tic prejudice, we are exhorted to dethrone this queen of the world, to blot out this light of the mind, to deface this fair column, to break in pieces this golden chain! We are to discard and throw from us, with loud taunts and bitter imprecations, that reason, which has been the lofty theme of the philosopher, the poet, the moralist, and the divine, whose name was not first named to be abused by the enthusiasts of the French revolution, or to be blasphemed by the madder enthusiasts, their opponents, but is co-eval with, and inseparable from the nature and faculties of man,—is the image of his Maker stamped upon him at his birth, the understanding breathed into him with the breath of life, and in the participation of which alone he is raised above the brute creation, and his own physical nature!—Vetus labours hard to persuade us, that the goddess and the strumpet are really one person, equally "convertible to the same abandoned purposes;" that reason and sophistry are the same thing. He may find his account in endeavouring to confound them; but his indifference betrays the hollowness of his claims to true reason, as the false mother was detected by her willingness to compromise her own pretensions, only to be revenged on her rival.
Vetus has, however, without knowing it, stumbled on an important truth, which is, that patriotism, in modern times, and in great states, is and must be the creature of reason and reflection, rather than the offspring of physical or local attachment. Our country is a complex abstract existence, known only to the understanding. It is an immense riddle, containing numberless modifications of reason and prejudice, of thought and passion. Patriotism is not, in a strict or exclusive sense, a natural or personal affection, but a law of our rational and moral nature, strengthened and determined by particular circumstances and associations, but not born of them, nor wholly nourished by them. It is not possible that we should have an individual attachment to sixteen millions of men, any more than to sixty millions. We cannot be attached, except rationally and "logically," to places we never saw, and people we never heard of. Is not the name of English-
