tented myself with a refusal to approve the bill upon that ground, yet, sensible of the vital import ance of the subject, and anxious that my views and opinions in regard to the whole matter should be fully understood by Congress and my constituents, I felt it my duty to go further. I therefore embraced that early occasion to apprise Congress that, in my opinion, the constitution did not confer upon it the power to authorize the construction of ordinary roads and canals within the limits of a state, and to say respectfully, that no bill admitting such a power could receive my official sanction. I did so, in the confident expectation, that the speedy settlement of the public mind upon the whole sub ject would be greatly facilitated by the difference between the two houses and myself, and that the harmonious action of the several departments of the federal government in regard to it would be ultimately secured.

"So far at least as it regards this branch of the subject, my best hopes have been realized. Nearly four years have elapsed, and several sessions of Congress have intervened, and no attempt, within my recollection, has been made to induce Congress to exercise this power. The applications for the construction of roads and canals, which were formerly multiplied upon your files, are no longer presented; and we have good reason to infer that the current of public sentiment has become so decided against the pretension as effectually to discourage its reassertion. So thinking, I derive the greatest satisfaction from the conviction, that thus much at least has been secured upon this important and embar

rassing subject. From attempts to appropriate the national funds of the states to objects which are confessedly of a local character, we cannot, I trust, have anything further to apprehend. My views in regard to the expediency of making appropriations for works which are claimed to be of a national character, and prosecuted under state authority, assuming that Congress have the right to do so, were stated in my annual message to Congress in 1830, and also in that containing my objections to the Maysville road bill. So thoroughly convinced am I that no such appropriations ought to be made by Congress, until a suitable constitutional provision is made on the subject, and so essential do I regard the point to the highest interests of our country, that I could not consider myself as discharging my duty to my constituents in giving the executive sanction to any bill containing such an appropriation. people of the United States desire, that the public Treasury shall be resorted to for the means to prosecute such works, they will concur in an amendment of the constitution, prescribing a rule by which the national character of the works is to be tested, and by which the greatest practicable equality of the benefits may be secured to each member of the confederacy. The effects of such a regulation would be most salutary in preventing unprofitable expenditure, in securing our legislation from the pernicious consequences of a scramble for the favours of the government, and in repressing the spirit of discontent which must inevitably arise from an unequal distribution of treasures which be long alike to all. There is ano.

If the

ther class of appropriations for what may be called, without impropriety, internal improvements, which have always been regarded as standing upon very different interests from those to which I have referred. I allude to such as have for their object the improvement of our harbours, the removal of partial and temporary obstructions in our navigable rivers, and for the facility and security of our foreign commerce. The grounds upon which I distinguished appropriations of this character from others have been stated to Congress. I will add, that at the first session of Congress under the new constitution, it was provided by law that all expenses which should accrue from and after 15th August, 1789, in the necessary support and maintenance and repair of all lighthouses, beacons, buoys, and public piers, erected placed, or sunk, before the passing of the act, within any bay, inlet, harbour, or port of the United States, for rendering the navigation thereof easy and safe, should be defrayed out of the Treasury of the United States; and further, that it should be the duty of the secretary of the Treasury to provide by contract, with the approbation of the president, for rebuilding when necessary, and keeping in good repair the lighthouses, beacons, buoys, and public piers in the several states, and for furnishing them with supplies. Appropriations for similar objects have been continued from that time to the present without interruption or dispute. As a natural consequence of the increase and extension of our foreign commerce, ports of entry and delivery have been multiplied and established, not only upon our sea-board, but

in the interior of the country, upon our lakes and navigable rivers. The convenience and safety of this commerce have led to the gradual extension of these expenditures to the erection of lighthouses, the placing, planting, and sinking of buoys, beacons, and piers, and to the removal of partial and temporary obstructions in our navigable rivers, and in the harbours upon our great lakes, as well as on the sea-board. Although I have expressed to Congress my apprehensions that these expendi tures have sometimes been extravagant and disproportionate to the advantages to be derived from them, I have not felt it to be my duty to refuse my assent to bills containing them, and have contented myself to follow in this respect in the footsteps of all my predecessors. Sensible, however, from experience and observa.. tion, of the great abuses to which the unrestricted exercise of this authority by Congress was posed, I have prescribed a limitation for the government of my own conduct, by which expenditures of this character are confined to places below the ports of entry and delivery established by law. I am very sensible that this restriction is not so satisfactory as could be desired, and that much embarrassment may be caused to the execu tive department in its execution by appropriations for remote and not well understood objects. But as neither my own reflections nor the lights which I may properly derive from other sources have supplied me with a better, I shall continue to apply my best exertions to a faithful application of the rule upon which it is founded. I sincerely regret that I could not give my assent to a bill entitled

"An act to improve the navigation of the Wabash river;" but I could not have done so without receding from the ground which I have, upon the fullest consideration, taken upon this subject, and of which Congress has been heretofore apprised, and without throwing the subject again open to abuse, which no good citizen, entertaining my opinions, could desire. I rely upon the intelligence and candour of my fellow-citizens, in whose liberal indulgence I have already so largely participated, for a correct appreciation of my motives in interposing, as I have done on this and other occasions, checks to a course of legislation which, without in the slightest degree calling in question the motives of others, I consider as sanctioning improper

and unconstitutional expenditures of public treasure. I am not hostile to internal improvements, and wish to see them extended to every part of the country; but I am fully persuaded, if they are not commenced in a proper manner, confined to proper objects, and conducted under an authority generally conceded to be rightful, that a successful prosecution of them cannot be reasonably expected. The attempt will meet with resistance where it might otherwise receive support, and instead of strengthening the bonds of our confederacy, it will only multiply and aggravate the cause of disunion.

"ANDREW JACKSON.

Dec. 1, 1834."

MR

R. COLERIDGE was the youngest son of the Rev. John Coleridge, vicar of St. Mary Ottery, Devonshire, and Ann his wife, and was born in that parish, where he was baptized, 30th December, 1772. His father died in the month of October, 1781, leaving his widow with a family of eleven children. A presentation to Christ's Hospital, London, was procured for the future poet from John Way, Esq., one of the governors; and the boy was admitted to that excellent school on the 18th of July, 1782. He has himself, in his "Biographia Literaria," published in the year 1817, left us some records of his early and most important days.

"At school I enjoyed the inestimable advantage of a very sensible, though at the same time a very severe, master (the rev. James Bowyer). He early moulded my taste to the preference of Demosthenes to Cicero, of Homer and Theocritus to Virgil, and again of Virgil to Ovid. He habituated me to compare Lucretius, Terence, and, above all, the chaster poems of Catullus, not only with the

Roman poets of the (so called) silver and brazen ages, but with even those of the Augustan era; and, on grounds of plain sense and universal logic, to see and assert the superiority of the former in the truth and nativeness, both of their thoughts and diction. At the same time, that we were studying the Greek tragic poets, he made us read Shakspeare and Milton as lessons, and they were the lessons, too, which required most time and trouble to bring up, so as to escape his censure. I learned from him that poetry, even that of the loftiest and seemingly that of the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe as that of science, and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more, and more fugitive, causes.

"I had just entered my seventeenth year when the sonnets of Mr. Bowles, twenty in number, and just then published in a quarto pamphlet, were first made known and presented to me by a schoolfellow who had quitted us for the University, and who, during the whole time that he was in our first form, (or, in our school language, a Grecian) had been my patron and

protector,-I refer to Dr. Middleton, the truly learned and every way excellent bishop of Calcutta. It was a double pleasure to me, and still remains a tender recollection, that I should have received from so revered a friend the first knowledge of a poet, by whose works, year after year, I was so enthusiastically delighted and inspired. As my school finances did not permit me to purchase copies, I made, within less than a year and a half, more than forty transcriptions, as the best presents I could offer to those who had in any way won my regard. And with almost equal delight did I receive the three or four following publications of the same author."

On the 7th of September, 1791, Mr. Coleridge was sent from Christ's Hospital, with one of the exhibitions belonging to that foundation, to Jesus College, Cambridge. The only university honour, for which his indolence and indifference allowed him to become a candidate, was sir William Browne's medal for the best Greek ode; and even this, we are told, he gained only by the compulsion of his friends, who made him a prisoner in a room containing nothing but pen, ink, and paper, till he had written it.

He remained at Cambridge till October term, 1794, when he quitted the University without cause assigned, and without taking a degree. The master and fellows of the College, consequently, made an order that his name should be removed from the College boards, unless he returned before the 14th of June, 1795; and the committee of Christ's Hospital, considering that their exhibitions are voted by the general court under a restriction that, if the students absent

themselves from college without permission, their allowance is to cease, and having further considered that the general example of a scholar of such distinguished abilities might be highly detrimental to the youth of the house, resolved that his exhibitions, which had been paid to the 5th of April, 1795, should be from that time withheld.

It was in the long vacation of the year 1792, that he became ac quainted with Mr. Southey, then a student of Baliol College, Oxford. The two young poets, both dazzled with the specious opening of the French revolution, commenced an enthusiastic friend. ship; and struck out a scheme for settling themselves in the wilds of America, and for there "establishing a genuine system of property," which they entitled pantisocracy. It was with the view of realizing it, that Mr. Southey, in the year 1795, married a young lady of Bristol, of the name of Fricker, to whom he had been long attached, and that about the same time Mr. Coleridge and Mr. Robert Lovell, were respectively united to her two sisters. This project of emigration and pantisocracy, however, was never carried into execution. Mr. Southey, on the very day after his secret marriage, obeyed his mother's uncle, by accompanying him to Lisbon for six months; and on his return quietly settled in Gray's Inn as a law-student. Mr. Coleridge remained with his wife at or near Bristol.

In the previous winter of 17945, he had delivered there a course of lectures on the French revolution; having even before that published, in conjunction with Mr. Southey, a hasty drama, called "The Fall of Robespierre." In the