Who is Blennerhassett? A native of Ireland, a man of letters, who fled from the storms of his own country to find quiet in ours. His history shows that war is not the natural element of his mind; if it had been, he would never have exchanged Ireland for America. So far is an army from furnishing the society natural and proper to Mr. Blennerhassett's character, that on his arrival in America, he retired even from the population of the Atlantic states, and sought quiet and solitude in the bosom of our western forests. But he carried with him taste, and science, and wealth; and “lo, the desert smiled." Possessing himself of a beautiful island in the Ohio, he rears upon it a palace and decorates it with every romantic embellishment of fancy. A shrubbery that Shenstone might have envied, blooms around him; music that might have charmed Calypso and her nymphs, is his; an extensive library spreads its treasures before him; a philosophical apparatus offers to him all the secrets and mysteries of nature; peace, tranquillity and innocence shed their mingled delights around him; and to crown the enchantment of the scene, a wife, who is said to be lovely even beyond her sex, and graced with every accomplishment that can render it irresistible, had blessed him with her love, and made him the father of her children. The evidence would convince you, sir, that this is but a faint picture of the real life. In the midst of all this peace, this innocence, and this tranquillity, this feast of the mind, this pure banquet of the heart-the destroyer comes-he comes to turn this paradise into a hell-yet the flowers do not wither at his approach and no monitory shuddering through the bosom of their unfortunate possessor, warns him of the ruin that is coming upon him. A stranger presents himself. Introduced to their civilities by the high rank which he had lately held in his country, he soon finds his way to their hearts by the dignity and elegance of his demeanor, the light and beauty of his conversation, and the seductive and fascinating power of his address. The conquest was not a difficult one. Innocence is ever simple and credulous; conscious of no designs itself, it suspects none in others; it wears no guards before its breast; every door, and portal, and avenue of the heart is thrown open, and all who choose it enter. Such was the state of Eden, when the serpent entered its bowers.

The prisoner in a more engaging form, winding himself into the open and unpractised heart of the unfortunate Blennerhassett, found but little difficulty in changing the native character of that heart and the objects of its affection. By degrees he infuses into it the poison of his own ambition; he breathes into it the fire of his own courage; a daring and a desperate thirst for glory; an ardor panting for all the storm, and bustle, and hurricane of life. In a short time the whole man is changed, and every object of his former delight relinquished. No more he enjoys the tranquil scene: it has become flat and insipid to his taste: his books are abandoned: his retort and crucible are thrown aside his shrubbery blooms and breathes its fragrance upon the air in vain-he likes it not: his ear no longer drinks the rich melody of music; it longs for the trumpet's clangor, and the cannon's roar; even the prattle of his babes, once so sweet, no longer affects him; and the angel smile of his wife, which hitherto touched his bosom with ecstacy so unspeakable, is now unfelt and unseen. Greater objects have taken possession of his soul-his imagination has been dazzled by visions of diadems, and stars, and garters, and titles of nobility he has been taught to burn with restless emulation at the names of Cromwell, Cæsar, and Bonaparte. His enchanted island is destined soon to relapse into a desert; and in a few months, we find the tender and beautiful partner of his bosom, whom he lately "permitted not the winds of" summer to visit too roughly" we find winter banks of the Ohio, and

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her shivering, at midnight, on the mingling her tears with the torrents that froze as they fell. Yet this unfortunate man, thus deluded from, his interest and his happiness-thus seduced from the paths of innocence and peacethus confounded in the toils which were deliberately spread for him, and overwhelmed by the mastering spirit and genius of another this man, thus ruined and undone, and made to play a subordinate part in this grand drama of guilt and treason-this man is to be called the principal offender; while he, by whom he was thus plunged and steeped in misery, is comparatively innocent -a mere accessory. Sir, neither the human heart nor the human understanding will bear a perversion so monstrous and absurd; so shocking to the soul; so revolting to reason. O no sir. There

is no man who knows anything of this affair, who does not know that to everybody concerned in it, Aaron Burr was as the sun to the planets which surround him; he bound them in their respective orbits, and gave them their light, their heat, and their motion. Let him not then shrink from the high destination which he has courted; and having already ruined Blennerhassett in fortune, character and happiness forever, attempt to finish the tragedy by thrusting that ill-fated man between himself and punishment.

RICHARD RUSH ON IMPRESSMENT OF AMERICAN SEAMEN.

THE seizure of the persons of American citizens under the name and the pretexts of impressment, by the naval officers of Great Britain, is an outrage of that kind which makes it difficult to speak of it in terms of appropriate description; for this, among other reasons, that the offence itself is new. It is probable that the most careful researches into history, where indeed of almost every form of rapine between men and between nations is to be found the melancholy record, will yet afford no example of the systematic perpetration of an offence of a similar nature, perpetrated, too, under a claim of right. To take a just and no other than a serious illustration, the only parallel to it is to be found in the African slave-trade; and if an eminent statesman of England once spoke of the latter, as the greatest practical evil that had ever afflicted mankind, we may be allowed to denominate the former the greatest practical offence that has ever been offered to a civilized and independent state.

Under a mere personal view of this outrage, and considering it on the footing of a moral sin, it is strictly like the African slavetrade. Like that it breaks up families and causes hearts to bleed. Like that it tears the son from the father, the father from the son. Like that it makes orphans and widows, takes the brother from the sister, seizes up the young man in the health of his days and blasts his hopes forever. It is worse than the slavery of the African, for the African is only made to work under the lash of a task

master, whereas, the citizen of the United States, thus enslaved, receives also the lash on the slightest lapses from a rigorous discipline, and is moreover exposed to the bitter fate of fighting against those towards whom he has no hostility, perhaps his own countrymen-it may be, his own immediate kindred. This is not exaggeration, fellow-citizens, it is reality and fact.

But, say the British, we want not your men; we want only our own. Prove that they are yours, and we will surrender them up. Baser outrage! insolent indignity! that a free-born American must be made to prove his nativity to those who have previously violated his liberty, else he is to be held forever as a slave! That before a British tribunal—a British boarding officer—a free born American must be made to seal up the vouchers of his lineage, to exhibit the records of his baptism and his birth, to establish the identity that binds him to his parents, to his blood, to his native land, by setting forth in odious detail his size, his age, the shape of his frame, whether his hair is long or cropt—his marks—like an ox or a horse of the manger-that all this must be done as the condition of his escape from the galling thraldom of a British ship! Can we hear it, can we think of it, with any other than indignant feelings at our tarnished name and nation? And suppose through this degrading process his deliverance to be effected, where is he to seek redress for the immediate wrong? The unauthorized seizure and detention of any piece of property, a mere trespass upon goods, will always lay the foundation for some, often the heaviest retribution, in every well regulated society. But to whom, or where, shall our imprisoned citizen, when the privilege of shaking off his fetters has at last been accorded to him, turn for his redress? where look to reimburse the stripes, perhaps the wounds he has received his worn spirit-his long inward agonies? No, the public code of nations recognizes not the penalty, for to the modern rapaciousness of Britain it was reserved to add to the dark catalogue of human sufferings, this flagitious crime.

But why be told that, even on such proofs, our citizens will be released from their captivity? We have long and sorely experienced the impracticable nature of this boon, which, in the imagined relaxation of her deep injustice, she would affect to hold out.

Go to the office of the Department of State, within sight of where we are assembled, and there see the piles of certificates and documents, of affidavits, records, and seals, anxiously drawn out and folded up-to show why Americans should not be held as slaves -and see how they rest, and will forever rest, in hopeless neglect upon the shelves. Some defect in form, some impossibility of filling up all the crevices which British exaction insists upon being closed; the uncertainty, if, after all, they will ever reach their point of destination, the climate or the sea where the hopes of gain or the lust of conquest are impelling, through constant changes, their ships; the probability that the miserable individual to whom they are intended as the harbinger of liberation from his shackles, may have been translated from the first scene of his incarceration to another, from a seventy-four to a sixty-four, from a sixty-four to a frigate, and thus through rapid, if not designed mutations, a practice which is known to exist-these are obvious causes of discouragement, by making the issues at all times doubtful, most frequently hopeless. And this Great Britain cannot but know. She does know it, and, with deliberate mockery, in the composure with which bloated power can scoff at submissive and humble suffering, has she continued to increase and protract our humiliation, as well as our suffering, by renewals of the visionary offer.

Again it is said, that our citizens resemble their men, look like them in their persons, speak the same language, that discriminations are difficult and impracticable, and therefore it is they are unavoidably seized. Most insulting excuse! And will they impeach that God who equally made us both? who forms our features, moulds our statures, and stamps us with a countenance that turns up to his goodness in adoration and love! Impious as well as insulting! The leopard cannot change his spots or the Ethiopian his skin, but we, we, are to put off our bodies and become unlike ourselves, as the price of our safety! Why should similarity of face yoke us exclusively with an ignominious burden? why, because we were once descended from them, should we be made at this day, and forever, to clank chains? Suppose one of their subjects landed upon our shores-let us suppose him a prince