CAMPBELL.
IT is to be regretted that those early writers who treated of the
discovery and settlement of America have not given us more
particular and candid accounts of the remarkable characters that
flourished in savage life. The scanty anecdotes which have
reached us are full of peculiarity and interest; they furnish us
with nearer glimpses of human nature, and show what man is in a
comparatively primitive state and what he owes to civilization.
There is something of the charm of discovery in lighting upon
these wild and unexplored tracts of human nature--in witnessing,
as it were, the native growth of moral sentiment, and perceiving
those generous and romantic qualities which have been
artificially cultivated by society vegetating in spontaneous
hardihood and rude magnificence.
In civilized life, where the happiness, and indeed almost the
existence, of man depends so much upon the opinion of his
fellow-men, he is constantly acting a studied part. The bold and
peculiar traits of native character are refined away or softened
down by the levelling influence of what is termed good-breeding,
and he practises so many petty deceptions and affects so many
generous sentiments for the purposes of popularity that it is
difficult to distinguish his real from his artificial character.
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