As I Passed Up The Long Range Of Tables, The Health Of The President Of The Republic Was Responded To By The Company.

The cheers were deafening, and, what most surprised me was, that the negro waiters joined heartily, I may say frantically, in it, and danced about like mad creatures, waving their napkins, and shouting with energy.

Some of the elder ones, I noticed, looked mournfully on, and were evidently not in a gay humour, seeming a prey to bitter reflections. Notwithstanding the curse of slavery, which, like a poisonous upas, taints the very air they breathe with the murdered remains of its victims, the white citizens of the south are extremely sensitive of their civil and political rights, and seem to regard the palladium of independence secured by their progenitors as an especial benefit conferred by the Deity for their good in particular. Actuated by this mock patriotism (for it is nothing less), the citizens of the south omit no opportunity of demonstrating the blessings they so undeservedly inherit, and which, if I am not mistaken, will, ere many years elapse, be wrested from them, amidst the terrible thunders of an oppressed and patient people, whose powers of endurance are indeed surprising.

Leaving the square, I passed up King-street, at the top of which was my intended boarding-house. The shops in this fashionable resort are fitted out in good style, and the goods are of the best description. After sunset the streets are often lined with carriages. The city lies flat, like the surrounding country, and, owing to this, is insalubrious; stagnant water collects in the cellars of the houses, and engenders a poisonous vapour, which is a fertile source of those destructive epidemics, that, combined with other causes, are annually decimating the white population of the south of the American continent in all parts.

At the top of King-street, facing you as you advance, is a large Protestant episcopal church. I went there to worship on the following Sunday, but was obliged to leave the building, there being, it was stated by the apparitor, no accommodation for strangers, a piece of illiberality that I considered very much in keeping with the slave-holding opinions of the worshippers who attend it. This want of politeness I was not, however, surprised at, for it is notorious, as has been before observed by an able writer, that, excepting the Church of Rome, "the members of the unestablished Church of England - the Protestant Episcopalian, are the most bigotted, sectarian, and illiberal, in the United States of America. Being fully persuaded," to follow the same writer, "that prelatical ordination and the three orders are indispensable to their profession, they are, like too many of their fellow professors in the mother country, deeply dyed with Laudean principles, or that love of formula in religion and grasping for power which has so conspicuously shown itself among the Oxford tractarians, and which, it is to be feared, is gradually undermining Protestant conformity, by gnawing at its very heart, in the colleges of Great Britain." Vital piety, or that deep sense of religious duty that impels men to avoid the devious paths of sin, and to live "near to God," is, I am inclined to believe (and I regret it, as a painful truth), by no means common in America.

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