Page images
PDF
EPUB

THE

NORTH AMERICAN

REVIEW.

VOL. XXI.

New Series.

VOL. XII.

BOSTON,

PUBLISHED BY CUMMINGS, HILLIARD AND COMPANY,

FOR THE PROPRIETOR, AT THE OFFICE OF THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW,

134 WASHINGTON STREET.

1825.

[blocks in formation]

NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.

No. XLVIII.

NEW SERIES, NO. XXIII.

JULY, 1825.

ART. I.-United States Naval Chronicle. By CHARLES W. GOLDSBOROUGH. Vol. I. 8vo. pp. 395. Washington. 1824.

It is the common fate of events, however conspicuous they may have been, which have ceased to occupy the public mind, without having yet attained a place in history, to sink into temporary oblivion. Our regards are generally fixed on the present, or thrown back upon the remote past, like the memory of old age, which leaps over the interval between childhood and its latter days. We behold the occurrences rising around us, and we are deeply versed in the records of other times; but few, save the grateful and the curious, recollect achievements, which are too old for popular enthusiasm, and too recent for deliberate history. Indeed, it is difficult to bring them into view. They exist in the scattered chronicles of their day, but mingled with a heterogeneous mass, appalling to common industry, awaiting the patient research of some laborious compiler, who will gather up the disjecta membra, and present them to the world with some degree of form and compactness. To appreciate our obligations to these assiduous chroniclers, it is only necessary to recall to mind the difficulty, which each one has probably experienced, in tracing back the connexion of modern events, that are still VOL. XXI.NO. 48.

I

« PreviousContinue »