Your brother has given me a very pleasing piece of intelligence:  my friend Emily Montague is at Montreal, and is going to be married to great advantage; I must write to her immediately, and insist on her making me a visit before she marries.  She came to America two years ago, with her uncle Colonel Montague, who died here, and I imagined was gone back to England; she is however at Montreal with Mrs. Melmoth, a distant relation of her mother’s.  Adieu! ma tres chere!

LETTER 11.

To Miss Rivers, Clarges Street.

Quebec, Sept. 10.

I find, my dear, that absence and amusement are the best remedies for a beginning passion; I have passed a fortnight at the Indian village of Lorette, where the novelty of the scene, and the enquiries I have been led to make into their antient religion and manners, have been of a thousand times more service to me than all the reflection in the world would have been.

I will own to you that I staid too long at Montreal, or rather at Major Melmoth’s; to be six weeks in the same house with one of the most amiable, most pleasing of women, was a trying situation to a heart full of sensibility, and of a sensibility which has been hitherto, from a variety of causes, a good deal restrained.  I should have avoided the danger from the first, had it appeared to me what it really was; but I thought myself secure in the consideration of her engagements, a defence however which I found grow weaker every day.

But to my savages:  other nations talk of liberty, they possess it; nothing can be more astonishing than to see a little village of about thirty or forty families, the small remains of the Hurons, almost exterminated by long and continual war with the Iroquoise, preserve their independence in the midst of an European colony consisting of seventy thousand inhabitants; yet the fact is true of the savages of Lorette; they assert and they maintain that independence with a spirit truly noble.  One of our company having said something which an Indian understood as a supposition that they had been subjects of France, his eyes struck fire, he stop’d him abruptly, contrary to their respectful and sensible custom of never interrupting the person who speaks, “You mistake, brother,” said he; “we are subjects to no prince; a savage is free all over the world.”  And he spoke only truth; they are not only free as a people, but every individual is perfectly so.  Lord of himself, at once subject and master, a savage knows no superior, a circumstance which has a striking effect on his behaviour; unawed by rank or riches, distinctions unknown amongst his own nation, he would enter as unconcerned, would possess all his powers as freely in the palace of an oriental monarch, as in the cottage of the meanest peasant:  ’tis the species, ’tis man, ’tis his equal he respects, without regarding the gaudy trappings, the accidental advantages, to which polished nations pay homage.