Chapter 6

Anápa, that manufactory of arms for the robbers of the mountains, that bazar where are sold the tears, the blood, the sweat of Christian slaves, that torch of rebellion to the Caucasus--Anápa, I say, was, in 1808, invested by the Russian armies, on the sea and on the mountain side. The gun-boats, the bomb-vessels, and all the ships that could approach the shore, were thundering against the fortifications. The land army had passed the river which falls into the Black Sea, under the northern wall of Anápa, and was posted in swampy ground around the whole city. Then they constructed wooden trenches, hewing down, for that purpose, the surrounding forest. Every night new works arose nearer and nearer to the walls of the town. The interior of the houses flamed from the effects of the shells; the outer walls fell under the cannon-balls. But the Turkish garrison, reinforced by the mountaineers, fought desperately, made fierce sorties, and replied to all proposals for surrender by the shots of their artillery. Meanwhile the besiegers were incessantly harassed by the Kabardinétz skirmishers, and the foot-archers of Abazékhs, Shamsóukhs, Natoukháitzes, and other wild mountaineers of the shores of the Black Sea, assembled, like the jackals, in hope of plunder and blood. Against them it was necessary to erect redans; and this double work, performed under the fire of cannon from the fortress and from the forest, on irregular and boggy ground, delayed long the capture of the town.

At length, on the eve of the taking of Anápa, the Russians opened a breaching-battery in a ravine on the south-east side of the town: its effect was tremendous. At the fifth volley the battlements and parapets were overthrown, the guns laid bare and beaten down. The balls, striking against the stone facing, flashed like lightning; and then, in a black cloud of dust, flew up fragments of shattered stone. The wall crumbled and fell to pieces; but the fortress, by the thickness of its walls, resisted long the shattering force of the iron; and the precipitous steepness of the ruins offered no opportunity for storming. For the heated guns, and for the weary artillerymen, worn out by incessant firing, repose was absolutely necessary. By degrees the firing from the batteries by land and sea began to slacken; thick clouds of smoke, floating from the shore, expanded over the waves, sometimes concealing, sometimes discovering, the flotilla. From time to time a ball of smoke flew up from the guns of the fortress, and after the rolling of the cannon-thunder, far echoing among the hills, a ball would whistle by at random. And now all was silent--all was still both in the interior of Anápa and in the trenches. Not one turban was seen between the battlements, not one carabineer's bayonet in the intrenchment. Only the Turkish banners on the towers, and the Russian ensign on board the ships, waved proudly in the air, now undimmed by a single stream of smoke--only the harmonious voices of the muezzins resounded from afar, calling the Mussulmans to their mid-day prayer. At this moment, from the breach opposite the battery on the plain, descended, or rather rolled down, supported by ropes, a horseman on a white horse, who immediately leaped over the half-filled ditch, dashed to the left between the batteries, flew over the intrenchments, over the soldiers dozing behind them, who neither expected nor guessed any thing like this, and, followed by their hasty shouts, plunged into the woods. None of the cavalry had time to glance at, much less to pursue him: all remained thunderstruck with astonishment and vexation; and soon forgot all about the brave cavalier, in the alarm of the renewed firing from the fortress, which was recommenced in order to give the bold messenger time to escape to the mountains. Towards evening the breaching battery, which had thundered almost incessantly, had accomplished its work of demolition. The prostrate wall formed a kind of bridge for the besiegers, who, with the impatience of bravery, prepared for the assault; when suddenly an unexpected attack of the Tcherkéss, who had driven in the Russian scouts and outposts, compelled the besiegers to direct the fire of the redans against the furious mountaineers. A thundering Allah-il-Allah, from the walls of Anápa, greeted their encounter: the volleys of cannon and musketry arose with redoubled violence from the walls, but the Russian grape tore asunder and arrested the crowds of horsemen and infantry of the Tcherkéss, as they were preparing to throw themselves upon the batteries with their sabres; and they, with furious cries of "Giaour, giaourla!" turned back, leaving behind them the dead and wounded. In a moment the whole field was strewn with their corpses and their disabled, who, staggering to their feet, fell back, struck by the balls and grape-shot; whilst the cannon-shot shattered the wood, and the grenades, bursting, completed the destruction. But from the beginning of the action, till the moment when not one of the enemy remained in sight, the Russians saw before them a well-built Tcherkéss on a white horse, who rode, at a slow pace, up and down before their redans. All recognized in him the same horseman who had leaped over the trenches at mid-day, probably in order to induce the Tcherkéss to fall upon the Russians from the rear, at the moment when the now unsuccessful sortie was to be made from the gate. Crashing and thundering danced the grape-shot around him. His horse strained at the bridle; but he, looking calmly at the batteries, rode along them as if they were raining flowers upon him. The artillerymen ground their teeth with vexation at the unpunished daring of the cavalier: shot after shot tore up the earth, but he remained unhurt as if enchanted. "Give him a cannon-ball!" shouted a young officer of artillery, but lately released from the military college, who was above all enraged at their want of success: "I would load the gun with my head, so glad would I be to kill that bragger: it is not worth while to waste grape upon one man--grape--look out! a cannon-ball will reach the guilty!" So saying, he screwed up the quoin and levelled the gun, looking through the sight; and having exactly calculated the moment when the horseman would ride through the line of aim, he stepped aside and ordered the fatal fire.

For some moments the smoke enveloped the battery in darkness: when it floated away the frightened horse was dragging the blood-stained corpse of his rider, with the foot entangled in the stirrup. "Hit--killed!" was shouted from all the trenches; and the young artillery officer, taking off his cap, piously crossed himself, and with a joyous face jumped down from the battery to seize the prey which he had earned. He soon succeeded in catching by the reins the horse of the slain Tcherkéss, for he was dragging the body sideways on the ground. The unfortunate man had his arm torn off close to the shoulder; but he still breathed, groaned, and struggled. Pity touched the good-natured youth: he called some soldiers, and ordered them to carry the wounded man carefully into the trench, sent for the surgeon, and had the operation performed before his eyes. At night, when all was quiet, the artilleryman sat by the side of his dying prisoner, and watched him with interest by the dim light of the lantern. The serpent-marks of sorrow, graven on his cheek by tears, the wrinkles on his forehead, dug, not by years but passions, and bloody scratches, disfigured his handsome face; and in it was painted something more torturing than pain, more terrible than death. The artilleryman could not restrain an involuntary shudder. The prisoner sighed heavily, and having, with difficulty, raised his hand to his forehead, opened his heavy eyelids, muttering to himself in unintelligible sounds, unconnected words.... "Blood," he cried, examining his hand ... "always blood! why have they put _his_ bloody shirt upon me? Already, without that, I swim in blood.... Why do I not drown in it?... How cold the blood is to-day!... Once it used to scald me, and this is no better! In the world it is stifling, in the gave so cold.... 'Tis dreadful to be a corpse. Fool that I am, I sought death. O, let me live but for one little day--one little hour, to live!..."

"What? Why have I hidden another in the grave, _whisperest thou_? Learn thyself what it is to die!..." A convulsive paroxysm interrupted his raving, an unspeakably dreadful groan burst from the sufferer, and he fell into a painful lethargy, in which the soul lives only to suffer.

The artilleryman, touched to the very bottom of his heart, raised the head of the miserable being, sprinkled his face with cold water, and rubbed his temples with spirits of wine, in order to bring him to himself. Slowly he opened his eyes, shook his head several times, as if to shake the mist from his eyelashes, and steadfastly directed his gaze on the face of the artilleryman, which was faintly lighted up by the feeble gleam of the candle. Suddenly, with a piercing cry, he lifted himself on his bed, as if by some superhuman force: his hair stood upright, his whole body shook with a fevered trembling, his hand seemed endeavouring to push something from him, an ineffable horror was expressed on his countenance.... "Your name!" he cried at length, addressing the artilleryman. "Who are thou, stranger from the grave?"

"I am Verkhóffsky?" ... answered the young artilleryman. This was a shot that went straight to the heart of the prisoner. The ligature on the principal artery gave way from a rush of blood, which poured through the bandages. Yet a few struggles, yet the throat-rattle, and the leaden hand of death choked the wounded man's last sigh, imprinted on his brow the seal of the last grief; gathering whole years of repentance into one rapid moment, in which the soul, tearing itself from the body, fears equally the tortures of life and of nothingness, feels at once all the gnawing of the past and all the agony of the future. Terrible was it to look on the convulsed face of the dead. "He surely must have been a great sinner," said Verkhóffsky, in a low voice to the general's interpreter, who stood near him, and he shuddered involuntarily.

"A great villain," rejoined the interpreter: "it appears to me he was a Russian deserter. I never met with a mountaineer who spoke Russian so correctly as this prisoner. Let me look at his arms. We may, perhaps, find some marks on them." With these words he unsheathed, with a look of curiosity, the dagger which had been taken from the dead man, and bringing it to the lantern, deciphered and translated the following inscription:--

"Be slow to offend--swift to revenge!"

"Quite a robber's rule," said Verkhóffsky; "my poor brother Evstafli! you fell a victim to such a fanatic principle as this!"

The eyes of the good youth filled with tears.... "Is there not something else?" he asked.

"This is apparently the slain man's name," replied the interpreter.

"It is: Ammalát Bek!"

* * * * *

MR BAILEY'S REPLY TO AN ARTICLE IN BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE.

We have just been favoured with a pamphlet from Mr Bailey, entitled "A Letter to a Philosopher, in Reply to some Recent Attempts to Vindicate Berkeley's Theory of Vision, and in further Elucidation of its Unsoundness." Our article on Mr Bailey's review of Berkeley's theory, which appeared in _Blackwood's Magazine_ of June 1842, was one of these attempts. Had the author merely attacked or controverted our animadversions on his book, we should probably have left the question to its fate, and not have reverted to a subject, the discussion of which, even in the first instance, may have been deemed out of place in a journal not expressly philosophical. There is, in general, little to be gained by protracting such controversies. But, as Mr Bailey accuses us, in the present instance, of having misrepresented his views, we must be allowed to exculpate ourselves from the charge of having dealt, even with unintentional unfairness, towards one whose opinions, however much we may dissent from them, are certainly entitled to high respect and a candid examination, as the convictions of an able and zealous enquirer after truth.

In our strictures on Mr Bailey's work, we remarked, that he had represented Berkeley as holding that the eye is not directly and originally cognizant of the outness of objects in relation to each other, or of what we would call their reciprocal outness; in other words, we stated, that, according to Mr Bailey, Berkeley must be regarded as denying to the eye the original intuition of space, either in length, breadth, or solid depth. It was, however, only in reference to one of his arguments, and to one particular division of his subject, that we laid this representation to his charge. Throughout the other parts of his discussion, we by no means intended to say that such was the view he took of the Berkeleian theory. Nor are we aware of having made any statement to that effect. If we did, we now take the opportunity of remarking, that we restrict our allegation, as we believe we formerly restricted it, to the single argument and distinction just mentioned, and hereafter to be explained.

In his reply, Mr Bailey disavows the impeachment _in toto_. He declares that he never imputed to Berkeley the doctrine, that the eye is not directly percipient of space in the two dimensions of length and breadth. "The perception of this kind of distance," says he, "never formed the subject of controversy with any one ... That we see extension in two dimensions is admitted by all."--(_Letter_, p. 10.) If it can be shown that the doctrine which is here stated to be admitted by all philosophers, is yet expressly controverted by the two metaphysicians whom Mr Bailey appears to have studied most assiduously, it is, at any rate, possible that he may have overlooked, in his own writings, the expression of an opinion which has escaped his penetration in theirs. To convince himself, then, how much he is mistaken in supposing that the visual intuition of longitudinal and lateral extension is admitted by all philosophers, he has but to turn to the works of Dr Brown and the elder Mill. In arguing that we have no immediate perception of visible figure, Dr Brown not only virtually, but expressly, asserts that the sight has no perception of extension in any of its dimensions. Not to multiply quotations, the following will, no doubt, be received as sufficient:--"They (i.e. philosophers) have--_I think without sufficient reason_--universally supposed that the superficial extension of _length and breadth_ becomes known to us by sight originally."[28] Dr Brown then proceeds to argue, with what success we are not at present considering, that our knowledge of extension and figure is derived from another source than the sense of sight.

[28] Brown's Lectures, Lecture xxviii.

Mr James Mill, an author whom Mr Bailey frequently quotes with approbation, and in confirmation of his own views, is equally explicit. He maintains, in the plainest terms, that the eye has no intuition of space, or of the reciprocal outness of visible objects. "Philosophy," says he, "has ascertained that we derive nothing from the eye whatever but sensations of colour--that the idea of extension [he means in its three dimensions] is derived from sensations not in the eye, but in the muscular part of our frame."[29] Thus, contrary to what Mr Bailey affirms, these two philosophers limit the office of vision to the perception of mere colour or difference of colour, denying to the eye the original perception of extension in any dimension whatever. In their estimation, the intuition of space is no more involved in our perception of different colours than it is involved in our perception of different smells or different sounds. Dr Brown's doctrine, in which Mr Mill seems to concur, is, that the perception of superficial extension no more results from a certain expanse of the optic nerve being affected by a variety of colours than it results from a certain expanse of the olfactory nerve being affected by a variety of odours.[30] So much for Mr Bailey's assertion, that _all_ philosophers admit the perception of extension in two dimensions.

[29] Mill's Analysis, vol. i. p. 73.

[30] This reasoning of Dr Brown's is founded upon an assumed analogy between the structure of the optic nerve, and the structure of the olfactory nerves and other sensitive nerves, and is completely disproved by the physiological observations of Treviranus, who has shown that no such analogy exists: that the ends of the nervous fibres in the retina being elevated into distinct separate _papillæ_, enable us to perceive the extension, and discriminate the position of visible bodies, while the nerves of the other senses being less delicately defined, are not fitted to furnish us with any such perception, or to aid us in making any such discrimination. See _Müller's Physiology, translated by W. Baly, M.D._, vol. ii. pp. 1073, 1074. Although the application of Treviranus's discovery to the refutation of Dr Brown's reasoning is our own, we may remark, in justice to an eminent philosopher, that it was Sir William Hamilton who first directed our attention to the _fact_ as established by the great physiologist.

But, of course, our main business is with the expression of his own opinion. In rebutting our charge, he maintains that "the visibility of angular distance (that is of extension laterally) is assumed, by implication, as part of Berkeley's doctrine, in _almost_ every chapter of my book."--(_Letter_, p. 13.) That word _almost_ is a provident saving clause; for we undertake to show that not only is the very reverse assumed, by implication, as part of Berkeley's doctrine, in the _single_ chapter to which we confined our remarks, but that, in another part of his work, it is expressly avowed as the only alternative by which, in the author's opinion, Berkeley's consistency can be preserved.

At the outset of his enquiry, Mr Bailey divides his discussion into two branches: first, Whether objects are originally seen to be external, or at _any_ distance at all from the sight; and, secondly, Supposing it admitted that they are seen to be external, or at _some_ distance from the sight, whether they are all seen in the same plane, or equally near. It was to the former of these questions that we exclusively confined our remarks;[31] and it was in reference to it, and to an important argument evolved by Mr Bailey in the course of its discussion, that we charged him with fathering on Berkeley the doctrine which he now disavows as his interpretation of the bishop's opinion. He further disputes the relevancy of the question about our perception of lateral extension, and maintains that distance in a direction from the percipient, or what we should call protensive distance, is the only matter in dispute; and that it is a misconception of the scope of Berkeley's essay to imagine otherwise. The relevancy of the question shall be disposed of afterwards. In the mean time, the question at issue is, Can the allegation which we have laid to Mr Bailey's charge be proved to be the fact, or not?

[31] Mr Bailey seems disposed to carp at us for having confined our remarks to this first question, and for not having given a more complete review of his book. But the reason why we cut short our critique is obvious; for if it be proved, as we believe it can, that objects are originally seen at _no distance whatever_ from the sight, it becomes quite superfluous to enquire what appearance they would present if originally seen at _some_ distance from the sight. The way in which we disposed of the first question, however imperfect our treatment of it may have been, necessarily prevented us from entering upon the second; and our review, with all its deficiencies, was thus a complete review of his book, though not a review of his complete book.

In discussing the first of the two questions, it was quite possible for Mr Bailey to have represented Berkeley as holding, that visible objects, though not seen to be external to the sight, were yet seen to be out of each other, or laterally extended within the organism or the mind. But Mr Bailey makes no such representation of the theory, and the whole argument which pervades the chapter in which the first question is discussed, is founded on the negation of any such extension. All visible extension, he tells us, must, in his opinion, be either plane or solid. Now he will scarcely maintain that he regarded Berkeley as holding that we perceive solid extension within the organism of the eye. Neither does he admit that, according to Berkeley, and in reference to this first question, plane extension is perceived within the organism of the eye. For when he proceeds to the discussion of the _second_ of the two questions, he remarks that "we must, _at this stage_ of the argument, consider the theory under examination, as representing that we see all things _originally in the same plane_,"[32] obviously implying that he had not _as yet_ considered the theory as representing that we see things originally in the same plane: in other words, plainly admitting that, in his treatment of the first question, he had not regarded the theory as representing that we see things originally under the category of extension at all.

[32] Review of Berkeley's Theory, p 35.

But if any more direct evidence on this point were wanted, it is to be found in the section of his work which treats of "the perception of figure." In the chapter in which he discusses the first of the two questions, he constantly speaks of Berkeley's theory as representing that "our visual sensations, or what we ultimately term visible objects, are originally mere internal feelings." The expression _mere internal feelings_, however, is ambiguous; for, as we have said, it might still imply that Mr Bailey viewed the theory as representing that there was an extension, or reciprocal outness of objects within the retina. But this doubt is entirely removed by a passage in the section alluded to, which proves that, in Mr Bailey's estimation, these mere internal feelings not only involve no such extension, but that there would be an inconsistency in supposing they did. In this section he brings forward Berkeley's assertion, "that neither solid nor plane figures are immediate objects of sight." He then quotes a passage in which the bishop begs the reader not to stickle too much "about this or that phrase, or manner of expression, but candidly to collect his meaning from the whole sum and tenour of his discourse." And then Mr Bailey goes on to say, "endeavouring, in the spirit here recommended, to collect the author's meaning when he affirms that the figures we see are neither plane nor solid, it appears to me to be _a part or consequence_ of his doctrine already examined, which asserts that visible objects are only internal feelings."[33] We can now be at no loss to understand what Mr Bailey means, and conceives Berkeley to mean, by the expression "mere internal feelings." He evidently means feelings in which no kind of extension whatever is involved: for, in the next page, he informs us that all visual extension or extended figure, "_must_ be apprehended as either plane or solid, and that it is impossible even to conceive it otherwise." Consequently, if the figures we see are, as Berkeley says, apprehended neither as plane nor as solid, Mr Bailey, entertaining the notions he does on the subject of extension, _must_ regard him as holding that they cannot be apprehended as extended at all--and accordingly such is the express representation he gives of the theory in the passage just quoted, where he says that "the doctrine of Berkeley, which affirms that the figures we see are neither plane nor solid, (that is, are extended in _no_ direction, according to Mr Bailey's ideas of extension,) appears to him to be _a part_ of the doctrine which asserts that visible objects are only internal feelings." Now if that be not teaching, in the plainest terms, that, according to Berkeley, no species of extension is implied in the internal feelings of vision, we know not what language means, and any one thought may be identical with its very opposite.

[33] Ibid. p. 136.

Here we might let the subject drop, having, as we conceive, said quite enough to prove the truth of our allegation that, in reference to the first question discussed, in which our original visual sensations are represented by Berkeley to be mere internal feelings, Mr Bailey understood and stated those feelings to signify sensations in which no perception of extension whatever was involved. However, as Mr Bailey further remarks that, "although Berkeley's doctrine about visible figures being neither plane not solid, is thus consistent with his assertion that they are internal feelings, it is in itself contradictory,"[34] we shall contribute a few remarks to show that while, on the one hand, the negation of extension is not required to vindicate the consistency of Berkeley's assertion, that visible objects are internal feelings, neither, on the other hand, is there any contradiction in Berkeley's holding that objects are not seen either as planes or as solids, and are yet apprehended as extended. Mr Bailey alleges that we are "far more successful in involving ourselves in subtle speculations of our own, than in faithfully guiding our readers through the theories of other philosophers." Perhaps in the present case we shall be able to thread a labyrinth where our reviewer has lost his clue, and, in spite of the apparent contradiction by which Mr Bailey has been gravelled, we shall, perhaps, be more successful than he in "collecting Berkeley's meaning from the whole sum and tenour of his discourse."

[34] Review of Berkeley's Theory, p. 137.

First, with regard to the contradiction charged upon the bishop. When we open our eyes, what do we behold? We behold points--_minima visibilia_--out of one another. Do we see these points to be in the same plane? Certainly not. If they are in the same plane we learn this from a very different experience from that of sight. Again, do we see these points to be _not_ in the same plane? Certainly not. If the points are not in the same plane we learn this, too, from a very different experience than that of sight. All that we see is that the points are out of one another; and this simply implies the perception of extension, without implying the perception either of plane or of solid extension. Thus by the observation of a very obvious fact, which, however, Mr Bailey has overlooked, is Berkeley's assertion that visible objects are apprehended as extended, and yet not apprehended either as planes or solids, relieved from every appearance of contradiction.

It must, however, be admitted that Mr Bailey has much to justify him in his opinion that extension must be apprehended either as plane or as solid. None of Berkeley's followers, we believe, have ever dreamt of conceiving it otherwise, and finding in their master's work the negation of solid extension specially insisted on, they leapt to the conclusion that the bishop admitted the original perception of plane extension. But Berkeley makes no such admission. He places the perception of plane extension on precisely the same footing with that of solid extension. "We see planes," says he, "in the same way that we see solids."[35] And the wisdom of the averment is obvious; for the affirmation of plane extension involves the negation of solid extension, but this negation involves the conception (visually derived) of solid extension; but the admission of that conception, so derived, would be fatal to the Berkeleian theory. Therefore its author wisely avoids the danger by holding, that in vision we have merely the perception of what the Germans would call the _Auseinanderseyn_, that is, the _asunderness_, of things--a perception which implies no judgment as to whether the things are secerned in plane or in protensive space.

[35] Essay, § 158.

With regard to the supposition that, in order to preserve Berkeley's consistency, it was necessary for him to teach that our visual sensations, (colours namely,) being internal feelings, could involve the perception neither of plane nor of solid extension, that is to say, of no extension at all, according to Mr Bailey's ideas, we shall merely remark, that there appears to us to be no inconsistency in holding, as Berkeley does, that these colours, though originally internal to the sight, are nevertheless perceived as extended among themselves.

We shall now say a few words on the _relevancy_ of the question, for Mr Bailey denies that this question, concerning the reciprocal outness of visible objects, ought to form any element in the controversy. We shall show, however, that one of his most important arguments depends entirely on the view that may be taken of this question; and that while the argument alluded to would be utterly fatal to Berkeley's theory, if the perception of reciprocal outness were denied, it is perfectly harmless if the perception in question be admitted.

Mr Bailey's fundamental and reiterated objection to Berkeley's theory is, that it requires us to hold that conceptions or past impressions, derived from one sense, (the touch,) are not merely recalled when another sense (the sight) executes its functions, but are themselves absolutely converted into the present intuitions of that other sense. In his own words, (_Review_, p. 69,) the theory is said to require "a transmutation of the conceptions derived from touch into the perceptions of sight." "According to Berkeley, (says he, _Review_, p. 22,) an internal feeling (i.e. a visual sensation) and an external sensation (i.e. a tactual sensation) having been experienced at the same time: the internal feeling, when it afterwards occurs, not only suggests the idea, but, by doing so, suggests the idea, or, if I may use the figure, infuses the perception of its own externality. Berkeley thus attributes to suggestion an effect contrary to its nature, which, as in the case of language, is simply to revive in our conception what has been previously perceived by the sense."

Now, this objection would be altogether insurmountable if it were true, or if it were a part of Berkeley's doctrine, that the sight has no original intuition of space, or of the reciprocal outness of its objects--in other words, of colours out of colours; for it being admitted that the sight has ultimately such a perception, it would be incumbent on the Berkeleian to show how conceptions derived from another sense, or how perceptions belonging to another sense, could be converted into that perception. We agree with Mr Bailey, in thinking that no process of association could effect this conversion; that if we did not originally see colours to be out of each other, and the points of the same colour to be out of each other, we could never so see them; and that his argument, when thus based on the negation of all original visual extension, and on the supposition that the touch is the sole organ of every species of externality, would remain invulnerable.

But, with the admission of the visual intuition of space, the objection vanishes, and the argument is shorn of all its strength. This admission relieves the theory from the necessity of maintaining, that conceptions derived from touch are transmuted into the perceptions of sight. It attributes to the sight all that ever truly belongs to it, namely, the perception of colours out of one another; it provides the visual intuitions with an externality of their own--and the theory never demands that they should acquire any other; and it leaves to these visual intuitions the office of merely suggesting to the mind tactual impressions, with which they have been invariably associated in place. We say, _in place_; and it will be found that there is no contradiction in our saying so, when we shall have shown that it is the touch, and not the sight, which establishes a protensive interval between the organ and the sensations of vision.

Visible extension, then, or the perception of colours external to colours, being admitted, Mr Bailey's argument, if he still adheres to it, must be presented to us in this form. He must maintain that the theory requires that the objects of touch should not only be suggested by the visual objects with which they have been associated, but that they should actually be _seen_. And then he must maintain that no power of association can enable us to see an object which can only be touched--a position which, certainly, no one will controvert. The simple answer to all which, is, that we never do see tangible objects--that the theory never requires we should, and that no power of association is necessary to account for a phenomenon which never takes place.

We cannot help thinking, that not a little of the misconception on this subject which prevails in the writings of Mr Bailey, and, we may add, of many other philosophers, originates in the supposition that we identify vision with the eye in the mere act of seeing, and in their taking it for granted that sight of itself informs us that we possess such an organ as the eye. Of course, if we suppose that we know instinctively, or intuitively, from the mere act of seeing, that the eye is the organ of vision, that it forms a part of the body we behold, and is located in the head, it requires no conjurer to prove that we _must_ have an instinctive, or intuitive, knowledge of visible things as larger than that organ, and, consequently, as external to it. In this case, no process of association is necessary to account for our knowledge of the distance of objects. That knowledge must be directly given in the very function and exercise of vision, as every one will admit, without going to the expense of an octavo volume to have it proved.

But we hold that no truth in mental philosophy is more incontestable than this, that the sight originally, and of itself, furnishes us with no knowledge of the eye, as we _now_ know that organ to exist. It does not inform us that we have an eye at all. And here we may hazard an observation, which, simple as it is, appears to us to be new, and not unimportant in aiding us to unravel the mysteries of sensation; which observation is, that, in no case whatever, does any sense inform us of the existence of its appropriate organ, or of the relation which subsists between that organ and its objects, but that the interposition of some other sense[36] is invariably required to give us this information. This truth, which we believe holds good with regard to all the senses, is most strikingly exemplified in the case of vision, as we shall now endeavour to illustrate.

[36] It would not be difficult to show, that as, on the one hand, _distance_ is not involved in the original intuitions of sight, so, on the other hand, _proximity_ is not involved in the original intuitions of touch; but that, while it is the touch which establishes an interval between the organ and the objects of sight, it is the sight which establishes _no_ interval between the organ and the objects of touch. Sight thus pays back every fraction of the debt it has incurred to its brother sense. This is an interesting subject, but we can only glance at it here.

Let us begin by supposing that man is a mere "power of seeing". Under this supposition, we must hold that the periphery of vision is one and the same with the periphery of visible space; and the two peripheries being identical, of course whatever objects lie within the sphere of the one must lie within the sphere of the other also. Perhaps, strictly speaking, it is wrong to say that these objects are apprehended as internal to the sight; for the conception of internality implies the conception of externality, and neither of these conceptions can, as yet, be realized. But it is obvious what the expression _internal_ means; and it is unobjectionable, when understood to signify that the Seeing Power, the Seeing Act, and the Seen Things, co-exist in a synthesis in which there is no interval or discrimination. For, suppose that we know instinctively that the seen things occupy a locality separate from the sight. But that implies that we instinctively know that the sight occupies a locality separate from them. But such a supposition is a falling back upon the notion just reprobated, that the mere act of seeing can indicate its own organ, or can localise the visual phenomena in the eye--a position which, we presume, no philosopher will be hardy enough to maintain, when called upon to do so, broadly and unequivocally. The conclusion, therefore, is irresistible, that, in mere vision, the sight and its objects cling together in a union or synthesis, which no function of that sense, and no knowledge imparted to us by it, (and, according to the supposition, we have, as yet, no other knowledge,) can enable us to discriminate or dissolve. Where the seeing is, there is the thing seen, and where the thing seen is, there is the seeing of it.

But man is not a mere seeing animal. He has other senses besides: He has, for example, the sense of touch, and one of the most important offices which this sense performs, is to break up the identity or cohesion which subsists between sight and its objects. And how? We answer, by teaching us to associate _vision in general_, or the abstract _condition_ regulating our visual impressions, with the presence of the small tangible body we call the eye, and _vision in particular_, or the individual sensations of vision, (i.e. colours,) with the presence of immeasurably larger bodies revealed to us by touch, and tangibly external to the tangible eye. Sight, as we have said, does not inform us that its sensations are situated in the eye: it does not inform us that we have an eye at all. Neither does touch inform us that our visual sensations are located in the eye. It does not lead us to associate with the eye any of the visual phenomena or operations _in the first instance_. If it did, it would (_firstly_) either be impossible for it _afterwards_ to induce us to associate them with the presence of tangible bodies distant and different from the eye: or, (_secondly_), such an association would merely give birth to the abstract knowledge or conclusion, that these bodies were in one place, while the sensations suggesting them were felt to be associated with something in another place; colour would not be seen--as it is--incarnated with body: or, (_thirdly_), we should be compelled to postulate for the eye, as many philosophers have done, in our opinion, most unwarrantably, "a faculty of projection"[37] by which it might dissolve the association between itself and its sensations, throwing off the latter in the form of colours over the surface of things, and reversing the old Epicurean doctrine that perception is kept up by the transit to the sensorium of the ghosts or _simulacra_ of things,

Quæ, quasi membranæ, summo de corpore rerum, Direptæ, volitant ultro citroque per auras.[38]

It is difficult to say whether the hypothesis of "cast-off films" is more absurd when we make the films come from things to us as spectral effluxes, or go from us to them in the semblance of colours.

[37] We observe that even Müller speaks of the "faculty of projection" as if he sanctioned and adopted the hypothesis.--See _Physiology_, vol. ii. p. 1167.

[38] Lucretius.

But according to the present view no such incomprehensible faculty, no such crude and untenable hypothesis, is required. _Before_ the touch has informed us that we have an eye, _before_ it has led us to associate any thing visual with the eye, it has _already_ taught us to associate in place the sensations of vision (colours) with the presence of tangible objects which are not the eye. Therefore, when the touch discovers the eye, and induces us to associate vision in some way with it, it cannot be the particular sensations of vision called colours which it leads us to associate with that organ; for these have been already associated with something very different. If it be not colours, then what is it that the touch compels us to associate with the eye? We answer that it is the abstract _condition_ of impressions as the general law on which all seeing depends, but as quite distinct from the particular visual sensations apprehended in virtue of the observance of that law.

Nor is it at all difficult to understand how this general condition comes to be associated with the eye, and how the particular visual sensations come to be associated with something distant from the eye: and further, how this association of the condition with one thing, and of the sensations with another thing, (an association established by the touch and not by the sight,) dissolves the primary synthesis of seeing and colours. It is to be observed that there are two stages in the process by which this secernment is brought about--_First_, the stage in which the visual phenomena are associated with things different from the organ of vision, the very existence of which is as yet unknown. Let us suppose, then, the function of sight to be in operation. We behold a visible object--a particular colour. Let the touch now come into play. We feel a tangible object--say a book. Now from the mere fact of the visible and the tangible object being seen and felt together, we could not associate them in place; for it is quite possible that the tangible object may admit of being withdrawn, and yet the visible object remain: and if so, no association of the two in place can be established. But this is a point that can only be determined by experience; and what says that wise instructor? We withdraw the tangible object. The visible object, too, disappears: it leaves its place. We replace the tangible object--the visible object reappears _in statu quo_. There is no occasion to vary the experiment. If we find that the visible object invariably leaves its place when the tangible object leaves its, and that the one invariably comes back when the other returns, we have brought forward quite enough to establish an inevitable association in place between the two. The two places are henceforth regarded, not as two, but as one and the same.

By the aid of the touch, then, we have associated the visual phenomena with thing which are _not_ the organ of vision; and well it is for us that we have done so betimes, and before we were aware of the eye's existence. Had the eye been indicated to us in the mere act of seeing; had we become apprised of its existence _before_ we had associated our visual sensations with the tangible objects constituting the material universe, the probability, nay the certainty, is that we would have associated them with this eye, and that then it would have been as impossible for us to break up the association between colours and the organ, as it now is for us to dissolve the union between colours and material things. In which case we should have remained blind, or as bad as blind; brightness would have been in the eye when it ought to have been in the sun; greenness would have been in the retina when it ought to have been in the grass. A most wise provision of nature it certainly is, by which our visual sensations are disposed of in the right way before we obtain any knowledge of the eye. And most wisely has nature seconded her own scheme by obscuring all the sources from which that knowledge might be derived. The light eyelids--the effortless muscular apparatus performing its ministrations so gently as to be almost unfelt--the tactual sensations so imperceptible when the eye is left to its own motions, so keen when it is invaded by an exploring finger, and so anxious to avoid all contact by which the existence of the organ might be betrayed. All these are so many means adopted by nature to keep back from the infant seer all knowledge of his own eye--a knowledge which, if developed prematurely, would have perverted the functions, if not rendered nugatory the very existence of the organ.

But, _secondly_, we have to consider the stage of the process in which vision is in some way associated with an object which is _not_ any of the things with which the visual sensations are connected. It is clear that the process is not completed--that our task, which is to dissolve the primary synthesis of vision and its phenomena, is but half executed, unless such an object be found. For though we have associated the visual sensations (colours) with something different from themselves, still vision clings to them without a hair's-breadth of interval and pursues them whithersoever they go. As far, then, as we have yet gone, it cannot be said that our vision is felt or known to be distanced from the fixed stars even by the diameter of a grain of sand. The synthesis of sight and colour is not yet discriminated. How, then, is the interval interposed? We answer, by the discovery of a tangible object in a different place from any of the tangible objects associated with colour; and then by associating, in some way or other, the operations of vision with this object. Such an object is discovered in the eye. Now, as has frequently been said, we cannot associate colours or the visual sensations with this eye; for these have been already disposed of otherwise. What, then, do we associate with it--and how? We find, upon experiment, that our apprehension of the various visual sensations depends on the presence and particular location of this small tangible body. We find that the whole array of visual phenomena disappear when it is tactually covered, that they reappear when it is reopened, and so forth. Thus we come in some way to associate vision with it--not as colour, however, not as visual sensation. We regard the organ and its dispositions merely as a general condition regulating the apprehension of the visual sensations, and no more.

Thus, by attending to the two associations that occur,--the association (in place) of visual sensations with tangible bodies that _are not_ the eye; and the association (in place) of vision with a small tangible body that _is_ the eye--the eye regarded as the condition on which the apprehension of these sensations depends; by attending to these, we can understand how a protensive interval comes to be recognised between the organ and its objects. By means of the touch, we have associated the sensations of vision with tangible bodies in one place, and the apprehension of these sensations with a tangible body in another place. It is, therefore, impossible for the sight to dissolve these associations, and bring the sensations out of the one place where they are felt, into the other place where the _condition_ of their apprehension resides. The sight is, therefore, compelled to leave the sensations where they are, and the apprehension of them where it is; and to recognize the two as sundered from each other--the sensations as separated from the organ, which they truly are. Thus it is that we would explain the origin of the perception of distance by the eye; believing firmly that the sight would never have discerned this distance without the mediation of the touch.

Rightly to understand the foregoing reasoning--indeed to advance a single step in the true philosophy of sensation--we much divest ourselves of the prejudice instilled into us by a false physiology, that what we call our organism, or, in plain words, our body, is necessarily _the seat_ of our sensations. That all our sensations come to be associated _in some way_ with this body, and that some of them even come to be associated with it _in place_, is undeniable; but so far is it from being true, that they are all essentially implicated or incorporated with it, and cannot exist at a distance from it, that we have a direct proof to the contrary in our sensations of vision; and until the physiologist can prove (what has never yet been proven) an _à priori_ necessity that our sensations must be where our bodies are, and an _à priori_ absurdity in the contrary supposition, he must excuse us for resolutely standing by the fact as we find it.

This is a view which admits of much discussion, and we would gladly expatiate upon the subject, did time and space permit; but we must content ourselves with winding up the present observations with the accompanying diagram, which we think explains our view beyond the possibility of a mistake.

A B_a_ _á_C

Let A be the original synthesis, or indiscrimination of vision and its sensations--of light and colours. Let _á_ be the visual sensations locally associated by means of the touch with the tangible bodies C _before_ vision is in any way associated with B--before, indeed, we have any knowledge of the existence of B. Then let _a_, the general condition on which the sensations, _after a time_, are found to depend, and in virtue of which they are apprehended, be locally associated with B--the eye discovered by means of the touch--and we have before us what we cannot help regarding as a complete _rationale_ of the whole phenomena and mysteries of vision. Now, the great difference between this view of the subject and the views of it that have been taken by _every_ other philosopher, consists in this, that whereas their explanations invariably implicated the visual sensations _á_ with B from the very first, thereby rendering it either impossible for them to be afterwards associated with C, or possible only in virtue of some very extravagant hypothesis--our explanation, on the contrary, proceeding on a simple observation of the facts, and never implicating the sensations _á_ with B at all, but associating them with C _à primordiis_, merely leaving to be associated with B, _a_, a certain general condition that must be complied with, in order that the sensations _á_ may be apprehended,--in this way, we say, our explanation contrives to steer clear both of the impossibility and the hypothesis.

We would just add by way of postscript to this article--which, perhaps, ought itself to have been only a postscript--that with regard to Mr Bailey's allegation of our having plagiarised one of his arguments, merely turning the coat of it outside in, we can assure him that he is labouring under a mistake. In our former paper, we remarked that we could not see things to be _out_ of the sight, because we could not see the sight itself. Mr Bailey alleges, that this argument is borrowed from him, being a mere reversal of his reasoning, that we cannot see things to be _in_ the sight, because we cannot see both the sight and the things. That our argument might very naturally have been suggested by his, we admit. But it was not so. We had either overlooked the passage in his book, or it was clean out of our mind when we were pondering our own speculations. It did not suggest our argument, either nearly or remotely. Had it done so, we should certainly have noticed it, and should probably have handled both Mr Bailey's reasoning and our own to better purpose, in consequence. If, notwithstanding this disclaimer, he still thinks that appearances are against us, we cannot mend his faith, but can merely repeat, that the fact is as we have stated it.

* * * * *

THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD.

WITH THIRTY-TWO ILLUSTRATIONS, BY WILLIAM MULREADY, R.A.

In a review we made last January of Goldsmith's "Deserted Village," illustrated by the Etching Club, we concluded our notice with recommending to those able artists the "Vicar of Wakefield;" and expressed a hope that Mr Maclise would lend his powerful aid, having in our recollection some very happy illustrations of his hand in pictures exhibited at the Royal Academy Exhibition.

What the Etching Club are about, we know not; but the subject has been taken up by Mr Mulready; and we now feel it incumbent upon us to notice this new and illustrated edition of that immortal work. Immortal it must be; manners pass away, modes change, but the fashion of the heart of man is unalterable. The "Vicar of Wakefield" bears the stamp of the age in which it was written. Had it been laid aside by the author, discovered, and now first brought out, without a notice of the author, or of the time of its composition, received it must have been indeed with delight, but not as belonging to the present day. It differs in its literature and its manners. It is at once a most happy work for illustration, and the most difficult. It is universally known. Who has not shed previous and heart-improving tears over it? Taking up the tale now, for the hundredth time, we are become, from somewhat morose, tender as a lamb--propitious condition for a critic! We opened upon the scene where Mr Burchell so cruelly tries poor Sophia, by offering her a husband in Mr Jenkinson; we know the whole transaction perfectly, the bitter joke, the proposal

"impares Formas atque animas in juga ahenea Sævo mittere cum joco."

Yet how strangely are we moved! Had the taxman at the moment called for the income-tax, he would have concluded we were paying the last farthing of our principal. What art is this in a writer, that he should by one and the same passage continue to move his readers, though they know the trick! Readers, too, that would have turned the cold shoulder to real tales of greater distress, and met suspicion that all was a cheat halfway; but the acknowledged fictitious they yield to at once their whole hearts, throwing to the winds their beggarly stint. Never was there a writer that possessed to so great a degree as did Goldsmith this wondrous charm; and in him it is the more delightful in the light and pleasant _allegria_ with which he works off the feeling. The volume is full of subjects that so move; and in this respect it is most admirable for illustration, inviting the ablest powers. But the difficulty, wherein does that lie? Look at all illustrations that have hitherto appeared in print, and you cry out to all--Away with the failure! Certain it is that but slender abilities have been hitherto employed; and when we hear of better artists coming to the undertaking, we are hardened against them. And then, how few come fresh to the tale. To those who do, perhaps a new illustration may have a tenfold charm; but to any one past five-and-twenty, it must come "with a difference." It is very difficult to reconcile one to a new Dr Primrose, a new Mrs Primrose. Beauty ever had the power of beauty, and takes us suddenly; we can more readily dismiss the old idea and pitch on the new, so that the Miss Primroses are more reconcilable and transferable creatures, than the Vicar and his wife, or the incomparable Moses and the unyielding Mr Burchell. We cannot pretend to tell how all these characters would have fitted their images given by Mr Mulready, had the work now first come into our hands. As it is, we can only say they are new to us. It requires time to reconcile this. In the meanwhile we must take it for granted, that they actually do represent those in Mr Mulready's vision, and he is a clear-sighted man, and has been accustomed to look into character well. His name as the illustrator, gave promise of success. Well do we remember an early picture by him--entitled, we believe, the Wolf and the Lamb. It represented two schoolboys--the bully, and the more tender fatherless child. The history in that little picture was quite of the manner of Goldsmith. The orphan boy's face we never can forget, not the whole expression of his slender form, though it is many years ago that we saw the picture. So that when the name of Mulready appeared as illustrator, we said at once, That will do--down came the book, and here it is before us. The pages have been turned over again and again. We cannot, nevertheless, quite reconcile our ideas to the new Dr and Mrs Primrose; but in attempting to do so, so many real artistical beauties have beamed from the pages, that we determined at once to pour out our hearts to Maga, and turn over page after page once more. The illustrations are thirty-two in number; one to head each chapter, though, and which we think a defect, the subject of the illustration is not always in the chapter at the head of which it is. The first is the choice of a wife--"and chose my wife as she did her wedding-gown." The intended bride is a very beautiful graceful figure, with a most sweet simplicity of countenance. This never could have resembled Mrs Deborah Primrose; the outline is most easy and graceful, even as one of Raffaelle's pure and lovely beings. The youth of the bride and bridegroom, fresh in their hopes of years of happiness, is happily contrasted with the staid age of the respectable tradesman, evidently one of honest trade and industrious habits--the fair dealer, one of the old race before the days of "immense sacrifices" brought goods and men into disrepute. The little group is charming; every line assists another, and make a perfect whole.

"The Dispute between the Vicar and Mr Wilmot."--"This, as may be expected, produced a dispute, attended with some acrimony." Old Wilmot is capital; there is acrimony in his face, and combativeness in his fists--both clenching confidently his own argument, and ready for action; the very drawing back of one leg, and protrusion of the other, is indicative of testy impatience. The vicar is a little too loose and slovenly, both in attitude and attire; the uniting of the figures (artistically speaking) is with Mr Mulready's usual ability.

"The Rescue of Sophia from Drowning by Mr Burchell."--"She must have certainly perished, had not my companion, perceiving her danger, instantly plunged in to her relief." This is altogether a failure, yet it is a good subject; nor has Mr Mulready been at all happy in the female beauty. The vicar stands upon the bank too apathetic; and the group in the vehicle, crossing the stream above, seem scarcely conscious of the event, though they are within sight of it. Mr Mulready has here, too, neglected his text. Sophia fell from her horse; all the party set out on horseback; there is no carriage mentioned.

"The Vicar at Home, with Neighbour Flamborough and the Piper."--"These harmless people had several ways of being good company; while one played, the other would sing some soothing ballad." The happy father, with his children climbing up his chair, and clinging to him, is a beautiful group, and quite worthy of Mr Mulready's pencil.

"Squire Thornhill."--"At last a young gentleman, of a more genteel appearance than the rest, came forward, and for a while regarding us, instead of pursuing the chase, stopped short, and giving his horse to a servant who attended, approached us with a careless, superior air." The family are sweetly grouped--the story well told--the easy assurance of the squire undeniable. The father holds his two boys, one on his lap, the other between his knees; but is he "_the_ vicar?"

"Mr Burchell and Sophia"--A most charming illustration. It is the haymaking scene. "I could not avoid, however, observing the assiduity of Mr Burchell, in assisting my daughter Sophia in her part of the task." Sophia is a lovely creature, just what she should be. We are not quite sure of Mr Burchell: possibly he may look too young; he was a character, and must have borne about him some little acquired oddity, sturdy, and not undignified. In the illustration he is too prettily genteel; but we do not wish to see any but Sophia--delightful, loving, lovable Sophia. In the background, Moses lies on the ground with his book, and the vicar has rather too suspicious a look; but we can forgive him that, and, for Sophia's sake, forgive Mr Mulready that he has paid less attention to her admirer--for at present he is no more. But his admiration is better, and more to the purpose than other men's love.

"Moses defeated in Argument, or rather borne down by the arrogant, ignorant volubility of the Squire."--"This effectually raised the laugh against poor Moses." It is well grouped; but the only successful figure is Moses. The squire is not the well-dressed, designing profligate. If the story were not well told by the grouping, we might have taken the squire for an itinerant "lecturer." The squire is so prominent a person in the tale, that we think there should have been a well-studied representation of the accomplished villain and fine gentleman.

No. 8.--Beyond the skill in grouping, Mr Mulready has not attempted any great interest in this illustration. It represents the family, with their friend Burchell, interrupted in their enjoyment by the chaplain, or rather the chaplain's gun; for that only presents its muzzle. "So loud a report, and so near, startled my daughters; and I could perceive that Sophia, in the fright, had thrown herself into Mr Burchell's arms for protection." We do not recognize the alarmed and lovely Sophia--here she might be any miss; so that the greatest miss is Mr Mulready's, for he has missed an opportunity of showing the beauty of the sweet sisters in alarm. In this chapter, we have Goldsmith's delightful ballad, "Turn, gentle hermit of the dale." Surely this was worthy an illustration or two; and if Mr Mulready felt himself confined to the heads of chapters, might he not, for once, have made his digression from the tale, as Goldsmith has done, and given us that charming episode?

"The Family Group on Horseback, going to Church."--"And when I got about halfway home, perceived the procession marching slowly forward towards the church." "The colt that had been nine years in the family, and Blackberry, his companion," are not the best horse-flesh. Mr Mulready does not draw the horse like Mr Herring; so, having failed in the feet of the colt, he has, though rather awkwardly, hidden Blackberry's behind a convenient stone, which yet makes us fear that the "family pride" will have a fall, and spare the Vicar's reproof. The party on Blackberry is good; and the patient, blind face of the animal is well attempted.

"The Visit to Neighbour Flamborough's on Michaelmas Eve."--"But previously I should have mentioned the very impolitic behaviour of Mr Burchell, who, during this discourse, sat with his face turned to the fire; and, at the conclusion of every sentence, would cry out, 'Fudge!'" This is scarcely the subject of the illustration, for Mr Burchell is quite in the background. We should like to have seen his face. Miss Carolina Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs is good; Lady Blarney is not the overdressed and overacting peeress. The whole is very nicely grouped. Perhaps we are not so pleased with this illustration, remembering Maclise's more finished picture of the subject.

Moses departing for the "Fair." Hopeful and confident are the group, and not least so Moses himself. We fancy we recognize in Moses a similar figure in a sweet picture exhibited last year by Mr Stonhouse, one of the "Etching Club." We are not quite satisfied with the other figures--they all hide their faces, as well they might, for their simplicity in trusting to the "discreet boy" that can "buy and sell to very good advantage"--so off go Moses and the colt that had been nine years in the family. "We all followed him several paces from the door, bawling after him good-luck! good-luck! till we could see him no longer."

No. 12 exhibits simplicity upon a larger scale, and shows the head of the family, verifying the old proverb, "like father like son"--though it should be here like son like father. The colt was fitly turned over to the son, grave blind Blackberry was a horse for the father's art and wisdom. "By this time I began to have a most hearty contempt for the poor animal myself, and was almost alarmed at the approach of every customer." Poor Blackberry! He is quite conscious of his depreciation; he is a wise animal, and can see that "with half an eye." Alas! we fear he has not that half. Blackberry is good--yet will he sell for nothing; how patiently he lets them handle his leg, and a handle it is; we can imagine the creature thinking, "pray, sir, would you like to look at the other poor thing of a leg?" The rascally Fair, in which Mr Mulready has shown, according to his author, that the Vicar ought not to have been, is well given; but we should have liked a full length portrait of Mr Jenkinson pronouncing [Greek: Anarchon ara chai atelentaion to pan.]

The reading the letter, the well-known letter of Mr Burchell to "The Ladies." "There seemed, indeed, something applicable to both sides in this letter, and its censures might as well be referred to those to whom it was written, as to us; but the malicious meaning was obvious, and we went no further." This, as usual, is well grouped; the Vicar ponders, and cannot tell what to make of it. We should have preferred, as a subject, the Vicar confronting Mr Burchell, and the cool effrontery of the philosopher turning the tables upon the Vicar, "and how came you so basely to presume to break open this letter?" or better still, perhaps, the encounter of art between Mr Burchell and Mrs Deborah Primrose. And why have we not Dick's episode of the dwarf and the giant? Episodes are excellent things, as good for the illustrations as for the book. No. 14, the contrivance of Mrs Primrose to entrap the squire, properly belongs to another chapter. "Then the poor woman would sometimes tell the squire that she thought him and Olivia extremely of a size, and would bid both stand up to see which was tallest." The passage is nicely told; there is, however, but one figure to arrest attention, and that is quite right, for it is Olivia's, and a sweet figure it is. Dear Olivia! We have not seen her portrait before, and we shall love her, beyond "to the end of the chapter," to the end of the volume, and the more so, that hers after all was a hard fate. It is the part of the tale which leaves a melancholy impression; Goldsmith has so determined it--and to his judgment we bow implicitly. Had any other author so wretchedly disposed of his heroine, in a work not professedly tragic, we should have been pert as critics usually are. Mrs Primrose is certainly here too young. We cannot keep our eyes off Olivia; and see, the scoundrel has slyly taken her innocent hand, and the other is put up to her neck in such modest doubt of the liberty allowed. Here, as in other instances, the squire is not the well-dressed man of the world, whose gold lace had attracted Dick's attention. We could linger longer over this illustration, but must pass on--honest Burchell has been dismissed, villany has full sway. We must leave poor Olivia to her fate, and turn to the family picture "drawn by a limner;" capital--"limner" well suiting the intended satire--some say a good-natured, sly cut at Sir Joshua. We should certainly have had Mrs Primrose as Venus, and the two little ones as Cupids, and the Vicar presenting to her his books on the Whistonian controversy, and the squire as Alexander. Whoever wishes to see specimens of this kind may see some ludicrous ones at Hampton court--particularly of Queen Elizabeth, and the three goddesses abashed by her superiority. We thought to leave poor Olivia to her fate--Mr Mulready will not let us give her up so easily, and takes us to the scene of her quitting her home for her betrayer; and this is the subject of--

"Yes, she is gone off with two gentlemen in a post-chaise; and one of them kissed her, and said he would die for her;" and there she is, hiding her beautiful face with her hands, and poor good Dick is pulling her back by her dress, that she may not go; but a villain's hand is round her waist, and one foot he has upon the step of the chaise, and the door is open. Poor Dick, you have nothing left you to do but to run home as fast as you can; and there you will find such a scene of innocent enjoyment, how to be marr'd! at the very moment, too, that the good Vicar had been feeling and saying, "I think myself happier now than the greatest monarch upon earth. He has no such fireside, nor such pleasant faces about it. We are descended from ancestors that knew no stain, and we shall leave a good and virtuous race of children behind us. While we live they will be our support and our pleasure here, and when we die they will transmit our honour untainted to posterity. Come, my son, we wait for a song: let us have a chorus. But where is my darling Olivia? That little cherub's voice is always sweetest in the concert." O Dick, Dick! at such a moment as this to run in and tell him to be miserable for ever; for that his cherub, his Olivia is gone, and gone, as it appears, to infamy, a thousand times more grievous than death. Was there ever so touching a scene?--Mr Mulready feared it. That is a wonderful chapter--the happiness is so domestically heightened, that the homefelt joy may be more instantly crushed. We know we shall not see dear darling Olivia again for a long, long time; and feel we want a pause and a little diversion--so we will go back to Bill the songster for amusement, and take it if we can; and here is for the purpose Bill's "Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog," alas! taught him, too, by honest Mr Williams; we only hope young, sturdy farmers have strong nerves, and don't break their hearts in love's disappointments. Here is Dick's Elegy; and as we, too, have a Moses at home of a "miscellaneous education," we will put on the Vicar's simplicity, and cheerful familiarity with his own flesh and blood--and thus we address our Moses, "Come, my boy, you are no hand at singing, so turn the Elegy another way: let us have a little Latin, for your music is Hexameter and Pentameter." Our Moses, "That's a hard task, sir, for one that cannot mount to Parnass Hill without his 'Gradus ad Parnassum.'" "Well, then get your Gradus, and put your foot in that first step of the ladder." Our Moses, waggishly--"I must mind my feet, sir, or they will be but lame verses, and go halting and hobbling--but I suppose you won't be very particular as to Latinity. I have heard you tell how Farmer Williams"--"No," said we, "not Williams, any other farmer you please; poor Williams is not likely to have any children; yet I know what you were going to say." "Farmer any body, then," said our Moses, "when he took his boy to school, left him with the master; and shortly returned to inform him, that, discoursing upon the subject at the 'public,' he had heard that there were two sorts of Latin, and so he brought the master a gammon of bacon, for he wished his son to have the best: now I think, sir, one of these two sorts must be 'dog Latin,' and that must be best fitted for the Elegy in question." Our Moses beats the Vicar's hollow in waggery, so we are proud of him. He takes after his mother. We condescended to be familiar enough to laugh. Now, then, Moses, to _your_ task and we to _ours_. And here we are at--

The scene of Mr Arnold and his family breaking in upon his butler personating his master, we are rather inclined to think a failure. There is Mr Mulready's good grouping, but somehow or other it is rather flat for so piquant an incident; "I was struck dumb with the apprehension of my own absurdity, when whom should I next see enter the room but my dear Miss Arabella Wilmot." We should like to have seen, in illustration, the political butler ordering the Vicar out of his house, or at least a more decided portrait of Arabella Wilmot. "Beauty is," as Miss Skeggs said of virtue, "worth any price;" and we are sorry to look about, and continue, in her words, "but where is that to be found?" What had Mr Mulready to do, that he would not let us have a sight of Arabella Wilmot. We, therefore, pass on to her lover, the Vicar's eldest son George, delivering his letter of recommendation to the nobleman's footmen, with his fee, which brings us to--

"However, after bribing the servants with half my worldly fortune, I was at last shown into a spacious apartment, my letter being previously sent up for his lordship's inspection." The Vicar's son is a fine fellow in the illustration: we are glad to see him, but rather wish Mr Mulready had chosen a better subject. George's adventures were written with a nice satire; for Goldsmith knew what and whom he had to describe. The reasons why he would not do for an usher, are well put. Is it not possible that Mr Dickens took his first hint of Do-the-boys' Hall from reading this passage in Goldsmith? Indeed, there may be a suspicion that Mrs Primrose gave the idea of Mrs Nickleby, though he has made her an original. But to return to the traveller--we should like to have seen an "illustration" of his interview with the principal of the College of Louvain, a passage quite in the spirit of Le Sage. "The principal seemed at first to doubt my abilities; but of these I offered to convince him, by turning a part of any Greek author he should fix upon into Latin. Finding me perfectly earnest in my proposals he addressed me thus, 'You see, young man,' continued he, 'I never learned Greek, and I don't find that I have ever missed it. I have had a doctor's cap and gown without Greek; I have ten thousand florins a year without Greek; and, in short,' continued he, 'as I don't know Greek, I do not believe there is any good in it.'"

The office of Mr Crispe, who fitted becoming situations upon every body. "There I found a number of poor creatures, all in circumstances like myself, expecting the arrival of Mr Crispe, presenting a true epitome of English impatience." And there is Mr Crispe himself, in the distance indeed, but certainly the principal figure. The expectants are good enough, but Mr Crispe, with his audacious, confident, deceitful face, is excellent; the fellow rattling the money in both his pockets, with fraud, successful laughing fraud filling out both his cheeks. The audacious wretch! little cares he for the miserable expectants whom he means to ship off to America and slavery. Preferring to see the Vicar's son among "the harmless peasants of Flanders," we turn over the leaves.

Here is a delightful group,--a fine sturdy fellow holding his dog by a handkerchief through his collar, and how naturally the honest brute leans against his master, as claiming a sort of kindred--the expression of the young woman with the child in her arms, is attention and admiration. It is not quite certain that one of the loungers is pleased with that admiration. This is a pleasant scene, and happily illustrated. "I had some knowledge of music, with a tolerable voice, and now turned what was once my amusement into a present means of subsistence." That is a pleasant, happy scene, though the personages are the poorest. Of another character is the next scene, and quite other personages act in it; for we come again to poor Olivia in her distress, grossly, brutally insulted by the wealthy profligate.

The profligate scoundrel in the very lowest baseness of his character.--It is poor Olivia speaks. "Thus each day I grew more pensive, and he more insolent, till at last the monster had the assurance to offer me to a young baronet of his acquaintance." This scene is not fit for picture; it is seemingly nothing but successful villany, and of too gay a cast to be pathetic. The chapter from which it is taken would have furnished a much better one--the meeting between the Vicar and his poor Olivia. We can bear the suffering of a Cordelia, because all in that is great though villany be successful; but there is a littleness in mere profligacy that infects even the victim. We could have wished that Mr Mulready had taken the "Meeting" for his illustration. How exquisitely beautiful is the text! The first impulse of affection is to forget, or instantly palliate the fault. "Welcome, any way welcome, my dearest lost one, my treasure, to your poor old father's bosom!" Then how exquisite her observance of the effect of grief upon the parent's appearance. "Surely you have too much wisdom to take the miseries of my guilt upon yourself." How timely has Goldsmith thrown in this, when we are most willing to catch at a straw of excuse for the lovely sufferer! No, we say, she never contemplated the misery she has inflicted; and then how natural is the instantaneous remembrance of her guilt! The taking it up and laying it down at a moment's call, from affection, is most touchingly beautiful. "Our wisdom, young woman," replied I--"Ah, why so cold a name, papa?" cried she. "This is the first time you ever called me by so cold a name." "I ask pardon, my darling," returned I; "but I was going to observe that wisdom makes but a slow defence against trouble, though at last a sure one." Admitting the subject chosen by Mr Mulready, we do not approve of his manner of telling it; we scarcely know which is the principal figure. Nor is Olivia's good. It has nothing of the madness the text speaks of. "My answer to this proposal was almost madness." We are glad to quit the scene, though our next step is into deeper misery; and--

"The return of the Vicar to his home in flames," a pitiable sight; but here is the triumph of love over misery, and the subject is good. "Now," cried I, holding up my children, "now let the flames burn on, and all my possessions perish." The scene is well told, and not the worse for a justifiable theft from Correggio in the fainting figure--it is the _mother_ in the Ecce Homo in the National Gallery. The failing of the hands at the moment of action, is true to the original and to nature. We rejoice that Mr Mulready did not take the return of Olivia as his subject. We should not like to see Mrs Primrose in that odious light; and though admirable in the tale, she is no favourite already. The parent had called his child, "woman--young woman"--the coldness passed away, and the word was changed for "darling." The word was again to be resumed, and how applied!--to the unforgiving--That even the Vicar's anger, we must rather say indignation, should be virtuous. "Ah, madam!" cried her mother, "this is but a poor place you have come to after so much finery. My daughter Sophy and I can afford but little entertainment to persons who have kept company only with people of distinction. Yes, Miss Livy, your poor father and I have suffered very much of late; but I hope Heaven will forgive you." Not a word of her own forgiving, not a word of endearment; and we suspect the word madam had, when written, more blame in it than it now retains--and how do the words "my daughter Sophy and I" cut off the forlorn one from the family!--and the plural "persons" avoiding the individuality, the personality of her daughter was another deep cut into the very flesh of the lost one's heart. Now then comes the reproof, and the good man shines in the glory of goodness and greatness, indignation for love's sake. "During this reception the unhappy victim stood pale and trembling, unable to weep or to reply; but I could not continue a silent spectator of her distress; wherefore, assuming a degree of severity in my voice and manner, which was ever followed with instant submission, 'I entreat, woman, that my words may be now marked once for all: I have brought you back a poor deluded wanderer: her return to duty demands the revival of our tenderness. The real hardships of life are now coming fast upon us; let us not therefore increase them by dissensions among each other." The words to the conclusion of the chapter should be written in letters of gold, were not the better place for them out of sight, upon the hearts of all; for none of us have too much charity, though some may have an excess of love.

No. 22 is an affecting scene. The Vicar with his wounded arm is on his bed, with his distressed family about him. Olivia has fainted on hearing the news of her betrayer's intended marriage, and the mother is attending her. "My compassion for my poor daughter, overpowered by this new disaster, interrupted what I had further to observe. I bade her mother support her, and after a short time she recovered." The countenance of the Vicar in this scene is the best among the illustrations--of that good man enduring affliction, that sight worthy the gods to look at, as said the Stoic. But we that have human sympathies, would willingly turn away from such a sight; and where shall we find refuge? for sorrow is coming on--sorrow upon sorrow--an accumulation of miseries no Stoic would have borne; for he, with all his boasted indifference, would have borne them no longer, but ended them and life together, if he might so end them, as he thought. And now, happily, "_our_ Moses" comes to our relief, not with extracts from chapters on stoicism, or any other false philosophy, but holding up to us what he is pleased to call his "dogrel." So, between him and Bill the Songster, we will have a duet. But as we have no Bill present, we will take his part ourselves, and, like other acting substitutes, go through the part, reading. "Now we hope," addressing our Moses, "you have not lengthened out your Latin to four lines for the four short English in each stanza. If you have, to the flames with them!"

_Our Moses_.--

"CARMINA ELEGIACA IN MORTEM CUJUSDAM CANIS ISLINGTONIENSIS."

(_We_.--Not in such a hurry--"An Elegy on the death of a mad dog;" and what made you put in Islingtoniensis? Well, I suppose you call that a Ciceronic flourish! Now, I will read the English--you the Latin.)

_We_.--Good people all, of every sort, Give ear unto my song, And if you find it wondrous short, It cannot hold you long.

_Our Moses_.--Quotlibet huc, ubicunque hominum, auscultate canenti, Si breve vos teneam;--non ego longus ero.

_We_.--In Islington there was a man Of whom the world might say, That still a godly race he ran Whene'er he went to pray.

_Our Moses_.--Quidam Islingtoniensis erat, quem donec adibat Templa pius, sacra diximus ire via.

_We_.--A kind and gentle heart he had To comfort friends and foes; The naked every day he clad When he put on his clothes.

_Our Moses_.--Suavis amico, inimico, ita mitis, nudum ut amictu, Quum se vestibat, cotidie indueret.

_We_.--And in that town a dog was found, As many dogs there be, Both mongrel, puppy, whelp, and hound, And curs of low degree.

_Our Moses_.--Et canis oppido eodem erat huic, ubi plurimus, et grex Et fæx, cum catulis plebs numerosa canum.

_We_.--This dog and man at first were friends, But when a pique began, The dog, to gain some private ends, Went mad and bit the man.

_Our Moses_.--Grandis amicitia, at Canis, ut sibi gratificetur Fit rabidus, rabido dente hominemque petit.

_We_.--Around from all the neighbouring streets The wondering neighbours ran, And swore the dog had lost his wits, To bite so good a man.

_Our Moses_.--Concurrunt cives, O illum Cerberun, at aiunt, Qualem amens rabido dense momordet herum.

_We_.--The wound it seem'd both sore and sad To every Christian eye, And while they swore the dog was mad, They swore the man would die.

_Our Moses_.--O sævum vulnus, clamant lachrymosius omnes, En rabidus canis, et mox moriturus homo.

_We_.--But soon a wonder came to light, That show'd the rogues they lied; The man recover'd of the bite, The dog it was that died.

_Our Moses_.--Mendaces cives monstrat res prodigiosa, Sanus homo subito fit--moriturque canis.

"A very good boy, Bill, upon my word," said the Vicar, "and an Elegy that may truly be called tragical." So we present our Moses a sovereign for his verse--"A sovereign for a verse, my boy." "I will never," quoth he, "be averse to a sovereign. We have heard of a monarch who gave a crown for a song." A little refreshed, let us turn to the book. Here is

No. 23.--Very well, Mr Mulready, artistically performed; but we fear we shall not relish too many of these distressing subjects. We know, from distress to distress, you will take us into prison. Artists and writers of the present day delight in prison scenes; we are not of that class, but endure it. We would on no account sit down with that rascally-looking fellow that is driving and taking an inventory of the Vicar's stock. It is winter too. "The consequence of my incapacity was his driving my cattle that evening, and their being appraised and sold the next day for less than half their value."

No. 24--Is the attempt at a rescue. The Vicar represses and reproves the violence of his enraged parishioners. The drawing is good; but it is not a subject we delight to look at; and we begin to fear that further on we shall fare worse. Why did not Mr Mulready give us the interview between the Vicar and his old acquaintance, Mr Jenkinson? Artists of skill like to show it in grouping, and prefer that to giving character. "The consequences might have been fatal, had I not immediately interposed, and with some difficulty rescued the officers from the hands of the enraged multitude."

"The Prison." We have little wish to stay there long, and look at the odious villains that surround the good man "paying his footing." "I was apprised of the usual perquisite required upon these occasions, and immediately complied with the demand, though the little money I had was nearly exhausted." The next illustration, too, takes us into equally bad company.

The Vicar's attempt to reform the jail. The mockery, and roguery, and Vicar's perseverance, while a practised hand is picking his pocket--are admirably represented. "I therefore read them a portion of the service, with a loud unaffected voice, and found my audience perfectly merry upon the occasion."

The penitent scene. "My design succeeded, and in less than six days some were penitent, and all attentive." We now began to say, what a happy thing it was that Dr Primrose was sent to jail. Doubtless Goldsmith intended to show how good comes out of evil. There are some good figures in this illustration.

The seizure of poor Sophia--and very good it is--not that we congratulate Mr Mulready on his Sophia here; she is rather a vulgar dowdy figure, the others are very good, and the incident well told. "A post-chaise and pair drove up to them, and instantly stopped. Upon which a well-dressed man, but not Mr Thornhill, stepping out, clasped my daughter round the waist, and, forcing her in, bid the postilion drive on, so that they were out of sight in a moment." Now, Mr Mulready, in the next edition, you must positively illustrate the rescue by Mr Burchell.

"The Vicar delivering his sermon"--Charmingly grouped are the attentive and subdued audience. Mrs Primrose is surely too young a figure. If we could get over our early impression of the Vicar's countenance, his figure here would probably please. "The prisoners assembled themselves according to my directions, for they loved to hear my counsel--my son and his mother supported me on either side."

The return of dear Sophia, with her true but singular lover and deliverer--Perhaps the vicar takes it more coolly than the text justifies. "Just as he delivered this news, my dearest girl entered, and with looks almost wild with pleasure, ran to kiss me in a transport of action." There should have been an illustration of the scene where Mr Burchell is discovered to be Sir William Thornhill; and above all, where he proposes Jenkinson to Sophia.

The complete detection of the squire's villainies, and his great disappointment. "And to convince you that I speak nothing but truth, here is the license by which you were married together." All here is good but the figure of the Squire. In appearance we are to presume that Squire Thornhill was a gentleman, or Miss Wilmot could not have endured his addresses, nor indeed would Olivia have been deceived by him. In this illustration he has neither the appearance, dress, nor attitude of one in that condition.

The last illustration, or "All's Well that End's Well." It is, however, near ending badly, both as to the incident and the illustration--in the latter all is good, excepting only Arabella Wilmot; perhaps there is a defect in the printing, which gives her an odd look--but altogether she is not a good figure. She should have been elegance personified. Burchell looks the sturdy runner that could overtake the chaise, and rescue manfully his Sophia, to win and wear a favour, though he seems here in little hurry; but that is in character. "But as I stood all this time with my book ready, I was at last quite tired of the contest, and shutting it, 'I perceive,' cried I, 'that none of you have a mind to be married.'" We should like to have seen the dinner-party, and the two Miss Flamboroughs ready to die with laughing. "One jest I particularly remember: old Mr Wilmot drinking to Moses, whose head was turned another way, my son replied, 'Madam, I thank you.' Upon which the old gentleman, winking upon the rest of the company, observed that he was thinking of his mistress; at which jest I thought the two Miss Flamboroughs would have died with laughing." We should like to have seen their faces by Mr Mulready's hand, because we are sure that the two Miss Flamboroughs were thinking of themselves, in conjunction with Moses and the jest.

We have noticed every illustration. We hope there will be another edition, and then we may have a few more plates. We have therefore, as we have gone on, ventured to suggest some subjects--but, above all, we would recommend Mr Mulready to supply a few portraits, heads only, such as that of the "Schoolmaster in the Deserted Village," by the Etching Club.

* * * * *

THE ATTORNEY'S CLERK IN THE MONK'S HOOD.

"I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous boy-- The sleepless soul that perish'd in his pride."

Had the "resolution and independence" which dignify the lowly, and strengthen the unhappy, when no visible eye befriends them, been among the rich endowments of Chatterton's wonderful mind--had he possessed and cherished the courage that bears up against obloquy and neglect--had he pursued the rough tenour of his way undaunted, in spite of "solitude, pain of heart, distress, and poverty," how different must have been the fate of the inspired boy of Bristol! He might be alive yet; he would be ninety years old, graced with honour, love, obedience, troops of friends, and all that should accompany old age. He might have achieved some great epic, or some gorgeous historical dramas,--have finished the Fairy Queen, or given us a Fairy King of his own creation.

Among the lighter honours of social distinction, we can fancy his reception as a London "lion," by the fair and noble in proud places. Still pleasanter is the vision of his less public hours of idleness spent among congenial spirits. We can fancy him, the patriarch of living poets, seated as a guest at the breakfast-table of Samuel Rogers, who is about twelve years his junior, and those fine lads, Lisle Bowles, James Montgomery, and William Wordsworth, and those promising children, Tom Moore and Tom Campbell, and that braw chiel John Wilson--(_palmam qui meruit ferat_)--the youngest of the party something, perhaps, but not much, under seventy, except the bard of the Isle of Palms, who is no chicken; and unless the master of the feast have summoned those pretty babes from the Wood, the two Tennysons. But alas for Chatterton! the vision will not hold: he disappears from his chair at the feast, like Banquo--"and, when all's done, you look but on a stool." The ghost of the slayer of himself, after long haunting Strawberry Hill, to rebuke the senile complacency of the chronicler of royal and noble authors, repaired, after the death of that prosperous man of wit and fashion, to his native town, to prowl in Redcliff church, and about the graves of his fathers in its churchyard, and the graves which they had successively dug there during a century and a half. His bones were left to moulder among those of other pauper strangers in the burial-ground of Shoelane workhouse. We attach no credit to the story of the exhumation of his body, and its mysterious reinterment in Redcliff. His fathers were sextons; and he, too, was in some sort a sexton also--but spiritually and transcendantly. He buried his genius in the visionary grave of Rowley, "an old chest in an upper room over the chapel on the north side of Redcliff church;" and thence, most rare young conjurer, he evoked its spirit in the shape of fragments of law-parchment, quaintly inscribed with spells of verse and armorial hieroglyphics, to puzzle antiquaries and make fools of scholiasts. Puzzle them he did; and they could not forgive a clever stripling, whom hunger had tempted to don an ancient mask, and impose himself on their spectacled eyes as a reverend elder. Rogue!--vagabond! Profligate impostor! The slim, sleek, embroidered juggler of the Castle of Otranto had not a kind word for this ragged orphan of his own craft. He, whose ambition was to shine among writers who have given intellectual grace to their noble lineage--among whom assuredly he does and will shine--but whose acute consciousness of something meretricious in his metal, made him doubt if the public would accept coinage from his mint; and so caused him to wear tentative disguises, whether he elaborated a romance or a keen and playful witticism--and who really did injustice to his own powers,--not from modesty but meanness,--even he, the son of a prime minister and heir to a peerage--a man who was himself always something of a trickster, now mystifying a blind old woman at Paris; now sending open letters, privately nullified, recommending the bearers to his friend the envoy at Florence; now, with the mechanic aid of village carpenters and bricklayers, rearing a frail edifice bristling with false points, and persuading the world that it was all pure Gothic, perhaps chuckling at his assurance--even this shrewd mummer gravely shook his head at Chatterton, and frowned on him as a cheat! True; they were both cheats; Horace Walpole from apprehensive vanity; Chatterton from proud oblique humility. The Bristol boy knew his worth; but, doubting the equity as well as the sagacity of his judges, he did not venture to produce it as his own. He supposed that an obscure and penniless youth, such as he, could have little chance of attention or fair play in the world if he appeared in his proper character; so he painfully assumed another, of a nature that could not long have been supported even had he been a various linguist deeply versed in etymologies, and especially proficient in our extinct idioms, and their several dates of usage, instead of wanting even Latin enough to understand the easiest parts of Skinner's Etymology of the English tongue, one of the books that he consulted and guessed at.

Of all modern suicides this youth was the most interesting; of all literary impostors the least unpardonable, though his ways were, unhappily for himself, of indefensible crookedness. He neither ascribed his fictions to a great name as Ireland did, nor did he, like Macpherson, steal the heart out of national ballads and traditions, to stuff a Bombastes Penseroso of his own making.

Any competent, yet moderately indulgent reader, who should for the first time take up Chatterton's works, and beginning at the beginning, in Tyrwhitt's first edition, for example, peruse no more than sixty or seventy pages, would probably lay down the volume somewhat disappointed not to have found the very extraordinary merit he had expected. The compositions that this partial examination would take in are three--Eclogues, Elinour and Juga, Verses to Lydgate, with Song to Ella, Lydgate's Answer, and the Tournament.

The first Eclogue is a conversation between two fugitive shepherds, who bewail the wretched condition to which the barons' wars have reduced them. It contains some pleasing lines.

As the rustics discuss their grievances in a valley under cover of

"... Eve's mantle gray, The rustling leaves do their white hearts affray. They regret the pleasures of their forsaken home, ... the kingcup decked mees, The spreading flocks of sheep of lily white, The tender applings and embodied trees, The parker's grange, far spreading to the sight, The gentle kine, the bullocks strong in fight, The garden whiten'd with the comfrey plant, The flowers Saint Mary shooting with the light-- ... The far-seen groves around the hermit's cell, The merry fiddle dinning up the dell, The joyous dancing in the hostry court-- But now, high song and every joy farewell, Farewell the very shade of fair disport."

In the second Eclogue, a good son invokes blessings on his father, who is gone with the crusaders to Palestine. He describes with much animation the voyage, the landing in Syria, the warring Saracens, King Richard of lion's heart, and anticipates victory and the return to England.

"Thus Nigel said, when from the azure sea The swollen sail did dance before his eyne. Swift as the wish he to the beach did fly, And found his father stepping from the brine. Sprites of the blest, the pious Nigel said, Pour out your pleasance on my father's head!"

The third Eclogue, if divested of certain exuberances--for Chatterton was precocious in every thing, and many of his fancies want the Bowdler pruning-knife--might be seasonably transferred to some of the penny publications for the benefit of Mr Frost's disciples. A poor man and woman, on their way to the parson's hayfield, complain to each other of their hard lot in being obliged to earn their bread by the sweat of their brows. "Why," asks the woman, "should I be more obligated to work than the fine Dame Agnes? What is she more than me? The man, unable to solve so knotty a point, says he doesn't see how he himself is not as good as a lord's son, but he will ask Sir Roger the parson, whom he consults accordingly.

"_Man_.--By your priestship now say unto me, Sir Godfrey the knight, who liveth hard by, Why should he than me Be more great In honour, knighthood, and estate?

"_Sir Roger_.--If thou hast ease, the shadow of content, Believe the truth, none happier is than thee. Thou workest well; can that a trouble be? Sloth more would jade thee than the roughest day. Could'st thou the secret minds of others see, Thou would'st full soon see truth in what I say. But let me hear thy way of life, and then Hear thou from me the lives of richer men.

"_Man_.--I rise with the sun, Like him to drive the wain, And, ere my work is done, I sing a song or twain. I follow the plough-tail With a bottle of ale. On every saint's day With the minstrel I'm seen, All footing away With the maids on the green. But oh, I wish to be more great, In honour, station, and estate!

"_Sir Roger_.--Hast thou not seen a tree upon a hill, Whose ample boughs stretch wide around to sight? When angry tempests do the heavens fill, It shaketh drear, in dole and much affright: While the small flower in lowly graces deck'd Standeth unhurt, untroubled by the storm. The picture such of life. The man of might Is tempest-chafed, his woe great as his form; Thyself, a floweret of small account, Would harder feel the wind as higher thou didst mount."

Sir Roger's moral is trite enough, yet it seems to have escaped the consideration of our Chartists and Socialists.

Elinour the nut-brown, and Juga the fair, are two pining maidens, who, seated on the banks of the Redbourne, a river near St Alban's, are each bemoaning their lovers, gone to fight in that neighbourhood for the Rose of York. Presently, racked with suspense, they hasten nearer to the scene of action.

"_Like twain of clouds that hold the stormy rain, They moved gently o'er the dewy meads_ To where Saint Alban's holy shrines remain. There did they find that both their knights were slain. Distraught they wander'd to swoln Redbourne's side, Yell'd there their deadly knell, sank in the waves, and died."

The verses to Lydgate consist of ten lines of no merit at all, and supposed to be sent to him by Rowley, with the Ode to Ella, which has a movement that recalls Collins, a lyrical artist perhaps unexcelled in our language, and in whose manner Chatterton so obviously and frequently composes, that the fact alone might have settled the Rowley question, though we are not aware that it was ever particularly insisted on in the controversy.

"Oh Thou, or what remains of Thee, Ella! the darling of futurity, Let this my song bold as thy courage be, As everlasting to posterity--

"When Dacia's sons, with hair of blood-red hue, Like kingcups glittering with the morning dew, Arranged in drear array, Upon the fatal day, Spread far and wide on Watchet's shore, Then didst thou furious stand, And by thy valiant hand Besprinkle all the meads with gore.

"Driven by thy broadsword fell, Down to the depths of hell, Thousands of Dacians went.

* * * * *

"Oh Thou, where'er, thy bones at rest, Thy sprite to haunt delighteth best, Whether upon the blood-embrued plain-- Or where thou ken'st from far, The dismal cry of war, _Or see'st some mountain made of corses slain,_

"Or see'st the war-clad steed That prances o'er the mead, And neighs to be among the pointed spears-- Or in black armour stalk around Embattled Bristol, once thy ground, Or haunt with lurid glow the castle stairs,

"Or, fiery, round the Minster glare! Let Bristol still be made thy care; Guard it from foeman and consuming fire; Like Avon's stream embrace it round, Nor let a sparkle harm the ground, Till in one flame the total world expire."

The quatrains entitled Lydgate's answer, are amply complimentary on the foregoing song, but otherwise as prosaic as the lines that introduce it.

* * * * *

"Among the Grecians Homer was A poet much renown'd; Among the Latins _Virgilius_ Was best of poets found.

"The British Merlin often had The gift of inspiration; And Afled to the Saxon men Did sing with animation.

"In Norman times Turgotus and Good Chaucer did excel; Then Stowe, the Bristol Carmelite, Did bear away the bell.

"Now Rowley, in these murky days, Sends out his shining lights, And Turgotus and Chaucer live In every line he writes."

The next is the Tournament, an interlude. Sir Simon de Burton, its hero, is supposed to have been the first founder, in accomplishment of a vow made on the occasion, of a church dedicated to _Our Lady_, in the place where the church of St Mary Redcliff now stands. There is life and force in the details of this tourney; and the songs of the minstrel are good, especially the first, which is a gallant hunting stave in honour of William the Red King, who hunts the stag, the wolf, and "the _lion_ brought from sultry lands." The sentiment conveyed in the burden of this spirited chorus sounds oddly considerate, as the command issued by William Rufus:--

"Go, rouse the lion from his hidden den, Let thy darts drink the blood of any thing but men."

To the paternity of the next in order--the Bristol Tragedy, or Death of Sir Charles Baldwin--Chatterton confessed; and such an admission might have satisfied any one but Dean Milles. The language is modern--the measure flowing without interruption; and, though the orthography affects to be antiquated, there is but one word (bataunt) in the whole series of quatrains, ninety-eight in number, that would embarrass any reader in his teens; though a boy that could generate such a poem as that, might well be believed the father of other giants whom he chose to disown. It is a masterpiece in its kind, almost unexceptionable in all its parts. The subject is supposed to have been suggested by the fate of Sir Baldwin Fulford, a zealous Lancastrian, beheaded at Bristol in 1461, the first year of the reign of Edward IV., who, it is believed, was actually present at the execution.

Now comes Ella, a tragical interlude, or discoursing tragedy, by Thomas Rowley, prefaced by two letters to Master Canning, and an introduction. In the first letter, among various sarcasms on the age, is one, complaining that

"In holy priest appears the baron's pride."

A proposition, we fear, at least as true in our day as in the fifteenth century. From the same epistle we would recommend to the consideration of the Pontius Pilates of our era, the numerous poets who choose none but awfully perilous themes, and who re-enact tremendous mysteries more confidently than if they were all Miltons, the annexed judicious admonition:--

"Plays made from holy tales I hold unmeet; Let some great story of a man be sung; When as a man we God and Jesus treat, In my poor mind we do the Godhead wrong."

And the following piece of advice, from the same letter, would not be ill bestowed on modern shopocracy:--

"Let kings and rulers, when they gain a throne, Show what their grandsires and great-grandsires bore; Let trades' and towns'-folk let such things alone, Nor fight for sable on a field of ore."

Yet he who could give this sensible counsel did by no means follow it. Chatterton, who really could trace back his ancestors for 150 years as a family of gravediggers, drew out for himself a pedigree which would have astonished Garter king-at-arms, and almost abashed a Welsh or German genealogy. He derived his descent from Sire de Chasteautonne, of the house of Rollo, the first Duke of Normandy, who made an incursion on the coast of Britain in the ninth century, and was driven away by Alfred the Great! Nine shields, exhibiting the family arms, were carefully prepared by him, and are preserved, with many other and very various inventions by the same hand, in the British Museum; and neat engravings of those Chatterton escutcheons are furnished by Mr Cottle, in his excellent essays on this tortuous genius. He was equally liberal in providing a pedigree for his friend Mr Burgham, a worthy and credulous pewterer in his native town, convincing him, by proofs that were not conclusive at the Herald's College, that he was descended from the De Burghams, who possessed the estate and manor of Brougham in the reign of Edward the Confessor, and so allying the delighted hearer with the forefathers of an illustrious Ex-Chancellor of our day. No less a personage, too, than Fitz-Stephen, son of Stephen Earl of Ammerle in 1095, grandson of Od, Earl of Bloys and Lord of Holderness, was the progenitor gravely assigned to Chatterton's relative, Mr Stephens, leather-breeches-maker of Salisbury. Evidence of all sorts was ever ready among the treasures in the Redcliff muniment room, the Blue-Coat boy's "Open Sesame!"

The plot of Ella may be told in a few words. Ella, a renowned English warrior, the same who is invoked in the fine song already quoted, marries Bertha, of whom his friend and fellow warrior, Celmond, is secretly enamoured. On the wedding-day he is called suddenly away to oppose a Danish force, which he defeats, but not without receiving wounds severe enough to prevent his immediate return home. Celmond takes advantage of this circumstance, and under pretence of conducting Bertha to her husband, betrays her into a forest that chances to be the covert of Hurra, the Danish general, and other of the discomfited invaders. Her shrieks bring Hurra and his companions to her aid. They kill Celmond, and generously resolve to restore Bertha to her lord. He in the mean time, impatient to rejoin his bride, has contrived to get home, where, when he hears of her ill-explained departure, believing her false, he stabs himself. She arrives only in time to see him die.

Celmond, soliloquizing on the charms of Bertha, exclaims,--

"Ah, Bertha, why did nature frame thee fair? Why art thou not as coarse as others are? _But then thy soul would through thy visage shine_; Like nut-brown cloud when by the sun made red, So would thy spirit on thy visage spread."

At the wedding-feast, so unexpectedly interrupted by news of the Danes, the following pretty stanzas are sung by minstrels representing a young man and woman.

"_Man_.--Turn thee to thy shepherd swain; Bright sun has not drunk the dew From the flowers of yellow hue; Turn thee, Alice, back again.

_Woman_.--No, deceiver, I will go, Softly tripping o'er the mees, Like the silver-footed doe Seeking shelter in green trees.

_Man_.--See the moss-grown daisied bank Peering in the stream below; Here we'll sit in dewy dank, Turn thee, Alice: do not go.

_Woman_.--I've heard erst my grandam say That young damsels should not be, In the balmy month of May, With young men by the greenwood tree.

_Man_.--Sit thee, Alice, sit and hark How the blackbird chants his note, The goldfinch and the gray-morn lark, Shrilling from their little throat.

_Woman_.--I hear them from each greenwood tree Chanting out so lustily, Telling lectures unto me, Mischief is when you are nigh.

_Man_.--See, along the mends so green Pièd daisies, kingcups sweet, All we see; by none are seen; None but sheep set here their feet.

_Woman_.--Shepherd swain, you tear my sleeve; Out upon you! let me go; Keep your distance, by your leave, Till Sir Priest make one of two.

_Man_.--By our lady and her bairn, To-morrow, soon as it is day, I'll make thee wife, nor be forsworn, So may I live or die for aye.

_Woman_.--What doth hinder but that now We at once, thus hand in hand, Unto a divine do go, And be link'd in wedlock-band? (Sensible woman!)

_Man_.--I agree, and thus I plight Hand and heart and all that's mine. Good Sir Herbert do us right, Make us one at Cuthbert's shrine.

_Both_.--We will in a cottage live, Happy though of no estate; Every hour more love shall give; We in goodness will be great."

The two Danish generals, Hurra and Magnus, warm their blood to the fighting temperature before the battle by quarreling with and abusing each other, like Grecian heroes. They are both bullies, but Hurra is brave and Magnus a craven. Chatterton's sarcastic humour plays them off admirably. The result of the struggle between the two armies is pithily announced by one of the fugitives:--

"Fly, fly, ye Danes! Magnus the chief is slain; The Saxons come with Ella at their head: Fly, fly, _this is the kingdom of the dead_."

In this drama is the exquisite melody, "O, sing unto my roundelay!" with which every one is familiar, as it is introduced into all our popular selections from the poets.

Here is a cunning description of dawn.

"The morn begins along the east to sheen, _Darkling the light doth on the waters play_; The faint red flame slow creepeth o'er the green, To chase the murkiness of night away, Swift flies the hour that will bring out the day. The soft dew falleth on the greening grass; The shepherd-maiden, dighting her array, _Scarce sees her visage in the wavy glass_."

Such extracts do not, and are not intended to, convey any notion of Chatterton's dramatic power in this play. Mere extracts would not do justice to that, and therefore we confine ourselves to selections of a few out of many passages that can stand independent of plot or action, without detriment to their effect. The same remark will not apply to the next piece, or rather fragment. Godwin, a Tragedy, by Thomas Rowley. It is short, and the dramatic interest weak. In the following noble chorus, however, we recognise the genius of Chatterton:--

"When Freedom, drest in blood-stained vest, To every knight her war-song sung, Upon her head wild weeds were spread, A gory broadsword by her hung. She paced along the heath, She heard the voice of death.

"Pale-eyed Affright, his heart of silver hue, In vain essay'd her bosom to congeal: She heard inflamed the shrieking voice of Woe, And cry of owls along the sadden'd vale. She shook the pointed spear, On high she raised her shield; Her foemen all appear, And fly along the field.

"Power, with his head uplifted to the skies, His spear a sunbeam and his shield a star, Like two bright-burning meteors rolls his eyes, Stamps with his iron feet, and sounds to war. She sits upon a rock, She bends before his spear, She rises from the shock, Wielding her own in air.

"Hard as the thunder doth she drive it on; Keen wit, cross muffled, guides it to his crown; His long sharp spear, his spreading shield are goe; He falls, and falling rolleth thousands down."

A short prologue by Master William Canning, informs us that this tragedy of Godwin was designed to vindicate the Kentish earl's memory from prejudices raised against him by monkish writers, who had mistaken his character, and accused him of ungodliness "for that he gifted not the church." There are but three scenes in the play. In the first, Godwin and Harold confer together on the distressed state of the nation, and the weakness of the king, whose court is overrun with Norman favourites to the exclusion of the English knights, and the great oppression of the people. Harold, young and impetuous, is for instant rebellion; but the father tries to moderate his rage, recommending patience and calm preparation.

"_Godwin_.--What tidings from the king? _Harold_.-- His Normans know. _Godwin_.--What tidings of the people? _Harold_.--Still murmuring at their fate, still to the king They roll their troubles like a surging sea. Has England, then, a tongue but not a sting? Do all complain, yet will none righted be? _Godwin_.--Await the time when God will send us aid. _Harold_.--Must we, then, drowse away the weary hours? I'll free my country, or I'll die in fight. _Godwin_.--But let us wait until some season fit. _My_ Kentishmen, _thy_ Somertons shall rise, Their prowess warmer for the cloak of wit, Again the argent horse shall prance in skies."

An allusion, says Chatterton, to the arms of Kent, a horse salient, argent. As to the cloak of wit, it may possibly be preserved in Somersetshire; but the mantle certainly was not tied as an indefeasible heirloom over the broad shoulders of the county of Kent. No ancient Saxons, or even Britons, ever displayed prowess so stolid as those brave wild-wood savages of Boughton Blean, near Canterbury, who recently fell in battle with her Majesty's 45th regiment, opposing sticks to balls and bayonets, under their doughty leader Sir William Courtenay, Earl of Devonshire, Knight of Malta, King of Jerusalem, and much more. And there were other blockheads, substantial dunces, of respectable station in East Kent, among this ignorant and ambitious madman's supporters; men who had been at school to little purpose. Such an insurrection of satyrs, and such a Pan, in the middle of the nineteenth century, within earshot of the bells of Christchurch! But this by the bye.

The next poem is styled English Metamorphosis, by T. Rowley. It consists of eleven stanzas of ten lines each, all fluent and spirited, and some of very superior merit. It is the fable of Sabrina, Milton's "daughter of Locrine," transliquefied to the river Severn, while her mother, Elstrida, was changed to the ridge of stones that rises on either side of it, Vincent's rocks at Clifton, and their enemy, the giant, was transformed to the mountain Snowdon. This giant was a very Enceladus.

"He tore a ragged mountain from the ground; Hurried up nodding forests to the sky: Then with a fury that might earth astound, To middle air he let the mountain fly, _The flying wolves sent forth a yelling cry_."

In illustration of Elstrida's beauty,--

"The morning tinge, the rose, the lily flower, In ever-running race on her did paint their power."

The most vulgar and outworn simile is refreshed with a grace by the touch of Chatterton.

Of the next poem--An excellent ballad of Charity, by the good priest, Thomas Rowley, 1454--it is clear that the young author thought highly, by a note that he transmitted with it to the printer of the "Town and Country Magazine," July 4, 1770, the month preceding that of his death. Unlike too many bearers of sounding appellations, it has certainly something more than its title to recommend it.

The octosyllabic lines--twenty only--on Redcliff Church, by T.R., show what nice feeling Chatterton had for the delicacies of that florid architecture:--

"The cunning handiwork so fine, Had wellnigh dazzled mine eyne. Quoth I, some artful fairy hand Uprear'd this chapel in this land. Full well I know so fine a sight, Was never raised by mortal wight."

Of its majesty he speaks in another measure:--

"Stay, curious traveller, and pass not by Until this festive pile astound thine eye. Whole rocks on rocks, with iron join'd, survey; And oaks with oaks that interfitted lie; This mighty pile that keeps the winds at bay, And doth the lightning and the storm defy, That shoots aloft into the realms of day, Shall be the record of the builder's fame for aye. Thou see'st this mastery of a human hand, The pride of Bristol, and the western land. Yet is the builder's virtue much more great; Greater than can by Rowley's pen be scann'd. Thou see'st _the saints and kings in stony state, As if with breath and human soul expand_. Well may'st thou be astounded--view it well; Go not from hence before thou see thy fill, And learn the builder's virtues and his name. Of this tall spire in every country tell, And with thy tale the lazy rich men shame; Show how the glorious Canning did excel; How he, good man, a friend for kings became, And glorious paved at once the way to heaven and fame."

The "Battle of Hastings" is the longest of Chatterton's poems, and the reader who arrives at its abrupt termination will probably not grieve that it is left unfinished. The whole contains about 1300 lines in stanzas of ten, describing archery fights and heroic duels that are rather tedious by their similarity, and offensive from the smell of the shambles; and which any quick-witted stripling with the knack of rhyming might perhaps have done as well, and less coarsely, after reading Chapman's or Ogilby's Homer, or the fighting scenes in Spenser, the Border Ballads, &c. But even this composition is not unconscious of the true afflatus, such as is incommunicable by learning, not to be inhaled by mere imitative powers, and which might be vainly sought for in hundreds of highly elaborated prize poems.

There is nothing more interesting in British history than the subject; and it is one which Chatterton, with all his genius, was much too young to treat in a manner at all approaching to epic completeness. Yet a few specimens might show that he is not deficient in the energy of the Homeric poetry of action. But here is metal more attractive, a young Saxon wife:--

"White as the chalky cliffs of Britain's isle, Red as the highest-coloured Gallic wine, Gay as all nature at the morning smile, Those hues with pleasance on her lips combine; Her lips more red than summer evening's skies, Or Phoebus rising in a frosty morn; Her breast more white than snow in fields that lies, Or lily lambs that never have been shorn, Swelling like bubbles in a boiling well, Or new-burst brooklets gentling whispering in the dell,

* * * * *

"Brown as the filbert dropping from the shell, Brown as the nappy ale at Hocktide game-- So brown the crooked rings that neatly fell Over the neck of that all-beauteous dame. Grey as the morn before the ruddy flame Of Phoebus' chariot rolling through the sky; Grey as the steel-horn'd goats Conyan made tame-- So grey appear'd her featly sparkling eye.

* * * * *

"Majestic as the grove of oaks that stood Before the abbey built by Oswald king; Majestic as Hibernia's holy wood, Where saints, and souls departed, masses sing-- Such awe from her sweet look far issuing, At once for reverence and love did call. Sweet as the voice of thrushes in the spring, So sweet the words that from her lips did fall.

* * * * *

"Taper as candles laid at Cuthbert's shrine, Taper as silver chalices for wine, So were her arms and shape.-- As skilful miners by the stones above Can ken what metal is inlaid below, So Kennewalcha's face, design'd for love, The lovely image of her soul did show. Thus was she outward form'd; the sun, her mind, Did gild her mortal shape and all her charms refined."

The next poem, and the last of the _modern-antiques_ that it may be worth while to note, is the story of William Canning, the illustrious founder of Redcliff Church, and is worthy of the author and his subject.

"Anent a brooklet as I lay reclined, Listening to hear the water glide along, Minding how thorough the green meads it twined, While caves responded to its muttering song, To distant-rising Avon as it sped, Where, among hills, the river show'd his head.

Engarlanded with crowns of osier-weeds, And wreaths of alders of a pleasant scent.

"Then from the distant stream arose a maid, Whose gentle tresses moved not to the wind. Like to the silver moon in frosty night, The damsel did come on so blithe and bright. No broider'd mantle of a scarlet hue, No peakèd shoon with plaited riband gear, No costly paraments of woaden blue; Nought of a dress but beauty did she wear; Naked she was, and looked sweet of youth, And all betoken'd that her name was Truth."

The few words then spoken by this angelical lady--who unhappily favoured Chatterton but with "angel visits, short and far between"--throw him into a reverie on the life of William Canning, whose boyhood was more fortunate than the poet's; for it is here reported of Canning, that

"He ate down learning with the wastlecake."

Chatterton, poor fellow, had neither fine bread to eat, nor fine learning within the possibility of his acquisition. Yet even the worthy Corporation of his native city will, we doubt not, be willing to allow that the Blue-Coat Charity boy might be entitled to the praise he gives Canning in the next couplet: that he--

"As wise as any of the Aldermen, Had wit enough to make a Mayor at ten."

We have limited these slight notices to the Rowley Poems; and such readers of our extracts as have been repelled from the perusal of those poems, by the formidable array of uncouth diction and strange spelling, may enquire what has become of the hard words. Here are long quotations, and not an obsolete term or unfamiliar metre among them. Chatterton took great pains to encrust his gold with verd-antique; it requires little to remove the green rubbish from the coin. By the aid of little else than his own glossary, "the Gode Preeste Rowleie, Aucthoure," is restored to his true form and pressure, and is all the fairer for the renovation.

We have no space for examination of the "numerous verse," and verses numerous, that Chatterton left undisguised by barbarous phraseology. His modern poems, morally exceptionable as is much of the matter, are affluent of the genius that inspired the old. African Eclogues, Elegies, Political Satires, Amatory Triflings, Lines on the Copernican System, the Consuliad, Lines on Happiness, _Resignation_, The Art of Puffing, and Kew Gardens--to say nothing of his equally remarkable prose writings--attest the versatility of his powers, and the variety of his perception of men and manners. His knowledge of the world appears to have been almost intuitive; for surely no youth of his years ever displayed so much. Bristol, it is true, was, of all great towns in England, one of the most favourable to the development of his peculiar and complicated faculties. His passion for antiquarian lore, and his poetical enthusiasm, found a nursing mother in a city so rich in ancient architecture, heraldic monuments, and historical interest; his caustic humour was amply fed from the full tide of human life, with all its follies, in that populous mart; and his exquisite sensibility to the beautiful and magnificent in nature, was abundantly ministered to by the surrounding country. We are told that he had been by some odd chance taught his alphabet, and his first lesson in "reading made easy," out of a black-letter Bible! That accident may have had its share in forming his taste for old-fashioned literature. But he was an attorney's clerk! The very name of a lawyer's office seems to suggest a writ of ejectment against all poetical influences in the brain of his indented apprentice. Yet Chatterton's anomalous genius was in all likelihood fostered by that dark, yet subtle atmosphere. His duty of copying precedents must have initiated him in many of the astute wiles and twisted lines of reasoning that lead to what is termed sharp practice, and so may have confirmed and aided his propensities to artifice; while the mere manual operation tutored his fingers to dexterity at quaint penmanship. He had much leisure too; for it is recorded that his master's business seldom occupied him more than two hours a-day. He was left to devote the rest of his time unquestioned to all the devices of an inordinate imagination.

After all, it is no unreasonable charity to believe, that what was unworthy and unsound in his character, and probably in his physical temperament, might, under more auspicious circumstances of condition and training, have been kept in check till utterly expelled by the force of his own maturer mind. In weighing his faults against his genius and its better fruits, it should never be forgotten that when he terminated his existence he was only seventeen years and nine months old.

"More wounds than nature gave he knew, While misery's form his fancy drew In dark ideal hues and horrors not its own."[39]

May we not even dare to hope, then, though he "perished in his pride," that he is still a living genius, assoiled of that foul stain of self-murder, and a chartered spiritualized melody where want and trouble madden not?

[39] T. Warton's "Suicide."

* * * * *

IGNACIO GUERRA AND EL SANGRADOR;

A TALE OF CIVIL WAR.

On a June evening in the year 1839, four persons were assembled in the balcony of a pleasant little villa, some half-league from the town of Logroño in Navarre. The site of the house in question was a narrow valley, formed by a double range of wood-covered hills, the lower limbs of a mountain chain that bounded the horizon some miles in rear of the villa. The house itself was a long, low building, of which the white stone walls had acquired the mellow tint that time and exposure to the seasons can alone impart. A solid balcony of carved unpainted oak ran completely round the house, its breadth preventing the rays of the sun from entering the rooms on the ground floor, and thereby converting them into a cool and delightful refuge from the heats of summer. The windows of the first and only story opened upon this balcony, which, in its turn, received shelter from a roof of yellow canes, laid side by side, and fastened by innumerable packthreads, in the same way as Indian matting. This sort of awning was supported by light wooden pillars, placed at distances of five or six feet from each other, and corresponding with the more massive columns that sustained the balcony. At the foot of these latter, various creeping plants had taken root. A broad-leafed vine pushed its knotty branches and curled tendrils up to the very roof of the dwelling, and a passion-flower displayed its mystical purple blossoms nearly at as great a height; while the small white stars of the jasmine glittered among its narrow dark-green leaves, and every passing breeze wafted the scent of the honeysuckle and clematis through the open windows, in puffs of overpowering fragrance.

About two hundred yards to the right of the house, rose one of the ranges of hills already mentioned, and on the opposite side the eye glanced over some of those luxuriant corn-fields which form so important a part of the riches of the fertile province of Navarre. The ground in front of the villa was tastefully laid out as a flower garden, and, midway between two magnificent chestnut trees, a mountain rivulet fell into a large stone basin, and fed a fountain, from which it was spouted twenty feet into the air, greatly to the refreshment of the surrounding pastures.

The party that on the evening in question was enjoying the scent of the flowers and the song of the nightingales, to which the neighbouring trees afforded a shelter, consisted, in the first place, of Don Torribio Olana, a wealthy proprietor of La Rioja, and owner of the country-house that has been described. He had been long used to pass the hot months of each year at this pleasant retreat; and it was no small calamity to him when the civil war that broke out on the death of Ferdinand, rendered it scarcely safe, in Navarre at least, to live out of musket-shot of a garrison. Sometimes, however, and in spite of the advice of his friends, who urged him to greater prudence, the worthy Riojano would mount his easy-going round-quartered cob, and leave the town for a few hours' rustication at his _Retiro_. After a time, finding himself unmolested either by Carlists or by the numerous predatory bands that overran the country, he took for companions of his excursions his daughter Gertrudis, and an orphan niece, to whom he supplied the place of a father. Five years of impunity were taken as a guarantee for future safety, and Don Torribio now no longer hesitated to pass the night at his country-house as often as he found it convenient. It was observed, also, that many of those persons who had at first loudly blamed him for risking his neck, and that of his daughter and niece, in order to enjoy a purer atmosphere than could be inhaled in the dusty streets of Logroño, at length gathered so much courage from his example, as to accompany him out to the _Retiro_, and eat his excellent dinners, and empty his cobweb-covered bottles, without allowing their fear of the Carlists to diminish their thirst or disturb their digestion.

Upon this occasion, however, the only guest was a young and handsome man, whose sunburnt countenance and military gait bespoke the soldier, while a double stripe of gold lace on the cuff of his blue frock-coat, marked his rank as that of lieutenant-colonel. Although not more than thirty years of age, Don Ignacio Guerra had already attained a grade which is often the price of as many years' service; but his rapid promotion was so well justified by his merit and gallantry, that few were found to complain of a preference which all felt was deserved. Both by moral and physical qualities, he was admirably suited to the profession he had embraced. Slender in person, but well knit and muscular, he possessed extraordinary activity, and a capacity of enduring great fatigue. Indulgent to those under his command, and self-denying in all that regarded himself personally, his enthusiasm for the cause he served was such, that during nearly two years that he had been the accepted lover of Donna Gertrudis Olana, this was only the second time he had left his regiment for a few days' visit to his affianced bride. He had arrived at Logroño the preceding day from a town lower down the Ebro, where the battalion he commanded was stationed; and Don Torribio, with whom he was a great favourite, had lost no time in taking him out to the _Retiro_; nor, perhaps, were the lovers sorry to leave the noise and bustle of the town for this calm and peaceful retreat.

It was about an hour after sunset, and Don Torribio sat dozing in an arm-chair, with his old black dog Moro coiled up at his feet, and his niece Teresa beside him, busying herself in the arrangement of a bouquet of choice flowers, while at the other end of the balcony Gertrudis and her lover were looking out upon the garden. The silence was unbroken, save by the splashing noise of the fountain as it fell back upon the water-lilies that covered its basin. The moon was as yet concealed behind the high ground to the right of the house; but the sky in that direction was lighted up by its beams, and the outline of every tree and bush on the summit of the hill was defined and cut out, as it were, against the clear blue background. Suddenly Gertrudis called her companion's attention to the neighbouring mountain. "See, Ignacio!" exclaimed she, "yonder bush on the very highest point of the hill! Could not one almost fancy it to be a man with a gun in his hand? and that clump of leaves on the top bough might be the _boina_ of one of those horrid Carlists?"

While she spoke the officer ran his eye along the ridge of the hill, and started when he caught sight of the object pointed out by Gertrudis; but before he could reply to her remark, she was called away by her father. At that moment the supposed bush made a sudden movement, and the long bright barrel of a musket glittered in the moonbeams. The next instant the figure disappeared as suddenly as though it had sunk into the earth.

The Christino colonel remained for a moment gazing on the mountain, and then, turning away, hastened to accompany his host and the ladies, who had received a summons to supper. On reaching the foot of the stairs, however, instead of following them into the supper-room, he passed through the house-door, which stood open, and, after a moment's halt in the shade of the lattice portico, sprang forward with a light and noiseless step, and in three or four bounds found himself under one of the large chestnut trees that stood on either side the fountain. Keeping within the black shadow thrown by the branches, he cast a keen and searching glance over the garden and shrubberies, now partially lighted up by the moon. Nothing was moving either in the garden, or as far as he could see into the adjacent country. He was about to return to the house, when a blow on the back of the head stretched him stunned upon the ground. In an instant a slip-knot was drawn tight round his wrists, and his person securely pinioned by a strong cord to the tree under which he had been standing. A cloth was crammed into his mouth to prevent his calling out, and the three men who had thus rapidly and dexterously effected his capture, darted off in the direction of the house.

Desperate were the efforts made by Don Ignacio to free himself from his bonds, and his struggles became almost frantic, when the sound of a scuffle in the house, followed by the piercing shrieks of women, reached his ears. He succeeded in getting rid of the handkerchief that gagged him, but the rope with which his arms were bound, and that had afterwards been twined round his body and the tree, withstood his utmost efforts. In vain did he throw himself forward with all his strength, striking his feet furiously against the trunk of the tree, and writhing his arms till the sharp cord cut into the very sinew. The rope appeared rather tightened than slackened by his violence. The screams and noise in the house continued; he was sufficiently near to hear the hoarse voices and obscene oaths of the banditti--the prayers for mercy of their victims. At length the shrieks became less frequent and fainter, and at last they died away entirely.

Two hours had elapsed since Ignacio had been made prisoner, hours that to him appeared centuries. Exhausted by the violence of his exertions, and still more by the mental agony he had endured, his head fell forward on his breast, a cold sweat stood upon his forehead, and had it not been for the cords that held him up, he would have fallen to the ground. He was roused from this state of exhaustion and despair by the noise of approaching footsteps, and by the arrival of a dozen men, three or four of whom carried torches. They were dressed in the sort of half uniform worn by the Carlist _volantes_, or irregular troops; round their waists were leathern belts filled with cartridges, and supporting bayonets and long knives, in many instances without sheaths. Ignacio observed with a shudder that several of the ruffians had their hands and weapons stained with blood.

"Whom have we here?" exclaimed a sallow, evil-visaged fellow, who wore a pair of tarnished epaulets. "Is this the _negro_ you secured at the beginning of the affair?"

One of the men nodded assent, and the chief bandit, taking a torch, passed it before the face of the captive officer.

"_Un militar_!" exclaimed he, observing the uniform button. "Your name and rank?"

Receiving no reply, he stepped a little on one side, and looked to the coat-cuff for the usual sign of grade.

"_Teniente coronel_!" cried he on seeing the double stripe.

A man stepped forward, and Ignacio, who knew that death was the best he had to expect at the hands of these ruffians, and was observing their proceedings in stern silence, immediately recognized a deserter from his battalion.

"'Tis the Colonel Ignacio Guerra," said the man; "he commands the first battalion of the Toledo regiment."

An exclamation of surprise and pleasure burst from the Carlists on hearing the name of an officer and battalion, well known and justly dreaded among the adherents of the Pretender. Their leader again threw the light of the torch on the features of the Christino, and gazed at him for the space of a minute with an expression of cruel triumph.

"Ha!" exclaimed he, "_el Coronel Guerra! He_ is worth taking to headquarters."

"We shall have enough to do to get away ourselves, laden as we are," said one of the men, pointing to a number of large packages of plunder lying on the grass hard by. "Who is to take charge of the prisoner? Not I, for one."

A murmur among the other brigands approved this mutinous speech.

"_Cuatro tiros_," suggested a voice.

"Yes," said the leader, "to bring down the enemy's pickets upon us. They are not a quarter of a league off. Pedro, lend me your knife. We will see," he added with a cruel grin, "how the gallant colonel will look cropped."

A knife-blade glanced for a moment in the torchlight as it was passed round the head of the Christino officer.

"_Toma! chicos!_" said the savage, as he threw the ears of the unhappy Ignacio amongst his men. A ferocious laugh from the banditti welcomed this act of barbarous cruelty.

The leader sheathed the knife twice in his victim's breast before restoring it to it's owner, and the Carlists, snatching up their booty, disappeared in the direction of the mountains.

At daybreak the following morning, some peasants going to their labour in the fields saw the body of the unfortunate officer still fastened to the tree. They unbound him, and, perceiving some signs of life, carried him into Logroño, where they gave the alarm. A detachment was immediately sent out to the Retiro, but it was too late to pursue the assassins; and all that could be done was to bring in the bodies of Don Torribio, his daughter, and niece, who were lying dead in the supper-room. An old groom and two women servants had shared a like fate; the horses had been taken out of the stable, and the house ransacked of every thing valuable.

For several weeks Ignacio Guerra remained wavering, as it were, between life and death. At length he recovered; but his health was so much impaired, that the surgeons forbade his again encountering the fatigues of a campaign. Enfeebled in body, heartbroken at the horrible fate of Gertrudis, and foreseeing the speedy termination of the war, consequent on the concluded treaty of Bergara, he threw up his commission, and left Spain to seek forgetfulness of his misfortunes in foreign travel.

In all French towns of any consequence, and in many whose size and population would almost class them under the denomination of villages, there is some favourite spot serving as an evening lounge for the inhabitants, whither, on Sundays and fête-days especially, the belles and _élégants_ of the place resort, to criticize each other's toilet, and parade up and down a walk varying from one to two or three hundred yards in extent.

The ancient city of Toulouse is of course not without its promenade, although but poor taste has been evinced in its selection; for, while on one side of the town soft well-trimmed lawns, cool fountains, and magnificent avenues of elm and plane trees, are abandoned to nursery-maids and their charges, the rendezvous of the fashionables of the pleasant capital of Languedoc is a parched and dusty _allée_, scantily sheltered by trees of recent growth, extending from the canal to the open square formerly known as the Place d'Angoulême, but since 1830 re-baptized by the name of the revolutionary patriarch General Lafayette.

It was on a Sunday evening of the month of August 1840, and the Allée Lafayette was more than usually crowded. After a day of uncommon sultriness, a fresh breeze had sprung up, and a little before sundown the fair Toulousaines had deserted their darkened and artificially cooled rooms, and flocked to the promenade. The walk was thronged with gaily attired ladies, smirking dandies, and officers in full dress. In the fields on the further side of the canal, a number of men of the working-classes, happy in their respite from the toils of the week, were singing in parts, with all the musical taste and correctness of ear for which the inhabitants of that part of France are noted; while, on the broad boulevard that traverses the lower end of the _allée_, a crowd of recruits whom the conscription had recently called under the colours, stood gazing in open-mouthed astonishment and infinite delight at some rudely constructed booths and shows, outside of which, clown and paillasse were rivalling each other in the broad humour of their lazzi. Parties of students, easily recognizable by their eccentric and exaggerated style of dress, and the loud tone of their conversation, were seated outside the cafés and ice-rooms, or circulating under the trees, puffing forth clouds of tobacco smoke; and on the road round the _allée_, open carriages, smart tilburies, and dapper horsemen were careering.

Among the various groups thronging the promenade was one, which, in Hyde Park or on the Paris boulevards, would have attracted some notice; but the persons composing it were of a class too common of late years in the south of France to draw upon them any attention from the loungers. The party in question consisted of three men, who, by their bronzed complexions, ragged mustaches, and sullen, dogged countenances, as well as their whole air and _tournure_, were easily distinguishable as belonging to the exiled and disappointed faction of the Spanish Pretender. Their threadbare costume still exhibited signs of their late military employment, probably from a lack of means to replace it by any other garments. The closely buttoned blue frock of one of them still had upon its shoulders the small lace straps used to support the epaulets, and another wore for headdress a _boina_, with its large starlike tassels of silver cord. The third and most remarkable of the party, was a man in the prime of life and strength, whose countenance bore the impress of every bad passion. It was one of those faces sometimes seen in old paintings of monkish inquisitors, on viewing which, one feels inclined to suspect that the artist has outdone and exaggerated nature. The expression of the cold, glassy, grey eye, and thin, pale, compressed lips, was one of unrelenting cruelty; while the coarsely moulded chin and jaw gave a sensual character to the lower part of the face. The scar of a sabre-cut extended from the centre of the forehead nearly to the upper lip, partly dividing the nose, and giving a hideously distorted and unnatural appearance to that feature. The man's frame was bony and powerful; the loose sheepskin jacket he wore was thrown open, and through the imperfectly fastened shirt-front, it might be seen that his breast was covered with a thick felt of matted hair.

It was the moment of the short twilight that in the south of France intervenes between day and night. The Carlists had reached the upper end of the walk, and, turning round, began to descend it again three abreast, and with the man who has been particularly described in the centre. On a sudden the latter stopped short, as though petrified where he stood. His countenance, naturally sallow, became pale as ashes, and, as if to save himself from falling, he clutched the arm of one of his companions with a force that made him wince again, while he gazed with distended eyeballs on a man who had halted within half-a-dozen paces of the Spaniards. The person whose aspect produced this Medusa-like effect upon the Carlist was a man about thirty years of age, plainly but elegantly dressed, and of a prepossessing but somewhat sickly countenance, the lines of which were now working under the influence of some violent emotion. The only peculiarity in his appearance was a black silk band which, passing under his chin, was brought up on both sides of the head, and fastened on the crown under the hat.

"_Que tienes, Sangrador_? What ails thee, man?" enquired the Carlists of their terror-stricken companion, addressing him by a _nom-de-guerre_ that he doubtless owed to his bloody deeds or disposition. At that moment the stranger sprang like a bloodhound into the centre of the group. In an instant El Sangrador was on the ground, his assailant's knee upon his breast, and his throat compressed by two nervous hands, which bade fair to perform the office of a bowstring on the prostrate man. All this had passed in far less time than is required to narrate it, and the astonishment of the Carlists at their comrade's terror and this sudden attack, was such, that, although men of action and energy, they were for a moment paralysed, and thought not of rescuing their friend from the iron gripe in which he was held. Already his eyes were bloodshot, his face purple, and his tongue protruding from his mouth, when a gendarme came up, and aided by half-a-dozen of those agents who, in plain clothes, half-spy and half-policeman, are to be found in every place of public resort in France, succeeded, but not without difficulty, in rescuing the Carlist from the fierce clutch of his foe, who clung to him with bull-dog tenacity till they were actually drawn asunder by main force.

"_Canalla! infame!_" shouted the stranger, as he writhed and struggled in the hands of his guards. "By yonder villain have all my hopes in life been blasted--an adored mistress outraged and murdered, myself tortured and mutilated in cold blood!" And, tearing off the black fillet that encircled his head, it was seen that his ears had been cut off. A murmur of horror ran through the crowd which this scene had assembled. "And shall I not have revenge?" shouted Ignacio (for he it was) in a voice rendered shrill by furious passion. And by a violent effort he again nearly succeeded in shaking off the men who held him.

El Sangrador, whose first terror had probably been caused by astonishment at seeing one whom he firmly believed numbered with the dead, had now recovered from his alarm.

"_Adios_, Don Ignacio," cried he with a sneer, as he walked away between two gendarmes, while his enemy was hurried off in another direction.

The following day El Sangrador was sent to a depôt of Spanish emigrants in the interior of France. On his departure, the authorities, who had made themselves acquainted with the particulars of this dramatic incident, released Don Ignacio from confinement; but he was informed that no passport would be given him to quit Toulouse unless it were for the Spanish frontier.

At the distance of a few leagues from the town of Oleron, and in one of the wildest parts of the Pyrenees, is a difficult pass, scarcely known, except to smugglers and izard-hunters whose hazardous avocations make them acquainted with the most hidden recesses of these rugged and picturesque mountains. Towards the close of the summer of 1841, this defile was occasionally traversed by adherents of the Ex-Queen-Regent Christina, entering Spain secretly and in small parties, to be ready to take share in the abortive attempt subsequently made to replace the reins of government in the hands of Ferdinand's widow. Not a few Carlists also, weary of the monotonous inactive life they were leading in France, prepared to join the projected insurrection; and, leaving the towns in which a residence had been assigned them, sought to gain the Spanish side of the Pyrenees, where they might lie _perdus_ until the moment for active operation arrived, subsisting in the meanwhile by brigandage and other lawless means. Owing to the negligence, either accidental or intentional, of the French authorities, these adventurers usually found little difficulty in reaching the line of demarcation between the two frontiers; but it was there their troubles began, and they had to take the greatest precaution to avoid falling into the hands of the Spanish _carabineros_ and light troops posted along the frontier.

Among those who intended to take a share in the rebellion, Don Ignacio Guerra occupied a prominent place. Being well known to the Spanish Government as a devoted adherent of Christina, it would have been in vain for him to have attempted entering Spain by one of the ordinary roads. Repairing to Oleron, therefore, he procured himself a guide, and one of the small but sure-footed horses of the Pyrenees, and, after a wearisome march among the mountains, arrived about dusk at a cottage, or rather hovel, built on a ledge of rock within half-an-hour's walk of the Spanish frontier. Beyond this spot the road was impracticable for a horse, and dangerous even for a pedestrian, and Don Ignacio had arranged to send back his guide and horse and proceed on foot; in which manner, also, it was easier to avoid falling in with the Spanish troops. The night was fine, and having had the road minutely explained to him by his peasant guide, Ignacio had no doubt of finding himself, in a few hours, at a village where shelter and concealment were prepared for him. Leaving the horse in a sort of shed that afforded shelter to two or three pigs, the Christino officer entered the hut, followed by his guide and by a splendid wolf-dog, an old and faithful companion of his wanderings. It was some seconds, however, before their eyes got sufficiently accustomed to the dark and smoky atmosphere of the place, to distinguish the objects it contained. The smoke came from a fire of green wood, that was smouldering under an enormous chimney, and over which a decrepit old woman was frying _talloua_ or maize-meal cake, in grease of a most suspicious odour. The old lady was so intent on the preparation of this delicacy, a favourite food of the Pyrenean mountaineers, that it was with difficulty she could be prevailed upon to prepare something more substantial for the hungry travellers. Some smoked goats' flesh and acid wine were at length obtained, and, after a hasty meal, Ignacio paid his guide and resumed his perilous journey. The moon had not yet risen--the night was dark--the paths rugged and difficult, and the troops on the alert; to avoid falling in with an enemy, or down a precipice, so much care and attention were necessary, that nearly three hours had elapsed before Ignacio perceived that his dog had not followed him from the cottage. The animal had gone into the stable and lain down beside his master's horse, doubtless imagining, by that sort of half-reasoning instinct which dogs possess, that, as long as the horse was there, the rider would not be far off.

Ignacio's first impulse, on discovering the absence of his four-footed companion, was to return to the cottage; but the risk in so doing was extreme, and as he felt certain his guide would take care of the dog, and that he should get it at some future day, he resolved to pursue his journey. Meantime the night became darker and darker--thick clouds had gathered, and hung low--there was no longer the slightest trace or indication of a path, and the darkness preventing him from finding certain landmarks he had been told to observe, he was obliged to walk on nearly at hazard, and soon became aware he had lost his way. To add to his difficulties, the low growlings of distant thunder were heard, and some large drops of rain fell. A violent storm was evidently approaching, and Ignacio quickened his pace in hopes of finding some shelter before it came on, resolving to wait at all risks till daylight before continuing his route, lest he should run, as it were, blindfolded into the very dangers he wished to avoid. A sort of cliff or wall of rock he had for some time had on his left hand, now suddenly ended, and a scene burst on his view which to him was commonplace enough, but would have appeared somewhat strange to a person unaccustomed to such sights. The mountain, which had been steep and difficult to descend, now began to slope more gradually as it approached nearer its base. On a sort of shelving plateau of great extent, a number of charcoal-burners had established themselves, and, as the most expeditious way of clearing the ground, had set light in various places to the brushwood and furze that clothed this part of the mountain. To prevent, however, the conflagration from extending too far, they had previously, with their axes, cleared rings of several feet wide around the places to which they set fire. The bushes and furze they rooted up were thrown into the centre, and increased the blaze. In this manner the entire mountain side, of which several hundred acres were overlooked from the spot where Ignacio stood, appeared dotted with brilliant fiery spots of some fifty feet in diameter, the more distant ones assuming a lurid blood-red look, seen through the fog and mist that had now gathered over the mountain. Ignacio approached the nearest of the fires, lighted close to a crag that almost overhung it, and that offered a sufficient shelter from the rain which had begun to descend in torrents. Throwing himself on the ground with his feet towards the flames, he endeavoured to get a little sleep, of which he stood much in need. But it was in vain. The situation in which he found himself suggested thoughts that he was unable to drive away. Gradually a sort of phantasmagoria passed before his "mind's eye," wherein the various events of his life, which, although a short one, had not the less been sadly eventful, were represented in vivid colours. He thought of his childhood, spent in the sunny _vegas_ of Andalusia--of the companions of his military studies, high-spirited free-hearted lads, of whom some had achieved honours and fame, but by far the greater part had died on the battle-field--the smoke of the bivouac fire, the merry laugh of the _insouciant_ soldier--the din and excitement of the fight--the exultation of victory, and the well-won and highly relished pleasures of the garrison town after severe duty in the field;--the graceful form of Gertrudis now flitted across the picture--her jetty hair braided over her pure white forehead, the light of her swimming "eye, that mocked her coal-black veil," flashing from under the mantilla. Her father, with his portly figure and good-humoured countenance, was beside her. They smiled at Ignacio, and seemed to beckon to him. So life-like was the illusion of his fancy, he could almost have sprung forward to join them. But again there was a change. A large and handsome room, a well-covered table--all the appliances of modern luxury--plate and crystal sparkling in the brilliant lights--a happy cheerful party surrounding the board. Alas, for the tragedy played on this stage! The hand of the spoiler was there--blood and womens' screams, dishevelled hair and men's deep oaths, the wild and broken accents of despair, the coarse jest and ferocious exultation of gratified brutality. And then all was dark and gloomy as a winter's night, and through the darkness was seen a grave-stone, shadowy and spectral, and a man still young, but with heart crushed and hopes blighted, lying prostrate before it, his breast heaving with convulsive sobs of agony, until at length he rose and moved sadly away, to become an exile and a wanderer in a foreign land.

Maddened by these reflections, Ignacio started to his feet, and was about to rush out into the storm, and fly, he knew not whither, from his own thoughts, when he suddenly became aware of the presence of a man within a few yards of him. The projecting crag, under which he had sought a shelter, extended all along one side of the fire. In one corner an angle of the rock threw a deep shadow, in which Ignacio now stood, and was thus enabled, without being seen himself, to observe the new-comer, who seated himself on a block of stone close to the fire. As he did so, the flame, which had been deadened by the rain, again burned up brightly, and threw a strong light on the features of the stranger. They were those of _El Sangrador_.

With stealthy pace, and trembling at every step, lest his prey should take the alarm, and even yet escape him, Ignacio stole towards his mortal foe. The noise of the storm, that still raged furiously, enabled him to get within five paces of him without being heard. He then halted, and silently cocking a pistol, remained for some time motionless as a statue. Now that his revenge was within his grasp, he hesitated to take it, not from any relenting weakness, but because the speedy death it was in his power to give, appeared an inadequate punishment--a paltry vengeance. Had he seen his enemy torn by wild horses, or broken on the wheel, his burning thirst for revenge would hardly have been slaked; and an easy, painless death by knife or bullet, he looked upon as a boon rather than a punishment. An end was put to his hesitation by the Carlist himself, who, either tormented by an evil conscience, or oppressed by one of those unaccountable and mysterious presentiments that sometimes warn us of impending danger, became restless, cast uneasy glances about him, and at last, turning round, found himself face to face with Ignacio. Almost before he recognized him, a hand was on his collar, and the muzzle of a pistol crammed into his ear. The click of the lock was heard, but no discharge ensued. The rain had damped the powder. Before Ignacio could draw his other pistol, the Carlist grappled him fiercely, and a terrible struggle commenced. Their feet soon slipped upon the wet rock, and they fell, still grasping each other's throats, foaming with rage, and hate, and desperation. The fire, now nearly out, afforded little light for the contest; but as they rolled over the smouldering embers, clouds of sparks arose, their clothes and hair were burned, and their faces scorched by the heat. The Carlist was unarmed, save with a clasp-knife, which, being in his pocket, was useless to him; for had he ventured to remove one hand from the struggle even for a moment, he would have given his antagonist a fatal advantage. At length the contest seemed about to terminate in favour of Ignacio. He got his enemy under, and knelt upon his breast, while, with a charred, half-burned branch which he found at hand, he dealt furious blows upon his head. Half-blinded by the smoke and heat, and by his own blood, the Carlist felt the sickness of death coming over him. By a last effort he slipped one hand, which was now at liberty, into his pocket, and immediately withdrawing it, raised it to his mouth. His teeth grated upon the blade of the knife as he opened it, and the next instant Ignacio, with a long deep sob, rolled over among the ashes. The Carlist rose painfully and with difficulty into a sitting posture, and with a grim smile gazed upon his enemy, whose eyes were glazing, and features settling into the rigidity of death. But the conqueror's triumph was short-lived. A deep bark was heard, and a moment afterwards a wolf-dog, drenched with mud and rain, leaped into the middle of the embers. Placing his black muzzle on Ignacio's face, he gave a long deep howl, which was succeeded by a growl like that of a lion, as he sprang upon the Carlist.

The morning after the storm, when the charcoal-burners returned to their fires, they found two dead bodies amidst the ashes. One of them had a stab in his breast, which had caused his death. The other was frightfully disfigured, and bore marks of the fangs of some savage animal. In that wild district, the skirmishing-ground of smugglers and _douaniers_, the mountaineers think little of such occurrences. A hole was dug, the bodies thrown into it; and a cross, rudely cut upon the rock, alone marks the spot where the midnight conflict took place.

* * * * *

MEMORANDUMS OF A MONTH'S TOUR IN SICILY.

LEAVING NAPLES.

STEAM-BOATIANA.

The _Francesco Primo_ was to leave the harbour at ten o'clock. Better acquaintance with Mediterannean _pyroscaphs_, as they call themselves, whose axle-trees turn not except when the police pleases, ought to have led us to all the latitude of uncertainty; but when two hours and more had elapsed with all the passengers aboard, we began to suppose some extraordinary cause for so long a detention. A deputation is accordingly dispatched to the captain, which brings back an abrupt reply, that he is not going _yet_; and that it is for him and the proprietors to be dissatisfied, who are wasting steam, while we are only losing patience. It shortly transpired that he was under Government orders, and would not proceed for another hour at _least_, nor even then, unless he received permission from the minister of police. The affair now looked serious. We must have some _carbonaro_ on board, who was, in due time, to be arrested; and no further doubt could remain of this, when, that other hour being past, we saw a longboat leaving shore, with two officers and six stout rowers, who soon brought her under our bow. What can it be? The senior epaulet rises in the boat--the second follows his example--both are on deck; the captain, hitherto unseen, now comes forward with alacrity, and, stretching forward _both_ his hands, receives with profound reverence a thin, square enclosure, with an immense seal attached to it, and retires to put it in a place of safety. The uniforms disappear over the side of the vessel--the paddles begin to paw the water--we swing round--and in a few seconds our prow points for the _Sorrentine_ coast, and we are on our watery way to _Sicily_. What, then, had detained us? It is always very provoking to have a miserable solution of a promising mystery! We were on the exact spot for a new edition of some "_Verbosa et grandis Epistola_" from the tyrants of the land; and so it was, but only not _from_ Capreæ or Tiberius this time. Yes! The actual cause of the delay of a great steam-boat, full of passengers, for three hours, attended, among other melancholy results, with that of exciting the choler of a new-made cardinal, was a _letter_ that the Queen of Naples, who had probably overslept herself, had occasion to write to the king on conjugal affairs!--his majesty having left her majesty only the day before, to show himself to his loving subjects at Palermo. Hem! Campania _felix_! If we were known to be inditing this unreverential passage, and its disloyal apostrophe, we should, no doubt, be invited to leave "Campania the happy" at a day's notice; whereas our comfort is, that this day three months it is quite possible that it will have been read in Bengal!

We are now in the middle of the Bay of Naples; the spot from which panoramas have been so often sketched on that noble elevation, the deck of a lofty ship, swinging on her cables. What numberless sites of unparallelled interest are hence visible to the newly arrived and insatiable stranger! _Misenum, Baiæ, Puteoli, Gaurus, Vesuvius, Herculaneum, Pompeii_! But the office of the cicerone here cannot--alas for Britain!--be confined to the old classics, or the mere indication of places whose very _names_ are things to _conjure with_! In America, we converse with nature only, whose voice is in her woods and waterfalls; but, in our threadbare Europe, all _sites_ are _historical_, and chiefly in one sad sense--for Waterloo only brings up the rear of fields illustrated by the wholesale destruction of mankind! In the position which we now occupy, volumes might be written--ay, and _have been written_.

Look at that proud, impregnable Castle of St Elmo, culminating over all Naples! Look at those sea-washed fortresses which guard the entrance of her harbour! The garrisons of those strong places having, in the year 1799, from the turn of public affairs, judged it expedient to capitulate to Ferdinand and his allies, on conditions which should leave their honour without blemish, and assure their own safety and that of the city; and this capitulation having been solemnly accepted and ratified by _Cardinal Ruffo, as the king's legate and plenipotentiary_, by the late _Sir Edward Foote_, as acting commodore of the British force, and by the representatives of _two European governments_, officially residing in the revolutionized city, and the surrender of the forts having accordingly taken place, it came to pass, in an evil hour, that Lord Nelson, entering the bay as commander-_in-chief_, took upon himself the odious responsibility of rescinding the British guarantee, and of supporting Ferdinand, powerless but through him, in his refusal to hold himself bound by a convention made _by his own viceroy_!--thus delivering over the defenceless city to its own implacable sovereign. Then came a political persecution unknown in the annals of mankind; till, _hebetes lasso lictore secures_, even Naples could bear no more! The noblest blood and the most distinguished talent were no protection at the bar of a special tribunal, with a low-born monster at its head, not surpassed in its atrocities by the revolutionary tyrants of Paris and of Lyons. The ships shared the infamy; the venerable and noble Caraccioli, seventy-five years of age, himself an admiral, was the first _piaculum_! Summarily condemned by a court-martial _held on board Nelson's flag-ship_, he was executed like a felon, and cast overboard from a Neapolitan frigate floating on the same anchorage, and subject to the same authority!

But Nelson's star was then in the ascendant; the presence and notorious influence of Emma Hamilton in these frightful transactions, was unaccountably connived at by the British nation. The officer who has been a party to a convention, which his commander-in-chief thinks proper not only to disapprove but to violate, must inevitably suffer in that fame and popularity which our public services so justly cherish. And in the state of men's passions during that memorable war, _so that it were against the French, a successful_ commander-in-chief could do no wrong! Yet here, probably, the matter would have rested; but when, nine years afterwards, _Stanier Clarke_ so little appreciated the duty of a biographer as to relate a transaction susceptible of no excuse, in terms unjustified by the facts, and sought to render his hero _immaculate_ at the _expense of others_, the excellent officer whose feelings and character had been so cruelly sacrificed, felt himself compelled at last to publish his "Vindication," judicious in every thing but _the title_. He most properly printed the _Convention itself_ in the original words, and with all the signatures it bore. Such works, however, even when the affairs they refer to are _recent_, are never read but by _friends_--or _enemies_. A late atonement was made by William IV. in conferring on Sir Edward Foote a titular distinction, which the public heed not; but the tables are now turned, and Europe, taught by Cuoco, Coletta, and by Botta, the great historian of Italy, has irrevocably closed this _great account_. The name of Foote is recorded in all their pages in terms which, had he seen them, might well have consoled him for the past; while the last and most popular biographer of Nelson (Southey) feels himself compelled to admit, and the frank admission does him infinite honour, that this is a passage of his hero's life which the muse of history "must _record with sorrow and with shame_."

But the sea spray is dashing splendidly on our bows--we are clearing Capri, and have, as we pass it, a fine view of that high and precipitous rock, thinking of Tiberius and the soothsayer Thrasyllus, and of all the monstrous scenes which those unapproachable cliffs concealed from the indignation even of a Roman world. But twilight was already coming on, and the city and the coast were gradually withdrawn from the panorama--dark night came rushing over the deep, an Italian summer's night, and yet with no stars or moon; meanwhile steadily rides our vessel along the Calabrian waters, confident alike of her strength and her bearings, which we soon left her to pursue, and went down to see what the cabin and the company promised below. And thus the hours passed away; and when the suspended lamp began to burn dimly under the skylight, and grey morning found stealthy admittance through the cabin windows, although we had been unable to sleep, the anticipation of all the marvels we were to see in Sicily had answered the purpose of a night's rest, and sent us active and alert on deck to fresh air and the rising sun. Nor were we a moment too soon. A large flotilla of little boats manoeuvring between two of larger size, placed to defend the space destined for their operations, were now in the full activity of the thunny and spada fishery; and a most picturesque rock, right over our bow, proved to be no other than _Monte Pelegrino_, at the foot of which lay Palermo and our breakfast--in short, after a voyage of little more than a summer's night, we are again on _terra firma_, if that name can be given to volcanic soils, and long before noon are actively engaged in perambulating the streets of the Sicilian capital of the _fæcunda Panormos_.

Among the most striking peculiarities of the interior or street views, presented to the stranger's eye at Palermo, are its very unusually situated convents, buildings which, even in cities, are commonly and naturally in _retirement_; but here, in whichever of the most public ways you walk, a number of extraordinary trellised balconies are observed on the upper stories of almost every large house, while business and bustle of all kinds are transacted as usual in the street below. You may well be surprised to see the nunnery over the _Marchande de Modes_! The unhappy inmates thus tormented by the sight and sound of worldly activity, have not in Palermo even the solace of a garden; and if these places of more than usual mortification have any connexion with the world without, it is by an under-ground passage to some church in the neighbourhood! Thither repair the poor victims of superstition to warble _Aves_ to the Virgin behind their screens, and then back again to their monotonous cloister. There are twenty-four nunneries in the city of Palermo alone, each containing from thirty to sixty women, and there are as many monasteries! With open doors like coffee-houses, full upon the street, are placed at Palermo innumerable _consulting shops_ of so many _lawyers_; the earliest to begin business, the last to close, you may have the luxury of law at any hour of the day till bedtime. Nay, your Sicilian lawyer, unlike the lazy tradesman who puts up his shutters and sleeps from twelve to four, takes no _siesta_; his _atra janua lilis_ is always open, and there sit the _firm_, one listening to a client, another smoking a cigar, a third chatting with an acquaintance over his coffee or the newspaper. Scarcely less mischievous than these sowers of dissension, is the _barber-surgeon_, who still flourishes in Trinacria. The bleeding arm over the peruke shop is often to be seen in Rome and Naples; but at Palermo almost at every third house, you read _Salassatore_ over a half-naked figure in wood or canvass, erect like Seneca in his bath, or monumentally recumbent, the blood spouting, like so many Tritons, from twenty orifices at once. Led by professional curiosity, we enter one of these open doors; and, desiring the ordinary service of the razor, and intending to ask some questions parenthetically touching the double craft, we have scarcely occupied the chair, when a smart youth comes up with a razor and a lancet, and quietly asks "_Which_?" Why, surely he could not think of _bleeding_ us without a warrant for our needing it. "_Eperchè? Adesso vi le dîrò subito_--Why not? I'll tell you whether you want it without a doctor,"--feeling for our pulse. "_Non c'è male_--not so much amiss," pursued the functionary; "but a few ounces bleeding would do you _no harm_! Your hand is hot, it must be _several months_ since you were last bled!" "A year." "Too long: you should be bled, at your age, at least _twice a-year_ if you would keep your health!" "What amount of depletion did he recommend?" "_Depende--di sei a dieci oncie_," at which portion of the dialogue our mouth was shut to all further interrogations by a copious supply of soap-suds, and now he became the tonsor only, and declares against the mode in which we have our hair cut: "They have cut your hair, Signor, _à condannato_--nobody adopts the toilette of the guillotine now; it should have been left to grow in front _à la Plutus_, or have been long at the sides _à la Nazarène_, which is the mode most of our Sicilian gentlemen prefer." We were about to rise, wash, and depart, but an impediment is offered by the artist. "_Non l'ho_ raffinato _ancora, Signor, bisogna_ raffinarlo _un poco_!" and before we could arrive at the occult meaning of _raffinare_, his fingers were exploring very technically and very disagreeably the whole surface over which his razor had travelled, and a number of supplementary scrapings were only stopped by an impatient _basta_ of the victim. _Still_ he was unwilling to part with us. _Would_ we like, now that we are on the spot, to _lose a few ounces of blood_ before he takes a stranger in hand, (who is waiting for the one or other operation;) and, as we most positively declined, he turned to the latter to ask him whether he was come for his "_piccolo salassio di sei oncie_." "_Gia_!" said Signor Antonio, taking off his coat, and sitting down with as much _sangfroid_ as if he were going to take his breakfast. "Can you shave _me_?" asks a third party, standing at the door. "_Adesso_," after I have _bled_ this gentleman. Such are all the _interiors_ where _Salassatore_ is written over the door; they bleed and they shave indifferently, and doing either, talk of the last _take_ of _thunny_, the _opera_ that has been or is to be, and the meagre skimmings of their permitted newspaper, _which_ begins probably with the advertisement of a church ceremony, and ends always with a charade--for our subscribers!!

CHURCHES.

The clergy are wealthy, the bishop's salary is 18,000 scudi, and many of the convents are very opulent; but there is scarcely one of the churches which you care to visit twice. Most of them are disgraced by vulgar ornaments, in which respect they surpass even the worst specimens at Naples! Gilt stucco, cut and stamped into flowery compartments, shows off like a huge twelfth cake! but the _Matrice_ or _Duomo_, and the Saracenic _Chapel of the Palazzo Reale_, and the cathedral of _Monreale_, four miles beyond the town, are noble exceptions; these in their several ways are all interesting, both within and without. The old Siculo-Norman archway of _Monreale_, and its fine bronze gates crusted with a beautiful hard polished _coin-like patina_, would repay the excursion, even were the interior less fine. Here we have columns from whose high architraves the Gothic arch springs vigorously; walls perfectly covered with old Byzantine mosaics; a roof of marvellous lightness, and almost modern elegance; still the critic, who is bound by _métier_ to find fault with violated canons, will, we must own, be at no loss for a text in the church of Monreale--a building which is, however, of sufficient importance in ecclesiastical architecture to have been designed, measured, and engraved, in whole and in part, in a splendid volume, published in folio, by the Duke of Serra di Falco.

VISIT TO THE GARDEN OF THE DUKE OF SERRA DI FALCO, NEAR PALERMO.

After a delicious half hour's drive through country lanes hedged with cactus, aloes, and pomegranates, we find ourselves in front of a small villa distant about two miles from the sea. As to the house, many an English gentleman, in very moderate circumstances, has a far better; but on passing the archway of this Sicilian country-box into its garden, two trees, which must be astonished at finding themselves out of Brazil--trees of surpassing beauty--are seen on a crimson carpet of their own fallen petals, mixed with a copious effusion of their seeds, like coral. At the northern extremity of Italy (Turin) this _Erythinia corallodendron_ is only a small stunted shrub; nor is it much bigger at Naples, where it grows under cover. Six years in the _open air_ have in Sicily _produced_ the tree before you: it is, in fact, larger than most of our fruit-bearers. We next recognise an agreeable acquaintance, formed two years ago, in the _Neapolis Japonicus_; it bears a delicate fruit, of the size of a plum, whose yellow, freckled skin contains such a nectar-like juice that the pine-apple itself scarcely excels it. Our fellow-passenger, the infallible voice of a new-made cardinal of the warlike name of Schwarzenburg, who tasted it here, as he told us, for the first time, has already pronounced a similar opinion, and no dissentients being heard, the Japan medlar passed with acclamation. The _Buggibellia spectabilis_ of New Holland, calls you to look at his pink _blossoms_, which are no other than his leaves in masquerade. We grub up, on the gardener's hint and permission, some of the _Cameris humilis_, to whose filamentous radicles are attached certain little grains, of great sweetness and flavour. The banana-tree, "_Musa paradisaica_," which, cooped in our low hot-houses at home, breaks its neck, and might well break its heart, as its annual growth is resisted by the inexorable glass dome, is here no prisoner but an acclimated denizen of sun and air. The _Cactus Opuntiæ_, or Indian fig, is here for vulgar tastes; and the _Cactus cochinellifera_ for the Luculluses of the day, who could afford to pay for its rearing. The small _sneezing plant_, a vegetable smelling-bottle, is still employed in headach by the common people of Sicily, who bruise the leaves and sniff their pungency: its vulgar name, _malupertusu_, is the corruption of Marum del Cortuso, as we find it in the ancient herbal of Durante. The _Ferula communis_ or _Saracinisca_, a legacy left to the Sicilian pedagogues by their eastern lords, is sold in fagots at the green-grocers, and fulfils the scholastic office of _birch_; and, being more elastic, must be pleasant to _flog with_. We recommend it to _head masters_. The _sumac_, _Rhus coriaria_, is not only to be seen here, but every where else in Sicily; and they say there is a daily exportation of one thousand sacks of its ground leaves. The ancients knew it well, and employed it for giving a flavour to their meat, as they do now in Nubia and Egypt, according to Durante, who deems its many virtues deserving of Latin verse. We smell pepper!--a graceful shrub, whose slender twigs stand pencilled out like sea-weed spread upon paper; and the _Schinus mollis_, a leaf of which we have gathered ignorantly, is the source of the smell. We strew some leaves on the basin of a neighbouring fountain, and amuse ourselves by seeing them swim about as if they were bewitched, parting at the same time with a whitish fluid, which, spreading on the surface of the water, gives it an iridescent hue. The _Fuchsia arborescens_ of Japan flowers here, they say, every month, just as we see him in all his pink luxuriance, and makes himself quite at home; and here is that little blue vegetable butterfly, the _Polygala_! Who can overlook his _winged_ petals, peeping out of their myrtle-looking bower? Then the _geraniums_!--not potted, as in Covent-Garden, or the _Marché aux Fleurs_, but forming vast parti-coloured _hedgerows_, giving to every pathway its own _particular flower and perfume_; so that a connoisseur might be taken blindfold and declare where each kind grew. _Hedges of geranium seven feet high_! Think of that, ye _Dicksons_ and nursery-ground men about _Brompton_ and the _King's Road_! The stalks a mass of real ligneous matter, fit for the turner's lathe if it were but hard enough. A small mound enables us to look about us more at large; and now we discern the stately _bamboo_, thicker than your arm, and tall as a small mast; and the _sugar-cane_, formerly cultivated for his juice, but now looking as if he were ill-used and neglected. His biography (but as it is not _auto_-biography, and written with his own _reed_, there may be some mistake) is remarkable. Soon after the annexation of Sicily to Spain in 1420, he was carried from Syracuse into Spanish captivity; he then escaped to Madeira and the Canaries, and at length saved himself in the West Indies. The _pistachia_ is also here, with its five-partite sessile leaf, like a dwarf walnut; the capsule holding the nut containing at present only a white germ, which it will require four months more to bring to nutty maturity. The _manna_-tree is very like an _alder_ in its general character, but thicker in its stem, and bears the cicatrices of last year's _ill treatment_; its wounds, however, will not bleed afresh now; but towards August the _salassatore_ of trees will run his steel into its limbs, taking care to place under the bleeding orifices leaves from the _cactus_ hedge hard by to serve as recipients, and drain its juices till it faints.

That a _leaf_ might not be _wanting_ to record these vegetable treasures, the pagoda-topped _papyrus_ nodded to us gracefully, and offered its services; while, to finish the picture, Angola goats are browsing amid the green and yellow ribbed _agaves_; and the beautiful blue sea peeps in through gaps of the wall of _cactus_, whose green stems are now all fringed with yellow blossoms. Leaving the flower garden, we enter a labyrinth, and arrive at a small hut, with a closed door, upon the threshold of which we have scarcely pressed, when the wicket flies open, and a big brown friar, with long beard and sandals, starts up in act to frighten us, which he succeeds in doing. This automaton _Schedoni_ might really well produce abortion, and would not care if he did: he cannot, we suppose, be placed there as a lawful instrument of relief, for all the _donzelle_ of Palermo must be _aware_ of, and be used to him. This, however, is thought so good a joke, that it is repeated with variations; for on releasing another spring a similar contrivance introduces us to another monk of the same convent, who is reading a huge tome on the lives of the saints: resenting the interruption, he raises his head, and fixes his eyes on the intruder, at the same time beckoning to him with his hand, and intimating that if he will do him the favour to come a little nearer, he will knock him down with the folio, as Johnson did Osborn the bookseller.

Another surprise is--but really these are surprising enough--and we came here to see vegetable rarities, and not the tricks of an overgrown toyshop.

THE THUNNY FISHERY.

[Greek: Tan baitan apodys eis chymaia taena haleymai, Hopeth tos Oynnos schopiazeiai 'Olpis o' gripeys.]--THEOC.

The thunny fishery, if not as exciting as that of the whale, is far from uninteresting to the uninitiated. We were rowing about in want of an object, when our boatmen proposed to take us to see this animating species of labour; and off we went to a spot about two miles from shore, where we came upon a little flotilla of boats, all occupied in the common pursuit. A large quantity of floating cork announced our arrival on the fishing ground; then came long lines of buoys, to which the drop-nets were attached, and at last we drew alongside a small boat, hailing which, we learn that the net is already half-drawn, and that _la pipa_ (the sword-fish) is _in_ it. Now, we had long wanted to see a live sword-fish, but there was no need to stimulate our rowers, who appeared equally eager that we should assist at the fun, and made great exertions to reach the spot in time. "_Questa_," says our guide, showing the boundary of the space circumscribed by walls of net; "_questa è la camera della morte_, (this is the chamber of death,) _piano, piano_, (or we shall shoot ahead.") The space thus designated lay between two long barges, one of which was fixed by anchor, and had few people on board, while the other was crowded with naked limbs, and fine heads in Phrygian bonnets, academy figures every man of them. What symmetry of form! what jet black beard and mustache! what dark flashing eyes! what noses without reproach! All were in the various combinations of action which their position demanded, hauling away at what seemed to our impatience an endless net; by the shortening of which, however, as their boat received it, layer upon layer, fold upon fold, coil upon coil, they were slowly bringing up the reticulated wall. As the place of captivity came nearer, every body was intensely anxious to get a first view of the fish; and many other boats were coming up alongside of ours, which fortunately lay right over the meshes of the prison, which was becoming every second more and more restricted in size. At length some of us obtained a first view of the _spada_ and his long sword, and testified our delight with vociferation. The fish, meanwhile, who hates publicity, backs off, and would back out, to the opposite end of the net, where, still finding himself an object of unpleasant remark, he tries by violence to escape sideways; but that is _no go_ even for a sword-fish, for a sword is his which cannot cut cords, and he soon finds he can make nothing of it. Smaller and smaller, meanwhile, is becoming the condemned hold, and greater and greater the perturbation within. The captive fish begins to swim round and round, and to watch a new opportunity, but it is too late!--too many are on the look-out for him! Every man gets ready his hooked pole, and there is more tightening of the tackle! The terrified fish now rises to the surface, as it were to reconnoitre, and then down he dives with a lash of his tail, which sends buckets of water into the boat of the assailants. This dive, of course, only carries him to the false bottom of the net, and come up presently he must! Every eye now looks _fishy_, and every man's hand is armed for the first blow. One tall athletic fellow takes aim, and misses; another is more successful, and hits. Stunned by the blow, the poor fish flounders on this side and on that, and the water is discoloured by his blood! One, two, three pointed poles at once, are again in his flank; and now he rushes about like a rounded lion, brandishing his tail, and dashing up whirlpools of water. More Blows! more blood! He rushes desperately at the net, and running his long snout into the meshes, is hopelessly entangled. It is all over with him! Countless wounds follow, till he turns over on his side, and is handed up lifeless into the boat.

"There," says one, "goes fifteen scudi's worth, and no harm done to _the net_." "Little enough, too; but he is worth two thunny, anyhow," says another. "Ay! and gives more _sport_," exclaims a third. Such piscatory eclogue fell upon our ear, when our guide announced to us that we had now seen every thing. The excitement over, we sat down in our boat to make a note of what we have written, while the boatmen clave the phosphorescent water homewards, and landed us neatly at sunset, with their oars dripping luminous drops at every stroke, in the beautiful harbour of Palermo.

Some days after we were still more fortunate; we had observed the scouts with a white hood over their boat, _looking keenly down_ (_vide_ our quotation from Theocritus) into the deep blue sea, and watching with all-eyed attention for the apparition of some giant shadow which should pass athwart the abyss, and give the signal for a new chase, while their comrades were hauling in an immense miscellaneous _take_ of fish, the acquisition of the morning. We shot the outpost, (placed to prevent larger vessels from entering the fishing preserves and injuring the nets,) and remarked our boatmen uncovering to a small _Madonna_ railed in alongside. We were just in time on this occasion to see the water enclosed in the _camera della morte_, already all alive with fish; for a shoal of _palamide_, and of immense _pesce di moro_, filled the reticulated chamber. They darted here and there as the net was raising, and splashed so furiously about, that the whole water became one lather; meanwhile, the men who had been singing gaily, now prepared their landing-nets, shouting in a way which certainly _did_ seem to increase the terror of their prisoners, who redoubled their efforts to escape.

The rich hues of the _palamide_, in shape and colour not unlike our mackerel, but with longitudinal, in place of transverse, green bands, were beautiful objects as they were raised all iridescent in their freshness out of the water, and transferred to the side boat. We also noticed in the net one or two immense fish, in shape like rounded parallelograms, with tough shagreen hides, goggle eyes, and two immense leathery fins placed at the lower part of the abdomen. They kept flapping these valves up and down, but not offering to strike, though lugged out by a hook. The haul was a good one, each fish worth a ducat; and had they, in fact, been at this price converted into coin at once, the money would have made no mean show in the bottom of the net. The treacherous _camera della morte_ was emptied quickly, and in one minute more, down it went again into the depths below.

We should have mentioned a singular practice of the fishermen of the present day in Sicily, to _pat_ the thunny while he is in the net, as you pat a horse or dog: They say it makes him docile. This done, they put their legs across his back, and _ride_ him round the net room, an experiment few would practise on the dolphin's back, at least in these days; yet Aulus Gellius relates that there was a dolphin who used to delight in carrying children on his back through the water, swimming out to sea with them, and then putting them safe on shore! Now, _but for the coins_, taking the above custom into consideration, one might have supposed the ancients' _delphinus_ to have been the modern _thunny_.

THE FISH MARKET.

"Dragged through the mire, and bleeding from the hock," lay a continuous mass of slaughtered thunny, mouths wide open, bloody sockets, from which the eyes had been torn to make lamp-oil, gills ripped off to be eaten fresh, and roes in baskets by their sides. There was also a quantity of a fish of dirty white belly and dusky back, the _alalonga_, and two huge _dolphins_, with skins full of lamp-oil. This really ugly creature looks far better in the _delphin_ title-pages, with his lamp and his "_alere flammam_" on clean paper, than on the stall; but his very best appearance is on a fine Sicilian coin, with _Arion on his back_. The snouts of four large sword-fish were also conspicuous; and there was thunny enough for all the world: some of the supply, however, was to be hawked about the streets, in order to which cords are placed under the belly of a thunny of fifteen cwt., and off he goes slung on a pole, with a drummer before and a drummer behind, to disturb every street and alley in Palermo till he is got rid of; not that the stationary market is quiet; for the noise made in selling the mutest of all animals is in all countries really remarkable; but who shall do justice to a _Sicilian_ Billingsgate at _mezzogiorno_! "_Trenta sei, trenta sei_," bawls out the Padrone, cleaving a fish in twain with one stroke of an immense chopper kept for the purpose. "_Trenta sei, trenta sei_," repeat the two journeymen accomplices, one counting it on his fingers to secure accuracy and telegraph the information to distant purchasers, or such as cannot _hear_ in the noise; another holds up a slice as a specimen; three fellows at our elbow are roaring "_tutti vivi, tutta vivi_," "_a sedici, a sedici_." The man of _whitings_, and even he of _sardines_, have a voice and a figure of their own. As you approach each stall, the noisy salesmen suspend their voices, and enquire, in gentler accents, if you intend to buy; if you do not, like the cicada their stunning sound returns as soon as you are past. We have hinted that the thunny, "_Integer et cadavere toto_," does not look handsome: vastly less attractive is he when mutilated. Big as an elephant's thigh, and with flesh like some black-blooded bullock of ocean breed, his unsavoury meat attracts a most repulsive assemblage, not only of customers, but of flies and wasps, which no flapping will keep off from his grumous liver. The _sword-fish_ cuts up into large bloodless slices, which look on the stall like so many fillets of very white veal, and might pass for such, but that the head and shoulders are fixed upon a long lance, high above the stall, to inform the uninitiated that the delicate looking meat in question was fed in the pastures of the deep. The _price_ of thunny, a staple commodity and object of extensive Sicilian commerce, varies considerably with the supply; as to the demand, it never ceases. During our stay in Palermo, a whole fish would fetch about eight _scudi_, and his retail price was about twopence _per English pound_. Think of paying three or four _francs_ for less than half a pound _sott 'olio_ in Paris. The supply seems very constant during the season, which, on the Palermo side of the island, is from May to July, and continues a month later along the _Messina_ coast; after which, as the fish cease to be seen, it is presumed here that they have sailed to the African coast. The flesh of the _spada_ fish is generally double in market price to that of the thunny, selling during the greater part of June at about fourpence a-pound. Every thunny is weighed upon landing, and a high tax paid upon it to the king, who, in consideration thereof, charges his Sicilian subjects no duty for gunpowder or salt. The fixed fisheries for thunny, round the Sicilian coast, are upwards of a dozen, the most famous being that of Messina. At Palermo, however, they sometimes take an immense strike of several hundred in one expedition. The average weight of a full grown thunny, is from 1000 to 1200 pounds; of course the men with poles who land him, can carry him but a little way, and he reaches the market by relays. Every bit of him is eaten, except his bones and his eyes, and even these yield a quantity of oil.

The spada, too, is pickled down to his bones--he is in great request for the hotels, and his eyes, duly salted, are considered a sort of luxury; in some places these are the perquisite of the fishermen, yielded by their employers, who farm the fisheries, and having satisfied the king, make what terms they can with the subject.

* * * * *

COMMERCIAL POLICY--RUSSIA.

From the brief review, in our last Number, of Spain, her commercial policy, her economical resources, her fiscal rigours, her financial embarrassments, these facts may be said to have been developed:--In the first place, that theoretically--that is, so far as legislation--Spain is the land of restrictions and prohibitions; and that the principle of protection in behalf, not of nascent, but of comparatively ancient and still unestablished interests, is recognized, and carried out in the most latitudinarian sense of absolute interdict or extravagant impost. Secondly, that under such a system, Spain has continued the exceptional case of a non or scarcely progressing European state; that the maintenance and enhancement of fiscal rigours and manufacturing monopoly, jealously fenced round with a legislative wall of prohibition and restriction, has neither advanced the prosperity of the quarter of a million of people in Catalonia, Valencia, and Biscay, in whose exclusive behalf the great and enduring interests of the remaining thirteen millions and upwards of the population have been postponed or sacrificed--nor contributed to strengthen the financial resources of the government, as proved by the prostrate position and prospects of a bankrupt and beggared exchequer; that, as the necessary and inevitable consequence, the progress of agriculture, the ascendant interest of all-powerful communities and vast territorially endowed states--of Spain, the almost one only interest and element of vitality, economical and political--has been impeded, and continues to be discouraged; that the march of internal improvements is checked or stunted, when not absolutely stayed; finally, that public morals--the social health of a great people, inheritors of glorious antecedents, of an historic renown for those qualities of a high order, the deep-seated sentiment of personal, as of national honour and dignity, the integrity, fidelity, and gallantry, which more loftily spurn contaminating approximation with action springing out of base, sordid, and degrading motives and associations--have been sapped and corrupted by the debasing influences of that gigantic system of organized illicit trade which covers Spain with hordes of _contrabandistas_, more numerous and daring than the bands of _aduaneros_ and the armies of regulars whom they set at defiance, and infests the coast of Spain with fleets of smuggling craft, which all the _guardas costas_, with the ancient armada of Spain, were it in existence, would be powerless to annihilate. And all this fine nation, of warm and generous temperament, of naturally noble and virtuous aspirations, thus desperately to be dismantled of its once-proud attributes, and demoralized in its character; its exhaustless riches of soil and climate to be wantonly wasted--per force of false legislation to be left uncultured--and for why? Shades of the illustrious Gabarrus and Jovellanos, why? Why, to enable some half dozen _fabricantes_ of Barcelona to keep less than half-a-dozen steam-engines at work, which shall turn some few thousands of spindles, spinning and twisting some few millions of pounds of yarn, by which, after nearly three quarters of a century that the cotton manufacture has been planted, "swathed, rocked, and dandled" with legislative fondness into a rickety nursling, some fifty millions of yards of cotton cloths are said to be painfully brought forth in the year; the value of which may probably be equal to the same or a larger quantity of French cottons introduced by contraband, and consumed in the provinces of Catalonia and Arragon themselves--the first being sole seat of the cotton manufacture for all Spain. And for this deplorable consummation, the superabundant harvests of the waving fields, the luscious floods of the vineyards, the full flowing yield of the olive groves of Spain--of the wine, the oil, and the corn, of which nature is more bountiful than in Egypt of old--the produce and the wealth of the millions, (which, permitted, would exchange advantageously for foreign products, and, bye all the value, add to the store of national wealth, and create the means of reproduction,) are left to run waste and absolutely perish on the ground, as not worth the cost of transport to markets without demand. "The production of this soil," observes the Ayuntamiento of Malaga, in their eloquent _Exposicion_ to the Cortes cited in our last Number, after referring to their own port and province, in whose elaboration thousands and thousands of hands are employed, millions and millions of capital invested, "are consumed, if not in totality, at least with close approximation, in England;" and after enumerating the wines, oil, raisins, grapes, oranges, lemons, and almonds, as products so consumed in this country--"We have active and formidable rivals in France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Turkey, the Greek Archipelago, and other countries. We shall say nothing of the wools, corn and other fruits of Spain, so important, and some so depressed in England by foreign competition with those of this province. If the treaties of commerce of England with Italy and Turkey are carried into effect, the exportation of our oils and dried fruits will receive its death warrant--_queda herida demuerte_. France, Germany, and Portugal, accepting favourably the idea of the British Government, will cause our wines to disappear from the market; their consumption is already very limited, inasmuch as the excessive duty, to one-third the amount of which the value of the wine does not reach, at the mouth of the Thames, prevents the sale of the inferior dry wines. The same excessive duty tends to diminish the consumption of our fruits from year to year. Our oil has alone been able to find vent by favour of the double duty imposed till now upon Sicilian, superior to ours in quality. But the English speculators are already shy of purchasing, in the expectation of an assimilation of duties on oils of whatever origin." The Ayuntamiento proceeds to urge the necessity of a "beneficial compensation" to British manufactures in the tariff of Spain, without which, "the flattering perspective" of prosperous progress for the industry and agriculture of the Andalusias will be destroyed, and that those vast, rich, and fertile provinces will become a desolate desert. "The admission or prohibition of foreign woven cottons," says the _Exposicion_, "is for Malaga and its province of vital importance under two aspects--of morality and commerce. Until now we have endured the terrible consequences of prohibition. The exorbitant gain which it supports is the germ of all the crimes perpetrated in our country. The man who carries a weapon, who uses it and sheds the blood of an agent of the law in the defence of his illegally acquired goods, will not hesitate in shedding the blood of a fellow citizen who may stand in the way of his desires. And hence the frequent assassinations. He who with gold seduces others for the increase of his own property and for antisocial purposes, does not scruple, when fortune is adverse, to possess himself by violence of the gold of the honest husbandman, or peaceful trader: from hence the constant robberies in the less frequented places; from hence the general abuse of carrying prohibited arms of all sorts, and using them criminally against any one on the least provocation, already accustomed to use them against the Government. Who shall venture to enumerate the assassinations, the robberies, the ruined families, the misfortunes of all kinds, which, directly and indirectly, spring from contraband trade?"

Such is the _Exposicion_, such the experience, and such the views of a patriotic and enlightened corporation, representing and ruling over one of the most populous, wealthy, and industrially disposed districts of Spain. Our object in prefacing at this length, and with seeming irrelevance, perhaps, our review of the commercial policy of Russia, with its bearings on the interests of Great Britain, is to show the differing action of the same commercial system, in the present case of the prohibitive and restrictive system in different countries, both in respect of the mode in which the internal progress and industry of countries acting upon the same principle are variously affected themselves and in respect of the nature and extent of the influences of such action upon those relations of interchange which they entertain, or might otherwise entertain, with other countries where an opposite or modified system prevails. In its broad features the system of Russia varies from that of Spain only in being more rigorous and intractable still. Both, however, are founded on the same exclusive principle, that of isolation--that of forcing manufactures at whatever cost--that of producing all that may be required for domestic consumption--of exporting the greatest possible maximum--of importing the lowest conceivable minimum. Starting from the same point, and for the same goal, it will not be without interest or instruction to accompany and observe the progress of the one, as we have already endeavoured to illustrate the fortunes of the other--to present Russia, industrial and commercial, side by side, or in contrast with Spain, as we have described her. Your absolute theory men, your free-traders with one idea, like Lord Howick, your performers in the economic extravaganza now rehearsing in the Parliament-house under the style of "leave imports free, and the exports will take care of themselves," may chance to meet with many strange facts to confound their arbitrary theorems on the banks of the Neva. Absolute of wisdom, however, as they arrogate to be, and casehardened as they are, against assaulting results which should destroy their self-willed principle--a principle, like the laws of the Medes and Persians, proclaimed to be unchanged and unchangeable--in face of which facts are powerless and adverse experience contumeliously scouted, or mendaciously perverted, it is sufficiently obvious that lessons in political economy will, less than from any quarter of the globe, perhaps, be accepted from St Petersburg--they will fall upon unwilling ears--upon understandings obtuse or perverted.

We are not of the number of those who would contend that, under all times or circumstances, should a principle, or rather the system built upon a principle, be rigorously upheld in its application intact, sacred equally from modification on the one hand, as against radical revolution on the other. It cannot be denied that, under the protective system, have grown into their present gigantic proportions all the great manufacturing interests of Great Britain. But, with customary hardihood of assertion, maintain the economists--in whose wake follow the harder-mouthed, coarser-minded Cobdens of the League--although manufactures have flourished under such a system to an extent which has constituted this country the workshop of the world, they have so flourished in spite of the system; and, in its absence, left exposed to free unrestricted competition from abroad, must inevitably have progressed at a more gigantic rate of speed still. This is asserted to be in the order of nature, but as nature is every where the same--as the same broad features and first elements characterize all countries more or less alike--we ask for examples, for one example only, of the successful establishment and progress of any one unprotected industry. The demand is surely limited, and reasonable enough. The mendacious League, with the Brights and Cobdens of rude and riotous oratory, are daily trumpeting it in the towns, and splitting the ears of rural groundlings with the reiterated assertion that, of all others, the cotton manufacture owes nothing to protection. What!--nothing? Were general restrictive imposts on foreign manufactures no protection? Was the virtually prohibited importation of the cotton fabrics of India no boon? of India, root and branch sacrificed for the advancement of Manchester? Why, there are people yet alive who can recollect the day when Manchester cottons could not have stood one hour's competition with the free, or even 100 per cent taxed fabrics of India.[40] How, indeed, could competition have been possible, with the wages of weaving and spinning in India at three-halfpence per day, whilst for equal quantities and qualities of workmanship, the British weaver was earning five shillings, and the spinner ten shillings per day on the average? In 1780, Mr Samuel Crompton, the ingenious inventor of the mule frame for spinning, such as it exists to this day, and is the vast moving machine of cotton manufacturing greatness, stated that he obtained _fourteen_ shillings per lb. for the spinning and preparation of No. 40 yarn, twenty-five shillings for No. 60, and two guineas for No. 80. The same descriptions of yarns are now profitably making at prices ranging from about tenpence to twentypence per lb. At the same period common calicoes were saleable at about two shillings per yard, which now may be purchased for threepence. Will it be said that the Indian spinner and weaver by hand could not, at the same epoch, have produced their wares at one-half the price, had not importation, with unrelenting jealousy, been interdicted? Was the rigid prohibition of the export of machinery no concession, all exclusively and prodigiously in the interest of the cotton manufacture, to the zealous promotion and ascendancy of which the mining and agricultural interests are unhesitatingly, not to say wantonly, prejudiced, if not absolutely perilled? We say wantonly, because the free exportation of cotton yarn, tolerated at the same moment, was an absurd and mischievous violation of the very principle on which the prohibited exportation of machinery was alone and could be justified. In face of these incontrovertible facts, of which hereafter, and now that the record of them is consigned to that wide circulation through the world which the pages of Blackwood only can afford, misrepresentation remains without excuse on the question of that fostering protection to which, in a larger degree, if not exclusively, the cotton manufacture of Great Britain is indebted for its growth to its present colossal, mammoth-like, and almost unwieldy grandeur. We do not, however, whilst re-establishing facts in their purity, dream the practical impossibility of confounding and disarming the ignorance of men unfortunately so ill educated and unread, and with intellect so incapable, apparently, of appreciating instruction, if not wilfully perverse, as the Cobdens, or of restraining the less coarse but more fluent flippancy and equally unscrupulous assurance of friend Bright, from resort to that stock and stale weapon of vulgar minds which is so readily drawn from the armoury of falsehood. To the end of the chapter they will lie on, until doomsday arrive, and they sink, like the Henry Hunts, _et id genus omne_, their at least as well-bred predecessors of the popularity-hunting school, to their proper level in the cess-pool of public contempt. Time, which executes justice upon all in the long run, cannot fail to lay the ghost of cotton and anti-corn law imposture, even in the troubled waters of the muddy Irk and Irwell, where first conjured from. And now, having shown how the cotton manufacture of Great Britain was from its birth cradled, rocked, and dandled into successful progress; how it was fostered and fenced round with protection and prohibitive legislation as against competition from abroad; we shall proceed with our review of the rise and career of _protected_ manufactures in Russia. And we would counsel "one who has whistled at the plough," whose "farming notes" in the _Morning Chronicle_, when confined to such matters of practical detail as may be supposed to lie within the scope of his own experience and comprehension, are not destitute of interest and information, though with distorted and exaggerated views, to ponder well before a next reiteration of the random and absurd assertion that the "corn-law has done to agriculture _what every law of protection has done for every trade that was ever practised_--it has induced negligence, and, by its uncertain operation, has obstructed enterprise." Instead of whistling at the plough, such a writer almost deserves to be whipped at the cart's tail for so preposterously dogmatic an assumption. It has yet to be demonstrated, and the proof is challenged, that ever a great interest, whether manufacturing or agricultural, was established in any part of the world, since the creation, without the aids and appliances of legislative and guernatorial patronage. The degree, the qualification the practical limitations, which in the progress of time, with social and industrial changes supervening at home and abroad, may be rendered expedient or necessary in the application of the principle, constitute quite a different question, which may be discussed and entertained without any disparagement of the soundness of the policy, as best adapted to existing circumstances, of the system when first applied. The theory of free trade may be, in its entirety, as plausibly it is presented to us, founded on just principle; the abstract truth and perfection of which are just as unimpeachable as that of the social theory propounded by Rousseau in the Savoyard's profession of faith, or that of the "liberty, equality, and community of property" (to say nothing of women) theory preached, and practically developed to some extent, in the paganish philosophies and New Harmony vagaries of the St Simonians, the Fourierians, and of Robert Owen, in these our days. And yet, from the beginning of time--whether from the world before the flood, or since the reconstruction of the world after--never, to this present epoch, has one single example come down to us of the sober realization of either the economical abstraction or the social abstraction. Primeval chaos, chaos existing before all time, could alone have represented the _beau-ideal_ of each. So far indeed as their own demesnes and domains, Laban and Pharaoh were not without their practical proficiency in the elements of economical science--for the one knew how to sell his daughters, as the other his corn, in the "dearest market;" and each to buy his labour and his money at the "cheapest." And never will these free-trade and social day-dreams be accomplished to the end of all time; never until chaos come again; never, unless perchance the Fitzwilliams and the Phillipses, impregnated with the beatific reveries of socialist Robert Owen, should throw open, the one, Wentworth hall, with its splendid parks and spacious domains--the other, his Manchester mills, wonder-working machinery, and million of capital stock, to joint-stock occupancy, with common right of possession of the rural labourers who till the ground, and the urban operatives who ply the shuttle--the producers, in fact, of all their wealth--share and share alike; themselves, in future, undertaking the proportion of daily task-work; driving the "teams afield," or tenting the mule-frame. Should, perhaps, the Phalansterial system of Fourier preferably suit their taste, they will be entitled to enter into the "phalanx of harmony," and share _à des degrés différents, dans la répartition des trots facultés--capital, travail, talent_, ... with the enjoyment of such an apartment in the Phalansterial "palace" for four hundred families, the minimum of the phalanx being eighty, which may compare with the quality of _répartition_ corresponding to them, as expounded by Madame Gatti de Gamond, the principal legatee of Fourier and his system.

[40] The cotton piece goods of India were still subject, in 1814, to a duty on importation equal to 85 per cent. This duty was reduced on the 5th of July 1819, but to L.67, 10s. per cent only. Finally, in 1825 the duty was again reduced to 10 per cent, at which it remains. The duty on cotton yarn imported from India was at the same time subject to a duty of 10d. per lb., and so remained till 1831 at least. It must be borne in mind, that India was the only country in the world which, before and during the rise of the cotton manufacture in Great Britain, was, or could be, an exporter of cotton fabrics and yarns.

In the course of the discussions which terminated in the treaty of commerce and navigation with Russia, laid before parliament on the opening of the session--the stipulations of which, however, chiefly bore upon the extension of certain reciprocal rights of navigation--the Emperor Nicholas, in answer to representations pressed upon him from this country, for a liberal extension of the same principle to the general commerce of Russia, to foreign imports as well as shipping and exports--to let in a glimmer of the free-trade principle, in fact--replied, as we observed in a former article, that "the system, such as it was, he had received from his predecessors, and it was found to work well for the interests of his empire." The Autocrat, despot as he may be, was not singular in the opinion; for even our esteemed friend Count Valerian Krasinski, distinguished no less for the solidity of his literary attainments than for the liberality of opinion and the patriotism which condemns him to the penalty of exile in a "dear country's cause," who therefore will not be suspected of undue bias in favour of Russian systems, had written and published in an able article on Russia, treating _inter alia_ of the rise and progress of her manufactures and commerce, to the following effect:--"The manufacturers of Russia commenced, as in other countries, with the beginning of its political importance, but have been chiefly indebted for their encouragement and progress to the efforts of the Government ... The (protective) system has been steadily adhered to with constantly increasing energy, and _the most brilliant success_, up to the present time." This was published in 1842. We shall proceed to test the merits of the case by reference to documents of official origin, Russian and British--both to the latest dates to which made up in a sufficiently complete shape for the object in view, and the former in some instances later than any yet published in this country, and, as believed, exclusively in our possession. We shall have to deal with masses of figures; but to the general reader in search of truth, they can hardly fail to be more acceptable than whole pages of allegations and assumptions unsupported by proof, however eloquently worked out to plausible conclusions.

We commence with laying the foundation for a comprehension of the industrial progression of Russia, by a comparative statement of the average imports of a few of the chief articles of consumption, raw materials of manufacture, and manufactures, for two series, of three years each; the first series being the earliest for which official records can be cited, or were perhaps kept. Accidental circumstances, and the special influences which, favourably or unfavourably, may act upon particular years, producing at one time a feverish excess of commercial movement, and at another, a reacting depression as unnatural, are best corrected and balanced by taking averages of years. Thus, the mean term of imports for 1793, 1794, and 1795, may be thus contrasted with that for 1837, 1838, and 1839, of the following commodities:--

Annual imports, 1793-95 1837-9 Sugar, 341,356 poods 1,675,806 poods Olive oil, 42,239 ib. 345,455 ib. Machines and Instruments of all kinds, for 111,300 silver rubles 1,025,264 silver rubles Woollen cloths for 3,978,000 ib. 570,000 ib. Raw cotton, 10,000 poods 315,000 ib. Cotton-yarn, 50,000 ib. 600,000 ib. Cotton fabrics for 2,600,000 silver rubles 3,866,000 ib.

During the first triennial period, a large proportion of the sugars imported was in the refined state, the number of sugar refineries being then very limited; in the second period, the imports consisted exclusively of raw sugar for the numerous existing refining establishments, which consumed besides 125,000 poods of beet-root sugar, the produce of the beet-root works established in Southern Russia. Woollen manufactories have so rapidly and extensively increased, that, whereas, comparatively a few years past only, the manufacture of woollens was confined almost exclusively to the coarser sorts for army use, whilst the better qualities for the consumption of the more easy classes, and for export to Asia, were imported from abroad, chiefly from Great Britain; for the fifteen years preceding 1840 the case has been completely altered. The import of foreign woollens has almost altogether ceased for internal consumption in Russia, whilst no woollens but of Russian make are now exported to Asia, and especially China. The export of these home-made woollens figures far above two millions of rubles yearly in the tables of Russian commerce with eastern countries. It will be seen that while the imports of cotton yarn, in the space of forty-two years, had increased in the proportion from 1 to 12 only, that of raw cotton had advanced in the proportion from 1 to 32. The facts are significant of the growing extension both of spinning factories and the cotton manufactories. It is difficult to understand or credit the increased imported values of cotton fabrics here represented, knowing, as we do, the decreased export to Russia in our own tables of values and quantities. But we shall have occasion hereafter, perhaps, to notice some peculiarities in the Russian official system of valuations, which may probably serve to clear up the ambiguity. But although importing foreign cottons for internal consumption, Russia is moreover an exporter of domestic fabrics, to the value of about one million of silver rubles, on the side of Asia. In order to avoid as far as possible the multiplication of figures by the accompanying reduction of the moneys and weights of Russia into English quantities, it may be convenient to state, that the silver ruble is equal to 37-1/2d. sterling, and, in commercial reckoning, the pood answers to 36 lbs. avoirdupois.

Limiting our views for the present to the trade in cottons, as the manufacture of cottons is of much more recent growth in Russia than woollen and other manufactures, we find that the exact imports, quantities, or values, of cotton and yarn, are thus quoted in Russian official returns for the three last years to which made up _seriatim_.

1839. 1840. 1841. Raw cotton, 354,832 398,189 314,000 poods. Cotton yarn, 535,817 519,189 560,799 ...

The depressed state of the cotton trade in 1841 in this country, with the very low prices of yarn, from consignments pushed, in consequence, for sale at any rates against advances, were doubtless the cause of the increased imports of yarn, and the decrease in raw cotton, exhibited in the returns for 1841. Otherwise, the import of raw cotton has been comparatively much more on the increase than cotton yarn for some years past. Thus, beginning with 1822, when the cotton industry began more rapidly to develope itself, but omitting the years just given, the imports stood thus:--

1822. 1830. 1838. Raw cotton, 55,838 116,314 326,707 poods Cotton-yarn, 156,541 429,736 606,667 ib.

Now, it will not be denied that the cotton manufacture in this country has enjoyed supereminent advantages over that of any other in the world, whether we look at the protective scale of duties maintained for half a century in its favour against foreign competition, or regard those glorious inventions and improvements in machinery, of which rigorous prohibitive laws against export, during the same period in force, long secured it a strict, and, even to a more recent period, a _quasi_ monopoly, and gave it a start in the race, which seemed to leave all chance of foreign concurrence, or equal ratio of progression, out of the question altogether. Neither for spinning nor weaving could Russia, in particular, possess any other than machinery of the rudest kind, with hand labour, until perhaps subsequently to 1820. Her tariffs, even by special treaty of commerce, in 1797, were entirely favourable to the entrance and consumption of British fabrics. The prohibitory, or Continental system of Bonaparte, was indeed substituted after the treaty of Tilsit; but in 1816 a new tariff was promulgated, modifying the "prohibiting system of our trade," as the Emperor Alexander, in his ukase on the occasion, expressed it. By this tariff, cotton fabrics of all kinds were taxed twenty-five per cent in value only; cotton yarn, seven and a half copecs per cent; fine woollens, 1 ruble 25 copecs per arschine; kerseymeres and blankets, twenty-five per cent on value; flannels, camlets, druggets, cords, &c., fifteen per cent. How, then, has Russia, subject to all these disadvantages and drawbacks, and so late in the field, fared in comparison with this country, so long and so far before her? Let us take the Russian data first given for the two triennial periods, and ascertain the issue.

The mean annual imports of cotton taken for consumption into Great Britain, deducting exports, may be thus stated in round numbers for the two terms, 1793-4-5 and 1837-8-9.

Annual imports, 1793-5. 1837-9. Raw cotton, 22,000,000 lbs. 391,830,000 lbs.

The ratio of progress of the manufacture, therefore, from one term to the other, of the forty-four years, was not far from eighteenfold.

Reducing the quantities of cotton-yarn imported into Russia into the state of raw cotton, by an allowance of about three ounces in the pound, or nearly seven pounds per pood, for waste in the operations of spinning, we have the following approximate results:--

Annual imports, 1793-5. 1837-9. Raw cotton, 69,700 poods. 1027,500 poods.

The ratio of increase from term to term being thus the greater part of fifteenfold.

But as the cotton manufacture, from circumstances referred to of favourable tariffs for importation--comparatively free-trade tariffs--did not begin fairly to shoot forth until 1822, it will be only right to try the question of comparative increase by another list, namely, as between the returns of the consumption of cotton respectively in the two countries for that year, and one of the later years, 1839, 1840, or 1841; but say rather an average of the three. We are unable, however, to strike a corresponding average three years forward from, but inclusive of 1822, for want of the corresponding Russian official returns for two of the years. On the other hand, to take the one year of 1839, when the quantity of cotton taken for consumption in this country was at a low ebb, would be like straining for an effect, which the impartial seeker after truth can have no object in doing, whilst the return for 1840 would be as much in excess the other way. Thus the total quantities of raw cotton taken for consumption in Great Britain were--

For the year 1822, 144,180,000 lbs. Average of the three years 1839, 1840, 1841, 440,146,000 ib.

The ratio of progression in Great Britain, for the term of eighteen years, was somewhat more than threefold.

The imports of raw cotton, and of cotton-yarn, rendered into cotton by an allowance in addition, at the rate of about three ounces per lb. for waste, or nearly seven pounds per pood, stand thus for Russia in round numbers:--

For the year 1822, in the shape of raw cotton, 55,838 poods. ... ... Cotton yarn calculated into about 186,900 ------- Total cotton, 242,738 Average raw cotton imports of 1839-40-41 355,673 Id. of cotton yarn calculated into cotton, 643,300 ------- Total cotton, 998,973

The ratio of increase in the cotton manufacture of Russia, for the same term of eighteen years, was therefore considerably more than fourfold. And this steady but extraordinary superiority of Russian progression took place in the face of all those prosperity years, when, from 1833 to 1838, the British cotton manufacture was stimulated, and bloated to excess, with the high prices resulting from the flash bank-paper and loan system of the United States, and the mad joint-stock banking freaks of Lancashire.

The average import and consumption of raw cotton in Russia, and of yarn calculated into cotton, was at the rate, on the average of the three years cited, of about, 35,963,000 lbs. per annum;

Which approximates the position of the Russian with that of the cotton manufacture of France as existing in the year 1818, when the consumption of raw cotton is officially stated at, 16,974,159 kilogrammes;

And with that of the cotton manufacture of the United States in 1828, when the quantity consumed at home was stated at about, 35,359,000 lbs.

It will still be insisted, doubtless, as all along it has never failed to be the cuckoo-note of unreflecting theorists, that the manufactures of Russia have flourished, and are flourishing, in spite of protection; that the only effect of protection is to repress their growth and mar their perfection. The assertion stands ready-made, and ever the stock on hand; it is a rash and blindfold speculation upon chance and futurity, at the best; a building without a corner stone; a _chateau-d'Espagne_ nowhere to be found. Where, except in the glowing fictions of Scheherezade, may the personification of such a phantom be detected? History, whether ancient or modern, may be ransacked in vain for one footprint of the realised existence and miraculous economical prodigies worked upon the absolute free-trade principle, in the spontaneous creation, the progress unrivalled, the prosperity Pactolean, of ingenious manufactures. The El-Dorado region has yet to be discovered; will Cobden, like another Columbus in search of new worlds, adventure upon the desperate enterprise, and furnish the writer of romance with apt materials for the frights and freaks of another "phantom ship" on the wide ocean? If so inclined, indeed, we may commend him to an undertaking now, at this present writing, in actual progress, as we learn from assured sources and high quarters, in Paris. A goodly ship of substantial proportions is now preparing in a French port, richly freighted for an interesting voyage with the products of French industry, with destination for the great sea-river of the Amazons, for navigating its thousands of miles of unploughed course, and exploring those realms untold of, those interminable wastes recorded, and those numberless nations as yet unknown, if existing, which coast the vast expanse of its waters to the utmost limits of Brazil, and the very confines of Bolivia, Peru, and Colombia. The King of the French is himself the patron and promoter of this great enterprise. Hasten, then, friend Cobden, erratic and chivalrous as Quixote of old, to "swell the breezes and partake the gale" of an expedition so glorious; for know, that on the banks of the noble Amazons itself, the magnificent queen-river, most worthy in the world of such distinction, have poets, romancers, and chroniclers, undoubting, from all time, sung of and planted the resplendent empire of the El-Dorado itself.

Our design being to demonstrate, by the force of example and contrast, the sophistical absurdity of absolute theories, that, however naturally and harmoniously their parts may be made to correspond in thesis and system as a whole, according to which the same consequences, upon a given principle, should inevitably flow from certain causes, yet that, practically, it is found the same causes do not produce the same effects, even when circumstances are most analogous; that, for instance, the protective, or restrictive system of industry, under the rule of which Spain languishes, notwithstanding the abundant possession of the first materials for the promotion of manufacturing, and the prosperity of agricultural interests, proves, at the other extremity of Europe, the spring of successful progress and industrial accumulation, and renders Russia prosperous, though proportionally not more largely gifted with those natural elements of wealth and production which consist in fertility of soil, in mines of the precious metals, of coal, iron, &c. We shall pursue our task to its completion before we proceed to draw and sum up those conclusions which must follow from the premises established, before we enter in order upon the analysis and dissection of the one absolute principle or theory, by which, in the conceit of certain sage travellers on the royal railroad to wisdom, eager for the end and impatient of the toil of thinking, the economical destinies of all nations should be cut, carved, and adjusted _secundum artem_, with mathematical precision and uniformity, according to the rule invariable of robber Procrustes, the ancient founder of the sect, who constructed a bed--that is, a system of certain proportions of size--that is, upon a certain principle--upon which he laid his victims; those found too short to fit the dimensions of the pallet, he stretched and tortured into the length required; those too long he fitted by decapitating the superabundance of head and shoulders, or by squaring off the legs and feet; just as economists would sever nations with their invariable system; just as, with their selfish and one-sided, sordid idea, the junta of Leaguers, rule and plummet in hand, would deal with the British empire, with its vast possessions in every clime, on which the sun never sets, peopled by races numerous and diverse of origin as of interests, multifarious, complicated, often conflicting. "_L'etât_," said Louis le Grand, "_c'est moi_." "The British empire"--bellows Syntax Cobden--"'tis _me_ and printed calicoes." "The British government and legislature"--exclaims Friend Bright--"'tis I and Rochdale flannel."

It is a strange, and, with our qualified and not exclusive opinions, not less a discouraging complication of affairs with which we have to deal, that, look among the great nations where we will, we find, to a great extent, that the protective system of commerce, where in force, or where it has superseded a _quasi_ free-trade system before in force, has conduced, in no small degree, to the advancement of material interests. The Germanic Customs' Union, that peculiar handicraft creation of Lord Palmerston, is there to confirm the fact, no less than Russia, than France, than Belgium, and other lands. The League themselves ostentatiously proclaim it, whilst pretending to impugn the retention of the very shadow of a shade of the same principle, for the country, above all others, which has grown to greatness under it--the very breath of whose nostrils it has been, during the struggles of infancy and progress to that full-blown maturity, when assuredly it seeks, (and need seek only,) willingly proffers, and readily accepts, equality of condition--reciprocity of interchange, with all the world. "The Manchester manufacturer"--the false _nom-de-guerre_ of a calico printer, who was not a manufacturer at all, and could scarcely distinguish a calico from a cambric at the time of writing, who erst was, is yet, perchance, the trumpeter of Russian policy, Russian principles, and Russian progress in the East and elsewhere--must be grateful for the information we have already afforded on the full careering ascendency of Russian material interests also. His gratitude will expand as he accompanies these pages.

Peter the Great laid the foundations of Russian manufactures, as of the Russian empire itself. He founded manufactories in all the larger cities. But with his death they fell into decay until the reign of Elizabeth. With that epoch began their revival, and the more rigorous revival also of the prohibitory system. Their present imposing appearance and magnitude date, however, from the peace of 1815, the great parent and promoter of all continental manufactures. In 1812 no more than 2,332 manufacturing establishments in the whole empire were in existence, employing 119,000 work-people; in 1835 the number of the former had reached to 6,015, and of the latter to 279,673, the half of the free labourers. At the beginning of 1839, says the report of the department of manufactures and internal commerce--the last which, hitherto, has been made up or come to our hands--the number of factories and manufactories had risen to 6,855, an increase over the year preceding of 405, whilst the number of workmen employed in them was 412,931, an increase over the year before of 35,111. Thus, in the space of three years, from 1835 to the end of 1838, 810 new establishments had been organized, and the number of workmen augmented by one-half. These industrial establishments were non-inclusive of mining works, iron works, &c., and the people employed in them. They were classed as follows:--

Woollen manufactories, 606 Silk ib. 227 Cotton ib. 467 Linen ib. 216 Tanneries, 1918 Tallow works, 554 Candle ib. 444 Soap ib. 270 Hardware ib. 486

The seat of Russian manufactures is principally in the central portion of the empire, in its ancient capital Moscow, and the surrounding provinces. The progress of Moscow itself may be thus briefly sketched, after remarking that in the beginning of 1839 there existed in the government, of which it was the capital city, 1058 manufactories, employing 83,054 work-people. In the 315 manufactories of the neighbouring province of Vladimir, 83,655 work-people were employed; in the equally adjacent province of Kalouga, 164 manufactories gave work to 20,401 workmen. The population of Moscow, the Manchester of Russia, amounted in 1825 to 241,514; in 1827 it had risen to 257,694; in 1830 to 305,631; in 1833 to 333,260; in 1840 to 347,224. The principal manufactories were thus classed for the latter year.

Silk manufacture, 68 looms, 2217 Cotton ib. 139 ib. 7252 Woollen cloth ib. 51 ib. 2960 Other woollen stuff ib. 16 ib. 579 Shawl ib. 17 ib. 282

In thirteen of the chief factories there were 263 spinning machines; three cotton factories alone contained 138. Besides these larger establishments, 3122 workshops, not considerable enough to be ranked as manufactories, employed alone 19,638 work-people; and 142 industrial establishments, such as founderies, breweries, distilleries, tallow and soap works, &c., gave bread to thousands more.

The consumption of the principal raw materials of manufacture is thus stated as an average of that and recent preceding years.

Cotton for the twenty spinneries of Moscow, 100,000 poods per an. Cotton yarn, 300,000 ... Dyed cotton yarn 200 ... Raw silk, 30,000 ... Dye woods, 100,000 ... Madder, 250,000 ...

The machinery for the manufactories is made for the most part in the founderies and machine-works of Vladimir, Tamboff, Kalouga, and Riazan, but, above all, in the city of Tula and the village of Parlovo. In McCulloch's _Statistical Dictionary_, the number of steam-engines in the government of Moscow is stated, for 1830, at about 100--in 1820, two only being in existence. On what authority the statement is given does not appear; our own documents, to 1841 inclusive, are silent on that head. For Moscow, with its immediate environs, the total number and the produce of the cotton looms are thus given:--

Cotton loom, 17,000 Producing annually, 450,000 pieces of calico Do. 400,000 do. of nankeen Do. above, 2,000,000 do. of handkerchiefs In the whole, inclusive of other goods, such as muslins, velvets, &c., &c., equal to above, 40,000,000 arschines of fabrics Valued at 7,500,000 silver rubles.

The arschine is about twenty-eight English inches. The silk manufacture, of recent establishment only in Moscow, presented the following results, for that city and the surrounding districts:--

Number of common looms, 10,000 Jacquard, more than 5,000 Producing annually, 15,000,000 arschines of st Valued at 10,000,000 silver rubles.

The woollen manufactories of Moscow, inclusive of the environs, employed apart smaller loom shops:--

Looms, 5,139 Producing yearly, 30,000 pieces of superior quality Do. more than 50,000 do. ordinary for the army And do. 700,000 arschines of light cloths for China.

The values not given. The imports of merchandise from Moscow by water, of which alone exact and detailed particulars are stated, amounted in--

1837, to 22,881,000 rubles assignation 1838, 22,074,563 ... 1839, 17,467,391 ... 1840, 28,283,877 ...

Three and a half rubles assignation, are equal to one silver ruble. Moscow enjoys the advantage of being an internal bonded port, or port of intrepôt, a privilege now seeking by Manchester, so that importers of foreign merchandise are not called upon for the payment of duties until the moment when, withdrawing their imports, or any other portion of them as occasion requires, the payment becomes necessary. Formerly the duties had to be paid in the frontier ports, and often in bulk. The customhouse revenue resulting, amounted in--

1837, to 637,074 rubles assignation 1838, 614,464 ... 1839, 626,764 ... 1840, 776,021 ... 1841, 898,398 ...

These returns are proof indisputable of industrial and social progress. It is unnecessary further to remark upon the great and growing importance of other branches of industry in Moscow, or to extend the limits of this notice so far as to comprise a review of the iron and hardware manufactories, and the numerous tanneries of Tula and Perm. The active movement of internal commerce, may, however, be inferred from the returns of products exhibited and sold at twelve fairs held annually, with one thrice, and another twice, in the year, the total value of which exposed for sale in 1840, was stated at 101,551,000 silver rubles, and of the quantity actually sold at 64,326,700 rubles. Of which alone at--

On Sale. Sold. Nijny Novgorod, for 47,264,967 38,828,984 silver rubles Irbit, 12,232,286 7,682,000 ... Romna, 2d fair 9,001,904 4,454,747 ... Kharkoff, 1st fair, 5,743,280 2,944,390 ... Koursk, 7,014,802 2,014,834 ...

The great fair of Nijny Novgorod may rival with Leipzig in the magnitude of its transactions. In 1841, the general movement of values at this fair is thus returned:--

Merchandise for sale, 50,506,606 silver rubles, or 176,773,121 rbls. ass. Sold, 41,704,236 ... 145,964,826 ...

By decree of the government, within the last three years, the public accounts, before kept in rubles assignation, that is government paper money, were ordered to be reckoned in silver rubles. For purposes of comparison with former years, we state them in both. Of the mass of commodities thus in motion at the fair, there were of Russian manufactures and indigenous products, to the total value of 37,132,693 silver rubles exposed for sale, and for 29,762,473 sold; some other chief articles ranging thus;--

For sale. Sold. Cotton goods, 7,336,665 5,947,865 silver rubles. Woollens, 3,448,295 2,620,175 ... Linen and hempen fabrics, 3,126,736 2,375,736 ... Silks, 3,220,489 2,239,989 ... Leather, worked and not, 1,043,583 876,083 ... Produce of mines and founderies, iron, copper, hardware, jewellery, 7,600,330 6,450,330 ...

Tea, for 7,107,500 rubles assignation, and other products of China, were brought to the fair; raw cotton, cotton-yarn, shawls, silks, skins, &c. from Persia and Asia, to the value of 29,796,819 roubles assignation, and chiefly sold. Of the products of Western Europe, which make but a miserable exhibit, the following are the chief:--

Woollen stuffs, for 256,455 silver rubles. Cottons, 510,830 ... Linens and hempen fabrics, 192,300 ... Silks, 423,130 ... Indigo, 918,000 ...

The growing magnitude of this fair will be appreciated by the following returns of former years:--

Total commodities for sale. Rubles assignation. 1829, 104,018,586 of which sold for 50,104,971 rbls. ass. 1831, 129,457,600 ... 98,329,520 ... 1833, 146,207,311 ... 117,210,670 ... 1835, 143,369,240 ... 117,743,340 ... 1837, 146,638,181 ... 125,507,881 ... 1838, 156,192,500 ... 129,234,500 ... 1839, 161,643,674 ... 137,100,774 ... 1840, 165,427,384 ... 135,901,454 ...

The convenience of these fairs for the purposes of interchange, both between different industries and the populations of different provinces of the same empire, and with contiguous countries from which so great an affluence of merchants with their merchandise for exchange was attracted, has induced the government to decree the establishment of eleven new fairs in different towns, and fifty-nine others in as many large villages, which, in growing size, may be already compared with towns.

The internal commercial communications of Russia are chiefly carried on by means of those innumerable rivers and canals, that network of natural and artificial canals, by which she is intersected through all her extent, and which, taking their rise in various central parts of the empire, pursue their course singly, or falling into each other, and so constituting mighty streams, to the White sea and the Baltic, or fall into the Black sea and the Caspian. The total movement of this internal navigation in all the rivers, presented the following results:--

Departures from the different ports in the interior in 1839, 60,277 barques. ( do. 24,421 rafts. Arrivals at ( do. 46,850 barques. ( do. 17,469 rafts.

They were the convoys of merchandise dispatched from the ports to the value of 737,814,276 rubles ass. Of merchandise forwarded to do. 538,921,730 ... In 1837 the values dispatched from, ascended only to 618,990,306 ... Do. forwarded to 490,505,940 ...

The various and many basins of river and water communication, scientifically arranged, and showing how all parts of that vast empire are connected with each other through all and nearly every portion of its territorial extent, as in the report before us, is a document worthy of study and more minute analysis, but our limits forbid.

The foreign commerce of Russia presents the following results for 1841:--

Exports to foreign countries, 86,382,179 silver rubles. Imports from do. 79,429,490 ...

The Russian official tables include, under the head of foreign commerce, the exports and imports with Finland and Poland; but as they fall within the range, in reality, of internal commerce, the accounts are better simplified by their exclusion. The system of separate returns results, doubtless, from the political arrangements and conventions by which Russia acquired the possession of those two countries.

The progress of exports and imports may be thus indicated:--

1838. 1839. 1840. Exports, 85,718,930 94,857,788 82,731,386 silver rubles. Imports, 69,693,824 69,993,589 76,726,490 ...

The remarkable excess of exports in 1839 resulted from the large demand for, and shipments of, corn in that year--the official value of which is stated at 25,217,027 silver rubles; the smallest export, so far as value, being that of 1841, valued at 10,382,509 silver rubles only. Exclusive of corn, the exports would stand thus:--

1838 for 70,562,252 silver rubles. 1839 69,640,761 ... 1840 68,704,971 ... 1841 75,999,670 ...

Gold and silver, in bars or specie, are not comprised in these returns.

For 1841 the values thus exported were, 4,023,728 silver rubles. ... ... ... imports, 9,347,867 ib.

It is necessary, however, to travel more backwards in order to a right appreciation of the progress of the foreign trade of Russia. This comparison is here instituted with earlier years, premising that the exports to Poland and Finland, amounting to some ten or twelve millions of rubles assignation, and imports from, amounting to about three millions, are included, and therefore swell the amount of the imports and exports of the following years. However, to facilitate the comparison, the silver ruble values of 1841 are multiplied into corresponding ruble assignation values:

Exportations. Importations. Balance in favour of Russia. In 1830 268,887,342 197,115,340 71,772,002 rb. as. 1836 283,748,233 237,251,204 13,733,196 1837 264,485,160 251,757,177 12,727,983 1841 302,337,626 378,003,215 24,334,411

Add 11,808,743 rubles assignation for exports to, and 4,792,346 imports from, Poland and Finland in 1841, and the real comparison would be, for 1841, exports 314,146,349, imports 282,795,561; balance in favour of 1841, 31,350,688 rubles assignation.

The bulk of Russian exportations consists of raw or first materials, such as flax, hemp, flax-seed, oil, tallow, leather, woad, metals, and of which to the aggregate value in 1841, of 59,773,354 silver rubles was exported; an amount nearly stationary as compared with the three previous years. But the export of Russian manufactures, viz. woollens, cottons, linens, candles, cordage, and cloths for China, had improved in aggregate amount from,--

Silver Rubles. In 1838, 6,527,222 To, in 1841, 10,259,209

It was the trade with China by Kiachta, and latterly also by the line of Siberia, which, however, had perhaps taken the most remarkable extension, and was held to be most promising of future progress and profit. The imports, and therefore the consumption, of tea in Russia, are growing annually larger; and the exports of Russian products and manufactures to China, equally in proportion. For by mutual convention, as dictated by China, for regulating the commercial intercourse between the two countries strictly limited to that frontier river port, although now indirectly countenanced by Siberia, the trade is exclusively one of barter; tea and silks for leather, furs, cottons, woollens, and linens. A condition, be it observed, which serves to place beyond all doubt the fact, that it was not the introduction and consumption, with the deterioration to the health of the population resulting, physically and morally, from the use of opium, which had so much effect with the celestial Emperor in provoking the late war with Great Britain, as the abstraction by export in payment, and the drain so constant, of Sycee silver. The imports of tea in--

Poods. Silver Rubles. 1838, By Kiachta, were, of good and ordinary quality, 127,645 value 2,015,189 By the line of Siberia, 10 ... 600 -------- --------- 127,655 ... 2,015,789 -------- ---------

1841, By Kiachta, 168,218 ... 6,976,363 By the line of Siberia and Caspian Sea, 1,364 ... 66,293 -------- --------- 169,582 ... 7,012,656

Besides which, the imports of an inferior tea, called _brick tea_, amounted to the value of 359,223 silver rubles in 1841. In three years, the general trade, China silks inclusive, had therefore more than trebled so far as value; for it is remarkable, that though larger quantities of tea are imported, yet prices, so far from declining, had actually considerably advanced; which proves that the commodity was becoming a favourite beverage, and gaining into more general consumption, in Russia. The values of the Russian merchandise, such as stated, which passed in barter, are said to have been equally sustained. It may be noted, indeed, as an extraordinary fact, that whilst, as the official report of the department of commerce observes, the prices and values of almost all foreign raw products and manufactured wares imported into Russia, during the three or four years preceding 1841, and including 1841, entered constantly, and some at considerably depreciated rates, in the reverse the products of Russia, exported to Europe and elsewhere during the same period, quantity for quantity, generally improved in prices and ascended in value.

The foreign commerce of Russia by sea was carried on, during the year 1841, by 2,596 vessels, inwards loaded, tonnage, 452,760 2,174 do. in ballast, do. 410,164 ----- ------- Totals, 4,770 862,924 ----- ------- 4,582 do. outwards loaded, do. 819,232 312 do. do. in ballast, do. 58,046 ----- ------- Totals, 4,894 877,278

In the coasting trade in the Northern seas, the number of vessels dispatched from port to port was 2007, in the Black Sea, 5,275.

The revenue from customs in 1841 amounted to 27,387,494 silver rubles, or upwards of two-fifths in excess of the receipts of 1830.

In order to exemplify the nature of the trade betwixt Great Britain and Russia, and exhibit it in its most disadvantageous aspect, we shall add here, from statements verified as authentic by competent authorities on the spot, the returns of British trade and shipping with certain Russian ports for 1842, which we have recently received direct. They will assist us to a conception of the relative importance of each place in respect of its commercial connexion with this country.

The commerce of the port of Archangel, omitting from the table Onega, Kola, Kemi, and Soumsk, the other ports in the White Sea, their traffic being inconsiderable, is thus represented.

1842.--Total shipping outward, 212, of which, British, 153, tonnage, 31,704 Total imports, (exclusive of L.13,816 by Norway coasters,) L.18,384 Of which from Great Britain, L.801 Total exports, (omitting L.22,236 to Norway,) L.427,789 Of which to Great Britain, L.305,823 In 1841, 176 vessels exported for Great Britain the value, L.408,077 Exclusive of cargoes by 2 other vessel, to the amount of L.7,208, for the Hanse towns and Holland. In 1840, 250 vessels, tonnage 48,249, exported to Great Britain the value of L.442,381 Exclusive of 6 British vessels which carried cargoes to the Hanse towns, France, and Italy, of the aggregate value of L.12,858.

The commerce with Riga exhibits a somewhat more favourable proportion between imports and exports, and we are induced, therefore, to give the return of imports for 1842 in same detail as received.

Nature and value of merchandise imported into Riga from Great Britain during the year 1842:--

Coffee, L.2,500 0 0 Cotton, 11,011 0 0 Cotton twist, L.21,159, 10s; do. goods, L.1135, 22,294 0 0 Woollen goods, 4,100 16 8 Woollen twist, 19,057 3 4 Indigo and other dyes, 13,764 0 0 Dye-woods, 2,718 6 8 Salt, 53,269 3 4 Sugar, 24,882 10 0 Wines and brandies, 19,200 13 4 Iron and steel wares, 7,025 0 0 Spices and drugs, 13,440 6 8 Non-enumerated articles, 12,527 10 0 ----------- Total, L.205,791 0 0

Countries from whence British vessels have arrived at the port of Riga during the year 1842:--

No. of vessels. Tonnage. Remarks. United Kingdom, 387 59,629 With cargoes and in ballast. Hamburg, 6 1,261 In ballast. Denmark, 21 3,730 ... Norway, 13 2,438 ... France, 5 670 ... Belgium, 1 484 ... Holland, 6 1,018 ... Prussia, 4 562 ... Sweden, 3 669 ... --- ------ Total, 446 70,461

Total value of Countries to exportations whence exported. 1842 exports. Tons. to Great Britain. British vessels, 446 70,461 L.1,527,810 5 4 United Kingdom.

The commerce of Odessa represents a closer approximation still between imports and exports; and they would perhaps nearly balance, but for the large shipments of wheat to this country, which contribute to swell the exports.

In 1842, 174 British ships entered, tonnage 44,428, sailed 176 tonnage, L.44,929 Total value of imports by them, 185,870 Of which, from the United Kingdom, 184,370 The remainder by 64 British vessels entering from Leghorn, Turkey, Algiers, Amsterdam, mostly in ballast. Total average of exports, 784,865 Of which, to the United Kingdom, 776,995 The remainder to the countries above named. 1841, Total imports by British ships, 147,950 Do. exports do. 590,570 1840, Total imports by British ships, 130,660 Do. exports do. 859,090

The commerce of St Petersburg is stated, for 1812, imports and exports together, at the value of 97,795,415 silver rubles. And of 1147 foreign vessels which left that port and Cronstadt with cargoes, more or less, 515 were British, of 117,793 tonnage--being a rather considerably less number than in either 1840 or 1841.

The present is the proper occasion to remark upon and explain the system of official valuation pursued in Russia, by which it will be observed how the real value, both of imports and exports, is swelled, probably with a view to the vain display of a greater commerce than is really carried on. As the system is nearly the same for both imports and exports, it cannot, of course, materially interfere with, or impeach the accuracy of the general balance-sheet. It is desirable, however, that the facts should be fairly represented, for the guidance of those who may be in the habit of consulting and comparing the official documents of different countries; and they will serve moreover to explain, in some degree, the extraordinary discrepancies which have been found betwixt the declared values of British products and manufactures exported to Russia, as published in the Board of Trade tables, and the same exports as exhibited in Russian customhouse returns.

In calculating the annual value of importations, it is the rule in the Russian customhouses to add the duties paid on the entry of goods to their original value. This practice in Russia, where the duties are so high, swells the value of imports far beyond their true amount, and gives a false and exaggerated view of them.

With respect to the exports, nearly the same practice exists. In calculating their value, all the shipping charges are added to the cost of the article; and we are informed by merchants resident in Russia, that on comparing the annual Government statements of exports for their establishments, they are found to correspond with the invoices forwarded to their foreign correspondents, which, of course, include commission, and all the expenses attendant on the shipping of the goods. The law also requires that the shipper, on clearing merchandise for export through the customhouse, should declare its value. With a view of preserving uniformity, the Russian authorities, from time to time, fix a standard price at which particular articles shall be valued for export at the customhouse. To exemplify the evil of this system, it is necessary only to mention that oats, for example, could lately be purchased at a Baltic port at sixty silver rubles per last, while the latest customhouse standard values them at eighty silver rubles per last. This practice is no way injurious to the merchant, but only unnaturally swells the tables of exports when annually made up by the Russian Government. A shipper, therefore, of any of the articles included in the Russian standard, is compelled to state a much greater value at the customhouse than he furnishes to his foreign correspondent, who, of course, only pays the market price of the article, with the additional shipping expenses.

The difficulty, such as it is, might be obviated, were the masters of British merchantmen compelled by law to submit their ship's papers, on arrival and departure, to the British consuls at each port, who would then be placed on the same footing with the consuls of other countries, and be enabled to communicate much important statistical information to their Government, of the opportunity for acquiring and transmitting which they are now deprived.

Our review of Russian commerce and industry would be more incomplete than it is, if we were to omit all notice of the vast mining wealth of that empire. But our limits, already nearly reached, do not admit of more than a passing reference. Suffice it, that in coal, both bituminous and anthracite, in iron and other metals, and salt, constituting the raw materials, Russia is rich enough for all her wants, and indeed supplies the great bulk of those wants within herself, with to spare in some of these products for her neighbours and other countries. Her mines are annually increasing in productiveness and number, as enterprise is extended and capital invested in them, and as domestic manufactures and improving agriculture increasingly absorb their produce. The treasure-yielding progress of her gold mines is one of the extraordinary events of the age. The existence of gold in Siberia was scarcely suspected till 1829. The first researches of adventuring individuals were attended with no success. Feodot Popoff, one of the earliest, succeeded at length in that year, when all others had abandoned the undertaking as hopeless, in discovering traces, and procuring some inconsiderable specimens, of gold--not in quantity, however, to repay the working; and the doubts before existing seemed confirmed as to the fruitlessness of further perseverance in the search. Major-General Kovalevsky, of the engineers of mines, having been appointed governor of Tomsk, renewed the attempt in 1830; and, at the close of that year, his indefatigable labours, and more methodical plan of operations, were rewarded with the discovery of a first considerable stratum of auriferous sands, which was designated Yégorievsky, (St George.) Adventurers flocked into the district forthwith, and in numbers, upon the widespreading news; and excellently did renewed labours recompense the zeal of the more fortunate; numerous were the discoveries of layers of golden sands. In one of these, last year, a massive piece of native gold, weighing 24-1/2 pounds Russian, (the Russian pound is about 1-1/2 oz. less than the English,) was discovered embedded in a fragment of quartz, and is now deposited in the museum of the School of Mines at St Petersburg. The yield of the Siberian mines has since been at the following rate of progression--omitting the intermediate years for brevity, although in every year there was an increase of quantity upon the preceding:--

1830 5 poods, 32 lbs., 59-1/2 zdotnicks. 1832 21 --- 34 --- 68-3/4 --- 1834 65 --- 18 --- 90-3/8 --- 1836 105 --- 9 --- 41 --- 1838 193 --- 6 --- 47-1/2 --- 1840 255 --- 27 --- 26-3/8 --- 1842 631 --- 5 --- 21-1/4 ---

The total of the thirteen years has been 2093 poods, 38 lbs., 46 zd. The pood, be it remembered, is equal to (rather more than) 36 lbs. avoirdupois.

The total general yield of the older worked mines of the Oural mountains for 1842, was, besides, 149 poods, 18 lbs., 58 zd. And of platina, 53 -- 33 -- 67 --

On a rough estimation, the produce of all the gold, platina, and silver from the silver mines, could not have amounted to less, perhaps, for the year 1842, than three millions sterling.

According to the learned academician Köppen, of St Petersburg, in a lengthened memoir upon the subject, the total population of Russia, inclusive of Poland, Finland, and Trans-Caucasian provinces, ascended in

1839 to 65,000,000 Or of Russia Proper alone, 55,500,000

With an empire so gigantic, a population so large, however disproportioned as compared with territory, and with resources so incalculable, it must appear extraordinary that foreign commercial relations are so limited. The total of exports and imports together for 1841, represents only, in round numbers, a commercial movement to the value of 165,811,000 silver rubles, or in sterling, about L.25,907,300. The matter which most concerns this country, is the very disproportionate interest which results to its share in the export and import trade of Russia. Taking the latest British returns of the value of Russian products imported into England, for the Board of Trade tables give quantities only, as we find them stated by Mr McGregor, the indefatigable secretary of that board, for 1838, at L.6,977,396, or say,

in round numbers L.7,000,000 And British exports at the declared value here of, say, 1,700,000 ----------- There would appear to result the very heavy difference against the United Kingdom of L.5,300,000

But bad as the case may be, it is not quite so bad as these figures would represent. It must not be forgotten in this sort of calculation, that shipping, freights, insurances, and commissions, represent property quite as substantially in the commercial sense, as even Mr Cobden's printed calicos, or friend Bright's flannel pieces. Now, we think it might admit of proof, that as much as nine-tenths of all the produce brought to this country from Russia, is so brought in British bottoms, and so also of the exports to Russia; although in 1840, the last of the Board of Trade tables containing such particulars, no more than 1629 British vessels, of 340,567 tonnage, against 296 foreign, of 79,152 tonnage, entered British ports from Russia--the proportions being much the same outwards; but whether the foreign were all Russian vessels may be doubted. Let us assume, however, that no more than three-fourths of both imports and exports were so carried, and leaving three-fourths British freights outwards to balance Russian one-fourth freights inwards and outwards, let us in fairness estimate the worth of that freightage in reduction of the enormous balance against us. As for Spain, in our last Number, we took twenty per cent to cover all the freightage charges, before indicated, on her commodities of less bulk though more value in proportion, twenty-five per cent on the average will not be too much, certainly, to cover those charges on the more bulky products of Russia, more especially when the long, costly, and intricate navigation of the Baltic, and the White and Black Seas, are taken into account. The calculation will then stand thus:--

Imports from Russia, L.7,000,000 Deduct twenty-five per cent freightage, &c. as British property and profit, 1,750,000 ----------- Real value of imports as on board in Russia, L.5,250,000 Declared value of ex-British exports to Russia, L.1,700,000 Value of British freightage, &c., as above, 1,750,000 ----------- L.3,450,000 ----------- Real approximative balance in favour of Russia, L.1,800,000

or say two millions, as the three-fourths produce of outward freight would, perhaps, not quite compensate the one-fourth on inward and outward cargoes to the Russian shipping. Even such a balance is exclusively and unjustly large against a country which, like Great Britain, is a consumer of Russian products to the extent of seven-twelfths of the total exports of Russia to all the world. The consequence is, that the rate of exchange is almost invariably against this country. Lord Howick, indeed, most quixotically deals with adverse exchanges; he disposes of them summarily, and in a style that must have astonished the people on 'Change. This disciple and representative of Mr Edward Gibbon Wakefield's economics in the House of Commons, as Lord Durham was before his political disciple, and the victim of his schemes colonial, thus decisively disposes of adverse exchanges in the celebrated debate on Import Duties, taking Portugal for an example.

"A large increase of importations from Portugal would necessarily be attended by a proportionate increase of our export trade. Was it not clear that every merchant who imported a pipe of wine would anticipate the bills drawn against him on account of it, and that, whatever would be the increase in the amount of imports, there would be a corresponding increase in the amount of the bills drawn against us? How were our merchants to provide for them? There would be no difficulty in it, whether the trade of Portugal increased legally or illegally. Suppose an increase of imports into Portugal, there would be an immediate demand for bills to Portugal. _The consequence would be, that if there was any other country from which Portugal received more than it exported, the bill-brokers would get bills from that country_, and our manufactures would be sent there instead of to Portugal. Admit that you could not find in any other country the means of discharging your debt by importation of your manufactures, bills on Portugal should then rise to a certain premium, and gold and silver would be sent to discharge the debt. The gold and silver would come from some other country, and the consequence would be that we should send our manufactures, not to Portugal, but to South America; while Portugal would be obliged to send the bullion to some other country that it might carry on a smuggling trade with its neighbour, Spain. It was impossible for the ingenuity of man to point out any different result."

The "bill-brokers" will be greatly amused with the new line of business chalked out for them, of "getting bills" from other countries when short in this. There are two descriptions of "bill brokers," but the class bearing that designation purely deal with domestic bills only. The other class are known as "exchange brokers," because they meddle only with foreign bills; but as to "getting bills" from abroad when bills are wanting here, that trustworthy and respectable description of agents certainly never dreams of such an occupation. Lord Howick would seem to imagine that manufactories of bills existed specially abroad, and that people could draw with as much nonchalance from Paris or from Hamburg, upon Jack Nokes and Tom Styles at Amsterdam or Frankfort, as here Lord Huntingtower accepted for his dear friend the Colonel values uncared for, or as folks familiarly talk of valuing an Aldgate pump when an accommodation bill is in question. May we venture to hint to the member for commercial Sunderland, the _ex_ for Northumberland, that the functions of "exchange brokers" extend no further than to ask A if he has any bills to sell, and B if he is a buyer; whereupon he has only further to learn what rate the one will purchase and the other sell at; that knotty point arranged, the bargain is concluded, and he receives his very small percentage. The operations are carried on every day, more or less, but on Tuesdays and Fridays, being especially "post days" on London 'Change, where Lord Howick any day may be initiated in the mystery, if not punctilious about being unceremoniously elbowed and jostled about.

In the principle of protection, we hold Russia to be perfectly in her right and her interest; in the abuse of it, she damages herself. Prohibition is not protection; restrictive duties equal to absolute prohibition, like the 85 per cent prohibitory tax, formerly levied here on Indian cotton fabrics, in favour of Lancashire, are not protection in the legitimate sense. The late Emperor Alexander hit the true nail of principle on the head when, in 1819, he reformed the Russian tariff on the calculation of imposts ranging from fifteen to forty per cent. We are, nevertheless, bound to say, that, even as protection is understood in its exaggerated sense by the Autocrat, the system has worked well for Russia, as indeed we have shown. She has accumulated wealth by that system; she has secured by it the possession of a large proportion of those precious metals, which are indispensable no less as the medium of foreign exchanges and balances, than as the means by which, above all other means, the operations of industry, and the employment of labour, are facilitated at home. How would industry progress, and wages be dispensed, if the master manufacturer could offer payment of wages only in yards or pieces of cloth, the iron-master in ore, or the land-proprietor in oxen, sheep, corn, hay, or cabbages? In respect of commercial balances, that of Great Britain against Russia is liquidated probably, to some extent, by the yearly balance resulting against Russia in her dealings with Persia; for the policy of Russia is to favour the commerce of Asia, whilst oppressing that with Europe, and Persia is always indebted to Great Britain. She has, however, the game in her own hands. Can we wonder that she plays it to her own advantage, half-political, half-commercial? She knows as well as we feel keenly, that the raw materials, in which she is so rich, are indispensable for our use; she charges accordingly. The time may come when we shall be more independent of her, and then, then only, she will conform to altered circumstances. The able and distinguished diplomatist at her court, Lord Stuart de Rothesay, who succeeded in the arduous task of negotiating the recent treaty of navigation with that crafty Government, is the man also who will not be slow to avail himself of any favourable conjuncture for turning circumstances to account, and redressing the adverse balance now against this country.

As before said, our intention, on this occasion, is not to dissect principles or theories, but to present facts. We have still more in store for the absolute theory men. But, in concluding, we may be allowed to observe, that the causes why a restrictive and exclusive system does answer for Russia, and, on the contrary, tends to the ruin of Spain, are simply these:--The raw materials of Russia are indispensable for this and other manufacturing countries, because cheaper and more abundant than can be elsewhere procured, and the price of labour is low. The raw products of Spain necessary for manufactures are, on the reverse, dear priced; her products of luxury, even, are dear; her rates of labour are higher than in this or any other country of Europe. Two shillings and sixpence a-day, or fifteen shillings a-week; with, besides Sundays, a hundred saints' days or holidays in the year, put her labour and produce quite _hors de combat_ in the race of competition. A Spanish operative would no more toil on a _dia de dos cruces_, (two saints on one day,) than he would fast on a feast-day, with an odorous _olla podrida_ before him on the table.

* * * * *

INDEX TO VOL. LIII.

[Transcriber's note: The page numbers refer to editions 327 to 332, published between January and June 1843, according to the following table:

Edition 327, pages 1-140, dated January 1843, 328, 141-280, February, 329, 281-414, March, 330, 415-550, April, 331, 551-692, May, 332, 693-826, June.]

Aden, on the occupation of, 484. Affghanistan, the war in, 17 review of the events in, 239 the evacuation of, 266. Agriculture, the practice of, 415. Akhbar Khan, murder of Macnaghten by, 257 defeat of, at Tazeen, 269. Amalia, from the German of Schiller, 442. Ammalát Bek, a tale, translated from the Russian, Translator's preface, 281 Chap. I., 288 Chap. II., 296 Chap. III., 464 Chap. IV., 471 Chap. V., 478 Chap. VI., 568 Chap. VII., 573 Chap. VIII., 579 Chap. IX., 584 Chap. X., 746 Chap. XI., 750 Chap. XII., 752 Chap. XIII., 755 Chap. XIV. 759. Anti-Corn Law League, failure of the, 6. Antique at Paris, the, from Schiller, 312. Antique, the, to the Northern Wanderer, 312. Aristocracies of London life, the, 67 the aristocracy of fashion, 68 of power, 227 of talent, 386. Arnold's lectures on history, review of, 141. Astronomical works, from Schiller, 311. Attorney's Clerk in the Monk's Hood, the, a review of Chatterton, 780. Auckland, Lord, remarks on his policy in India, 18, 266.

Bailey, Mr, his Reply to an Article in Blackwood's Magazine, on Berkeley's Theory of Vision, 762. Ballads of Schiller, the, see Schiller. Battle, the, from Schiller, 446. Battle of the Blocks, the, 614. Berkeley's Theory of Vision, further remarks on, 762. Book of the Farm, review of the, 415. Buckingham, the Duke of, his resignation, 5. Burial march of Dundee, the, 537. Burnes, Sir Alexander, murder of, 244.

Cabul, Eyre's Narrative of the Operations in, reviewed, 239. Caleb Stukely, Part X. The Revulsion, 33