370 THE YOUNG AMERICAN.

English censure. One cause of this is our immense reading, and that reading chiefly confined to the productions of the English press. It is also true that t0 imaginative persons in this country there is somewhat bare and bald in our short history and unsettled wilderness. They ask, who would live in a new country that can live in an old? and it is not strange that our youths and maidens should burn to see the picturesque extremes of an anti- quated country. But it is one thing to visit the Pyramids, and another to wish to live there. ‘Would they like tithes to the clergy, and sevenths to the government, and Horse-Guards, and licensed press, and grief when a child is born, and threaten- ing, starved weavers, and a pauperism now consti- tuting one thirteenth of the population? Instead of the open future expanding here before the eye of every boy to vastness, would they like the clos- ing in of the future to a narrow slit of sky, and that fast contracting to be no future? One thing for instance, the beauties of aristocracy, we com- mend to the study of the travelling American. The English, the most conservative people this side of India, are not sensible of the restraint, but an American would seriously resent it. The aristoc- racy, incorporated by law and education, degrades life for the unprivileged classes. It is a question- able compensation to the embittered feeling of a