Star.
London, England, 1831-06-15 00:00:00

POLICE REPOR 7'S.

BOVI-STREET.—Yesterday Jews Waters waa brought
up, charged with having robbed the Messrs. Willows, fish.
mongers, in the Strand, with whom he had lived as servant,
of plate, wine, and other property to large amount. The
prisoner was ordered to be remanded for a week.
MARLBOROUGH STREET.—Henty Hale, a potboy at a
publican's in Duke-street, was yesterday charged with steal.
ing a watch and appendages from the house of a Lady of
quality residing in Sdward.street, Portman.square.—He
was remanded.

In the case of Long versus Chubb, for a libel,
—as given in the STAR of yesterday,—the Jury retired at a
quarter to one o'clock, and did not return into Court till
hajf-part twelve at night, when they declared they found
for the plaintiff. Damages—Owe Hundred Pa m& I

Ford, the gaoler of Bow-street Office, was yes-
terday discharged for extorting money from prism% un-
fortunate women. This is not the ism time he hat bests
charged with the like offence ; but it was Dot permed to the
satisfaction of the Magistrates till the present oetssion_ffor
which the public are indebted to the exertions of Mr mix
maa,) though the system has beekssisi on fee ales/ Ilme.
Dodd, late messenger, is appointed the polar;Dodd, and WIN
gall is appointed messenger.

LITERATURE AND SCIENCE.

THE BREAD.TAX on CORN LAWS.

." BY A aHETFIELD POET.
England ! what for mine and me—
What bath bread-tax done for thee ?
It hath shown what kinglings arc,
Stripp'd thy hideous idols bare,
S,:11 thy greatness, stained thy name
Struck thee from the rolls of fame,
Given thy fields to civil strife,
('hanged thy falchion fur the knife ,
tld invading knout consign'd
e,r. Lack, and meanest mind;
it• t thy harvest. cunt thy land,
i linger stung thy skill'd right band;
Sou; thy riches to thy foes,
6ir':'d thy breech, anti twcak'd thy nose,
And beneath the western skies
Sown the worm that never dies.
Man of Consols, hark to me !
What shall bread-tax do for thec ?
Rob thee for the dead-alive,
Pawn thy thousands ten for five,
And ere vet its work be done,
Pawn thy thousands five for one.
Peer, too just, too proud to share
Millions wrung from toil and care !
Righteous peer, whose fathers fed
England's poor with untax'd bread !
Ancient peer, whose stainless name
Ages old have given to fame!
What shall bread-tax do for thee ?
Make the poor as mine and me ;
Drive thee from thy marble halls,
To some hovel's squalid sails ;
Drive thee from the land of crimes
Ilouseless, into foreign climes,
There to sicken, there to sigh,
Steep thy soul in tears, and die—
Like a flower from summer's glow,
Withering on the polar snow.
Church healew'd with martyr's blood,
Mother of the wise and good !
Temple of our smiles and tears,
Hoary with the frost of years !
Holy Church, eternal, true !
What for thee will bread-tax do
It will strip thee bare as she
Whom a despot stripe for thee;
Of thy surplice make thy pall,
Lower thy pride, and take thy
all—
Save thy truth establisit'd well,
Which,—when spire and pinnacle,
Gorgeous arch, and figured stone,
('ease to tell of glories gone,—
Still shall speak of thee and lizss,`
Whom adore the Seraphim,
Power, which likest heaven's might seem,
Glorious once in freedom's beam;
Once by tyrants felt and feared,
Still as freedom's dust revered
Throne, established by the good,
Not unstaln'd with patriot's blood,
Not unwatch'd by patriot fears,
Not unwept by patriot tears,—
What shall bread-tax do for thee,
Venerable Monarchy !
Dreams of evil, spare my sight !
Let that horror rest in night.

BAYLEY'S FOUR YEARS IN THE WEST
INDIES.

From the Trinidad Guardian.
These criticisms appear in the form of Letters signed
TISIOVIIT TROPIC. Travellers ought never to publish on
Countries where reside such lynx-eyed critics.
LETTER T RODUCT ORY.

MR. EDlTOR,—During the last six hundred
years it has been the custom of such men of letters
as have travelled to give an account of their pere-
grinations, and as works treating of " foreign
parts," (to use an half obsolete phrase) were always
acceptable to many readers, the productions of
those wandering literari were generally well re-
ceived ; this, by encouraging books of travels and
pretended travels, has produced much good and
some evil. The earliest travellers of modern times
might be denominated exaggerators, such as Marco
Polo who in the thirteenth, and Sir John Mande-
ville, who in the fourteenth century, gave a narra-
tive of their journies in the east ; the latter has be-
come proverbial in our language fcr " drawing the
long bow," the former was not an iota more vera-
cious,—his account of Qninsai is every whit as
extravagant as Sir John's description of Cathay
and the land beyond it, whose inhabitants, says
Mandeville, were " wild with horns on their beads,
very hideous, and epake not but rout as swine ;"
in short both these travellers are unsurpassed by
Munchausen himself in point of exaggeration.
A few years since the travelling book-makers
confined their wanderings to Great Britain, Ireland,
France, the Netherlands, Italy, in short to Europe,
but of late, a gentleman of the name of F. W. N.
Bayley has extended his trade to the colonies, and
has actually composed a hook of more than seven
hundred pages, with the following title—" Four
Years in the West Indies," in which seven hun-
dred pages he treats very learnedly and very wit-
tily about his aunt Josephine, his lovely Laura—
lie talks entertainingly about tropical climates and
turtle- soup earthquakes and land-crabs
san-
garee and petite soup6s—punch, pine apples, and
porter cup—floating islands and the Diamond Rock
—muscory ducks and methodists civil creoles
and military officers ;—he also embodies in his
book some violent philippics against sherry and
saints—unmacadamized roads, free labourers, town
sevens, MUT force negers, water drinkers, and
other vagabonds.
NATURAL HISTORY.—In Mr. Bayley's work,
I shall only note a few, which I take at random—
to begin with natural history. Our author quotes
Sturm at the head of chapter LXII. to prove that it
is not necessary that every one should be a learned
naturalist : nevertheless, it ought to be expected
that one who in his preface lays claim to credit for
particular veracity, ere he wrote a whole chapter
professing to treat of the natural history of the
West Indies, should have consulted, if not the early
Spanish historians of the new world, at least Bryan
Edwards and Buffon.

" The animals found in those islands," says Mr.
Bayley, " are mostly wild ; "—I suppose he does
not mean our flocks, herds, dogs, cats, &c.—but
what does he mean? there needs no ghost arise to'.
tell us that animals not domesticated are wild in
most countries. Mr. Bayley should have known
of the existence of the Lilco or mute dog, called in
Trinidad the Mangrove dog, which the Indians of
several islands had domesticated, and were remark-
ably fond of; and why does he omit mentioning
the native musk hog,' once common in many and
still an inhabitant of this island, a quadruped of
more importance than all he has enumerated. He
asserts that none of them (the animals of the West
Indies) arc beasts of prey : now, not to mention
alligators and lawyers, the Alco before mentioned
is, in its wild state, a beast of prey, and according
to his own account of the fowl ravages on poultry
committed by the Or ossum or Manacon, that is
also a beast of prey, so is the Musk Rat ; besides
which Major W. might have furnished him with
some notice of the Tiger Cat of Trinidad.
He says, " the Aoguti is much larger than a rat

• Oalled Quoutek from its Italian spellatlon Cuarco—s4re
common came it Picarif...;

but not so large as a rabbit." Mr. B. is an Eng-
lishman, so thatit is very possible, nay even very
probable, that he has seen a rat as well as a rabbit,
but it is not probable, nor scarcely possible, that
he could ever have seen an Agouti ; odd rabbit it,
to use his own manner of expression, I would
wager a quarter of a lappe against a copy of his
" Four Years in the West Indies" (long odds),
that I will shoot any day three agoutis, the small-
est of which should weigh more than the largest
rabbit, together with the two largest rats, save the
parliamentary rats, in Europe.
It may not be improper here to inform Mr.
Bayley, that it is not as he says (pago 566) the
bite of the scorpion which is dangerous but its
sting, which it is proverbial for inflicting with its
tail. So much for zoological accuracy.
Mr. Bayley says, page 65, " housebreaking and'
robberies are occurrences of a very rare nature in
the Vest Indies, and I believe there are only two
or three instances of the kind upon record." Had
he applied here for information we could have fur-
nished him with some hundreds, or to use an ex-
pression that he quotes some four score times,
" numbers numberless" of instances of robberies,
house and store breaking ; and I am much mis-
taken if every island, nay every state which our
author visited, could not furnish as many.
In page 201 our tourist talks of the militia of
Union Island ; as he boasts of the authenticity of
his information, he should have told us whether it
is the manager or three or four overseers that com-
pose this militia, as those are the only persons le-
gally capable of bearing arms in that island.
In botanical research he is equally successful as
he is in his shady of West India zoology; neverthe-
less, he should have been informed, that " the trees
and bushes," that oysters attach themselves attach
themselves to, are not generally planted by the band
of man, but grow there naturally—nor is the grape
considered here as a large scion of the cibrus or
orange stock (vide page 546). I also tell him that
the ceiba and silk cotton trees are one and
the same. I give Mr. Bayley this infor-
mation out of gratitude, for the pains he has
taken to convince the world (page 594) that the
custard apple is not the sour sop. Bryan Edwards
tells a story of a noble and learned lord who assured
his auditors that molasses was the raw unconcocted
juice of the cane from which sugar was made; it
is to be hoped that the wise judge was a better
judge of raw than of muscovadoes, but his blunder
is not more gross and certainly more excusable that
one Mr. Bayley has committed, who after living
four years in the colonies, gives the following ac-
count of the mountain cabbage (vide page 546.)
" The heart of the green spire that is seen shoot-
ing up above its branches is a hard vegetable sub.
stance, resembling, when cut up, the heart of a
cabbage—this, when boiled and properly dressed,
has a very pleasant flavour, and the trees are not
unfrequently cut down to procure it."
Now as the green spire that is seen to shoot up
above its branches could be obtained without de-
stroying or injuring the tree, every lover of botany
would wish that this was what is called the cab-
bage, as it would save from the axe a great num-
ber of those lovely palms, which Brown very ap-
propriately calls " Queens of the forest." TLa fact
is, the spire is a vegetable electric conductor, but
the cabbage is the green top of its stem below the
branches.

This and many other botanical errors remind me
of having read some years since Sir Something
Somebody's (I do not recollect who's) account of
the phys;c nut, Mho says that the French inhabi-
tants of the West Indies conceive that it is a re-
medy of such universal and infallible qualities, that
they call it the " bois immortelle !"—he further
says that the trunk of the mountain cabbage
tree, is very valuable for the main timbers of mill
frames.

I now come to the geographic correctness of Mr.
Bayley's work.
" Jamaica," says this authentic writer, " is the
largest of the West India islands ;—(page 493)—
from which we are led to infer, that Cuba and St.
Domingo are not West India islands, or are smaller
than Jamaica.

Montserrat (says Mr. Bayley, p. 324) is another
pretty little island, under the government of Bar-
buda! Oh, dear ! Mr. Four Years Residence in
the %Vest Indies, this is authenticity and undoubted
authority with a vengeance ; you might as well say
the Isle of Man is under the government of the
Isle of Wight.
In page 600 he informs us that Tobago is be-
tween eight and nine miles in length, and thirty in
breadth ; so then it is three time as broad as it is
long ! He adds, it is twenty-four miles in circum-
ference. Now, how an island can be eight or nine
miles in length, thirty in breadth, and only twenty-
four in circumference, I am not mathematician
enough to conceive.

He is equally correct in speaking of most of the
islands ; but to come at once to this colony, we are
told, page 217, that " the greater number of the
Indians reside beyond Serena Grande, the other
side of St. Joseph." For this authentic piece of
information we are indebted to the undoubted au-
thority of Major W. To this assertion of this man
of letters I reply nego majorum, having caught
Mr. Bayley's infection.
In page 602, we are told that Trinidad is an
island in the Gulf of Mexico, divided from New
Andalusia in Terra Firma by a Strait of about 3
miles in breadth !! On reading this marvellous
piece of information I took a large pinch of snuff
to clear my head, took off my spectacles to clean
my glasses, then looked at the beginning and the
end of the book for a list of errata, but looked
in vain ; there stood the above passage in
types, as black as the Pitch Lake, clear as
the waters of Diego Martin, and conspicuous as
the Tamaua mountain : and yet the writer of the
paragraph spent four years in the West Indies,
one year of which was almost in sight of Trinidad
—boasts of his authenticity and undoubted autho-
rity, and is, besides, what he delights to call him-
self, a " book-maker." 13efore I read Mr. Bayley's
work, I saw two or three reviews of it in English
periodicals, not one of which notice this most ab-
surd string of geographical blundery ; had he said
that the Caribbean Islands were in the Persian
Gulf, it had passed unnoticed by the learned gen-
tlemen► of the English press. In conclusion, let
me assure your readers, and Mr. E. W. N. Bayley,
should he ever sea this criticism, that nothing con-
tained in it is intended to injure his publication,
but merely to point out what absurdities are pro-
pagated about the West Indies, and how freely
they pass without notice iu England.

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