The North American Review (Volume 65) (Paperback)

Book may have numerous typos, missing text, images, or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1847. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... visited upon them, or to imitate with an inverted moral the example of the Palestine Jews, who heap stones of reproach upon Absalom's pillar as they pass through the King's Dale. Sufferers as we are in our own patrimony by the confiscation of the ancestral property of a Loyalist, we might feel some prejudice upon the suffering side. But to our minds, the experience of the Loyalists, and indeed of the Whigs, -- for there was, in fact, but a slight difference of amount between their personal trials, -- is good mainly as it mingles with all the dear-bought wisdom of the human race to prove that war is the heaviest of all calamities; and, since it does not admit of any of those alleviations which mitigate the heaviest chastisements of the Almighty, that it cannot be numbered among his plagues, but must stand first amid the voluntary follies of man. England was the wrongdoer, and her exchequer has ever since borne the penalty, and will bear it so long as she is numbered among the nations. We were the sufferers; and though we feel now no burden and no infliction from it, as we ought in justice to feel none, yet our annals and our domestic records will ever perpetuate the griefs and horrors of the civil strife which were our unavoidable portion. The most cheerful incident connected with the history of the Tories is, that while they were waiting in the British Northern Provinces for the tardy relief of the English government, their trials were lightened by charitable help sent by individuals- and associations in the United States, particularly by the Quakers. We close by asking for Mr. Sabine's volume a grateful reception, and the place to which it is entitled in our enlarging libraries. Art. VII. -- The Lives of the Lord Chancellors and Keepers of the Great Seal of England...