[H] Queen Elizabeth.
[I] The letter writer, we suspect, had not studied, carefully, the laws and customs of England, where all landed property belongs to the king; who allows the eldest male of a family to possess it during his good behaviour.
[J] This Oration was first printed in England.
[K] The celebrated Earl of Chatham.
[L] An Irish word, meaning: a distraction of attention by reason of words striking our intellect through both ears confusedly.
[M] Some of these were so exquisitely wrought, as not to disgrace the first cabinets in the world.
[N] Shirk—Shift, turn, twist, accommodate, and make the best of a disagreeable situation. It also means contrivance, cunning and evasion.
[O] See the Journals of English Navigators generally; and Captain Porter's Journal of his cruise in the U. S. frigate Essex.
[P] The Yankees first taught the British soldiery to brew spruce beer at the siege of Louisbourg. The reader may find directions for making it in general orders issued by General Amherst in Sept. 1758. See Captain John Knox's Historical Journal, Vol. I, page 184, where it says that one gallon of this beer costs, molasses and all, less than a penny sterling a gallon.
[Q] Lest some might suspect that I have recorded this rough treatment of the sick by an individual, as casting unjustly a reflection on many, I shall here subjoin a passage from a Journal of a tour and residence in Great Britain during the years 1810 and 1811 by a French Traveller—a very popular work in England and much commended by the Reviews there. The reader will perceive that he is much severer than we are. I have been carried, says the Traveller, to one of the Hospitals of this great town, supported by voluntary contributions. I shall relate what I saw. The physician seated at a table in a large hall on the ground floor, with a register before him ordered the doors to be opened; a crowd of miserable objects, women, pushed in, and ranged themselves along the wall; he looked into his book, and called them to him successively.—Such a one! The poor wretch leaving her wall, crowded to the table. "How is your catarrh?"—"Please your honour, no offence, I hope, it is the Asthma. I have no rest night and day, and"—Ah, so it is the Asthma; it is somebody else that has the Catarrh. Well you have been ordered to take, &c.—"Yes, Sir, but I grow worse and worse, and"—That is nothing, you must go on with it. "But Sir, indeed, I cannot." Enough, enough, good woman, I cannot listen to you any more; many patients to get through this morning—never do to hear them talk—go and take your draught.—The Catarrh woman made way for a long train of victims of corruption, cases of fever, dropsy, scrofula, and some disorders peculiar to women, detailed without any ceremony before young students. This melancholy review of human infirmities was suddenly interrupted by the unexpected entrance of a surgeon, followed by several young men, carrying a piece of bloody flesh on a dish. "A curious case," they exclaimed, placing the dish on the table; "an ossification of the lungs!—Such a one, who died yesterday—just opened. This is the state of his lungs.—See these white needles, like fish bones, shooting through here and there; most curious indeed."—Then they handled, and cut open, and held up between the eye and the light, these almost palpitating remains of an human creature who breathed yesterday. The symptoms of his disorder, and the circumstances of his death, were freely talked over, and accurately described in the hearing of the consumptive patients, who felt, I dare say, the bony needles pricking their own lungs at every breath they drew, and seemed to hear their own sentence of death pronounced.