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cannon, mortars, shells, shot, &c. ; but we search in vain for any of those chain and bar shot which the Americans employed with so much advantage in their warfare against the British. Upon the whole, no one, except an American, will consider as inapplicable to the design the following words of Mr. Addison: " One kind of burlesque represents mean persons in the accoutrements of Heroes." Previously to the late war with the United States, persons in this country were in the habit of exclaiming against " French boasting," " French misrepresentation," and " French impudence." My analysis of the American accounts has already, I trust, sufficiently shown that, in the art of boasting and misrepresenting, the French could never compete with the Americans; and I will now make it equally clear, that, in impudence also, our neighbours must yield up the palm. Within this week or two, an American bookseller, domiciled in London, has been trying to serve the cause of his country by practising a trick upon the gullible portion of this. He has put forth, in a neat octavo volume, a " history of the United States, from their first settlement as colonies, to the close of the war with Great Britain, in 1815." Of that part of the work which relates to the late war I shall only speak, and I do pronounce it as barefaced a calumny against England as ever issued from the American press. The writer, whoever he is, for he seems to have been ashamed to tell his name, has found the mistatements in the American official accounts too moderate for his purpose : he has culled his choice collection of "facts" from the most violent party-papers in the United States ; papers written when there was a fresh exciting cause to plead as some excuse for misrepresentation and invective; papers from which an American writer, with a name, would not, at this day, venture to draw his materials, even had he no other than an American public to please. This genuine, but anonymous American writer, comes, or probably sends, here to tell us (p. 385), that the attack by the President upon the Little-Belt, was " insolence deservedly punished;" that (p.397) "the Wasp, of 18 guns, captured the Frolic of 22," and that "in this action the Americans obtained a victory over force decidedly superior," that (p. 405) "Admiral Cockburn, departing from the usual modes of honourable war- ^ back to top ^ |