together, without at all minding the course of the general fight. Exactly the same thing takes place in the battles of the American Indians, who are also possessed of bows and arrows. The New Zealanders have no weapons of this description, and, until their intercourse with Europeans had put muskets into their hands, were without any arms whatever by which one body could, by its combined strength, have made an impression upon another from a distance. Even the long spears which they sometimes used could evidently have been employed with effect only when each was directed with a particular aim. When two parties engaged, therefore, they necessarily always came to close combat, and every man singled out his adversary; a mode of fighting which was, besides, much more adapted to their tempers, and to the feelings of vehement animosity with which they came into the field, than any which would have kept them at a greater distance from each other. The details of such personal conflicts amongst more refined nations always formed a principal ingredient in poetry and romance, from the times of Homer to those of Spenser. They are, indeed, always uninteresting and tiresome, although related with the highest descriptive power; and even in the splendid descriptions of Ariosto and Tasso there is something absolutely ludicrous in the minute representations of two