a government purely republican. Burke testifies in rich and gorgeous language his detestation of the French revolution; our orators have caused him to pour the same philippics on those who have opposed that revolution. Burke laments the misery and oppression which his fellow subjects in India suffer; our orators compel him to speak the same language of the sufferings of his fellow subjects at home. Thus Burke is made inconsistent with himself both in his invectives and panegyrics.

Now, unless those gentlemen, who have made such liberal use of his language, can produce a letter of attorney under the hand and seal of the orator, specially empowering them to utter recantations in his behalf, and confirming every thing that they do, I must think his reputation very unsafe in their hands.

Probably no man has done more injury, though unintentionally, to the taste of American youth than this celebrated writer. He throws over his subject a metaphoric veil, rich, and sparkling with every variegated brilliance. In whatever he did he was redundant. His speeches, his writings, and, if biography speak true, his conversation, all bear the same characteristic exuberance. The point he labours to establish is fairly lost amidst a deluge of superior wisdom. When we read his parliamentary speeches, and compare them with the motion that he advocates, or opposes, we can but be astonished that so trivial a cause should move such a mass of intellect. Dr. Goldsmith, that nice and acute discerner of character, alluded to this in the following lines,

"Who too deep for his hearers still went on refining,

And thought of convincing while they thought of dining."

This rendered him so unqualified to manage the impeachment against Warren Hastings. The lord chancellor restricted. the debates of the managers with the punctilious nicety of a special pleader. Burke, whose mind was warmed by the sufferings of India, could not endure such severity of discipline; he struggled for enlargement, and his constitutional irritability, sharpened by opposition, produced those frequent and intemperate sallies of passion of which his more phlegmatic opponents never failed to reap the advantage. With the pen he was alike uncontrollable. His letter in which he has delivered down the name of Bedford to indignant posterity, is a composition entirely of this cast. No one remembers the attack made upon him in the house of lords when he reads the justification of Burke. It was thus the fate of this man to be above the subject which he handled, and of him it may be said in the language of Dr. Young, with more truth than poetry, that he

"Resembled ocean into tempest wrought
To waft a feather or to drown a fly."

An imagination so active, and governed by a sensibility as ardent, delighted to hold a dangerous career. Many of us remember that when his reflections on the French revolution were first ushered into the world, men of sober temperature pronounced them the ravings of insanity. Amidst the acclamations and admiring plaudits of millions, he had the courage to stand alone in his censure, and his warning voice was almost literally "the voice of one crying in the wilderness." Subsequent events stamped this insanity with an authenticity next to revelation. Characters of this kind "are a law unto themselves." The mind of the reader is full of Burke, and the gorgeous drapery of his language reminds him of a criticism of Charles Fox no less elegant than just, that "his metaphors were more his foils than his ornaments." Souls combining such rare and wonderful qualities are scarcely fitted by nature for any situation. As politicians they are dangerous; their large and expansive views of the subject cannot bear the minuteness of detail, difficulties insurmountable appear to them diminished to the size of cobwebs, and are rather incentives to persevere than obstacles to confront. This will explain the cause of Burke's long and unprofitable labour in the government of the Indies. Contrasting the free and happy nature of the government at home, with the tyranny and oppression which his fellow subjects suffered abroad, he adopted the quixotic idea of securing to them all the blessings of the English constitution. This was a subject on which his fancy so delighted to dwell that he would probably, had the occasion required it, have died on the scaffold a martyr to the illusion. Visionary as this scheme undoubtedly was, it gave rise to specimens of eloquence that would not have disgraced the proudest days of Greece and Rome. It evaporated, where it began, in the effusions of imagination, and remains to this day a noble record of genius and of benevolence, and of nothing else. Burke was at last furnished with an opponent mighty enough for his genius to encounter, and that was the French revolution. This engrossed the mind of Burke, condensed all his powers, and invigora