CHAPTER IX.

Violante's first evening at the Lansmeres, had seemed happier to her than the first evening, under the same roof, had done to Helen. True that she missed her father much--Jemima somewhat; but she so identified her father's cause with Harley, that she had a sort of vague feeling that it was to promote that cause that she was on this visit to Harley's parents. And the Countess, it must be owned, was more emphatically cordial to her than she had ever yet been to Captain Digby's orphan. But perhaps the real difference in the heart of either girl was this, that Helen felt awe of Lady Lansmere, and Violante felt only love for Lord L'Estrange's mother. Violante, too, was one of those persons whom a reserved and formal person, like the Countess, "can get on with," as the phrase goes. Not so poor little Helen--so shy herself, and so hard to coax into more than gentle monosyllables. And Lady Lansmere's favourite talk was always of Harley. Helen had listened to such talk with respect and interest. Violante listened to it with inquisitive eagerness--with blushing delight. The mother's heart noticed the distinction between the two, and no wonder that that heart moved more to Violante than to Helen. Lord Lansmere, too, like most gentlemen of his age, clumped all young ladies together, as a harmless, amiable, but singularly stupid class of the genus-Petticoat, meant to look pretty, play the piano, and talk to each other about frocks and sweethearts. Therefore this animated dazzling creature, with her infinite variety of look and play of mind, took him by surprise, charmed him into attention, and warmed him into gallantry. Helen sate in her quiet corner, at her work, sometimes listening with almost mournful, though certainly unenvious, admiration at Violante's vivid, yet ever unconscious, eloquence of word and thought--sometimes plunged deep into her own secret meditations. And all the while the work went on the same, under the small noiseless fingers. This was one of Helen's habits that irritated the nerves of Lady Lansmere. She despised young ladies who were fond of work. She did not comprehend how often it is the resource of the sweet womanly mind, not from want of thought, but from the silence and the depth of it. Violante was surprised, and perhaps disappointed, that Harley had left the house before dinner, and did not return all the evening. But Lady Lansmere, in making excuse for his absence, on the plea of engagements, found so good an opportunity to talk of his ways in general--of his rare promise in boyhood--of her regret at the inaction of his maturity--of her hope to see him yet do justice to his natural powers, that Violante almost ceased to miss him.

And when Lady Lansmere conducted her to her room, and, kissing her cheek tenderly, said, "But you are just the person Harley admires--just the person to rouse him from melancholy dreams, of which his wild humours are now but the vain disguise"--Violante crossed her arms on her bosom, and her bright eyes, deepened into tenderness, seemed to ask, "He melancholy--and why?"

On leaving Violante's room, Lady Lansmere paused before the door of Helen's; and, after musing a little while, entered softly.

Helen had dismissed her maid, and, at the moment Lady Lansmere entered, she was kneeling at the foot of the bed, her hands clasped before her face.

Her form, thus seen, looked so youthful and child-like--the attitude itself was so holy and so touching, that the proud and cold expression on Lady Lansmere's face changed. She shaded the light involuntarily, and seated herself in silence, that she might not disturb the act of prayer.

When Helen rose, she was startled to see the Countess seated by the fire; and hastily drew her hand across her eyes. She had been weeping.

Lady Lansmere did not, however, turn to observe those traces of tears, which Helen feared were too visible. The Countess was too absorbed in her own thoughts; and as Helen timidly approached, she said--still with her eyes on the clear low fire--"I beg your pardon, Miss Digby, for my intrusion; but my son has left it to me to prepare Lord Lansmere to learn the offer you have done Harley the honour to accept. I have not yet spoken to my lord; it may be days before I find a fitting occasion to do so; meanwhile, I feel assured that your sense of propriety will make you agree with me that it is due to Lord L'Estrange's father, that strangers should not learn arrangements of such moment in his family, before his own consent be obtained."

Here the Countess came to a full pause; and poor Helen, finding herself called upon for some reply to this chilling speech, stammered out, scarce audibly--

"Certainly, madam, I never dreamed of--"

"That is right, my dear," interrupted Lady Lansmere, rising suddenly, and as if greatly relieved. "I could not doubt your superiority to ordinary girls of your age, with whom these matters are never secret for a moment. Therefore, of course, you will not mention, at present, what has passed between you and Harley, to any of the friends with whom you may correspond."

"I have no correspondents--no friends, Lady Lansmere," said Helen deprecatingly, and trying hard not to cry.

"I am very glad to hear it, my dear; young ladies never should have. Friends, especially friends who correspond, are the worst enemies they can have. Good night, Miss Digby. I need not add, by the way, that, though we are bound to show all kindness to this young Italian lady, still she is wholly unconnected with our family; and you will be as prudent with her as you would have been with your correspondents--had you had the misfortune to have any."

Lady Lansmere said the last words with a smile, and pressed a reluctant kiss (the stepmother's kiss) on Helen's bended brow. She then left the room, and Helen sate on the seat vacated by the stately unloving form, and again covered her face with her hands, and again wept. But when she rose at last, and the light fell upon her face, that soft face was sad indeed, but serene--serene, as if with some inward sense of duty--sad, as with the resignation which accepts patience instead of hope.

ENGLISH ADMINISTRATIONS.[6]

[6] _The Grenville Papers._ Edited by W. J. SMITH, Esq. 2 vols. 8vo. London: Murray.

The last century was the era of monarchs. The _people_ had not yet formed a visible object. They were the counters at the table of the great gamesters of the day. In England, which had since the Reformation always advanced before the age, the people had started into substantial existence. It was impossible totally to overlook a power which had subverted one Constitution, and erected another--which had dethroned one dynasty, and enthroned another--which had begun its existence under theories of divine right, and signalised the maturity of its generation by establishing the most perfect national freedom which man had ever seen.

But, in continental Europe, the people formed no more an object, in the general polity of nations, than a submarine mountain takes its place in a map of the ocean. It had an existence, but no recognition; it had a place, but the ship of the State passed over it without casting the lead or shifting a sail. The government of all foreign nations existed only in the Council Chamber. The king was at once the author and the agent of all measures; the decrees of the administration were as mysterious, as inscrutable, and as unexpected, as Oracles. Men saw nothing in the political world but kingdoms--masses of power--revolving before the eye of the politician and the philosopher, as the planets revolved, with irresistible force, with vast and various splendour, but by laws as much beyond human dispute as the Laws of Nature.

The maxim which in our day is felt to contain the consummation of despotism, _L'Etat--c'est moi_, was once the _motto_ of every throne, the essential character of dominion, the crown jewel, the substance of the sceptre. Whether that maxim is to be revived--whether the struggle between popular power and the throne is once more to be tried--whether the monarchies of Europe, unwarned by the rents already made in their ramparts by the comparatively slight incursions of the popular surge, are prepared to defy the ocean in its strength, must be left to the future.

But there can be no doubt in the prediction, that whenever the ultimate conflict arrives, it will be tremendous; it will shake all the old barriers of power, and either cover society with ruin, or sweep away the ruin itself, for a total renovation.

It is difficult to touch upon this subject without some reference to that country which, for the last fifty years, has gone the whole round of revolution--has lived in an atmosphere of fiery vapours--has been acclimated to epidemics of overthrow--and reckons her years by the flight of monarchs, the fabrication of hollow governments, and the crush of constitutions.

France seems resolved on making the dreadful experiment of Despotism. It failed before, and its failure consigned the Imperial experimentalist to a fate so singular and so condign, as to seem a direct punishment from Providence for daring to counteract its purposes in the progress of man. With his successor to his principles, the experiment is but beginning. How will it end? He has invoked a spirit that had been laid these thirty years. Whether, like the magicians of old, he must find employment for the demon, under the penalty of being in his grasp, or he is finally to evade the bond, no man within memory has placed himself and his country in a more trying and threatening dilemma. If he attempts to make war his policy, he will be guilty of every drop of blood shed in the field. If he attempts to re-establish despotism, he has the warning of St Helena before his eyes.

But, without conjecturing the personal fate of this man of power, nothing can be clearer than the fact that he has placed himself in a position to mould the fate of Europe for a century to come. If he shall succeed in concentrating all national power in himself, the example is sure not to be lost upon kings. The insults which characterised the triumphs of the mob in the late Continental tumults--the remembrances which must rankle in the hearts of all Continental governments--the revenge, which is the natural passion of arbitrary power--and even the rational alarm at the possible return of the popular excesses, must make all foreign princes partial to the revival of Despotism.

This hour is a _Crisis_. Principles are on their trial; the antagonists are in the field; and the first shock may decide, for a long period, the victory of bold measures over impassioned men, and of unlimited might over confused, but daring, and defeated, but obstinate, right--a contest which will never wholly cease henceforth, and which, in its continuance, may shatter the whole frame of society.

How far this great political change in the most influential of kingdoms may be but the indication of a new course of Providence--how far it may be connected with those new and singular means and powers of nature and of mechanism which, in our time, have been assigned to man--how far it may be, in politics, a corresponding phase to the railroad, the electric telegraph, and the discoveries of gold in the ends of the earth--can be only a matter of conjecture; but while we are convinced that Providence does nothing without system, and does nothing in vain, we cannot altogether suppress the feeling, that an Era of _Revelations_ in government, science, and society, has begun.

But it must be acknowledged that the monarchs of the last century bore their honours well. They were all bold, brave, and intelligent. Whether in the right or the wrong, they showed decision--the first qualification for the government of kingdoms. Some were of remarkable intellectual power, and none, with slight exceptions, were inferior to the weight of the diadem. The age which reckoned among its sovereigns, Frederic II. of Prussia, Maria Theresa of Germany, the Emperor Joseph, the Czarina Catherine, and, in its earlier portion, Louis XIV. and William III., could not be regarded as destitute of minds equal to the conduct of affairs in perhaps the most complicated, struggling, and difficult period of Europe before the French Revolution.

The reign of George II. formed a strong contrast to those of the Continental sovereigns: their difficulties arose from war--his from peace; their combats in the field were scarcely less anxious than his in the cabinet. The conclusion was different; the successes and failure of the foreign monarch equally wasted the blood and treasure of Europe; the struggles of the British king issued in larger accessions to liberty, and to the power of that body which is politically called the _people_.

George II. was a stern and stubborn man, possessed of considerable ability, but unpopular in its application; unimpassioned, but ambitious of fame; longing to figure in war, but compelled by the nation to peace; uneasy in England, and never happy but in Hanover, from which he imported his prejudices and his favourites, his politics and his household; fond of power, but capable of complying with the public will; and retaining all the feelings of a German Elector, yet respectful to the laws of a limited monarchy. Whatever were the morals of the court, he never sought to make them the fashion in England; and whatever might be his own sense of decorum, he governed his people with dignity, dying at the age of seventy-seven; and, after a reign of thirty-four years, he was, if not loved, regretted by the empire.

The volumes which have recalled us to this subject consist of the correspondence of George Grenville, Lord Temple, and their chief contemporaries--among the rest, the celebrated Earl of Chatham. It extends from 1742 to the tenth year of George III., and is peculiarly important in its references to the last seventeen years of that period.

It has long been the custom of the leading English families in public life to preserve the documents connected with their career. This habit exists, perhaps, to a greater extent in England than in any other country, from the superior nature of public character, from the frequency of public investigation, from the severity of public judgment, and, as the general result, from the importance of having a ready defence of the statesman's reputation against the casual charge as well as the studied libel.

The history of the present _deposit_ may be briefly told. Earl Temple's papers were always kept at Stowe, the well-known and superb mansion of the Buckingham family. A considerable portion of Mr Grenville's correspondence, preserved at Wotton, was brought to Stowe, and arranged with that of Earl Temple, and the remainder was discovered by the editor, in a large chest at Buckingham House, which had remained unopened since it was brought there. The whole of these papers were rearranged by the late Duke, with the assistance of the editor, (then librarian at Stowe,) but with the ducal wish that they should not be published before the death of his uncle, the Right Hon. Thomas Grenville. The latter, however, surviving the Duke seven years, the publication was retarded till, by the present Duke, it was committed to the hands of the editor, in conformity with the intention of his father.

In England in the last century there were _castes_ as marked as in India: there was a military caste, a class of society in which the generality of the military commissions, and all the leading employments of the court, went; there was also a political _caste_, a class in which all the great offices of administration went, as regularly as the night succeeded the day, and in which any deviation from the routine, any appointment of any individual _not_ in the muster-roll of the aristocracy, would probably have been considered as a deviation from the law of nature. In this condition of things, men of other classes had no imaginable chance of prominent office on their own account. Their only hope must be in attaching themselves to some of those "_Dii majorum gentium_"--those sons of fortune, those hereditary possessors of high positions, those natural rulers of the powers and the privileges of political high life. The government, in consequence, was an Oligarchy under the name of a monarchy, and the authority of the Crown was merged in the actual authority of the political connection.

The monarch had, undoubtedly, the right to choose, but it was the right to choose between submitting to the captain of the ship and going over the side. He might appoint his cabinet, but he must appoint it from the men whom the political class offered; he could not stray into the world for a better selection; he could not follow the man of talents, or the man of integrity, into the less nobly born and less dexterously combined orders of society: _there_ stood the aristocratic recruits for his government, and unless he took them as they were, he was a general without an army. The advantages and disadvantages of this system were equally conspicuous. On the one view, ministers were not the creatures of place; they had personal characters to lose, their principles were publicly known, they were not dependent on the emoluments of office, nor thus had grown up through a succession of minor employments into places of distinction, the most ill-omened education for public men; they were not adventurers, they brought with them an accession of family influence, which raised them beyond the great temptation of _new_ men--that of courting the populace; and as the natural result of their birth, connections, and intercourse with men of a high class of society, they acted under a higher sense of dignity, and their public acts were more generally marked with a fearless, open, and generous stamp.

On the other hand, the evils were of some moment in the monopoly of power in turning the State into a corporation, in the restriction on the rising ability of the humbler conditions of life, to the loss of doubtless much vigorous and original aid to the public councils, in the jealousy which that restriction naturally created in men who felt their talents, and in the consequent difficulties produced by the direction of those talents to party, as the only means of claiming justice for themselves. This was continually felt in the political tumults of England for the last fifty years of the century, and it was eminently experienced in Ireland, where every rising barrister instantly took the side of Opposition, and where even his attainment of office was felt as a stimulant and a bribe for new assaults on the Government: like buying off an invasion, the purchase was only a proclamation for a new march against the cabinet.

The Grenvilles were of the political _caste_, and for two-thirds of a century there was no political good fortune in which a Grenville was not sure to share, if on the ministerial side--nor measure of opposition in which a Grenville was not sure to be busy, until the change came round, and the bustling patriot was transformed into the complacent placeman.

The _public_ origin of this family was derived from Richard Temple of Wotton, by his marriage with the sister of Lord Cobham of Stowe, whom she succeeded, by the title of Countess Temple, in 1759. The eldest son of this marriage was Richard, Earl Temple, born in 1711. The second son was George Grenville, the minister, born in 1712. The next brother was James Grenville, a Lord of Trade, Deputy-paymaster of the Forces, and Cofferer of the Household. The third was Henry Grenville, successively governor of Barbadoes, ambassador to Constantinople, and a Commissioner of Customs. The fourth was Thomas Grenville, a captain in the navy, who was unfortunately killed in action.

George Grenville, the minister, had three sons, equally heirs of official fortune;--George, who succeeded to the earldom of Temple, and afterwards obtained the marquisate of Buckingham; Thomas Grenville, who, after filling several lucrative offices, died lately, and honourably left his fine library to the nation. The youngest son was the late Lord Grenville, the coadjutor of William Pitt. The connection with that illustrious statesmen was formed through the marriage of Lady Hester Grenville, the sister of the first Earl Temple, with Pitt, afterwards Earl of Chatham, and the father of William Pitt. The present Duke of Buckingham is the great-grandson of George Grenville.

As George Grenville forms the principal personage of these volumes, a sketch of his progress to power may be given. Educated at Eton and Christ-Church, he was intended for the bar, but, at the suggestion of his relative, Lord Cobham, he soon determined on a political career. The borough of Buckingham was at his disposal, and he was its representative for thirty years. His rise through office was rapid. He was first made a Lord of the Admiralty, then a Lord of the Treasury, then Treasurer of the Navy, then Secretary of State, then First Lord of the Admiralty, until finally, in April 1763, he rose to be Premier, or First Lord of the Treasury, and Chancellor of the Exchequer. This consummation, however, was short-lived. Within two years he was deprived of the premiership, held office no more, and retired from public life for ever, leaving, as the principal memorial of his political career, the unlucky Stamp Act, so well known as the pretext for the revolt of America, the watchword of party in Parliament, and of faction in the streets, and yet a measure which no man could fairly charge with injustice, and whose consequences no man could charge upon the minister.

That Parliament had as valid a right to tax a British colony as it had to tax a British county, is beyond all doubt; and, remote as the question now is with respect to the American contest, we have other colonies which may be the wiser for stating its true grounds.

The British subject emigrating to a colony, however distant, is still a British subject; and the child of that emigrant born in the British colony is still a British subject. Allegiance cannot be extinguished by distance. If he takes arms against England, he is liable to be punished as a rebel. The support of the law, the support of the government, the support of the fleet and army, all which protect the empire, and with it the colony, must require contributions, and the colony, sharing in the protection, must be bound to assist that contribution--it must pay _taxes_. The outcry of the time, that the colonies were taxed _without_ representation, was utterly unfounded. The colonies _were_ represented in the British Parliament; they were represented by the whole Parliament legislating for the whole Empire. The wisdom of adding to the numbers of a parliament, already perhaps numerous enough for every purpose of deliberation, was a question exclusively for the Government, and the British colony in America had no want of advocates; the whole Opposition were its virtual representatives.

The question of right was thus decided. The question of policy was another consideration; and there can be no doubt that, by admitting American members into the House, the United States might have remained British for a few years longer. But distance and difficulty, population and power, would soon have solved the problem, and the great colony would have now been a great _kingdom_. The war made it a great _republic_. The bitterness of hostilities envenomed the colonies against the only form of government _congenial_ to the British mind; and for a limited monarchy, the most fortunate and rational of all governments, they adopted a limited democracy, which nothing but the extent of their territories could have prevented, long since, from being an anarchy. But stubbornness on the one side, and faction on the other, prevailed. The Stamp Act was felt to be so legitimate, in the first instance, that it scarcely raised a debate in Parliament. The resistance revived the spirit of opposition in the legislature. It was too favourable an opportunity for metaphorical indignation and verbal virtue to be thrown away; and by the help of parliamentary intrigue, backed by popular outcry, this natural, obvious, and easy act of legislature was stigmatised as the foulest oppression. Time has rectified the opinion; and while we rejoice in the prosperity of all nations, we may calmly respect the principles of social law.

To George Grenville we owe the "Act for securing purity of Election," which was once regarded as a model of legislative wisdom, adequate to preserve the hustings from contamination and the House from influence for ever. But the dexterities of modern corruption have proved too subtle for the provisions of our ancestors. How many hundred elections have been driven through the Grenville Act, is not for us to say, and it would perhaps be difficult to calculate. But the constant lowering of the franchise has shown the weakness of all defences against a bribe; and as the expedient of every new candidate for popularity is to put the elections into hands lower still, we may safely predict the growing inefficiency of all laws against the temptation to corrupting of the populace.

The celebrated Burke, in his speech on American Taxation, a masterpiece of eloquence, and a masterpiece of that sophistry in which Party involved his illustrious spirit _for the time_, relieved the House from the dryness of statistics, by a striking sketch of Grenville, almost ten years after his retirement from public life, and nearly five years after he was in his tomb.

"Mr Grenville undoubtedly was a first-rate figure in the country. With a masculine understanding, and a stout and resolute heart, he had an application undissipated and unwearied. He took public business, not as a duty he was to fulfil, but as a pleasure he was to enjoy, and he seemed to have no delight out of the House, except in such things as in some way related to the business that was to be done within it. If he was ambitious, I will say this for him, his ambition was of a noble and generous strain. It was to raise himself, not by the low politics of a court, but to win his way to power through the laborious gradations of public service, and to secure himself a well-earned rank in Parliament, by a thorough knowledge of its constitution, and a perfect practice in all its business."

But this panegyric was rather lowered by its peroration. Burke was fond of looking at every subject in a variety of lights, and it became the habit of even his vigorous mind to fill up the background of his portraits with picturesque _shade_. He then closed his character of the deceased statesman by observing that his having been a barrister "narrowed the extent and freedom of his political views."

"He was bred to the law, a science which does more to quicken and invigorate the understanding than all the other kinds of learning put together. But it is not apt, except in persons very happily born, to open and liberalise the mind exactly in the same proportion." Having flung this passing sarcasm at the profession, he let fall a drop of contempt on the system of public employment.

"From that study, he did not go very largely into the world, but plunged into the business of office, and the limited and fixed forms established there. These forms are adapted to ordinary occasions, and therefore persons who are nurtured in office do admirably well so long as things go on in their common order; but when the highroads are broken up, and the waters are out, when a new and troubled scene is opened, and the file affords no precedent, then it is that a greater knowledge of mankind, and a far more extensive comprehension of things, is requisite than ever office gave, or than office ever can give. Mr Grenville thought better of the wisdom and power of human legislation than, in truth, it deserves."

The fact evidently is, that the fiery and soaring spirit of Burke despised the heavy uniformity and dull routine of the whole tribe of which Grenville was the representative; that he disdained the substitution of heavy regularity for brilliant enterprise, of precedent for principle, and of taking shelter under obsolete forms, instead of adopting those lofty innovations which alone can guide a government through new perils, deserve the name of statesmanship, and elevate politics into the dignity of a science.

But this attempt to qualify his panegyric, by laying the weight of Grenville's failure on his profession, was keenly retorted by Wedderburn, (then Solicitor-General, and afterwards Chancellor and Earl of Rosslyn,) declaring that he had no intention of taking a part in the debate, but that he had been called up by Burke's character of Grenville. He observed, "that the gentleman had neither done him that justice with which posterity might treat his memory, nor had he spoken of him as the general voice of a grateful people would even at that moment express itself of his person, his conduct, and his acts." After alluding to the remark, that his mind was narrowed by the bar, and that he had plunged into office before he mingled in the world, Wedderburn (who _might_ have observed that he came into Parliament and politics at twenty-nine, consequently had practised but little in his profession, and that at thirty-three he held the office of a Lord of the Admiralty) said cleverly--

"Going into the world is a term too large for my narrow comprehension. If it means that he neither played, nor dressed, nor was a member of any of the fashionable clubs, I believe it may be true. But his birth and his talents introduced him to an early intimacy with the first men of the age. He passed, by regular gradations, from one office to another. Whatever related to the Marine of this country, he had learned during his attendance at the Admiralty. The Finance he had studied under a very able master at the Treasury. The Foreign Department was for a time intrusted to him. The proper business of the House was for several years his particular study. In almost every various office of the state he had acquired a practical knowledge, improved by theory; and, from the general course of his observation and researches, he had adopted principles and habits which the firm temper of his mind would not stoop to abandon or unlearn, in complaisance to the opinions of any man. Such were the _disqualifications_ under which Mr Grenville was called forth to the first situation of administration, at a time when ancient _prejudices_ were still respected, and before it was understood that parts were spoiled by application, that ignorance was preferable to knowledge, and that any _lively man of imagination_, without practice in office, and without experience, might start up at once, a self-taught minister, and undertake the management of a great country in difficult times."

We have given these extracts, as displaying both sides of the character, and by comparison enabling the student of history to form an estimate of a man who for twenty-one years had been exercised in the various administrations of the empire, and who finally rose to the highest official rank in the country.

But it is still more to the advantage of his character, and it may have constituted the chief secret of his success, that he was a man of integrity; that the corruptions universally charged upon Walpole were never fixed on him; that, in an age when the highest rank in the realm often startled the nation, by following foreign fashions of morality, he was a good father, a faithful husband, and a firm friend.

One of the observations which these volumes force upon us, is the agreeable evidence of the improvement in the public health. Every man in high station seems to have been the victim of a perpetual tendency to disease. Ministers seem universally to have been tortured by gout, or some painful disorder, which drove them to the country, the Continent, or the Bath waters. The women of rank had some unaccountable and indescribable malady of their own, which they called the Vapours; every judge had some excruciating disorder, which he could alleviate only by opium; every man of letters had some ailment of the same kind. The common people, living in the unventilated and obscure haunts of cities, had, of course, all the diseases which we are now so slowly striving to prevent; and the ploughman appeared to enjoy the only health in the land. How far the improvement in this all-important matter may be owing to improved medical science, to the drainage of the soil, to more extended agriculture, or to some fortunate change in the atmosphere, or even to the adoption of more temperate habits, and the substitution of lighter food, we cannot precisely say; but there can be scarcely a doubt of the change in the general state of health, in the duration of life, in the proportion of those who grow up to maturity to those who die in infancy, and even in the continued vigour of the frame and faculties to a more advanced age.

The first letter in the correspondence is from Lord Cornbury, recommending Mr Grenville to travel for his recovery from a sickness which apparently enfeebled all his earlier years. His lordship suggests the south of France as a supplement to Bath, where he had gone to drink the waters, then a _panacea_ for the distempers of high life, and where his residence is mentioned in a lively epistle from Lyttleton to Pope. "George Grenville is in a fair way of recovery; the waters agree with him. Cheyne (the physician) says he is a giant, a son of Anak, made like Gilbert, the Lord Bishop of Sarum, and may, therefore, if he pleases, _live for ever_; his present sickness being nothing but a fillip given for his good, to make him temperate, and put him under the care of Dr Cheyne."

Lord Cornbury was an amiable young man, given to hospitality and letter-writing, and panegyrised by Pope in such tributes as his pretended scorn for nobility did not prevent him from paying to his entertainers:--

"Would you be blest, despise low joys, low gains, Disdain whatever Cornbury disdains; Be virtuous, and be happy, for your pains."

Such are the honours and the advice of poetry; but it may be suggested that a British peer has little temptation to _low_ joys or low gains, and that it is not difficult to bear the trials of life in possession of every advantage which life can give. The pungent pen of Lady Wortley Montague gives an easier account of this _dilettante_ lord on his death. "He had certainly a very good heart: I have often thought it a great pity it was not under the direction of a better head. His desire of fixing his name to a certain quantity of _wall_, is one instance, among thousands, of the passion men have for _perpetuating their memory_"--(possibly an allusion, sufficiently contemptuous, to his having built at Cornbury Park in Oxfordshire.)

We next have a letter from the first Lord Lyttleton, on the subject of a tour which the minister was still making, recommending that he should not risk his final recovery by coming to the House of Commons,--"Not that, if you were present, either you or I could do any good."

Lord Hervey, in his _Memoirs of the Reign of George II._, gives a sketch of Lyttleton, such as a modern fop might give of a successful rival, closing with--"He had a great flow of words, that were always uttered in a lulling monotony; and the little meaning they had to boast of was generally borrowed from the commonplace maxims and sentiments of moralists, philosophers, patriots, and poets, crudely imbibed, half-digested, ill put together, and confusedly refunded."

Such was the caricature of _the_ Lyttleton with whose poems all the ladies of England were enamoured, and who won all the plaudits of the clergy by his "Tract on the Conversion of St Paul;" certainly a very clever performance, and an extraordinary one, as coming from a man living in the fashionable circles of the last century.

Then follows a letter from the celebrated Lord Mansfield on the same subject:--

"I am very impatient for your recovery, and I rejoice in the favourable accounts I hear. I rambled about, as usual, during the leisure hours I had; and, among other places I was at, I spent three days most agreeably at Hagley with our friends Lyttleton and Pitt; where, you may believe, you _was_--[_sic_, in orig.]--not forgot.... Pope is at Bath, perched upon his hill, making epigrams, and _stifling_ them in their birth; and Lord H., [Hervey]--would you believe it!--is writing libels on the king and his ministers."

Lord Hervey was the son of the first Earl of Bristol--was the most inveterate courtier of his time, and in remarkable confidence with the whole of the royal family. Unfortunately, he knew _too much_, and has bequeathed his knowledge to posterity in a Memoir, fatal to the moral character of his age, yet lively, epigrammatic, and anecdotical. The whole family, even to the close of the century, were eccentric. The keen and witty Lady Wortley Montague defined them as a third class of the human race--"men, women, and _Herveys_."

Those were curious times. The letter ends with the news that Lord Bradford's _mistress_, to whom he had left his estate, had bequeathed it to Pulteney, Earl of Bath. Thus that most parsimonious of all peers got £12,000 a-year!

A letter from Richard Grenville (Lord Temple) to his brother, when abroad, thus gives him the political news of the day:--

"Lord Cobham and Lord Gower have refused going into the cabinet, and we have had very warm work in the House of Commons, the first day, upon the Address. Pitt (Earl of Chatham) spoke like ten thousand angels! and your humble servant was so inflamed at their indecency, that he could not contain, but talked a good while with his usual modesty.... We divided 150 against 259; we reckon ourselves, however, 200. And it is inconceivable how _colloquing_ and flattering all the ministers are to all of us, notwithstanding our impertinence.... Who but young Bathurst to answer me, in the most ridiculous, indecent, stupid speech that ever was made. It was melancholy, but entertaining enough, to see them skulk in, with their tails betwixt their legs, like so many spaniels.... We shall have a glorious day about the sixteen thousand. We shall then see, also, who are Hanoverians and who Englishmen."

The day of the sixteen thousand was the debate on fixing the subsidy for the payment of that number of Hanoverian troops. On this point Opposition made a great and popular stand, contending, truly enough, that nothing could be more derogatory to the honour of a great country than the employment of mercenaries; but George II. had all the prejudices of a German Elector on the subject, and the motion was urged and carried.

The first two Georges seemed actually to think that the English throne depended on the Hanoverian, and that the security of England itself was imperfect without a few German brigades. The third George, however, was of a different opinion; he boasted of his "being born a Briton;" and in that manly and rational feeling, he found England able to defend herself.

The Bathurst mentioned in the letter was the son of the lively and pleasant old Lord Bathurst, the associate of Pope and the wits of his day, alluded to in Burke's fine Episode of American Progress. This son became Lord Chancellor. There is an allusion to Bubb Dodington in the letter referring to his marriage. He led a loose life; and in this instance Horace Walpole gave him but little credit for reformation:--"Mr Dodington has at last owned his match with his old mistress. I suppose he wants a _new_ one."

Dodington (Lord Melcombe) deserves some recollection for the mere sake of his political _flexibility_. He entered Parliament young, and was shortly after sent Envoy to Spain. Inheriting a considerable fortune from his father, whose name was Bubb, he acquired a large estate by the death of his maternal uncle, Dodington, whose name he took in consequence. Still the pursuit of place was the business of his life, and he became proverbial for the eagerness of his avarice, and the slipperiness of his principles. Some talent, some plausibility, great perseverance, and unblushing impudence, gained him a succession of employments under all the successive parties. Beginning his political life under Walpole, by whom he was appointed a Lord of the Treasury, he secured for himself the lucrative sinecure of the Clerkship of the Pells in Ireland. When Walpole began to totter, Dodington _ratted_; and when the minister finally fell, he was made a sharer in the spoil, obtaining the Treasurership of the Navy. When Frederick, Prince of Wales, started in opposition, Dodington hastened to worship the rising sun, and became head of the "Prince's party." When Frederick died, Dodington returned to his old quarters, and figured again as Treasurer of the Navy, under the Newcastle administration.

On the death of George II., Lord Bute was the new dispenser of places, and Dodington joined him accordingly. His reward was the peerage in the same year. This was the summit of his busy, arrogant, aspiring, and _humiliating_ career. Whether he contemplated further experiments on fortune is not now to be known, for he enjoyed his _honours_ but a twelvemonth, dying in 1762. All this labour of servility was for himself alone, for he had no offspring. His _Diary_ is familiar to the readers of political biography, and it is uniformly quoted as the most singular instance, in public life, of fearless exposure to contempt, of sinister caution, and conscious tergiversation.

A _bon mot_ of Chesterfield was long remembered. Dodington, on going abroad on some mission, observed to Chesterfield the vexation of having such a name as Bubb appended to his better-sounding appellation. "Poh!" said Chesterfield, "enlarge it--call yourself Silly-bubb."

In this correspondence, it is surprising that we meet so few references to the invasion of the Pretender in 1745, unless we are to account for it by the letters having been destroyed. The event itself was the most memorable since the Civil War; and if the nation had been less Protestant, it might have changed the dynasty. But the bigotry of James II. had raised a spirit of determined resistance to his line, which nothing but actual overthrow in the field could extinguish. The enterprise was gallantly conceived, and as gallantly executed by the Highlanders; but there was a want of force. The Clans fought boldly, but their blood was shed in vain; and the invasion actually gave additional strength to the Protestant throne.

One of George Grenville's letters adverts to the progress of events briefly in these words:--

"The last accounts from the North say that the Highlanders have begun plundering part of the country between Edinburgh and Berwick. This manner of proceeding may be an unfortunate one with respect to those on whom it falls; but cannot be more so to them than to the party which suffers it, whose hopes, I think, it must entirely destroy, if carried to any length. It is now said that the Castle of Edinburgh is in great want of provisions; that the governor of the Castle ordered the inhabitants of the city to supply him, and threatened, in case of refusal, to burn the town, and beat it down about their ears. They obeyed for two or three days; but then the Highlanders threatened them with military execution if they continued it any longer; upon which they desisted immediately: and the magistrates have applied to the King, stating their miserable situation, and beseeching him to give orders to the governor not to execute his threats. The answer to the application I do not know; but I imagine it is a favourable one."

An amusing feature of these volumes is the style in which public men, in the last age, spoke of each other. It was contemptuous in the extreme--every character was a caricature. Pitt, in a letter to George Grenville, had alluded to Sir William Yonge, a veteran placeman, as telling him of Grenville's "being very well; and I most sincerely hope he tells me truth. I could more easily pardon any of the _fictions_ in which he sometimes deals, than one on this occasion."

Lord Hervey, in his _Memoirs_, thus sketches Yonge:--

"Without having done anything that I know of remarkably profligate, anything out of the common track of a ductile courtier and a parliamentary tool, his name was proverbially used to express everything pitiful, corrupt, and contemptible. It is true, he was a great _liar_, but rather a mean than a vicious one. He had been always constant to the same party, he was good-natured and good-humoured, never offensive in company, nobody's friend, nobody's enemy.... He had a great command of what is called parliamentary language, and a talent of talking eloquently without a meaning, and expatiating agreeably upon nothing, beyond any man, I believe, that ever had the gift of speech."

After all, this description leaves Yonge, as regards talents, a very considerable man. His lying, however, blackens the whole character. Yet it throve with him; for he was, in succession, Commissioner of the Admiralty, and of the Treasury, Secretary-at-War, finishing all by the opulent sinecure of joint-Treasurer of Ireland.

All the Memoirs of the time remind us of the adage of Solomon, "There is nothing new under the sun." Who will not recognise, in the character of Admiral Vernon, (which has had the honour to be delineated by Lord John Russell,) something of a celebrated living Admiral?

"Vernon was a man of undoubted talent, but ill qualified, by his character, to govern those under him, or to obey those above him. Vernon was raised to the rank of Admiral of the White, in April 1745. He was immediately appointed to the command of the fleet, for the defence of the Channel and north coast, and in this situation his vigilance has been greatly commended. The Board of Admiralty, however, having found fault with some of his dispositions of the force, he complained bitterly, and, after an angry correspondence, desired leave to strike his flag. The Admiralty, finding it useless to give orders, which were always cavilled at, complied with his request. Hereupon, the Admiral, who seems to have thought that the public would support him against the Government, published two pamphlets, in which he revealed the orders he had received, and published, without leave, his official correspondence. The Admiralty visited this offence in the most severe manner. Admiral Vernon was called on to attend the Board. When he appeared, the Duke of Bedford asked him, if he was the publisher of the two pamphlets. He declined to answer the question. The Duke of Bedford then informed him that the Board, after such a refusal, could not but consider him as the publisher. He stated his surprise that he should have been asked such a question, and withdrew. The next day, the Duke of Bedford saw the King, and signified to the Board the King's pleasure that Vice-Admiral Vernon should be struck out of the list of flag-officers."

A letter from Pitt speaks of his election, and the unlucky battle of Lauffeldt, in the same breath.

"My dear Grenville,--I am this moment arrived from Sussex, victorious as yourself, (Grenville had just been elected for Bridport,) after being opposed by Mr Gage and the Earl of Middlesex. It is certain my own success does not give me more pleasure than yours does.... Would to God our victories were not confined to our own little world. A full detail of the late action I have not yet seen. The clearest and best makes it evident that the British and Electoral troops did all that can be expected from men overpowered by numbers, the whole weight being upon them. The Duke (of Cumberland) has done himself great honour, by the efforts he made in person during the action," &c. &c.

William Duke of Cumberland was always unfortunate on the Continent, and, we believe, never succeeded but at Culloden. In the battle of Lauffeldt, Walpole says, "he was very near taken, having, through his short sight, mistaken a body of French for his own people. He behaved as bravely as usual; but (he adds sarcastically) his prowess is so well established, that it grows time for him to exert other qualities of a general."

In this action, considerable loss seems to have taken place among the officers of rank. Walpole says of Conway--"Harry Conway, whom nature always designed for a hero of romance, and who is _deplace_ in ordinary life, did wonders, but was overpowered and flung down, when one French hussar held him by the hair, while another was going to stab him. At the instant, an English sergeant, with a soldier, came up and killed the latter, but was instantly killed himself. The soldier attacked the other, and Mr Conway escaped, but was afterwards taken prisoner, and is since released on parole."

The description of the Lord Middlesex, mentioned in the letter, has all the keenness of Walpole's style. (He was the eldest son of the Duke of Dorset, and Master of the Horse to the Prince of Wales.) "His figure was handsome, had all the reserve of his family, and all the dignity of his ancestors. His passion was the direction of operas, in which he had not only wasted immense sums, but had stood lawsuits in Westminster Hall with some of those poor devils for their salaries. The Duke of Dorset had often paid his debts, but never could work upon his affections; and he had at last carried his disobedience so far, in complaisance to, and in imitation of the Prince, as to oppose his father in his own boroughs."

The death of Pelham, in 1754, awoke the bustle of parties in a singular degree. The activity of Fox (Lord Holland) was remarked by every one. Pelham had died about six in the morning; Fox was at Lord Hartington's door _before eight_, called on Pitt at an "early hour;" and a letter from Lord Hardwicke says--"A certain person (Fox) within a few hours after Mr Pelham's death, had made strong advances to the Duke of Newcastle and myself." Pitt's letter, addressed to Lyttleton and the Grenvilles, containing the proposal for a new cabinet, thus speaks of Fox:--"As to the nomination of a Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr Fox, in point of party, seniority in the corps, and, I think, of ability for Treasury and House of Commons business, stands, upon the whole, first of any. Dr Lee, if his health permits, would be very desirable. You, my dear Grenville, would be my nomination. A fourth idea, which, if practicable, might have great strength and efficiency for Government in it--I mean to _secularise_, if I may use the expression, the Solicitor-General (Murray,) and make him Chancellor of the Exchequer."

This fabric of the ministerial brain vanished, and Pitt remained in the subordinate position of Paymaster of the Forces. The ostensible cause was, the King's disinclination to have any intercourse with Pitt. That disinclination, however, ceased to be a pretext when Pitt became necessary to the Crown.

The fluctuations of memorable minds are the most interesting part of their history. Pitt's political disappointments always brought on a fit of his philosophy. When fortune smiled again, he forgot the philosophy, and grasped at the political prize. After the failure of his plan for the cabinet, he flew to Bath, and there, between disgust and distemper, he became romantic.

He thus writes to Earl Temple:--

"I am still the same indolent, inactive thing your lordship saw me; insomuch that I can hear unmoved of Parliament's assembling, and Speakers choosing, and all other great earthly things. I live the vernal day on verdant hills or sequestered valleys, where, to be poetical, for me health gushes from a thousand springs; and I enjoy the return of her, and the absence of that thing called Ambition, with no small philosophic delight. In a word, I envy not the favourites of Heaven, the few, the very few, '_quos æquus amavit Jupiter_;' the dust of Kensington causey, or the verdure of Lincoln's-Inn-Fields." (The King resided at Kensington, and the Duke of Newcastle in Lincoln's-Inn-Fields.) "I shall despatch my necessary business as fast as I can, and pursue you to Stowe, where the charms, so seldom found, of true taste, and the more rare joys and comforts of true friendship, have fixed their happy residence. There it is that I most impatiently long to enjoy you and your works."

Wilkes now comes on the _tapis_. A letter from Earl Temple congratulates him on having returned from the "expensive delights of Berwick." "I hope this will find you in good health, spirits as usual, and with an excellent cause. It is very gracious and kind in the pious Æneas, after his conversion after the love-feast, to keep up that kind of friendship with one who has so slender a claim to be admitted to the table of the saints."

The letter is written in a strain fitter for Wilkes than for a man in a public rank, and with a public character. The "expensive delights of Berwick" was an allusion to Wilkes's contest for the borough, which cost him between three and four thousand pounds, and in which he was defeated after all by the Delaval interest. Fox's description of the debate on the petition is pungent. "Mr Wilkes, a friend, it seems, of Pitt, (so little was he publicly known at this period,) petitioned against the younger Delaval, chose (chosen) at Berwick, on the ground of bribery only. Delaval made a speech, on his being thus attacked, full of wit, humour, and buffoonery, which kept the House in a continued roar of laughter."

From this period, for forty years, Wilkes flourished before the public. The man will do a striking service to the history of the constitution, of popular passion, and of political character, who shall write a "History of Wilkes." There have been memoirs of his life, publications of his letters, and registers of his political victories; but these are still but _Mémoires pour Servir_. The history of the _partisan_ is yet to be written; and it will still be the more curious, since it will be the history of a political age, which could have existed in no other country. Wilkes was embodied Demagogism. Athens might have her Cleon, Naples her Massaniello, and modern Rome her Rienzi; but England alone could produce a Wilkes, tolerate him, triumph in him, struggle for him, and finally pay to his indolent, helpless, and exhausted old age, almost the same popular veneration which the multitude had paid when his intrigues convulsed the whole fabric of the state. A temperament daring, crafty, and unscrupulous, a fluent pen, and a sarcastic wit, were the instruments of an ambition as remorseless, worldly, and grasping, as dwelt in the bosom of a Cæsar Borgia or a Catiline.

An outline of this singular man's bustling career will best show the pertinacity, the trials, and the troubles which belonged to the candidate for the Tribuneship of Great Britain.

John Wilkes, born in 1727, the son of a rich distiller, began his public life in the canvass for Berwick--alluded to by Lord Temple's letter. Having lost that election, he obtained a seat for Aylesbury, which involved him in heavy expenses. Parliament now became his resource and his profession; and he connected himself with Lord Temple, who gave him the colonelcy of the Buckingham militia.

In 1762, on the retirement of Lord Temple and Pitt from the ministry, he became an Opposition pamphleteer. Lord Bute, though a man of ability, was unpopular, as the royal favourite, and Wilkes attacked him in the _North Briton_. In 1763, Lord Bute resigned, and Wilkes, in the memorable No. 45 of the _North Briton_, libelled the King's speech. The sarcasm stung so deep that a prosecution was ordered against him. The prosecution finally became a triumph. The Home Secretary having issued a "General Warrant" for the apprehension of the author, printers, and publishers of the libel, Wilkes, on his arrest, denied its legality, and, as a member of Parliament, was committed to the Tower. The attention of the country was now fixed on the question. He was brought up before Chief Baron Pratt, who decided on the illegality of general warrants, and he was discharged amid the popular acclamations. Wilkes, in his turn, brought actions against the Home Secretary, the under secretaries, the messengers, &c., and gained them all, with damages--the Crown paying the damages. He was now the declared champion of the populace.

He republished the libel--fought a duel on the subject--was severely wounded--and fled to France. A second prosecution was commenced, and, on his non-appearance, he was expelled from the House of Commons. A third prosecution was commenced against him for language in a publication which was pronounced flagitious; and not returning to meet it, he was _outlawed_.

On the change of ministry he returned to England, and was imprisoned; and yet, during his imprisonment, was elected for Middlesex. He was tried, and condemned to remain in jail twenty-two months, or be fined £1000.

In 1769, in consequence of a pamphlet censuring the ministry for the employment of troops to suppress the riots at his election, he was again expelled, and again elected.

He was now declared incapable of sitting in Parliament, and Colonel Luttrel was returned as the sitting member, though with but a fourth of the votes. This act roused the popular indignation once more.

Wilkes, driven from Parliament, now turned to the city, and was elected alderman; and on some printers being brought before him, apprehended by a Royal proclamation, he discharged them all, on the ground of maintaining the privileges of the city. The Lord Mayor, Oliver, and Crosby, an alderman, followed Wilkes's example, and being members of the House, were sent to the Tower. Wilkes, on being ordered to attend at the bar, claimed his seat. Ministers now dreading further involvement, adjourned the House over the day appointed for his attendance, and, in 1774, he took his seat in triumph as member for Middlesex!

But his fortune was now decayed; old age was coming on, and he was glad to be chosen Chamberlain for London, (with a salary of nearly £4000 a-year.) On the fall of the North Cabinet, 1782, he moved that the resolution against him on the Journals should be expunged. The motion was carried; his victory was complete, and the remainder of his life was opulent and calm. That remainder, however, was brief, for he died in 1797, at the age of seventy.

Wilkes was a man of education, a man of wit, and a man of intrepidity. But his education had begun under an English sectary, and was finished in a foreign college--the first accounting for his republicanism, the next for his dissoluteness. But, though the man himself was worthless, his struggles were not unprofitable to the country. They fixed the popular attention on the principles of national liberty; they brought all the great constitutional questions into perpetual study. They rendered the public mind so sensitive to the possible encroachments of the Crown, or even of the Commons, that the future tyranny of any branch of the Legislature would be next to impossible. Let the merit of Wilkes be, that he drew a _fence_ round the Constitution.

But Wilkes had a support unknown to the public of his time, yet amply divulged in these volumes. He appears to have kept up a constant correspondence with Earl Temple, the head of the Grenville interest; to have been anxious for his opinion on his publications, and to have depended on him, even for pecuniary resources, which probably were applied to those publications. The connection of Wilkes in public sentiment with the Grenvilles, was, of course, well known; but we doubt if the evidence of an intimate agency was understood before. In these letters, Wilkes twice draws on Lord Temple for £500; and as his lordship was opulent, and his client quite the reverse, it is likely that those calls were not the only instances of craving. But this connection largely accounts for the otherwise marvellous daring of Wilkes. He had the Grenvilles, Pitt, and their whole connection, then a most powerful party, to fall back upon. The Cabinet which sent him to prison one day, might be succeeded by the Cabinet which would open his gates the next; his patrons might be the possessors of all power, and in the mean time, however he might be persecuted, he was sure not to be crushed.

We have a letter from Lord Temple on this subject, which shows, by its wish to mislead suspicion, the nature of this intimacy. The letter is from a corrected and much obliterated draught, in Lord Temple's handwriting; and as the editor says, "The very guarded manner in which the letter is expressed, renders it probable that Lord Temple expected that it would be read in the Post Office before it reached its destination; for it cannot be supposed that he was ignorant of the connection between the North Briton and Wilkes. Almon (the printer) says, "Lord Temple was not ignorant of his friend's design, and certainly approved of it."

The letter thus begins--"As to public events, I am sorry to see that the paper hostilities are renewed with so high a degree of acrimony as now appears on all sides; and although I make it a rule not to agitate any matter of a political nature by the Post--this Argus, with, at least, a hundred eyes--yet, while my thoughts agree with Government, I may venture to hazard them, subject even to that _inspection_. I am _quite at loss_ to guess through what channel the _North Briton_ flows." The remainder is a critique on the paper, concluding, "as the N. B. will, I suppose, endeavour by every means to lie concealed, it will be impossible to ferret him out, and give him good advice, otherwise I am sure I could convince him."

The caution of this note shows at once the confidential nature of the connection, and the consciousness of the responsibility. But the subsequent letters of Lord Temple to Wilkes prove the continued and increased interest taken by his lordship in Wilkes's political productions. A paper, called the _Monitor_, whether edited by Wilkes or not, but evidently conceived by Lord Temple to be under his direction, having expressed strong opinions relative to the royal personages, his lordship writes as follows:--

"As all the sins of the _Monitor_ against the ruling powers are principally charged upon our friend B., [Bradmore, his attorney,] and then, by way of rebound, upon _two other persons_, to whom the _Monitor_ has been so kindly partial, it is of the more moment to avoid that sort of personality which regards any of the R. F., [royal family.] I am glad, therefore, _my hint_ came, at least, time enough to prevent the publication of what would have filled up the whole measure of offence.... As to other matters, sportsmen, I suppose, are at liberty to pursue lawful game. I am only solicitous to have them not trespassers within the bounds of royal manors.... I hope I may be allowed to defray the loss and the expense of _laying aside the paper you sent me_."

This evidently implies that the paper was submitted to his lordship before publication.

The intercourse of a man like Wilkes, a notorious profligate, and impeached in public for his excess of profligacy, could not have been suffered by a man alive to character, but for some motive beyond the public eye; it was, of course, political, the common pursuit of an object, which is presumed to salve all sins.

A strong instance of their intimacy occurs in what Wilkes might have considered as his last act in this world. Lord Talbot, having been attacked in the _North Briton_, demanded an apology from Wilkes, who denied his lordship's right to question him. A challenge ensued, which produced a meeting, which produced an exchange of shots, without injury on either side. But Wilkes had given to his second, Colonel Berkeley, a note to be delivered, in case of his fall, to Earl Temple. This note Berkeley desired to return to Wilkes on the close of the affair; but it was forwarded to Temple, "as a proof of the regard and affection he bore your lordship, at a minute which might have been his last."

Wilkes's letter is dated

"BAGSHOT, _Nov. 5--Seven at night._

"MY LORD,--I am here, just going to decide a point of honour with Lord Talbot. I have only to thank your lordship for all your favours to me; and to entreat you to desire Lady Temple to superintend the education of a daughter, whom I love beyond all the world. I am, my Lord, your obliged and affectionate humble servant,

JOHN WILKES."

The second volume contains the Correspondence of Ministers, actual and expectant, down to 1764. Among those letters is one which exhibits a curious coincidence with the late transactions of the Foreign Office, though the relative positions of the persons were changed.

"The Earl of Egremont to Mr Grenville.

_February 12, 1763._

"DEAR SIR,--Perhaps the Duc de Nivernois has sent you word that the Treaty was to be signed yesterday. If not, I would not leave you a moment ignorant of the news after I had had it. Ever yours most faithfully,

EGREMONT."

"What think you of the Duke of B., [Bedford, then ambassador in Paris,] who lets the _King's Ministers_ be informed by the _French ambassador_ of the appointment to sign the Treaty!"

The volume abounds in references to high names. Among the rest we have a "Note" from the great Samuel Johnson, which, though only a receipt for his pension, has the value of a national remembrancer:--"To Mr Grenville. Sir,--Be pleased to pay to the bearer seventy-five pounds, being the quarterly payment of a pension granted by his Majesty, and due on the 29th of June last to, Sir, your humble servant, SAM. JOHNSON." The merit of this pension, so worthily bestowed, was due to Wedderburn, afterwards Earl of Rosslyn, and Chancellor.

A letter from the Countess Temple contains some lively Court gossip.

"Mrs Ryde was here yesterday. She is acquainted with a brother of one of the yeomen of the guard. He tells her, that the King cannot live without my Lord _Bute_. If he goes out anywhere, he stops, when he comes back, to ask if my Lord Bute is come yet. And that his lords, or people that are about him, look as mad as can be at it."

"The mob have a good story of the Duke of Devonshire, (Lord Chamberlain.) That he went first, to light the King; and the King followed him, leaning on Lord Bute's shoulder; upon which the Duke of Devonshire turned about, and desired to know 'whom he was waiting upon?'"

The name of the Chevalier D'Eon occurs in the Correspondence as demanding some wine detained in the Customs. The Chevalier was a personage who excited great public curiosity, even almost within our own time. He had been a captain of French dragoons, and was brought to England as the secretary to the Duc de Nivernois, who conducted the negotiations for the peace of 1763. On the Duke's departure, he left D'Eon minister-plenipotentiary. The Count de Guerchy, the new ambassador, desired him to resume the post of secretary; this hurt his pride, and he quarrelled with the ambassador and with the English Court, but was pensioned by France. A report at length was spread that D'Eon was actually a female; this the Chevalier fiercely denied, and we believe threatened to shoot the authors of the report. However, in a short time after, he adopted the dress of a female, and retained it till he died. As all matters in England _then_ turned to gambling, wagers were laid on the subject; until, at length, it was proved that the assumption of the female dress was either an eccentricity or a wilful imposture. His pension having been cut off by the Revolution, this singular person was reduced to great difficulties; so much so, that, to raise money, he appeared as a fencer on the stage, but still appeared in woman's costume.

We must now close our observations on this collection, which is indispensable to the historian of the time. Not referring to any of those great transactions which make the characteristics, or the catastrophes, of nations, these letters exhibit the _interior_ of public life with remarkable minuteness, and must have a peculiar interest for public men. But, with the honours of the statesman, they lay before us so vivid an example of the troubles, the vexations, and the disappointments of political life, and the struggles of men possessing the highest abilities and the highest character, that we doubt whether a more stringent moral against political ambition ever came before the eyes of England.

TIBET AND THE LAMAS.[7]

[7] _Tibet, Tartary, and Mongolia_: Their Social and Political Condition, and the Religion of Boodh, as there existing, &c. By HENRY T. PRINSEP, Esq. London, 1851.

Some years ago we had taken our passage for Alexandria on board a packet from Valletta. The Ægyptus, spick and span new from the Toulon dockyard, with the tricolor flaunting over her stern all resplendent with gilded sphynxes, lay, steam up and ready for departure, near the centre of the Great Harbour, amid that glorious cluster of cities which the knights of St John reared round the banner of the Cross, when Christendom was forced to shorten her cords and draw in her outposts before the swelling power of the unbelievers. Berth selected, baggage stowed away, and hour of dinner ascertained, we were at leisure to enjoy the familiar but never palling glories of the sky and scenery, and to amuse ourselves in watching the travellers of various nations who, party by party, mounted the deck, speculating the while on whatever promised in the first aspect of those who were to be our messmates on the five days' voyage. They were not numerous or very interesting--a party of French artists, bloused and bearded, who returned from their brief circuit of Valletta as full of the stalwart figures and novel costume of its garrison (the Forty-Second) as of the picturesque grandeur of its palaces, or the Titanic sublimity of its bulwarks--a grey-haired English veteran proceeding to his divisional command in India, with wife and daughters, and a most ante-Napierian baggage-train, received by M. le Commandant with scowling courtesy, as if the stately dame were _perfide Albion_ in proper person--then one or two half-Frenchified Moslems, returning from their studies in Paris with a complement of Western vice and science--and lastly, in coarse brown robe, sandalled feet, and shaven crown, with shining breviary beneath the arm, three Capuchin monks, going forth to make disciples for Holy Church in the far East. Each of the latter had his trunk--one of those lanky, hog-backed articles in which the continental European rejoices--and on the trunk his name and destination painted. Two, if we remember, were bound for Agra--the destination of the third we never can forget. On his coffer the painter had inscribed, as coolly, we daresay, as a railway porter would ticket your portmanteau for York or Glasgow,

"FR. ANASTASIO TIBET."

"It is a far cry to Loch Ow;" and whether brother Anastasius and his long pack ever reached their destination as per ticket we know not. But Tibet and its capital have since been visited by two brethren of his Church, though not of his order; and we have to thank Mr Prinsep for calling attention to their narrative in the very able abstract which he has published.[8]

[8] _Souvenirs d'un Voyage dans la Tartarie, le Thibet, et la Chine, pendant les années 1844, 1845, et 1846._ Par M. HUC, Prêtre-Missionaire de la Congregation de Saint Lazare. Paris, 1850.

To many readers, possibly, the name of Tibet calls up but a vague and shadowy image of a sort of eastern Lapland, which serves as a top-margin to the map of Hindostan, and produces lamas, generally understood to be a species of shawl goats from whose fleece the Messrs Nicol make world-renowned paletôts. Our purpose, then, is to define our ideas of the region called Tibet, and to gather together as we may, from old and new sources, some picture more or less dim and fragmentary of the land and its inhabitants.

Conquerors and congresses may make rivers the frontiers of polities and zollvereins, but mountains are the true boundaries of races.[9] The Rhine may part Germany from France, but the Vosges, not the Rhine, parts the German from the Frenchman. Not Tweed, but the Grampians, have marked in our native land the marches of Celt and Saxon. On the side of the Five Rivers the Indian population shades gradually from the true Hindoo into the shaggy robber of the valleys west of the Indus; at the extremity of the peninsula the Tamul tribes of the continent have peopled the coast of Ceylon, as the ancient Belgæ peopled the coast of Kent. But along the northern limit of India runs a barrier which,

"With snowy ridge the roving Tartar bounds,"

dividing the Caucasian from the Mongolian race now as completely as it did two or three thousand years ago.

[9] _Vide_ Greek Lexicon--Ορος--A mountain; Ὁρος--A boundary.

From the plains of the Punjab, hard baked beneath the blazing May sun--from the dusty levels of Sirhind, where meagre acacias cheat the eye with promise of shade--from the long lines of thatched pyramids that greet the traveller in the Doab, as he approaches a British cantonment--eastward through the rich misgoverned tracts of populous Oude, that year by year pour forth their streams of stalwart soldiers, servants, and labourers, to push their fortune in the service of the Kumpanee Buhadoor or its representatives--still eastward from the fertile prairies of Tirhoot and Purneea--from the bamboo thickets and rice swamps of northern Bengal--yet far eastward from the _ultima Thule_ of Anglo-Indian power, where the majestic flood of Burrampooter sweeps down into Assam from the unknown hills--from all these

"Dusk faces with white muslin turbans wreathed"

look northward through the clear morning air on the same mighty Himalaya,[10] stretching beyond their ken its awful barrier of unchanging snow.

[10] _Hema-alya_, _i. e._ Hiemis Aula--The abode of snow.

In mounting from the plains of India over the arduous passes, ranging from 12,000 to 20,000 feet above the sea, through which the pressure of human need, curiosity, and superstition, has forced a scanty and intermittent stream of intercourse, the traveller, after traversing the last ridge of the Himalaya, instead of having to descend again to the level of the southern regions, finds himself but little raised above a vast table-land, in some places extending in barren wastes of plain, or of bare monotonous hills, intersected by sudden deep valleys or great ravines, in which the rivers flow and the few villages are scattered; in others forming an endless alternation of lofty mountain ranges and low valleys, but the bottom of these last still many thousand feet above the plains of the Indian peninsula. To this elevated region, stretching from the Indus north-west of Kashmeer, to the extremest point of Assam, and somewhat farther east, a space of more than 1500 miles, the name of Tibet applies. The limits of its extent northward are somewhat more vague; but if they be considered to include a breadth of three or four degrees of latitude (33°-36°) towards the western extremity, and of nine or ten degrees (28°-38°) in the eastern and widest part, the estimate will not be far wrong. The identity throughout this "very large and long countrey," (to borrow the expression of an old traveller,) consists in the general use of the same language and customs, the prevalence, except in the extreme west, of the same faith, and the possession of the same religious books, written or printed in a character common to all. To these we might perhaps add the domestication of the shawl-goat and the yak throughout the whole territory.

The name of Tibet does not appear to be known, or at least applied, either in the country itself or by its Hindoo neighbours. Tubbet, or Tobot, is stated to have been the Mongolian appellation of a nation who anciently occupied the mountainous country on the north-west confines of China. Our old travellers doubtless learned the word from the Mongols; and from them also it has been adopted as the name of the high country north of India, in all the Mussulman languages of Western Asia. It was more particularly, perhaps, applied in these to Balti and Ladakh, the two most westerly districts, which, in the time of Bernier, were commonly distinguished as Little and Great Tibet. The natives apply to their country the name of Bód or Pót, and as Bhoteeas they are themselves known in Hindostan; though the appellation of Bhotan has in our geography-books come to be confined to a small dependency of Tibet bordering on the north of Assam, where the race comes most closely in contact with our knowledge and the British power, just as our forefathers gave the title of Dutch specially to that fraction of the Teutonic or _Deutsch_ race which most nearly adjoined their shores.

The central and most elevated portion of this region is the province of Ngari--called by the people of the adjoining British territory _Hyundes_, or "Snowland." It embraces extensive desert tracts, intersected by several lofty ranges, the chief being that of Kylass, the sacred celestial mountain of Indian mythology. The table-land at the foot of Kylass, on which lie the twin lakes of Rákas Thal and Manasaráwur, at a height of 15,250 feet above the sea, is probably the most elevated in Asia, or in the world. On the shores of these sacred lakes occurred, some years ago, the catastrophe of a curious historical episode. Zorawur Singh, commanding the troops, of Goolab Singh of Jummoo, (now well known as the Lord of Kashmeer,) after overrunning Little Tibet and subjugating Ladakh, advanced up the Indus and beyond it, till he had occupied posts on the frontier of the Nepalese Himalayas, as if he meditated a foray on the Grand Lama's capital at last. But it proved a Moscow expedition on a small scale. His troops, unused to such a climate, and straitened for fuel, were beset in the depth of winter by a superior force from Lhassa, and, helpless from cold, were overpowered: their leader was slain, their officers captured, and the mass perished in heaps miserably. A few poor, frost-maimed wretches--the sole relics of Zorawur Singh's adventurous band--brought the tale to the British station at Almora, having fled across passes 16,000 feet high in mid-winter. The bleak aspect of the Tibetan plain, as seen from the pass of Niti, somewhat westward of the lakes--shrubless, treeless, houseless--is compared by a traveller to the dreary moors of Upper Clydesdale, with stone and scanty brown herbage in the place of heather. Some of the most celebrated rivers in the world have their not unworthy source in the lofty table which forms the base of the Hindoo Olympus. The Ganges rises in the mountains immediately adjoining Ngari on the south-west, the Gogra, which, were size alone to decide the rights of river nomenclature, might perhaps claim the Ganges as a tributary, has its source in Ngari; so have the Indus, the Sutlej, and the Sanpoo. The Sanpoo, after flowing eastward behind the Himalayan range for some eight hundred miles, is lost to geography in the untraversed regions south-east of Lhassa. In the last century, D'Anville identified the Sanpoo with the Irawaddy, flowing through the whole extent of the Burman Empire to the sea at Rangoon; but the sagacity of Rennel suggested that the Burrampooter, emerging from unexplored mountains into the valley of Assam, and bearing to the sea a flood of waters greatly exceeding the Ganges, is the true Sanpoo. Turner, who, in his mission, reached the banks of the Sanpoo, indicates its course from the information of the Lamas in entire coincidence with Rennel's view.[11] In later years, however, Klaproth has revived the theory of D'Anville, apparently without good grounds. The Dihong, which is the principal contributor to the Burrampooter in Assam, though its course above the plains remains unexplored, bursts on our knowledge with a stream of such capacity as quite justifies the length attributed to it by the supposition that it is identical with the Sanpoo. And there seems little reason to doubt that the two great rivers, Ganges and Sanpoo, rising from the same lofty region, within 150 miles of one another, after diverging to an interval of some 17° of longitude, combine their waters in the plains of Bengal. In Rennel's time, the Burrampooter, after issuing westward from the Assam valley, swept south and south-eastward, and, forming with the Ganges a fluvial peninsula, entered the sea abreast of that river below Dacca. And so almost all English maps persist in representing it, though this eastern channel is now, unless in the rainy season, shallow and insignificant; the vast body of the Burrampooter cutting across the neck of the peninsula under the name of Jenai, and uniting with the Ganges near Pubna (about 150 miles north-east of Calcutta), from which point the two rivers, under the local name of Pudda, flow on in mighty union to the sea.

[11] On the other hand, it is curious that Rennel should have misapprehended the true courses of the other Ngari rivers as he has done. The upper streams of both Indus and Sutlej--the one as flowing past Ladakh from the range of Kylass, and the other past Chaprung from the Rakas lake--are represented with a general truth; but instead of tracing them westward to their true debouchments in the Punjaub, under the well-known names just mentioned, the Ganges is made to draw its waters from the combination of these two Tibetan streams, thus acquiring an imaginary extension of several hundred miles.--(See _Memoir of a Map of Hindostan_, 1778, p. 102.)

The upper part of the Indus valley, with the adjoining pastures, bears the name of _Chanthan_, or the _Northern Plains_, and produces the finest shawl wool. The export of this was long almost monopolised by the Ladakh market for the supply of Kashmeer, but much of it now finds its way direct to British India by the Sutlej valley and more eastern passes. The population is most scanty, and partially nomadic--the names which dot it on the map being mostly mere shepherd shelters, or clusters of nomad tents round a few houses of sunburnt brick. Tashigong, the only place of any extent, is the site of an important monastery. North of the Indus, and separated from it by a range of mountains, is the extensive salt lake of Pangkung. On the Singhkhabab, or Indus, farther westward, are strung, as it were, the principalities of Ladakh and Balti. These consist of a mass of mountain ranges rising from a base elevated 11,000 feet and more above the sea. This rugged country occupies the whole breadth of the Indus drainage from the Kashmeer Himalyas to the Karakoram mountains. The levels along the borders of the streams, and the slopes at the bases of the mountains, are diligently cultivated and irrigated, being first formed into terraced steps by a great accumulation of patient labour--a practice that prevails through the whole extent of the Himalaya Mountains. The uncultivated part of the country has the usual Tibetan aspect of bleakness and sterility.

Balti, or Little Tibet, is still independent under various chieftains, of whom the most powerful resides at Skardo, a considerable village, doing duty for a city where cities are so scarce. Ladakh was conquered by the Sikh feudatory, Goolab Singh, in 1835; and after the Sutlej victories of 1846, possession was confirmed to him by Lord Hardinge, at the same time that Kashmeer was made over to his tender mercies. Le, the capital, and probably the only aggregation of dwellings worthy of the name of town, situated in the valley of the Indus, and containing from 700 to 1000 houses, had before that period been visited by only two or three Europeans, of whom the persistent and unfortunate Moorcroft was the first in this century. Captain H. Strachey, of the Bengal army, belonging to the commission appointed to define the boundary between Ladakh and the Chinese or Tibetan dependencies, spent several years, between 1846 and 1849, in those regions; and far more accurate and full information than has ever yet been obtained may be expected from his researches. The whole population of Balti, and a half in Ladakh, are Sheea Mahommedans.

Returning to the centre of the table-land, we have, on the north-east of Ngari, extensive and almost unknown deserts, containing numerous salt-lakes, and haunted by a scanty nomad population, called by the Tibetans _Sok_, and supposed to represent the ancient Sacians. South-east lie the provinces of U and Tsang, or, conjointly, U-Tsang, to which the natives specially apply the name of Bód, and which may be considered as Tibet Proper. It is that part of the region to which we turn with most curiosity and interest, as containing the centre of spiritual and chief political supremacy--Lhassa, so long the unreachable Timbuctoo of the East. Lhassa is situated in the province of U, on a northern tributary of the Sanpoo, by which it is separated from Tsang. The latter territory is immediately governed by the Teshoo Lama, the potentate with whom we made an accidental acquaintance in Warren Hastings' time--our first and last brief but cordial intercourse with Tibet Proper. The provinces of U-Tsang are intersected by lofty alpine ranges, which, as they trend east and south-east, converge, but without uniting, insomuch that, in the inexpressibly rugged country where the frontiers of Tibet, Burma, and China approach one another, we find four parallel valleys traversed by four of the greatest rivers of Asia, embraced within the narrow space of one hundred miles. The Tibetan portion of this wild region, known as _Kham_, is inhabited by a rough race, of warlike and independent character, retaining many primitive superstitions beneath the engrafted Lamanism, and treating with little respect the Chinese pretensions to sovereignty. Through this region the missionaries Huc and Gabet were escorted back to China--the first Europeans, there can be little doubt, who ever trod those wilds. The plundering excursions of the Kham-pa extend all across the breadth of Tibet, and the fear of them haunts even the pilgrims to Kylass and the Manusaráwur Lake.

The Bhotan territory remains, which, from language, religion, manners, and political connection, may justly be considered as Tibetan, though occupying not the table-land north of the Himalaya, but the whole breadth of the range itself, from the Tsang country to Assam. Bhotan is a mass of mountains clothed in perpetual verdure, its slopes covered with forests of large and lofty trees; populous villages, girt with orchards, are scattered along the sides and summits of the spurs; every declivity of favourable aspect is carved into terraces, cultivated to the utmost, and carefully irrigated from the abundant streams. Nothing could be physically in greater contrast with the bleak and arid plains or rocky hills of Tibet. The people of Bhotan are a remarkably fine race. Scarcely anywhere else in the world shall we find an equal proportion of men so straight, so well made, and so athletic, many of them more than six feet high. Deformity is almost unknown, except that arising from goitre, which is very prevalent among them, as it is, indeed, over the whole extent of the Himalaya, and of the Turaee, or forest tract, at the base of the mountains; whilst Tibet Proper is entirely free from it. Tibetan geographers, according to Csoma de Körös, compare Ngari, with its fountains, to a tank, U-Tsang to the irrigating channels, and Kham to the field irrigated. We do not appreciate the aptness of the similitude. More intelligibly, European geographers have likened Tibet in form to a vast cornucopia pouring from its wide eastern mouth vast rivers forth, to fertilise the happier plains of China, Siam, Burma, and Assam.

All these countries, with the exception of Little Tibet, or Balti, and of Ladakh since its seizure by the Sikhs, acknowledge more or less directly the supremacy of the Dalai Lama at Lhassa, and, beyond him, that of China. Since the accession of the existing Manchoo dynasty to the throne of Pekin, they have always maintained two envoys at the court of Lhassa. Mr Prinsep aptly compares the position of these ministers to that of a British resident at the court of Luknow or Hyderabad. They do not, however, appear to meddle much with the ordinary internal administration, nor is their military force maintained in the country large. Besides a few hundred men at Lhassa, and guards established at intervals on the post-road from China, they take upon them the superintendence of the passes of the Himalaya, and see to the exclusion of Europeans by those inlets with unrelaxing rigour. In other parts of Tibet there are no Chinese.

The whole of this country, though so near the tropic, is the coldest and bleakest inhabited by a civilised people on the surface of the earth, if we except Siberia. Forests of cedar, holly, and other Himalayan trees, are met with in the valleys of the extreme east, bordering upon China. Lhassa is surrounded with trees of considerable size; and a few straggling willows or poplars, artfully pollarded for the multiplication of their staves, are found by the watercourses of Ladakh and Tibet Proper; but the vast extent of the table-land is bare and desolate, and as devoid of trees as Shetland. The ancient Hindoos are said to have esteemed it as a vault over hell. The only shrubs that dot the waste are the Tartaric furze, or the wizened wormwood, with its white parched stalks, or perchance, in more favoured spots, a few stunted rose-bushes. Though the winter is long and severe, snow is not frequent in the valleys. The air is of a purity and brilliance which dazzles and fatigues the eye, and its excessive dryness produces effects analogous to those of the scorching May winds in the torrid plains of Hindostan;--

"The parching air Burns frore, and cold performs the effect of fire;"

vegetation is dried to brittleness, and leaves may be rubbed between the fingers into dust. Mahogany chests, and furniture belonging to Turner's party, which had stood the climate of Bengal for years, warped and split under the cold dry winds of Tibet. Wood seems subject to no other cause of injury from time.

As might be expected, tillage is scanty, and the population depend much on imported food. Villages are small, seldom containing more than twenty houses. These, in the better parts of the country, have a cheerful appearance, the dwellings being all white-washed, with doors and windows picked out in red or yellow. Lhassa would seem to be the only city of Tibet worthy of that title: the Chinese geographers, indeed, and native itineraries, speak of one or two others, but nothing is known of them. Teshoo Loombo on the Sanpoo, ten days from Lhassa, though the residence of the second personage in Tibet, seems to be merely a monastic establishment. Indeed, the large convents are probably, after Lhassa, the most considerable nuclei of population in the country; and Lhassa itself has perhaps grown to importance as an appendage to the Potála, or residence of the Grand Lama.

No European traveller has described this celebrated city before M. Huc, and we cannot say that he succeeds in bringing its aspect before his readers very vividly. When within a day's journey of the city, one of the most rugged mountain passes of the many which the missionaries had met with, in their journey from the east of Tartary, still intervened. "The sun was about to set as we completed our descent of the innumerable zigzags of the mountain path. Issuing into a wide valley, we beheld on our right Lhassa, the famous metropolis of the Buddhistic world. The multitude of aged trees, which encircle the city as with a girdle of foliage--the lofty white houses, terminating in flat roofs surrounded by turrets--the numerous temples, with their gilded canopies--the Boodhala, crowned by the palace of the Dalai Lama--all unite to give Lhassa a majestic and imposing appearance." The city is stated to be nearly two leagues in circumference, and it is now without walls. Outside the suburbs are numerous gardens planted with the large trees mentioned above. The main streets are wide, well laid-out, and tolerably clean in dry weather; but the dirt of the suburbs is unspeakable. The houses, which are large, and several stories high, are whitewashed, according to universal Tibetan custom, the doors and windows being bordered in red or yellow. M. Huc does not enter into any detail of their architecture, but we may suppose that these houses are analogous in character to what is seen in other parts of Tibet. The lower part of a house presents lofty dead walls, pierced only by two or three air-holes; above these are from one to half-a-dozen tiers of windows with projecting balconies, and, over all, flat, broad-brimmed roofs, at a variety of levels; add to this, that the houses run into one another so strangely that it is difficult to determine the extent of each mansion, and that the groups of building generally contract in extent as they rise. On the whole, we may conceive a Tibetan city like a cluster of card-houses of various altitudes. In the suburbs of Lhassa there is one quarter entirely built of the horns of sheep and oxen set in mortar. The construction is solid, and the effect highly picturesque, the varied colour and texture of the two species facilitating the production of a great variety of patterns. Lhassa bustles with the continual traffic of crowds attracted by commerce or devotion from all parts of Asia, and presents an astonishing variety of physiognomy, costume, and language.

Less than a mile north of the town a conical craggy hill rises like an island from the middle of the wide valley. On this hill, Potala, (the name of which M. Huc writes Boodhala, and interprets, questionably,[12] to mean "Mount of Buddha,") is the residence of the Tibetan flesh-and-blood divinity. It is a great cluster of temples and other buildings, terminating in a lofty four-storied edifice towering over the others, crowned by a dome or canopy entirely covered with gold, and encircled by a range of gilded columns. From this lofty sanctuary the great Lama may contemplate on festival days the crowds of his adorers moving in the plain, and prostrating themselves at the foot of the holy hill. The subordinate buildings of this acropolis serve as residences to a crowd of Lamas of all ranks, who form the court and permanent attendants of the sacred sovereign. Two avenues lined with trees lead from the city to the Potala, generally thronged with mounted lamas of the court, and with pilgrims from a distance, who, as they move along, thread their long rosaries, and mutter the sacred symbol of their faith. The crowds around the Potala are in continual motion, but generally grave and silent, as if in religious abstraction. It is probably etiquette to be so.

[12] The Tibetan scholar Csoma de Körös writes it _Patala_.

Unfortunately our missionaries have ventured on no graphic illustrations; and the only attempt that we know of to delineate this interesting citadel of Buddhism, is a plate contained in the narrative of Grueber and Dorville's journey, given by Athanasius Kircher in his _China Illustrata_. It is meagre enough, but yet looks genuine, and not a mere Amsterdam concoction.

A singular legend is stated by Huc to exist, both at Lhassa and among the dwellers by the Koko-Noor, (the great salt lake on the north-east frontier of Tibet,) that the waters of that basin formerly occupied a subterraneous site beneath the capital city; but, on the breaking of a charm which detained them there, they passed off under ground, and flooded the valley where the lake now exists. It is curious that Turner met with a version of this same tradition on the southern frontier of Tibet; but there it was related that Buddha, in compassion to the few and wretched creatures who then inhabited the land, drew off the waters through Bengal. A similar tradition regarding the valley of Katmandoo exists in Nepaul.

The people of Tibet are of the great Mongolian family, and exhibit its characters in a very marked degree;--platter face, with prominent cheek-bones, button-hole eyes and upright eyelids, squashed nose, wide mouth, retiring chin, scant beard, coarse black hair, deeply-marked and weather-beaten countenances; naturally of a pale-brown colour, but tanned to any depth of copper, not without a ruddy tint at times; of a considerable variety of stature. The English traveller who, in traversing the steep valley-sides of the Himalaya, comes for the first time on a party of Tibetans driving southward their flock of sheep and goats--each little quadruped, like a camel from Lilliput, laden with some twenty pounds of salt or borax--is struck at once with the idea that he has stumbled on a group of Esquimaux out of Parry's voyages. These quaint, good-humoured people frequent the fairs of the British hill-territory, to exchange their salt for wheat and barley; and sometimes they get so far from home as to astonish, with unwonted apparition, the evening promenaders at Simla or Mussooree.

These uncouth peasants, though perhaps the best ethnographic studies, are not to be taken as samples of the culture and refinement of Tibet. The higher classes of the country have only been known to those few travellers who have penetrated to the capitals--Ladakh on the one side, Lhassa and Teshoo Loombo on the other. All these seem to have been most favourably impressed with the kindly and simple, but by no means unpolished manners of the educated class; the plain and unaffected language, the mild and unassuming demeanour, of the ruling prince at Teshoo Loombo--which Turner, at the same time, says was characteristic of all well-educated Tibetans--fully accords with the character of the regent-minister at Lhassa, as he appears in the later narrative of M. Huc.

Dark woollen cloth is the standard material of dress, formed into a wide frock, trousers, and leggings, the last replaced in the wealthy by boots of Russia, or other costly leather. Over all is worn a capacious mantle of cloth, sometimes lined with fur. From a red girdle depend various purses, containing the wooden teacup inseparable from a Tibetan, flint and steel, and other odds and ends. Gay broad-brimmed hats are in vogue at Lhassa, but are rarer in the west. The women dress much like the men, and plait the hair in narrow tresses hanging on the shoulders. On the top of the head the Ladakh women wear a flat lappet of cloth or leather, descending in a peak behind, stuck over with beads of turquoise, amber, and cornelian; and the back hair is gathered in a queue, which is lengthened by tassels of coloured worsted intermixed with shells, bells, and coins, until it nearly touches the ground. Though not veiled, like the Moslem women, with muslin or calico, their charms are subjected to a much more efficacious disguise. Before leaving home, every respectable woman at Lhassa plasters her face with a black sticky varnish like raspberry jam, which gives her an aspect scarcely human. The practice is said at Lhassa to have been introduced some centuries ago, in order to check the immorality which was then rampant in the city. But it appears to be widely diffused, and is probably ancient. Rubruquis refers to something like it in the thirteenth century. Grueber and Dorville, who travelled through Tibet and Nepaul in 1661, say, "The women of these kingdoms are so hideous that they are liker demons than human creatures; for through some superstition, instead of water they always use a stinking oil to wash with; and with this they are so fetid and so bedaubed that they might be taken for hateful hobgoblins." But tastes differ, and the same unguent which the missionaries represent as intended to render the women hideously unattractive, or at least a modification of it in fashion at Ladakh, Moorcroft appears to think is adopted as a cosmetic. From all the fathers could learn, the black varnish has not altogether reformed Tibetan morals.

The strange, repulsive custom of _polyandry_, or the marriage of one woman to several brothers, is diffused over the greater part of Tibet, though it is not mentioned by Huc as existing at Lhassa. It is not confined to the lower ranks, but is frequent also in opulent families. Turner mentions one instance in the neighbourhood of Teshoo Loombo, where _five_ brothers were living together very happily under the same connubial compact.

Moorcroft speaks of three meals a-day as the practise of Ladakh, but this extraordinary symptom of civilisation does not seem to be general. In Eastern Tibet, regular meals are not in vogue; the members of a family do not assemble to dine together, but "eat when they're hungry, drink when they're dry." We remember to have heard a graphic description of the Tibetan cuisine from a humourous _shikaree_, or native Nimrod, of our Himalayan provinces. "The Bhoteea folk," he said, "have a detestable way of eating. They take a large cooking-pot full of water, and put in it meat, bread, rice, what not, and set it on the fire, where it is always a-simmering. When hungry, they go and fish out a cupful of whatever comes uppermost, perhaps six or seven times a-day. Strangers are served in the same way. If a man gets hold of a bone, he picks it, wipes his hands on his dress, and chucks it back into the pot; so with all crumbs and scraps, back they go into the pot, and thus the never-ending, still beginning mess stews on."

Tea, however, is a staple article of diet, and is served on all occasions. A vast quantity is imported, artificially compressed into the form of solid bricks of about eight pounds weight, in which shape it requires little packing, and forms a most handy article for barter. Instead of infusing it after our fashion, they pulverise a piece of the brick and boil it in water, with a proportion of salt and soda; then churn it up with a quantity of butter, and serve the mess in a teapot. At Tassisudon, Turner admired the dexterity (comparable to that of a London waiter manipulating a bottle of soda-water) with which the raja's attendant, before serving the liquid, "giving a circular turn to the teapot, so as to agitate and mix its contents, poured a quantity into the palm of his hand, which he had contracted to form as deep a concave as possible, and hastily sipped it up." When taken as a meal, _tsamba_, or the flour of parched barley, is added, each man mixing his own cupful up into a sort of brose or gruel with his five natural _spatulæ_. Meat is abundant, but is taken as an extra or embellishment, rather than as a staple of diet. In cookery, the people appear to have none of the genius of their neighbours, either of India or of China. Hares, winged game, and fish, though abundant, are not eaten, so that they have scarcely any meat but mutton, (excepting occasionally yak beef,) and their mutton they have but three ways of serving--viz., absolutely raw, frozen, and boiled. The frozen meat having been prepared in winter may then be kept throughout the year, and carried to any part of Tibet. European travellers generally commend this meat, which undergoes no process of cookery.

The Tibetans, being no great water-drinkers, the liquid next in importance to tea is an acidulous beverage made from fermented barley, known through more than 20° of longitude as _chong_. Turner absurdly calls it whisky, but it is rather analogous to beer. It requires a large quantity to produce intoxication, but, nevertheless, that result _is_ attained.

One of the peculiar customs which prominently mark the whole Tibetan race is the use of the _khata_, or scarf of ceremony. This is a fringed scarf of Chinese silk gauze, which is interchanged on all occasions of ceremonious intercourse, even the most trivial, and in every rank of society. They are to be had of qualities and prices suited to all pockets, and no Tibetan travels without a stock of them. In paying formal visits, in asking a favour, or returning thanks for one, in offering a present or delivering a message to a superior, the _khata_ is presented. On the meeting of friends after long separation, the first care is to exchange the _khata_. In epistolary correspondence, also, it is customary to enclose the _khata_; without it, the finest words and most magnificent presents are of no account. Turner mentions that the Bhotan Raja once returned a letter of the Governor-General's, because it was unaccompanied by this bulky but polite incumbrance.

Of all the quaint modes of salutation among men, that in fashion at Lhassa is surely the quaintest and most elaborate; and we can fancy that it affords room for all the graces of a Tibetan Chesterfield. It consists in uncovering the head, sticking out the tongue, and scratching the right ear! and these three operations are performed simultaneously.

Tibet has always been a subject of curiosity, not more from its inaccessibility than from the singular nature of its government, resting, as is well known, in the hands of a sovereign, elective under a singular and superstitious system, who, by the name of Dalai (_the ocean_) Lama, is not only king and spiritual father, but also the embodied divinity of his people. The Buddhistic faith, numbering as its adherents a greater population than any other existing creed, when driven from its native soil, India, (in which it has long been totally extinct, though its gigantic footsteps still mark the surface in all parts of the peninsula,) spread over Nepaul, Ceylon, the kingdoms of the Transgangetic Peninsula, China, Corea, Japan, Tibet, and the whole Mongolian region to the confines of Siberia. The essential idea of Buddhism appears to be a peculiar development of the notion which runs through nearly all the Asiatic pagan philosophies, and which, interwoven with the fantasies of the innumerable Gnostic sects, once spread its influence to the centre of the Christian world--viz., that all the external world is but a transient manifestation of the Divine Being, and the souls of all living creatures are emanations from Him; that these souls, whilst included in material and perishable bodies, are in a state of imperfection, degradation, and suffering; and that the great object of intelligent creatures should be final release from the clog of the flesh, and abdication of all personal identity, to be absorbed in the universal soul. Considerable difference of opinion exists among the learned as to the true epoch of Sakya Muni or Gautama, the Indian deified saint, or _Buddha_, who was the propagator of the doctrine in the particular form which derives its appellation from him; but the latest of the various periods assigned for his death is 543 B.C. After a long life spent in preaching humility, self-denial, meditation on the divine perfections, and the celebration of solemn ritual services of praise and worship, he is believed himself to have been, at death, absorbed into the divine essence on account of his great attainments in sanctity. Sakya was followed by a succession of sacred personages, who are to be regarded either as mortals whose attainments in sanctity have reached, in repeated transmigrations, to a divine eminence, though not yet to the final absorption of a Buddha, or as voluntary incarnations of souls whose virtue _had_ attained to freedom from the necessity of renewed terrestrial life, but who chose to dwell again on earth in order to aid men in the attainment of perfection, and facilitate their reunion with the universal soul. It is this part of the system which has assumed an exaggerated prominence in Tibet and Mongolia, where these regenerations have gradually, in the general faith, taken the form of continual and manifold incarnations of Buddha, or the Divine Being.

In combination with this doctrine, and the stress laid on meditation and ritual worship, a vast proportion of the inhabitants, both in Tibet and Mongolia, one at least out of every family where there are more than one son, devote themselves to a religious life, and many of these dwell together in monastic communities. The Shabrongs or Regenerate Buddhas are so numerous that many of the chief convents possess one. These personages, though all esteemed divine, appear somehow to vary in spiritual consideration as well as temporal grandeur, as one Marian idol in the Church of Rome has more sanctity and miraculous power ascribed to it than another has. The most eminent and most venerated of all is the Dalai Lama. The exercise of his authority is in theory unlimited; he is the centre of all government. But since, in the capacity of manifested divinity, he could not, without derogation of his sacred character, mix himself up with the numerous trivialities of human affairs, few questions are actually submitted to him; he is regarded only in the most amiable light, as absorbed in religious duty, or interfering only to exercise the most benign attributes. The general administration of the government is carried on by another personage, also a Shabrong, nominated by the supreme Lama, and known as the _Nomé-Khan_; by the Chinese and the Western Tibetans, he is generally called King of Tibet Proper. The Nomé-Khan is appointed for life, and can only be removed by a _coup-d'état_. He is assisted in administration by four lay ministers called _Kalongs_.

The provinces are governed by ecclesiastical princes receiving their investiture from the Dalai Lama, and acknowledging his supremacy, but enjoying apparently a good deal of practical independence.

The most important of these princes, and in spiritual estimation but little below the Dalai Lama himself, is the Punjun Rimboochee of Jachee (or Teshoo) Loombo, known to the British in India as Teshoo Lama. The intercourse between the Anglo-Indian Government and this prince arose as follows:--In 1772 the Deb Raja, or sovereign of Bhotan, laid claim to and seized Kooch Bahar, a district at the mouth of the Assam Valley, adjoining Rungpoor. A sepoy force was sent to expel the hill people, which they speedily accomplished, pursuing the enemy to their mountains. The raja, alarmed for his own dominions, applied for the intercession of Teshoo Lama, who was then regent, spiritual, and political, of the whole of Tibet, during the minority of the Lhassa pontiff. The Lama sent a deputation to Calcutta, with a letter to Warren Hastings, then Governor--"an authentic and curious specimen," says Turner, "of his good sense, humility, simplicity of heart, and, above all, of that delicacy of sentiment and expression which could convey a threat in terms of meekness and supplication." The deputation, and the presents which it bore from a country so mysterious and inaccessible, excited intense interest at Calcutta--the Governor at once acceded to the Lama's intercession, and determined to take advantage of the opportunity afforded to acquire knowledge of those obscure regions, and to find, possibly, new outlets to British commerce, under circumstances so favourable and unlooked for. He accordingly despatched Mr George Bogle, a civilian, with presents and specimens of articles of trade. Bogle started in May 1774. There was a good deal of delay and difficulty made on the part of the Tibetan government about granting him a passport; and it was not till October that he arrived at the residence of the Lama. The two seem, during Bogle's visit, which continued till April 1775, completely to have gained each other's confidence and good-will. The Englishman, on his return, always spoke of the Lama as one of the most able and intelligent men he had ever known, maintaining his rank with the utmost mildness of authority, and living in the greatest purity and simplicity of manners. Turner, whose mission will be mentioned presently, found these praises confirmed by the very strong and unusual impression of regard which the sovereign's gentleness and benevolence had left among his subjects. On the other hand, the Lama showed his confidence in Bogle, by remitting to him some time after a considerable sum of money, to be expended in the erection of a temple and dwelling-house on the banks of the Hoogly, for the use of his votaries in Bengal. The characteristic reason assigned for this wish was, that during the numerous series of the Lama's regenerations, Bengal was the only country in which he had been born twice. In 1779, when the Lama, after repeated invitations, visited Pekin, he, in the same friendly spirit, requested Mr Bogle to go round to Canton, promising to obtain the Emperor's permission for his proceeding to the capital. This singular tryst came to nothing in consequence of the death of the Lama at Pekin--in accordance with a fatality which seldom spares the vassal princes of Central Asia on their visits to the Chinese court--and that of Mr Bogle himself about the same time. The brother and minister of Teshoo Lama communicated the circumstances in letters to Mr Hastings, stating that they were in continual prayer for the accomplishment of the transmigration; and, soon after intelligence of this important event was received, the governor sent a renewed deputation as bearers of congratulations, in which (in the lax Anglo-Indian spirit of that age) the continued identity of the Lama was fully recognised. The result of Captain Samuel Turner's mission, as regarded the establishment of commercial intercourse with Tibet, was nothing, but it obtained for us at least a very interesting and valuable book. Turner had the privilege of an interview with the young Lama, at that time past eighteen mouths old; and as the occasion was unique of its kind, we abstract his account of it. The envoy found the infant placed in great form on an elevated mound, covered with embroidered silk; on the left stood the child's father and mother, on the right the officer specially appointed to wait on him. Turner, advancing, presented a white scarf, and put into the Lama's hands the Governor-General's present of a string of pearls and coral. The other things were set down before him, and having then exchanged scarfs with the father and mother, the Englishmen took their seats on the Lama's right. The infant turned towards them, and received them with a cheerful look of complacency. "During the time we were in the room," says Turner, "I observed that the Lama's eyes were scarcely ever turned from us, and when our cups were empty of tea he appeared uneasy, and, throwing back his head, and contracting the skin of his brow, continued to make a noise, for he could not speak, until they were filled again. He took some burnt sugar out of a golden cup containing confectionary and, stretching out his arm, made a motion to his attendant to give it to me. He sent some in like manner to Mr Saunders, who was with me." Turner then made him a speech, expressing the Governor-General's grief at hearing of his decease in China, and his joy at the news of his reappearance; his hope that their former friendship might be increased, and that there might be extensive communication between his votaries and British subjects. "The little creature turned, looking steadfastly towards me with the appearance of much attention while I spoke, and nodded with repeated but slow movements of the head, as though he understood and approved every word, but could not utter a reply.... His whole attention was directed to us; I must own that his behaviour on this occasion appeared perfectly natural and spontaneous, and not directed by any external action or sign of authority."

The existing Punjun or Teshoo Lama is described by Huc from report, in 1816, as a man of about sixty years of age. It is, therefore, very probable that he is the same person who was seen by Turner in infancy; and if so, he has fulfilled the promise of mark, then precociously exhibited. He has great fame throughout Tibet and all Tartary, his partisans claiming for him spiritual power at least equal to that of the Dalai Lama, and never naming him without deep reverence. His influence has waxed the more from the fact that three successive Dalai Lamas have perished before attaining majority. He is said to be of majestic port, and surprising vigour for his age. All pilgrims to the holy sites of Tibet visit Jachee Loombo, and, after making their offerings to the Teshoo, are enrolled in the brotherhood of Gylongs instituted by him, of which all Tartar Buddhists aspire to be members, and which, doubtless, will one day play an important part in the history of that part of Asia. The votaries of Teshoo Lama are satisfied that he is acquainted with all languages, and converses with the pilgrims of all countries, "each in the tongue in which he was born." His predecessor, Panjun Irtinnee, being a native of Ladakh, was able to converse with Mr Bogle in Hindustanee, and as the bystanders believed their unknown language to be English, this strongly confirmed their belief in the polyglot powers of their chief.

Prophecies of coming events, all tending to the glorification of Punjun Remboochee, are in the mouths of all; and that personage is said to be preparing himself, by the practice of military exercises, and the accumulation of horses, for his warlike career.

The Lama next in influence and sanctity appears to be the Geesoo-Tamba, whose residence is at Oorga or Kooren, among the Khalka Tartars, beyond the great Gobi desert, on the banks of the Toola river, which flows northward into the Siberian Lake Baikal. This potentate, from his special influence over the Mongol tribes, is an object of great jealousy at Pekin. In 1839 he alarmed that court by announcing an intended visit. Great stringency was employed in reducing the number of his retinue, but his progress through Mongolia was a continued ovation, the Tartars thronging on all sides to meet and worship him. Geesoo Tamba's visit was hurried over, and, according to the rule in such cases, he died on his way back.[13] Most of the living Buddhas, even in the Tartar convents, are natives of Tibet, and the influence of the Chinese Emperor has been exerted to arrange that the Geesoo Tamba shall always seek his transmigration there.

[13] "It is said that when the son of a chieftain attains the age of from ten to fifteen, the father is invited to Pekin, and, after being treated with every mark of distinction, is sent back to his tribe. On the route, some Chinese functionary, in the course of the usual interchange of civilities, in which tea forms a prominent part, takes an opportunity of giving him a medicated draught: his son, whose youth and inexperience render him harmless, is raised to his father's dignity, to be removed by a similar method in his turn before he becomes dangerous."--MOORCROFT and TREBECK, vol. i. p. 380.

Other sanctities of celebrity are the Chang-kia-fo, a sort of grand almoner to the court of Pekin, and the Saja-fo, residing near the Himalayas, who has a singular and special mission. He is day and night in prayer for the perpetual fall of snow on the peaks of the mountains; for, according to Tibetan tradition, behind that range dwells a savage race, which only bides the thawing of the snows to pass the barrier, massacre the tribes of Bod, and seize their country.

The story related by Tavernier Grueber and Father Giorgi,[14] regarding the degrading superstition with which the basest personal relics of the reigning Lama were cherished by his votaries, was utterly denied to both Bogle and the French missionaries. The former ascribes the origin of the story to the Lama's practice of distributing little balls of consecrated flour, which the superstition of his more ignorant votaries may have converted into what they pleased.

[14] _Alphabetum Tibetanum_, p. 247.

Convents are exceeding numerous both in Tibet and Mongolia. In the former their number is said to amount to 3000, some near Lhassa containing as many as 15,000 members.

These convents consist usually of groups of whitewashed cells or cottages, clustered together on a hill-side, interspersed with temples of fantastic architecture. Opposite the great entrance to a temple is a sort of altar, above which the idols are enshrined, usually of handsome Caucasian features and colossal size, seated cross-legged. Before the chief image, (representing Maha-muni or Sakya,) and on a level with the altar, is a gilded seat for the Regenerate or Grand Lama of the convent, the rest of the apartment being occupied by rows of carpeted benches.

At prayer time, a conch blown at the temple-gate summons the members to their devotions. After making three prostrations to the head, they take their places, according to precedence, on the benches, seating themselves cross-legged and _vis-à-vis_, as choir and anti-choir. When a bell, rung by the master of the ceremonies, gives the signal, all commence muttering in a low tone a preparatory act of devotion, as they unrol on their knees the rubrical form of the day. After this short recitation is an interval of profound silence. The bell rings again, and then rises a psalmody of responsive choirs, in a grave and melodious tone. The Tibetan prayers, broken usually into verses, and composed in a style of rhythmic cadence, lend themselves with marvellous effect to concerted recitation. At intervals of repose, fixed by the rubrics, the instrumental band executes a piece of music. In the Tartar choirs this is described by Huc as a confused and stunning jumble of instruments, all the performers emulous in din. Turner, however, in a similar description of the service, speaks more respectfully of the Tibetan instrumental music. According to the latter authority also, the Tibetans possess a musical notation. Their instruments are generally on a large scale;--sliding trumpets from six to ten feet long, which Moorcroft describes as of very deep and majestic intonation; kettle drums; cymbals, highly mellow and sonorous; gongs, hautboys; a large shallow drum, mounted on a tall pedestal: these, with the human tibia and the sea-conch, compose their religious band.

From the earliest traveller to the court of the Grand Khan, to the last vice-regal aide-de-camp whose arduous duties have led him up the Sutlej to the pleasant slopes of Cheenee in Kunawur, whence Ramsay of Dalwolsie dealeth law to the millions of India from under the ripening grapes, all witnesses of the Lamaitic worship have been struck with the extraordinary resemblance of many features of the ecclesiastical system and ritual to those of the Roman Catholic Church. Rubruquis, who travelled in the thirteenth century, mentions a Mongolian people called Jugurs, (probably the Chakars of M. Huc,) whom he brands as rank idolaters, but at the same time admits that it is most difficult to distinguish many of their observances from those of the Catholic Church. They had holy candles, rosaries, and conventual celibacy. The further description of these Jugurs identifies them as Buddhists. "They placed their ideas of perfection in the silent and abstracted contemplation of the Divinity. They sit in the temples on two long forms, opposite to each other, repeating mentally the words, _Om mam hactami_, but without uttering a word." The missionaries of after days are struck by the same resemblances. Father Grueber, in 1661, states that at Lhassa there are two kings--one civil, the other sacred. "They regard the latter as the true and living God, the eternal and celestial Father. Those who approach prostrate themselves before him and kiss his feet, exactly as is done to his holiness the Pope; so showing the manifest deceits of the devil, who has transferred the veneration due to the sole Vicar of Christ to the superstitious worship of barbarous nations, as he has also, in his innate malignity, abused the other mysteries of the Christian faith." Father Desideri, without directly making such comparisons, indicates more marvellous coincidences than any one else; in fact, he drew some aid from a lively imagination when he deduced that the people of Ladakh had some idea of the Trinity, because they sometimes used the singular and sometimes the plural in speaking of the Deity, and from the form of the sacred symbol constantly in their mouths, which he simplifies into _Om ha hum_! "They adore," he goes on to say, "one _Urghien_(?), who was born seven hundred years ago. If you ask them if he was God or man, they will answer sometimes that he is both God and man, and that he had neither father nor mother, but was born of a flower. Nevertheless, they have images representing a woman with a flower in her hand, and this, I was told, was the mother of Urghien. They adore several other persons, whom they regard as saints. In their churches you see an altar covered with an altar-cloth; on the middle of the altar is a sort of tabernacle, where, according to them, Urghien resides, although at other times they will assure you that he is in heaven." Turner and Moorcroft, Protestant laymen, were as much struck by the resemblance of the choral service to the mass as the Roman priests, and none testify to it more frequently than our latest travellers, Huc and Gabet. "The crosier, the mitre, the Dalmatica, the cope or pluvial which the Grand Lamas wear in travelling, the double-choired liturgy, the psalmody, the exorcisms, the censer swung by five chains, and opening and shutting at will; the benedictions given by the Lama, in stretching his right hand over the head of the faithful; the rosary, the ecclesiastical celibate, the spiritual retreats, the worship of the saints; fasts, processions, holy water," (and they might have added, the tonsure, the ringing of bells during service, the conclave assembled in a temple to elect a pontiff, and the appellation of _Eternal Sanctuary_ applied to Lhassa, the Rome of their faith, by the Tartars,) "in all these numerous particulars do the Buddhists coincide with us." The matter-of-fact Moorcroft describes a Lama of Ladakh as dressed almost like a cardinal. Allowing for some accidental and some exaggerated similarities, more analogy remains than can well be explained, without supposing that the Lamas may have borrowed and adapted parts of the Church ritual from the Nestorians, who were early diffused over Asia; or perhaps that the churches of the latter, sinking in corruption and ignorance, had merged in the sea of superstition which surrounded them, leaving only some corrupted relics of external rites floating on the surface to mark that a church of Christ had once existed there.

As the Christian world is divided into Papist and Protestant, and the body of Islam into Soonnee and Sheea, so also the Lamas have their two great sects, the _Gelook-pa_ and _Dok-pa_, distinguished by the colour of their caps--yellow being adopted by the former, red by the latter.[15] Celibacy is _binding_ only on the Gelook-pa, but all who aspire to superior sanctity profess it. They all abstain from taking animal life, and some of especial austerity will not even take vegetable life, deeming it unlawful to cut down a tree unless it be withered, or to gather fruit unless it be ripe. Strong drink is forbidden to all the sects. The reform which originated the sect of the Gelook-pa, now predominant over Tibet and Mongolia, and claiming the Emperor himself as one of its adherents, was the work of Tsongkhapa, a celebrated Tibetan teacher of the fourteenth century. He is traditionally stated to have derived his doctrine from a mysterious western stranger, endowed with great learning and Slawkenbergian nose. To the innovations in the Lamaitic worship introduced by Tsongkhapa, the missionaries ascribe many of the more striking resemblances to Roman ritual, and they feel inclined to believe that the mysterious stranger from the West may have been a Catholic missionary, whose teaching was imperfectly received or apprehended. The large nose they conceive may only be an indication of the European physiognomy from the Mongolian point of view. We have a counterpart portrait of the Mongolian from a Caucasian pencil, in Benjamin of Tudela, who speaks of the "Copperal Turks" as having _no noses_, but only two holes in the face through which they breathe. So also Rubruquis, when he was presented to the wife of Scacatai, a Tartar Khan, verily thought she had cut and pared her nose till she had left herself none at all!

[15] The red Lamas are stated by some travellers to constitute several sects.

Among other Romanising rites we find something analogous to masses for the dead. In a temple at Ladakh, Moorcroft witnessed the consecration of food for the use of the souls of those condemned to hell, without which, it was believed, they would starve. The chief Lama consecrated barley and water, and poured them from a silver saucer into a brass basin, occasionally striking two cymbals together, and chaunting prayers, to which an inferior Lama from time to time uttered responses aloud, accompanied by the rest in an under-tone. Somewhat different appears to have been the annual festival in honour of the dead, or "All Souls," of which Turner gives a striking description. As soon as it became dark, a general illumination was displayed on the summits of all the buildings of the monastery; the tops of the houses on the plain, and of the distant villages, were also lighted, exhibiting altogether a brilliant spectacle. Though accustomed to esteem illuminations the strongest expressions of public joy, Turner now saw them exhibited as a solemn token of melancholy remembrance--an awful tribute of respect to the innumerable generations of the dead. Darkness, silence, interrupted occasionally by the deep slow tones of the kettle-drum, trumpet, gong, and cymbal; at different intervals, the tolling of bells, and loud monotonous repetition of sentences of prayer, sometimes heard when the instruments were silent, all united to produce an impression of seriousness and awe. Remarkably similar is the description given by the Frenchmen of the nocturnal litanies which they witnessed when resident in the convent of Koonboom.[16] Another impressive devotional practice is mentioned by the last travellers, and one which is the more pleasing, as not being confined to the clergy. "They have at Lhassa a touching custom, which we were almost jealous of meeting among unbelievers. In the evening, as the daylight is passing into twilight, all the Tibetans suspend their occupation, and meet in groups, according to sex and age, in the public places of the town. As soon as the parties are formed, all sit down on the ground, and begin to chaunt prayers in a slow and subdued tone. The aggregation of the sound of prayer, rising all over the city, produces a vast and solemn hum of harmony, which strangely moves the spirit."

[16] HUC, vol. ii. ch. iii.

The Buddhistic, symbol, or mystic form of concentrated prayer, _Om mani padme hom_, is not only heard from every mouth, or silently repeated on the rosary, but is to be seen written everywhere--in streets, public places, walls of apartments, on the fringes of the ceremonial scarf, on the flags that wave from the house-tops, and from cairns on the mountains; engraven on the rocks, carved on monuments by the way, or formed with stones, in gigantic spelling, on the hill-side, so as to be legible at considerable distances. Rich Buddhists maintain travelling Lamas, to go about, like Old Mortality, with hammer and chisel, multiplying the sacred sentences on the faces of the cliffs, and on stones by the highway. The words are Sanscrit, and came from India with the Buddhist faith in the seventh century. The Lamas say that these sacred words include an infinity of doctrine, which the life of man suffices not to survey, but their infinitesimal amount of meaning to the uninitiated is said to be--"_Oh, the precious lotus.--Amen!_"

The great difference between the Tibetan lama-serais and the convents of Romanised Europe appears to be, that the members of the former, though subjected to the same rule, and under one superior, cannot be said to live in common, the various gradations of wealth and poverty being as distinctly marked among them as among the laity. Lamas in rags may sometimes be seen begging of their wealthy brethren in the same convent. The revenue of the convent foundation, if it has one, is distributed at intervals in the form of a scanty supply of meal, in rations proportioned to rank in the hierarchy. Occasionally donations from pilgrims also fall to be divided. Sometimes a pilgrim "stands" tea to the whole convent--no small expense, when it numbers several thousand members. Many Lamas augment their means by practising as physicians, fortune-tellers, or exorcists; by various handicrafts, or by keeping retail-shops for the benefit of their brethren. Others are occupied in printing or transcribing religious books. The character is alphabetic, being a modification of the Nagari or Sanscrit letters introduced by Tongmi Sambodha, one of the first missionaries of Buddhism; but printing is, of course, conducted on the Chinese block system. The leaves are loose, printed on both sides, placed between two wooden boards, and tied with a yellow band. The character used in correspondence differs greatly from that of the printed books and literary MSS., being much more rounded and fluent. It is, however, perhaps, like our own writing, only a modification of the other adapted to a current hand.

The classic Tibetan literature appears to consist in two or three great collections, or cyclopædias, in many volumes, the greater part translated in remote times from ancient Sanscrit works. From the abstracts given in the _Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal_, by the one European who has mastered the subject, Alexander Csoma de Körös,[17] these books appear to be a dreary wilderness of puerile metaphysics and misplaced labour.

[17] This very remarkable person, a native of Pesth, travelled to the East about thirty years ago, with the view of tracing the original birthplace of the Hungarian race, which he conceived was to be found in Tibet. Moorcroft, on one of his expeditions, whilst resident at Ladakh, encountered him travelling in the garb of an Armenian, and obtained for him from the khalun, or minister, permission to reside in the monastery of Zanskar, (south-west of Lé). Here he spent several years mastering the Tibetan literature, and composing a grammar and dictionary of the language. This great work was carried on when, for four months, the thermometer was below zero, in a room nine feet square, and without a fire! He afterwards proceeded to Calcutta, and resided there till 1841 or 1842, engaged, under some patronage from the Bengal government and Asiatic Society, in publishing the works above mentioned, and many other notices of Tibetan literature.

In 1842 he visited the hill-station of Darjeeling, in sanguine expectation of being able to prosecute a long-meditated journey to Lhassa, but shortly after his arrival was seized with fever, and died.

According to M. Huc, the Lama physicians reckon 440 maladies affecting the human frame, neither more nor less. Their medical books, which the students of the faculty have to learn by heart, consist of a mass of aphorisms, more or less obscure, and a number of recipes. Most of their medicines are vegetable simples, generally mild and inoffensive. The number of their "simples," however, includes "_laudamy_ and _calamy_." At least, they have the art of preparing mercury, and use it as a specific, producing salivation. This result they promote by gagging the patient with a stick. Their diagnosis they derive principally from the pulse, professing to discover the seat of disease from its peculiar vibratory motion rather than its frequency. They have not the Chinese horror of bleeding, and practise cupping by help of a cowhorn and oral suction. Small-pox is held in great dread; indeed, they scarcely attempt to treat it, but endeavour to save the uninfected by cutting off all communication at the risk of starving the sufferers. The infected house or village is often razed to the ground.

Some of the baser class of the Lamas seek notoriety and lucre by juggling and disgusting feats, professing to rip open their stomachs, to lick red-hot iron bars, &c. &c., and to perform other such exploits. Messrs Huc and Gabet knew a Lama who was generally reputed able at will to fill a vessel of water by means of a certain form of prayer. They never could get him to perform in their presence, however. He said that, as they had not the same faith, the attempt would be unsuccessful, and perhaps dangerous. He obliged them by reciting his charm, which, it must be confessed, reads so like a Dr Faustus contract, that one cannot but suppose that the preconceived ideas of the good missionaries have lent it a little colouring. The Lama was, perhaps, after all, only an _electro-biologist_. Respectable Lamas affect to frown on such displays, but wink at them occasionally, for profit's sake.

Lamas of an ascetic spirit, not content with the duties of the convent, sometimes seek the seclusion which the desolate wilds of their country offer so plentifully, dwelling in eyries on the pinnacles of hills, either cut in the rock, or formed of timber attached to the cliff like swallows' nests. Sometimes these eremites, like Simon of the pillar, renounce all intercourse with the world--depending for their sustenance on the gifts of the devout dropt into a sack, which is let down from the inaccessible cell by a long cord.

Convents of nuns also exist, both in Tibet Proper and in Ladakh; they do not, however, appear to have been visited by any traveller, and the French fathers make no mention of them.

The inhumation of the dead is entirely unpractised in Tibet. The body of the sovereign Lama alone is preserved entire, and deposited in a shrine which is ever after looked on as sacred, and visited with religious awe. The bodies of inferior Lamas are burnt, and their ashes carefully preserved, to be enclosed in small metallic images, which have places assigned them in cabinets ranged in the sacred buildings. Sometimes, but not often, bodies are committed to the waters of lakes or rivers; but the common disposal of the dead is by making them over--

----κυνεσσιν οιωνοισι τε πασι--

either in carrying the corpses to the tops of lofty eminences, where the divided limbs are left for a prey, or, in depositing them in regular golgothas assigned for the purpose. These are enclosed yards, having openings left in the foot of the walls for the admission of dogs and wolves. But the most popular form of this practice is when the body is cut in pieces at once, and given to the dogs to eat. For the interment, or rather the _incanition_, of persons of distinction, in certain convents sacred dogs are maintained, which are set apart to this office. Strabo, Cicero, and Justin mention such customs as current among the nations of Central Asia. They prevail not only in Tibet, but among the nomad tribes of Mongolia, and appear to have no connection with the existing religion of these races. The practice of the Parsees is well known to be of a similar character. The most sanctified Lamas are privileged to eat and drink out of the skulls of bodies which have been thus devoured by beasts. Rosaries also are made from these skulls, and the larger bones are often converted into trumpets.

The profane vulgar, though uninstructed in the tedious liturgic lore which the Lamas acquire, not without plentiful corporal chastisement in the days of their pupilage, are enabled to achieve a meritorious amount of devotion by the aid of certain whirligigs, or prayer-mills--cylinders of wood or pasteboard, inscribed with the words of prayer, and rotating on a spindle. These _chu-kor_, or turn-prayers, which at one time, as a pet subject of allusion with Thomas Carlyle, almost rivalled Thurtell's gig, are either portable or stationary, generally turned by hand, but often by water-power; and in the Tartar huts they are suspended over the fireplace, so as to rotate like smoke-jacks, in behalf of the peace and prosperity of the family.

Various penances are performed by the pilgrims who visit the sacred places. Some make the circuit of the convent buildings laden with enormous piles of sacred books. The task achieved, they are reckoned to have recited all the prayers which form their load. Others perform the same circuit in measuring their length upon the ground at each step. This is a task often undertaken by great numbers following each other in single file; and if the convent be extensive, the day, from dawn till dusk, is occupied in the task. Some penitents, instead of making the tour of a single convent, perform long journeys in this fashion. The practice is known in India; and we remember to have heard of a Hindoo worthy, who, some sixty or seventy years ago, undertook to measure his way from Hurdwar to Calcutta, prophesying the while that, when he should have achieved his dusty task, the days of the Feringees' power would be numbered. Great was the twisting of mustaches and the furbishing of tulwars among the disaffected; but, alas! in passing Cawnpoor the unlucky prophet made his last prostration; he was laid hold of by the general, and hanged.

We had purposed to conclude this paper with a sketch of the journeys of previous travellers in Tibet, and some details of the last very interesting one from which we have derived many particulars, but we have now room for only very brief indications.

The name of Tibet appears to have first become known to Europe in the itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, a Jewish Rabbi, who travelled to the far East about the year 1160. He mentions that country as producing musk, but errs widely in placing it only four days' journey from Samarkand.

In the succeeding century, when the flood of Mongolian conquest, under Jenghiz and his successors, dissolved all political barriers, and brought the civilisations of the East and West for the first time in contact, a greater amount of intercourse ensued between Europe and interior Asia than has ever occurred before or since. At the noise of the coming Tartars, Europe stood amazed, and even the bewildered Danes were deterred for one season from starting for their herring fishery on our northern shores, lest they should fall into the hands of this mysterious foe. Pouring over Hungary and Poland to the frontiers of Silesia, they defeated and cut in pieces the duke of that country with his army, and it seemed as if the knell of Christendom had sounded, when providentially the death of the great Khan summoned the host back into Tartary; and the invasion of Western Europe, though often threatened, was never resumed. Embassies from the Roman Pontiff and European princes, at first of intercession and supplication, afterwards on more equal terms, when the dread of the Khan had passed away, were despatched and reciprocated. Monks of Flanders, France, and Italy, visited the seat of the Grand Khan, and a Latin archiepiscopate was established in Pekin. French artists worked in gold and silver for the court of Kara-Korum, and a banished Englishman was the first ambassador from the Tartars to the king of Hungary; whilst Mongols of distinction found their way to Rome, to Barcelona, to Paris, to London, to Northampton. "The arts, the faith, and the language of the nations of Asia became a subject of curiosity and study, and it was even proposed to establish a Tartar chair in the university of Paris."[18]

[18] REMUSAT, quoted in Huc.

During this extraordinary intercourse, which continued for a century and a half, the lines of travel eastward lay generally to the north of Tibet, and hints of its existence are rare and slight. Marco Polo, indeed, who travelled in the last quarter of the thirteenth century, devotes two of his Herodotean chapters to "the Province of Thibet." A few particulars, such as the existence of powerful dogs, of the musk animal, and the current use of salt in barter, are recognisable, but the country referred to is apparently the wild and rugged region of the Si-fan, towards the east and north-east of Tibet.

Oderic of Portenau, a travelling friar, who died in 1331, mentions Tibet, and is the first who speaks of the Grand Lama as the _pope of the idolaters_.

The Romish missionaries of later times made repeated attempts to establish themselves in the Trans-Himalayan regions. The first who appears to have succeeded in penetrating them was Antonio d'Andrada, a Portuguese Jesuit, with three companions of his order. In 1624 they ascended the Ganges by Hurdwar and Srinuggur to Budrinath, a celebrated place of Hindoo pilgrimage on the eastern branch of the sacred river. Apprehending hindrances to their advance, they made a desperate attempt to cross the pass into Tibet, (probably the Niti, or one of those nearer Lake Manusaráwur,) whilst it was still deep in snow, and without a guide. They succeeded, after frightful suffering, in surmounting the pass, but, finding the country at their feet a trackless sheet of snow, were compelled to return. Waiting for the usual convoy after the melting of the winter snow, they again effected the passage, and proceeded to what they call Rudac, the capital of Tibet. There is a fort so called (Radokh or Rohtuk) beyond the Indus, near the head of the Pangkung Lake; but Ladakh or Le is more likely to have been the place intended.

Though it seems scarcely credible that four strangers should have found their way twice across the Himalayan passes unguided, and before the regular season of transit, and yet survive to tell the tale, it must be said that Andrada's description of their Himalayan travels, in other respects, bears every mark of truth. The precipitous paths along the Ganges, the files of pilgrims shouting as they trudged to Budrinath, the demon-like Jogees whom they encountered, the straight and lofty pines and cypresses, the large rose-bushes, and forests of flowering trees, (rhododendron,) the rope bridges, the sufferings in the snow and from the attenuated air, are all plainly drawn from actual experience.

The next visitors to Tibet, and the first Europeans, so far as we know, who reached Lhassa, were the Fathers Albert Dorville and J. Grueber of the Chinese mission. They started from Pekin in June 1661, and travelled through China to Sining-fu, on the north-west frontier. From this place their route probably coincided with that of Huc and Gabet, who reached the same place from Eastern Mongolia. Their journey thence to Lhassa, Grueber describes as extending for three months through the deserts of Kalmuk Tartary, alternately sandy and mountainous. After some stay at Lhassa, they proceeded over the mountain range of "Langur, the highest existing, so that on its summit travellers can scarcely breathe on account of the subtlety of the air; nor can it be passed in summer, on account of the virulent exhalations of certain herbs, without manifest danger to life." Descending into the kingdom of _Necbal_, (Nepaul,) they passed some time at the capital, _Cudmendou_ (Katmandoo). Quitting Nepaul, they entered the kingdom of _Maranga_ (the Morung, or forest tract below the hills.) Proceeding by _Mutgari_ (Mooteeharee probably, in Tirhoot) to _Battana_ (Patna) on the Ganges, and thence to Benares, they reached Agra after 214 days' travelling from Pekin, exclusive of stoppages. Dorville died of fatigue shortly after the accomplishment of this heroic journey. The narrative, as abstracted in Kircher's _China Illustrata_, is adorned with some rather good cuts, most of which appear to have been derived from genuine sketches.

In the fifteenth volume of _Lettres Edifiantes_ is an epistle dated from Lhassa, 10th April 1716, by Father Hipolito Desideri, a Jesuit. It relates his journey from Goa to Delhi, where he was joined by a brother missionary; thence by Lahore over the Pir Punjál to Kashmeer, and, after a residence of six months there, across the passes of the Himalayas, to Le or Ladakh, which he describes as the royal fortress of the kingdom of Great Tibet, or _Buton_. Whilst making arrangements to settle at Ladakh, and commencing the study of the language, the fathers heard for the first time of a _third_ Tibet, (viz. the Lhassa country, in addition to Little Tibet or Balti, and Great Tibet, or Ladakh,) and thought it necessary to proceed to explore it. The journey occupied them from August 1715 to March 1716. Desideri and his comrade are the only Europeans who have ever travelled from Ladakh to Lhassa; but, unfortunately, they give no particulars of their route except these dates, and even the great delay which they indicate is not accounted for.

Previous to this, a Capuchin mission had visited Lhassa _via_ Nepaul in 1707, and a few years later, a dozen brethren of that order were established there under Father Horace della Penna. They sent home flourishing accounts of their success; but their additions to our knowledge of the country were very meagre. About 1754 this mission appears to have been expelled, and found refuge for a time in Nepaul. Some fifty volumes, the relics of the mission library, were, in 1847, recovered from Lhassa by Mr Hodgson, through the courtesy of the Grand Lama himself, and were transmitted to Europe to be presented to Pio Nono, whose reputation was then fresh and fragrant. Some itineraries and other curious particulars, derived from the correspondence of the Lhassa mission, are buried, among a mass of crude learning and rubbish, in a quarto published at Rome in 1762, under the name of _Alphabetum Tibetanum_, by Antonio Giorgi, an Augustin friar.

Of the missions of Bogle and Turner we have already spoken. In 1811, a Mr Manning succeeded in reaching Lhassa by their route, but was arrested and sent back by the Chinese. He died soon after without publishing any particulars of his journey. The sacred lakes of Ngari have been visited by Moorcroft, Captains Henry and Richard Strachey, and one or two more. Ladakh and the adjoining districts have been explored by the two former travellers, the Cunninghams, and others. But within this century, save Manning, no European, till Huc and Gabet, had penetrated to Tibet Proper. The enthusiastic Hungarian scholar, who would have gone with advantages possessed by none else, was cut off just as he deemed this object of his cherished hopes attainable.

A few words remain to be said more particularly of the work which suggested this paper. These need be few, because a translation of the whole work has been announced since we commenced writing.

The book which the missionaries have produced is not altogether satisfactory. It too well justifies its title of _Souvenirs_ by the lamentable paucity of dates, of which there are not half-a-dozen in the whole narrative of their two years' pilgrimage. Even the period of their starting is not stated at the time, and is only to be distinctly gathered from some retrospective calculations. Their geographical starting-point, too, is as obscure as the chronological one. Our maps help us little in following the details of their travels; and that which is inserted in their book is of as little aid as any other, being, in fact, dated five years previous to their journey. Nor, we fear, will they be found to have added much to the materials of future geographers; their work contains no indication of a single bearing or altitude, nor indeed had they the necessary instruments. The possession, indeed, of MS. maps would have endangered their lives in any collision with Chinese authority, such as actually befel them at Lhassa; but many valuable data might have been recorded without graphical embodiment. The worthy men, however, make no pretensions to science; they record of the Ko-ko-noor or Blue Lake on the north-east frontier of Tibet, that it has a flux and reflux of tide, without any further particulars of so marvellous a phenomenon, though they were some time encamped on its banks: they ascribe unquestioningly their sufferings, in passing certain lofty mountains, to poisonous exhalations from the soil; and they quit Tibet without a word as to the vexed question regarding the course of the Sanpoo. But they have given us a most readable and interesting personal narrative of a life of continued hardships, and of frequent suffering and danger in remote regions, the routes through which were partly never before recorded in detail, and partly never before trodden by any European.

FOREST LIFE IN CANADA WEST.[19]

[19] _Roughing it in the Bush; or, Life in Canada._ By SUSANNA MOODIE. In 2 vols. London: 1852.

Ladies of Britain, deftly embroidering in carpeted saloon, gracefully bending over easel or harp, pressing, with nimble finger, your piano's ivory, or joyously tripping in Cellarian circles, suspend, for a moment, your silken pursuits, and look forth into the desert at a sister's sufferings! May you never, from stern experience, learn fully to appreciate them. But, should fate have otherwise decreed, may you equal her in fortitude and courage. Meanwhile, transport yourselves, in imagination's car, to Canada's backwoods, and behold one, gently nurtured as yourselves, cheerfully condescending to rudest toils, unrepiningly enduring hardships you never dreamed of. Not to such hardships was she born, nor educated for them. The comforts of an English home, the endearments of sisterly affection, the refinement of literary tastes, but ill prepared the emigrant's wife to work, in the rugged and inclement wilderness, harder than the meanest of the domestics, whom, in her own country, she was used to command. But where are the obstacles and difficulties that shall not be overcome by a strong will, a warm heart, a trusting and cheerful spirit?--precious qualities, strikingly combined by the lady of whose countless trials and troubles we have here an affecting and remarkable record.

The Far West of Canada is so remote a residence, and there is so much oblivion in a lapse of twenty years, that it may be necessary to mention who the authoress is who now appeals (successfully, or we are much mistaken) to the favour of her countrymen, and more especially of her countrywomen. Of a family well known in literature, Mrs Moodie is a sister of Miss Agnes Strickland, the popular and accomplished historical biographer. In 1831, Miss Susanna Strickland published a volume of poems. Had she remained in England, she in time, perhaps, might have rivalled her sister's fame as one of the most distinguished female writers of the day. But it was otherwise ordained. In 1832 she sailed, as Mrs Moodie, an emigrant to Canada. Under most unfavourable circumstances, she still from time to time took up the pen. The anxieties and accidents of her forest life, her regrets for the country she loved so well, and had left perhaps for ever, and, subsequently, the rebellion in Canada, suggested many charming songs and poems, some of which are still extremely popular in our North American colony. Years passed amidst hardships and sufferings. At last a brighter day dawned, and it is from a tranquil and happy home, as we gladly understand, that the settler's brave wife has transmitted this narrative of seven years' exertion and adventure.

Inevitable hardships, some ill luck, some little want of judgment and deliberation, make up the history of Captain and Mrs Moodie's early days in Canada. "I give you just three years to spend your money and ruin yourself," said an old Yankee hag with whom the Captain was concluding the purchase of a wretched log-hut. It scarcely took so long. Borrowing our colours from Mrs Moodie's pages, we may broadly sketch the discomforts of the emigrant's first few months in Canada. These were passed near the village of C----, on the north shore of Lake Ontario. A farm of one hundred and fifty acres, about fifty of which were cleared, was purchased by Captain Moodie, for £300, of a certain Q----, a landjobber.

"Q----," says the Captain, who has contributed two or three chapters to his wife's book, "held a mortgage for £150, on a farm belonging to a certain Yankee settler, named Joe H----, as security for a debt incurred for goods at his store. The idea instantly struck him that he would compel Joe H---- to sell him his farm, by threatening to foreclose the mortgage. I drove out with Mr Q---- next day to see the farm in question. It was situated in a pretty retired valley, surrounded by hills, about eight miles from C----, and about a mile from the great road leading to Toronto. There was an extensive orchard upon the farm, and two log-houses, and a large frame-barn. A considerable portion of the cleared land was light and sandy; and the uncleared part of the farm, situated on the flat rocky summit of a high hill, was reserved for 'a sugar bush,' and for supplying fuel."

Pleased with the place, Captain Moodie bought it, and, having done so, had leisure to repent his bargain. Of the land he got possession in the month of September; but it was not till the following summer that the occupants of the house could be prevailed upon to depart. Until then the new comers dwelt in the wretched hut already mentioned. Even to this hovel Mrs Moodie's English habits of order and neatness imparted something like comfort; but a still greater evil, beyond her power to remedy, was connected with her residence. Her nearest neighbours were disreputable Yankee settlers.

"These people regarded British settlers with an intense feeling of dislike, and found a pleasure in annoying and insulting them when any occasion offered. They did not understand us, nor did we them, and they generally mistook the reserve which is common with the British towards strangers, for pride and superciliousness.

"'You Britishers are too _superstitious_,' one of them told me on a particular occasion.

"It was some time before I found out what he meant by the term '_superstitious_,' and that it was generally used by them for 'supercilious.'"

All that poor Mrs Moodie endured from her reprobate neighbours, could not be told in detail within the compass of a much larger work than hers. But we may glean a tolerable idea of her constant vexations and annoyance from her first volume, which contains sketches, at once painful and humorous, of the persecutions to which she was subjected. Impudent intrusion and unscrupulous borrowings were of daily occurrence, varied occasionally by some gross act of unneighbourliness and aggression. Although evidently a person of abundant energy and spirit, Mrs Moodie, partly through terror of these semi-savages, and partly from a wish to conciliate and make friends, long submitted to insolence and extortion. The wives and daughters of the Yankee settlers--some of whom had "squatted," without leave or license, on ground to which they had no right, made a regular property of her. Every article of domestic use, kettles and pans, eatables, drinkables, and wearables, did these insatiable wretches borrow--and never return. They would walk into her house and carry off the very things she at the moment needed, or come in her absence and take her gown from the peg, or the pot from the fire. The three families from which she had most to endure were those of a red-headed American squatter, who had fled his own country for some crime; of "Uncle Joe," the former proprietor of her farm, and still the occupant of her house; and of "Old Satan," a disgusting and brutal Yankee, who had had one eye gouged out in a fight, and whose face was horribly disfigured by the scars of wounds inflicted by his adversary's teeth. A pertinacious tormentor, too, was old Betty Fye, who lived in the log shanty across the creek. Having made Mrs Moodie's acquaintance, under pretence of selling her a "rooster," she became a constant and most unwelcome visitor, borrowing everything she could think of, returning nothing, and interlarding her discourse with oaths, which greatly shocked the good-tempered English lady.

"'Everybody swears in this country,' quoth Betty Fye. 'My boys (she was a widow with twelve sons) all swear like Sam Hill; and I used to swear mighty big oaths, till about a month ago, when the Methody parson told me that if I did not leave it off I should go to a tarnation bad place; so I dropped some of the worst of them.'

"'You would do well to drop the rest; women never swear in my country.'

"'Well, you don't say! I always hear'd they were very ignorant. Will you lend me the tea?'"

Tea to-day--it was something else to-morrow. Mrs Moodie tried every means of affronting her, but long without success. The most natural and effectual plan would have been to refuse all her demands; but to this Mrs Moodie, perhaps from unwillingness to disoblige, was tardy in having recourse. At last she got rid of her by quoting Scripture.

"The last time I was honoured with a visit from Betty Fye, she meant to favour me with a very large order upon my goods and chattels.

"'Well, Mrs Fye, what do you want to-day?'

"'So many things, that I scarce know where to begin. Ah, what a thing it is to be poor! First, I want you to lend me ten pounds of flour to make some Johnie cakes.'

"'I thought they were made of Indian meal?'

"'Yes, yes, when you've got the meal. I'm out of it, and this is a new fixing of my own invention. Lend me the flour, woman, and I'll bring you one of the cakes to taste.'

"This was said very coaxingly.

"'Oh, pray don't trouble yourself. What next?' I was anxious to see how far her impudence would go, and determined to affront her, if possible.

"'I want you to lend me a gown and a pair of stockings. I have to go to Oswego, to see my husband's sister, and I'd like to look decent.'

"'Mrs Fye, I never lend my clothes to any one. If I lent them to you, I should never wear them again.'

"'So much the better for me,' (with a knowing grin.) 'I guess if you won't lend me the gown, you will let me have some black slack to quilt a stuff petticoat, a quarter of a pound of tea and some sugar; and I will bring them back as soon as I can.'

"'I wonder when that will be. You owe me so many things that it will cost you more than you imagine to repay me.'

"'Since you're not going to mention what's past, I can't owe you much. But I will let you off the tea and the sugar, if you will lend me a five-dollar bill.'"

This was too much for even Mrs Moodie's patience. She read the incorrigible Betty a sharp lecture upon her system of robbing under colour of borrowing, and concluded by saying she well knew that all the things she had _lent_ her would be a debt owing to the day of judgment.

"'S'pose they are,' quoth Betty, not in the least abashed at my lecture on honesty, 'you know what the Scripture saith, "It is more blessed to give than to receive."'

"'Ay, there is an answer to that in the same book, which doubtless you may have heard,' said I, disgusted with her hypocrisy, 'The wicked borroweth, and payeth not again.'

"Never shall I forget the furious passion into which this too apt quotation threw my unprincipled applicant. She lifted up her voice and cursed me, using some of the big oaths temporarily discarded for _conscience'_ sake. And so she left me, and I never looked upon her face again."

Uncle Joe was another pleasant neighbour, and brought up his children to resemble himself. Mrs Joe would occasionally stroll over to visit Mrs Moodie, and exult over the unaccustomed toils to which the young English wife and mother submitted with a cheerfulness that did her infinite honour. It was a rough and hard life, even for men, in that Canadian loghouse; much worse, then, for a delicate woman, and worst of all for one who arrived there with an infant, and whose family rapidly augmented.

"For a week I was alone," writes Mrs Moodie, in the early days of her exile, "my good Scotch girl having left me to visit her father. Some small baby-articles were needed to be washed, and after making a great preparation, I determined to try my unskilled hand upon the operation. The fact is, I knew nothing about the task I had imposed upon myself, and in a few minutes rubbed the skin off my wrists, without getting the clothes clean. The door was open, as it generally was, even during the coldest winter days, in order to let in more light and let out the smoke, which otherwise would have enveloped us like a cloud. I was so busy that I did not perceive that I was watched by the cold, heavy, dark eyes of Mrs Joe, who, with a sneering laugh, exclaimed, 'Well, thank God! I am glad to see you brought to work at last.'"

Further, the amiable Mrs Joe declared her intense hatred of all Britishers, and her hearty wish that her unoffending neighbour might be brought down upon her knees to scrub the floor. Mrs Moodie had sense and dignity enough merely to smile at her vulgar malignity. The impudence of these people knew no bounds. The same evening, Mrs Joe sent over two of her offspring to borrow something she needed of the woman she had spitefully abused in the morning.

During Mrs Moodie's abode near C----, Old Satan got married for the fourth time. This was the occasion of a charivari, a custom dating from the French occupation of Canada, and still kept up there. Mrs Moodie has an amusingly _naïf_ chapter on this subject, concerning which she has collected some curious anecdotes. It is hardly necessary to explain that a mismatch--of a young and an old person--is the usual pretext for a charivari.

"The idle young fellows of the neighbourhood disguise themselves, blackening their faces, putting their clothes on hind part before, and wearing horrible masks, with grotesque caps on their heads, adorned with cocks' feathers, and bells. They then form in a regular body, and proceed to the bridegroom's house, to the sound of tin kettles, horns, drums, &c. Thus equipped, they surround the house, just at the hour when the happy couple are supposed to be about to retire to rest, beating upon the door with clubs and staves, and demanding of the bridegroom admittance to drink the bride's health, or in lieu thereof, a certain sum of money to treat the band at the nearest tavern."

Mrs Moodie expresses all a woman's indignation at what she styles "a lawless infringement upon the natural rights of man." The charivari is usually bought off--she mentions an instance when thirty pounds were disbursed by an antiquated swain who had wedded a handsome widow--but sometimes the victim resists, and the consequences are serious. Shortly before old Satan's bridal, a tragical affair had taken place at one of these saturnalia.

"The bridegroom was a man in middle life, a desperately resolute and passionate man, and he swore that if such riff-raff dared to interfere with him, he would shoot at them with as little compunction as if they were so many crows. His threats only increased the mischievous determination of the mob to torment him; and when he refused to admit their deputation, or even to give them a portion of the wedding cheer, they determined to frighten him into compliance by firing several guns, loaded with peas, at his door. Their salute was returned from the chamber-window, by the discharge of a double-barrelled gun, loaded with buck-shot. The crowd gave back with a tremendous yell. Their leader was shot through the heart, and two of the foremost in the scuffle dangerously wounded. They vowed they would set fire to the house, but the bridegroom boldly stepped to the window and told them to try it, and before they could light a torch he would fire among them again, for his gun was reloaded, and he would discharge it at them as long as one of them dared to remain on his premises. They cleared off."

In point of amusement there is little difference between the first and the second volumes of Mrs Moodie's book--which, however, is not intended merely to amuse, but also as "a work of practical experience," written for the benefit of, and conveying useful hints to, persons contemplating emigration to Canada. The first volume is the gayest of the two; there is a vein of great humour in Mrs Moodie's descriptions and sketches of her neighbours, and of her wild Irish servant, John Monaghan, who gave Uncle Joe an awful thrashing for purloining the captain's hay; and of Mrs D., the Yankee lady, who considered her English neighbours shocking proud because they did not eat with their "helps," but was of opinion that all negroes were children of the devil, for that "God never condescended to make a nigger." But it is in the second volume that the interest is strongest, and at times becomes intense. Disgusted with their neighbours, Captain and Mrs Moodie left their farm at C----, and removed to the township of Douro, forty miles off, in the backwoods, where they had friends and relatives settled, and where the society--consisting chiefly of English, Irish, and Scotch gentlemen, recently come from Europe, and many of them half-pay officers--was more congenial to their tastes and habits. Unfortunately, about this time Captain Moodie sold his commission, in consequence of an intimation in the newspapers that half-pay officers must either do so or join a regiment. This was not enforced in the case of officers settled in the colonies, and the captain greatly repented his haste; the more so, as he was induced to invest the proceeds of his sale in shares in a steamboat on Lake Ontario. Q----, the landjobber, appears to have led him into this investment. He received no interest on his shares, and when, some years afterwards, the boat was sold, he got back only a fourth of his capital. The mistake he made in parting with his half-pay was the cause of great privations and anxiety.

"It was a bright frosty morning," says Mrs Moodie, "when I bade adieu to the farm, the birthplace of my little Agnes, who, nestled beneath my cloak, was sweetly sleeping on my knee, unconscious of the long journey before us into the wilderness.... It was not without regret that I left Melsetter, for so my husband had called the place, after his father's estate in Orkney. It was a beautiful, picturesque spot; and, in spite of the evil neighbourhood, I had learned to love it; indeed, it was much against my wish that it was sold. I had a great dislike to removing, which involves a necessary loss, and is apt to give to the emigrant roving and unsettled habits. But all regrets were now useless; and, happily unconscious of the life of toll and anxiety that awaited us in those dreadful woods, I tried my best to be cheerful, and to regard the future with a hopeful eye."

Most nobly, when the toil and anxiety came, did this high-hearted woman bear up against them. Severer hardships and trials were perhaps never endured, for so long a period, by one of her delicate sex. At first, affairs looked promising in the forest. A timely legacy supplied means to purchase and clear land and to build a house; a considerable sum still remained in hand, and a good income from the steamboat stock was looked upon as certain. The first spring in the forest was spent in comparative ease and idleness.

"Those were the halcyon days of the bush. My husband had purchased a very light cedar canoe, to which he attached a keel and a sail; and most of our leisure hours, directly the snows melted, were spent upon the water. These fishing and shooting excursions were delightful.... We felt as if we were the first discoverers of every beautiful flower and stately tree that attracted our attention, and we gave names to fantastic rocks and fairy isles, and raised imaginary houses on every picturesque spot which we floated past during our aquatic excursions. I learned the use of the paddle, and became quite a proficient in the gentle craft."

They received visits from the Indians, a number of whom (of the Chippewa tribe) frequented a dry cedar-swamp hard by, fishing, shooting, and making maple-sugar, baskets, and canoes. They were friendly and communicative, grateful for the slightest kindness, never intrusive or offensively familiar; in short, they were born gentlemen, and in every respect a perfect contrast and immeasurably superior to the Yankee squatters at C----. Mrs Moodie devotes the greater part of a most interesting chapter to stories and traits of her red friends. No attention, however small, was lost upon these warm-hearted people. One cold night, late in autumn, six squaws asked shelter of Mrs Moodie. It was rather a large party to lodge, but forest hospitality is not stinted. There was "Joe Muskrat's squaw" and "Betty Cow," and an old white-haired woman, whose scarlet embroidered leggings showed her to be a chief's wife. After they had all well supped, mattresses and blankets were spread on the parlour floor for their use, and Mrs Moodie considerately told her servant to give the aged squaw the best bed.

"The old Indian glanced at me with her keen, bright eye; but I had no idea that she comprehended what I said. Some weeks after this, as I was sweeping my parlour floor, a slight tap drew me to the door. On opening it I perceived the old squaw, who immediately slipped into my hand a set of beautifully embroidered bark trays, fitting one within the other, and exhibiting the very best sample of the porcupine-quill work. While I stood wondering what this might mean, the good old creature fell upon my neck, and kissing me, exclaimed, 'You remember old squaw--make her comfortable! Old squaw no forget you. Keep them for her sake,' and before I could detain her she ran down the hill with a swiftness which seemed to bid defiance to years. I never saw this interesting Indian again, and I concluded that she died during the winter, for she must have been of a great age."

When fortune frowned on _Nono-cosiqui_, "the humming-bird," (the name given to Mrs Moodie by the Indians, in allusion to the pleasure she took in painting birds,) when her purse and pantry were alike empty, and, in Indian phrase, "her hearthstone was growing cold," many an acceptable supply of much-needed food was brought to her by her red friends.

"Their delicacy in conferring these favours was not the least admirable part of their conduct. John Nogan, who was much attached to us, would bring a fine bunch of ducks, and drop them at my feet, 'for the papoose [child,]' or leave a large muskinonge on the sill of the door, or place a quarter of venison just within it, and slip away without saying a word, thinking that a present from a poor Indian might hurt our feelings, and he would spare us the mortification of returning thanks."

The coolness and courage of these Indians are remarkable. Mrs Moodie tells a story of a squaw who was left by her husband in charge of some dead game, and who, whilst sitting carelessly upon a log, with his hunting-knife in her hand, heard a cracking amongst the branches, and, turning round, saw a bear within a few paces of her.

"It was too late to retreat; and seeing that the animal was very hungry, and determined to come to close quarters, she rose, and placed her back against a small tree, holding her knife close to her breast, and in a straight line with the bear. The shaggy monster came on. She remained motionless, her eyes steadily fixed upon her enemy, and as his huge arms closed around her, she slowly drove the knife into his heart. The bear uttered a hideous cry, and sank dead at her feet. When the Indian returned, he found the courageous woman taking the skin from the carcass of the formidable brute."

Mrs Moodie was not likely to emulate such feats as this. She had a horror of wild beasts, and was afraid even of cattle. Her dread of lions, tigers, and other unamiable carnivora, was the reason of her finding herself in Canada. Her husband had a property in South Africa, where he had passed many years, and whither the fine climate and scenery made him desirous to return. But his wife would not hear of it, and, when he tried to remove her exaggerated terrors, referred him triumphantly to the dangerous encounters and hairbreadth escapes recorded in a book of his own, called _Ten Years in South Africa_. A European woman's fear of tigers and rattle-snakes is natural enough, and let none impute want of courage to Mrs Moodie. The hero of a hundred fights might feel nervous, if perched on the top-gallant-yards of a frigate, whose captain might prefer boarding a French three-decker to riding at a bull-fence. Mrs Moodie's courage was not of the bear-fighting sort, but of a higher kind--moral, rather than physical. We read with admiration and deep sympathy of her presence of mind and intrepidity upon many trying occasions--when her house, for instance, was blazing over her head, and she alone was there to rescue her four children and such portions of her worldly possessions as her strength enabled her to carry out of the cedar-log dwelling, whose roof "was burning like a brush heap, and, unconsciously, she and her eldest daughter were working under a shelf upon which was deposited several pounds of gunpowder, procured for blasting a well. The gunpowder was in a stone-jar, secured by a paper stopper; the shelf upon which it stood was on fire." As to her fortitude under severe suffering--from bitter cold and other causes--and the perseverance with which she toiled, even at farm-labour, they are beyond praise.

"In the year 1835, my husband and I," she says, "had worked hard in the field; it was the first time I had ever tried my hand at field-labour, but our ready money was exhausted, and the steamboat stock had not paid us one farthing; we could not hire, and there was no help for it. I had a hard struggle with my pride before I would consent to render the least assistance on the farm, but reflection convinced me that I was wrong--that Providence had placed me in a situation where I was called upon to work--that it was not only my duty to obey that call, but to exert myself to the utmost to assist my husband, and help to maintain my family."

Most affecting is the account that follows, of hopes disappointed and hardships endured, in the years 1836 and 1837. To pay off debts--incurred chiefly for clearing land, and in confident expectation of deriving an income from the steamboat--Captain and Mrs Moodie resorted to a pinching economy. Milk, bread, and potatoes, were for months their only fare. Tea and sugar were luxuries not to be thought of. "I missed the tea very much," says the poor English lady, who, on an anchorite's fare, performed a day-labourer's task, hoeing potatoes, and cheerfully sharing with her husband the rude toils of the field. "We rang the changes on peppermint and sage, taking the one herb at our breakfast, the other at our tea, until I found an excellent substitute for both in the root of the dandelion." This root, roasted crisp, and ground, proved a very good imitation of coffee. Squirrel--stewed, roast, and in pies--was a standard dish at the dinner-table in the bush. In a trap set near the barn, often ten or twelve were caught in a day. But the lake was the great resource.

"Moodie and I used to rise by daybreak, and fish for an hour after sunrise, when we returned, he to the field, and I to dress the little ones, clean up the house, assist with the milk, and prepare the breakfast. Oh, how I enjoyed those excursions on the lake!--the very idea of our dinner depending upon our success added double zest to the sport."

Even here there was some compensation. The strange, Robinson-Crusoe-like existence had its joys as well as its sorrows. Who can doubt that, seasoned by labour, squirrel pie had, for the dwellers in the forest, such savour as few epicures find in pasty of choicest venison? The warm breath of summer, too, alleviated the hardships of the poor emigrants. But winter came, and, with winter, privation and misfortune.

"The ruffian squatter P----, from Clear Lake, drove from the barn a fine young bull we were rearing, and for several weeks all trace of the animal was lost. We had almost forgotten the existence of poor Whisky, when a neighbour called and told Moodie that his yearling was at P----'s, and that he would advise him to get it back as soon as possible. Moodie had to take some wheat to Y----'s mill, and as the squatter lived only a mile farther, he called at his house; and there, sure enough, he found the lost animal. With the greatest difficulty he succeeded in regaining his property, but not without many threats of vengeance from the parties who had stolen it. To these he paid no regard; but a few days after, six fat hogs, on which we depended for all our winter store of animal food, were driven into the lake and destroyed. The death of these animals deprived us of three barrels of pork, and half-starved us through the winter. That winter of '36, how heavily it wore away! The grown flour, frosted potatoes, and scant quantity of animal food, rendered us all weak, and the children suffered much from the ague."

Under these circumstances, great was the glee when a stray buck was shot. Spot, Katie's pet pig, had to be killed, in spite of the tears and entreaties of its little owner, for the family were craving after a morsel of meat. Here is a melancholy note in the diary of the emigrant's wife:--

"On the 21st May of this year, my second son, Donald, was born. The poor fellow came in hard times. The cows had not calved, and our bill of fare, now minus the deer and Spot, only consisted of bad potatoes, and still worse bread. I was rendered so weak by want of proper nourishment that my dear husband, for my sake, overcame his aversion to borrowing, and procured a quarter of mutton from a friend. This, with kindly presents from neighbours--often as badly off as ourselves--a loin of young bear, and a basket containing loaf of bread, some tea, fresh butter, and oatmeal, went far to save my life."

Think of this, ye dainty dames, who, in like circumstances, heap your beds with feathers, and strew the street with straw. Think of the chilly forest, the windy log-house, the frosted potatoes, the five children, the weary, half-famished mother, the absence of all that gentle aid and comfort which wait upon your slightest ailment. Think of all these things, and, if the picture move you, remember that the like sufferings and necessities abound nearer home, within scope of your charity and relief.

Quitting, for a while, the sad catalogue of her woes, Mrs Moodie launches forth into an episode which fills one of the most characteristic chapters of her work. In the midst of these hard times, an Englishman--with whom Captain Moodie had once travelled in the mail to Toronto, and whom he had invited to call on him, should he come into his part of the country--dropped in upon them one evening, proposing to remain for the night. He was their inmate for nine months. Mrs Moodie disliked him, from the very first day, for he was a surly, discontented, reckless scamp, but somehow there was no getting rid of him. He grumbled over his first meal of salt pork, dandelion coffee, and heavy bread; and he grumbled almost daily, until the happy morning when he left them for good and all. Malcolm (as Mrs Moodie chooses to call him) told his host that he was in hiding from the sheriff's officers, and should esteem it a great favour to be allowed to remain a few weeks at his house. The captain was far too good-natured and hospitable to refuse his request. "To tell you the truth, Malcolm," said he, "we are so badly off that we can scarcely find food for ourselves and the children. It is out of our power to make you comfortable, or to keep an additional hand, without he is willing to render some little help on the farm. If you can do this, I will endeavour to get a few necessaries on credit, to make your stay more agreeable." The proposition suited Malcolm to a hair. By working for his keep, he got rid of the obligation, and acquired a right to grumble. As to the work he did, it was really not worth speaking of. Mrs Moodie had a sort of rude bedstead made for him out of two large chests, and put up in a corner of the parlour. Upon that he lay, during the first fortnight of his stay, reading, smoking, and drinking whisky and water from morning till night. There was a mystery about the fellow which he did not care fully to clear up, but portions of his history oozed out.

"He was the son of an officer in the navy, who had not only attained a very high rank in the service, but, for his gallant conduct, had been made a Knight-Companion of the Bath. He had himself served his time as a midshipman on board his father's flag-ship, but had left the navy, and accepted a commission in the Buenos-Ayrean Service during the political struggles in that province. He had commanded a sort of privateer under the government, to whom, by his own account, he had rendered many very signal services. Why he left South America, and came to Canada, he kept a profound secret. He had indulged in very vicious and dissipated courses since he came to the province, and by his own account had spent upwards of four thousand pounds in a manner not over-creditable to him.... He was now considerably in debt. Money he had none; and, beyond the dirty fearnought blue seaman's jacket which he wore, a pair of trousers of the coarse cloth of the country, an old black vest that had seen better days, and two blue-checked shirts, clothes he had none. He shaved but once a week, never combed his hair, and never washed himself. A dirtier or more slovenly creature never before was dignified by the title of a gentleman. He was, however, a man of good education, of excellent abilities, and possessed a bitter sarcastic knowledge of the world; but he was selfish and unprincipled in the highest degree."

This piratical sea-bear quarrelled with Mrs Moodie's servants, disgusted and offended her by his ungentlemanly habit of swearing, and behaved altogether so outrageously that any one less forbearing and good-tempered than Captain Moodie would have turned him out of the house before he had been a month in it. But the captain, who lacked not spirit on occasion, had Highland notions of hospitality; and, moreover, he pitied the unhappy scapegrace--whose vile temper was his own greatest curse--and bore with his infirmities. Malcolm got the ague, and poor Mrs Moodie nursed him.

"During the cold fit, he did nothing but swear at the cold, and wished himself roasting; and, during the fever, he swore at the heat, and wished that he was sitting in no other garment than his shirt on the north side of an iceberg."

The only trait that somewhat reconciled Mrs Moodie to her rude guest was his affection for one of her children, a merry golden-haired little boy. When left alone with her in the house, he almost frightened her by his strange, sullen stare, and told her stories about wild deeds of bloodshed committed in his privateering days, and was very anxious to read her a manuscript work on South America, for which Murray, he said, had offered him a sum of money, but to which she preferred not listening. At last he got so indolent and insolent that Captain Moodie was roused to anger, sharply reproved him, and ordered him to be gone. But it was not a trifle in the way of rebuke that would drive Malcolm from free bed and board. He walked away for a few hours, and then returned and joined the family party, as if nothing had happened. One day, however, a nickname applied to him by Mrs Moodie's eldest girl put him in a furious passion, and he took himself off for ever, as his entertainers hoped. They were mistaken.

"Two months after, we were taking tea with a neighbour, who lived a mile below us on the small lake. Who should walk in but Mr Malcolm? He greeted us with great warmth, for him; and when we rose to take leave, he rose and walked home by our side. 'Surely the little stumpy man (the name Katie had given him) is not returning to his old quarters?' I am still a babe in the affairs of men. Human nature has more strange varieties than any one menagerie can contain, and Malcolm was one of the oddest of her odd species. That night he slept in his old bed below the parlour window, and for three months afterwards he stuck to us like a beaver."

The manner of this strange being's final departure was as eccentric as that of his first coming. On Christmas eve he started after breakfast to walk into Peterborough to fetch raisins for next day's pudding. He never came back, but left Peterborough the same day with a stranger in a waggon. It was afterwards said that he had gone to Texas, and been killed at San Antonio de Bexar. Whatever became of him, he never again was seen in that part of Canada. Mrs Moodie's account of his residence in her house is full of character, and admirable for its quietness and truth to nature. "Firing the Fallow," and "Our Logging Bee," are also, apart from their connection with the emigrant's fortunes, striking and interesting sketches of Canadian forest life. We are unable to dwell upon or extract from them, and must hasten to conclude our notice of this really fascinating book.

Rebellion broke out in Canada. Captain Moodie, although suffering from a severe accident he had met with whilst ploughing, felt his loyalty and soldiership irresistibly appealed to by the Queen's proclamation, calling upon all loyal gentlemen to join in suppressing the insurrection. Toronto was threatened by the insurgents, and armed bands were gathering on all sides for its relief. So Captain Moodie marched to the front. Regiments of militia were formed, and in one of them he received command of a company. He left in January, and Mrs Moodie remained alone with her children and Jenny--a faithful old Irish servant--to take care of the house. It was a dull and cheerless time. And yet her husband's appointment was a great boon and relief. His full pay as captain enabled him to remit money home, and to liquidate debts. His wife, on her side, was not inactive.

"Just at this period," she says, "I received a letter from a gentleman, requesting me to write for a magazine (the _Literary Garland_) just started in Montreal, with promise to remunerate me for my labours. Such an application was like a gleam of light springing up in the darkness."

When the day's toils--which were not trifling--were over, she robbed herself of sleep--which she greatly needed--to labour with her pen; writing by the light of what Irish Jenny called "sluts"--twisted rags, dipped in lard, and stuck in a bottle. Jenny viewed these literary pursuits with huge discontent.

"You were thin enough before you took to the pen," grumbled the affectionate old creature--"what good will it be to the children, dear heart! if you die afore your time by wasting your strength afther that fashion?"

But Mrs Moodie was not to be dissuaded from her new pursuit. She persevered, and with satisfactory results.

"I actually," she says, "shed tears of joy over the first twenty-dollar note I received from Montreal."

Emulous of her mistress's activity, Jenny undertook to make "a good lump" of maple-sugar, with the aid of little Sol, a hired-boy, whom she grievously cuffed and ill-treated, when he upset the kettle, or committed other blunders. Every evening during the sugar-making Mrs Moodie ran up to see Jenny in the bush, singing and boiling down the sap in front of her little shanty.

"The old woman was in her element, and afraid of nothing under the stars; she slept beside her kettles at night, and snapped her fingers at the idea of the least danger."

The sugar-making was a hot and wearisome occupation, but the result was a good store of sugar, molasses, and vinegar.

"Besides gaining a little money with my pen," writes Mrs Moodie at about this time, "I practised a method of painting birds and butterflies upon the white velvety surface of the large fungi that grow plentifully upon the bark of the sugar maple. These had an attractive appearance; and my brother, who was a captain in one of the provisional regiments, sold a great many of them among the officers, without saying by whom they were painted. One rich lady in Peterborough, long since dead, ordered two dozen to send as curiosities to England. These, at one shilling each, enabled me to buy shoes for the children, who, during our bad times, had been forced to dispense with these necessary coverings. How often, during the winter season, have I wept over their little chapped feet, literally washing them with my tears. But these days were to end. Providence was doing great things for us; and Hope raised at last her drooping head, to regard, with a brighter glance, the far-off future. Slowly the winter rolled away; but he to whom every thought was turned, was still distant from his humble home. The receipt of an occasional letter from him was my only solace during his long absence, and we were still too poor to indulge often in the luxury."

The spring brought work. Corn and potatoes must be planted, and the garden dug and manured. By lending her oxen to a neighbour who had none, Mrs Moodie obtained a little assistance; but most of the labour was performed by her and Jenny, the greatest jewel of an old woman the Emerald Isle ever sent forth to toil in American wildernesses. A short visit from the captain cheered the family. In the autumn, he expected, the regiment to which he belonged would be reduced. This was a melancholy anticipation, and his wife again beheld cruel poverty seated on their threshold. After her husband's departure, the thought struck her that she would write to the Governor of Canada, plainly stating her circumstances, and asking him to retain Captain Moodie in the militia service. She knew nothing of Sir George Arthur, and received no reply to her application. But the Governor acted, though he did not write, and acted kindly and generously. "The 16th of October my third son was born; and a few days after, my husband was appointed paymaster to the militia regiments in the V---- district, with the rank and full pay of captain." The appointment was not likely to be permanent, and Mrs Moodie and the children remained at their log-cabin in the woods during the ensuing winter. Malignant scarlet fever attacked the whole family; a doctor was sent for, but did not come; Mrs Moodie, herself ill, had to tend her five children; and when these recovered, she was stretched for many weeks upon a bed of sickness. Jenny, the most attached of humble friends, and a greater heroine in her way than many whom poets have sung and historians lauded, alone kept her suffering mistress company in the depths of the dark forest.

"Men could not be procured in that thinly-settled spot for love nor money; and I now fully realised the extent of Jenny's usefulness. Daily she yoked the oxen, and brought down from the bush fuel to maintain our fires, which she felled and chopped up with her own hands. She fed the cattle, and kept all things snug about the doors; not forgetting to load her master's two guns, 'in case,' as she said, 'the ribels should attack us in our retrate.'"

What says the quaint old song? that--

"The poor man alone, when he hears the poor moan, Of his morsel a morsel will give, Well-a-day!"

It were a libel to adopt the sentiment to its full extent, when we witness the large measure of charity which the more prosperous classes in this country are ever ready to dispense to the poor and suffering. But doubtless the sympathy with distress is apt to be heartiest and warmest on the part of those who themselves have experienced the woes they witness. It is very touching to contemplate Mrs Moodie walking twenty miles through a bleak forest--the ground covered with snow, and the thermometer far below zero--to minister to the necessities of one whose sufferings were greater even than her own. Still more touching is the exquisite delicacy with which she and her friend Emilia imparted the relief they brought, and strove to bestow their charity without imposing an obligation. "The Walk to Dummer" is a chapter of Mrs Moodie's book that alone would secure her the esteem and admiration of her readers. Captain N. was an Irish settler in Canada, who had encountered similar mishaps to those Captain Moodie had experienced--but in a very different spirit. He had taken to drinking, had deserted his family, and was supposed to have joined Mackenzie's band of ruffians on Navy Island. For nine weeks his wife and children had tasted no food but potatoes; for eighteen months they had eaten no meat. Before going to Mrs Moodie, Jenny had been their servant for five years, and, although repeatedly beaten by her master with the iron ramrod of his gun, would still have remained with them, would he have permitted her. She sobbed bitterly on learning their sufferings, and that Miss Mary, "the tinder thing," and her brother, a boy of twelve, had to fetch fuel from the bush in that "oncommon savare weather." Mrs Moodie was deeply affected at the recital of so much misery. She had bread for herself and children, and that was all. It was more than had Mrs N. But for the willing there is ever a way, and Mrs Moodie found means of doing good, where means there seemed to be none. Some ladies in the neighbourhood were desirous to do what they could for Mrs N.; but they wished first to be assured that her condition really was as represented. They would be guided by the report of Mrs Moodie and Emilia, if those two ladies would go to Dummer, the most western clearing of Canada's Far West, and ascertain the facts of the case. _If_ they would! There was not an instant's hesitation. Joyfully they started on their Samaritan pilgrimage. Ladies, lounging on damask cushions in your well-hung carriages, read this account of a walk through the wilderness; read the twelfth chapter of Mrs Moodie's second volume, and--having read it--you will assuredly read the whole of her book, and rise from its perusal with full hearts, and with the resolution to imitate, as far as your opportunities allow--and to none of us, who seek them with a fervent and sincere spirit, shall opportunities be wanting--her energetic and truly Christian charity.

_Le diable ne sera pas toujours derrière la porte_, says the French proverb. The gentleman in question had long obstinately kept his station behind Mrs Moodie's shanty door; but at last, despairing, doubtless, of a triumph over her courage and resignation, he fled, discomfited. The militia disbanded, Captain Moodie's services were no longer needed. But his hard-saved pay had cleared off many debts, and prospects were brighter.

"The potato crop was gathered in, and I had collected my store of dandelion roots for our winter supply of coffee, when one day brought a letter to my husband from the Governor's secretary, offering him the situation of Sheriff of the V---- district. Once more he bade us farewell; but it was to go and make ready a home for us, that we should no more be separated from each other. Heartily did I return thanks to God that night for all his mercies to us."

Short time sufficed for preparation to quit the dreary log-house. Crops, furniture, farm-stock, and implements, were sold, and as soon as snow fell and sleighing was practicable, the family left the forest for their snug dwelling in the distant town of V----. Strange as it may seem, when the time came, Mrs Moodie clung to her solitude.

"I did not like," she says, "to be dragged from it to mingle in gay scenes, in a busy town, and with gaily-dressed people. I was no longer fit for the world; I had lost all relish for the pursuits and pleasures which are so essential to its votaries; I was contented to live and die in obscurity. For seven years I had lived out of the world altogether; my person had been rendered coarse by hard work and exposure to the weather. I looked double the age I really was, and my hair was already thickly sprinkled with grey."

Honour to such grey hairs, blanched in patient and courageous suffering. More lovely they than raven tresses, to all who prefer to the body's perishable beauty, the imperishable qualities of the immortal soul!

FAREWELL TO THE RHINE.

LINES WRITTEN AT BONN.

Fare thee well, thou regal river, proudly-rolling German Rhine, Sung in many a minstrel's ballad, praised in many a poet's line! Thou from me too claim'st a stanza; ere thy oft-trod banks I leave, Blithely, though with thread the slenderest, I the grateful rhyme will weave; Many a native hymn thou hearest, many a nice and subtle tone, Yet receive my stranger lispings, strange, but more than half thine own.

Fare thee well! but not in sorrow; while the sun thy vineyards cheers, I will not behold thy glory through a cloud of feeble tears; Bring the purple Walportzheimer, pour the Rudesheimer bright, In the trellis'd vine-clad arbour I will hold a feast to-night. Call the friends who love me dearly, call the men of sense and soul, Call the hearts whose blithe blood billows, like the juice that brims the bowl: Let the wife who loves her husband, with her eyes of gracious blue, Give the guests a fair reception--serve them with a tendance true; With bright wine, bright thoughts be mated; and if creeping tears must be, Let them creep unseen to-morrow, Rhine, when I am far from thee!

Lo! where speeds the gallant steamer, prankt with flags of coloured pride, And strong heart of iron, panting stoutly up the swirling tide; While from fife, and flute, and drum, the merry music bravely floats, And afar the frequent cannon rolls his many-pealing notes; And as thick as flowers in June, or armies of the ruddy pine, Crown the deck the festive sailors of the broad and German Rhine. "_Der Rhein! Der Rhein!_" I know the song, the jovial singers too I know,-- 'Tis a troop of roving Burschen, and to Heisterbach they go; There beneath the seven hills' shadow, and the cloister'd ruin grey, Far from dusty books and paper, they will spend the sunny day; There will bind their glittering caps with oaken wreaths fresh from the trees, And around the rustic table sit, as brothers sit, at ease; Hand in hand will sit and laugh, and drain the glass with social speed, Crowned with purple Asmannshausen, drugged with many a fragrant weed; While from broad and open bosom, with a rude and reinless glee, Sounds the jocund-hearted pæan,--_Live the Bursch! the Bursch is free!_ Thus they through the leafy summer, when their weekly work is o'er, Make the wooded hamlets echo with strong music's stirring roar From young life's high-brimming fulness--while the hills that bear the vine Brew their juice in prescient plenty for the Burschen of the Rhine.

Oft at eve, when we were sated with the various feast of sight, Looking through our leafy trellis on the hues of loveliest light, Poured on the empurpled mountains by the gently westering sun; When at length the blazing god, his feats of brilliant duty done, Veiled his head, and Güdinghofen's gilded woods again were grey; When the various hum was hushed that stirred the busy-striving day, And the air was still and breezeless, and the moon with fresh-horned beam Threw aslant a shimmering brightness o'er the scarcely-sounding stream; We with ear not idly pleased would rise to catch the mellow note Softly o'er the waters wandering from the home-returning boat; And we saw the festive brothers, sobered by the evening hour, Shoreward drifted by the river's deep and gently-rolling power; And our car imbibed sweet concord, and our hearts grew young again, And we knew the deep devotion of that solemn social strain. And we loved the Bursch that mingles truth and friendship with the wine, While his floods of deep song echo o'er the broad and murmuring Rhine.

Fare thee well, thou people-bearing, joy-resounding, ample flood, Mighty now, but mightier then, when lusty Europe's infant blood Pulsed around thee; when thy Kaisers, titled with the grace of Rome, With a holy sanction issued from hoar Aquisgranum's dome, And with kingly preparation, where the Alps frost-belted frown, Marched with German oak to wreathe the fruitful Lombard's iron crown. Then the stream of wealth adown thee freely floated; then the fire Of a rude but hot devotion piled strong tower, and fretted spire, Thick as oaks within the forest, where thy priestly cities rose. Weaker now, and faint and small, the sacerdotal ardour glows Round the broad Rhine's unchurched billows; but an echo still remains, And a fond life stiffly lingers, in the old faith's ghostly veins. Ample rags of decoration, scutcheons of the meagre dead, By thy banks, thou Christian river, still, from week to week, are spread. Flags and consecrated banners wave around thee; I have seen Strewn with flowers thy streets, and marching in the gay sun's noonday sheen Lines of linen-vested maidens, lines of sober matrons grey, Lines of feeble-footed fathers, priests in motley grim array; I have seen the bright cross glitter in the summer's cloudless air, While the old brown beads were counted to the drowsy-mutter'd prayer; I have seen the frequent beggar press his tatters in the mud, For the bread that is the body, and the wine that is the blood, (So they deem in pious stupor,) of the Lord who walked on earth. Such thy signs of life, thou strangely-gibbering imp of Roman birth, Old, but lusty in thy dotage, on the banks of German Rhine: Though thy rule I may not own it, and thy creed be far from mine, I have loved to hear thy litany o'er the swelling waters float, Gently chaunted from the crowded, gaily-garnished pilgrim-boat; I have felt the heart within me strangely stirred; and, half believer, For a moment wished that Reason on her throne might prove deceiver. Live, while God permits thy living, on the banks of German Rhine, Fond old faith!--thou canst not live but by some spark of power divine; And while man, who darkly gropes, and fretful feels, hath need of thee, Soothe his ear with chiming creeds, and fear no jarring taunt from me.

Fare ye well, ye broad-browed thinkers! pride of Bonn upon the Rhine, Patient teachers, in the rock of ancient lore that deeply mine; Men, with whom in soul lives Niebuhr, and loves still to glean with them, From huge piles of Roman ruin many a bright and human gem; Oft with you, beneath the rows of thickly-blooming chestnut trees, I have walked, and seen with wonder how ye flung with careless case Bales of treasured thought about ye, even as children play with toys. Strange recluses! we who live 'mid bustling Britain's smoke and noise, Ill conceive the quiet tenor of your deeply-brooding joys; How ye sit with studious patience, and with curious travelling eyes Wander o'er the well-browned folio, where the thoughtful record lies; Musing in some musty chamber day by day, and hour by hour, Dimly there ye sit, and sip the ripest juice from Plato's bower; Each fair shape that graceful floateth through the merry Grecian clime, Each religious voice far-echoed through the galleries of time, There with subtle eye and ear ye watch, and seize the airy booty, And with faithful ken to know the rescued truth is all your duty. Souls apart! with awe I knew your silent speculative looks, And the worship that ye practise in the temples of your books; And I felt the power of knowledge; and I loved to bridge with you Gulfs of time, till oldest wisdom rose to shake hands with the new; May the God of truth be with you, still to glean, with pious patience, Grains of bright forgotten wisdom for the busy labouring nations; And, while books shall feed my fancy, may I use the pondered line, Grateful to the broad-browed thinkers, pride of Bonn upon the Rhine!

Fare ye well, old crags and castles! now with me for ever dwells, Twined with many a freakish joy, the stately front of Drachenfels. O'er thy viny cliffs we rambled, where the patient peasant toils, Where the rugged copse scarce shelters from the sun that broadly smiles, And the fresh green crown is plaited from the German's oaken bower: Here we wandered, social pilgrims, careless as the sunny hour, Gay and free, nor touched with horror of the legendary wood, Harnessed priests and iron knights, and dragons banqueting on blood. Praise who will the mail-clad epoch, when the princes all were reivers, Every maundering monk a god, and all who heard him dumb believers; Me, the peaceful present pleases, and the sober rule of law, Quiet homes, and hearths secure, and creeds redeemed from idiot-awe; Peopled cities' din; and where then tolled the cloister's languid chime, Now the hum of frequent voices from each furthest human clime, Every form of various life beneath the crag that bears the vine, Borne upon the steam-ploughed current of the placid-rolling Rhine.

Fare thee well, thou kingly river! while the sun thy vineyards cheers, I will not behold thy glory through a cloud of feeble tears. Bring the purple Walportzheimer, pour the Rudesheimer clear, In the green and vine-clad arbour spread the goodly German cheer; Call the friends who love me dearly, call the men of sense and soul, Call the hearts whose blithe blood billows like the juice that brims the bowl; With free cheer free thoughts be wedded; high as heaven, deep as hell, Wide as are the dark blue spaces where the starry tenants dwell. Let the German hymn, that echoes from the Sound to Adria's Sea, Ring damnation to the despot, peal salvation to the free; And when I from vine-clad mountains and from sunny woods am far, By the cold bleak coast of Buchan, where wild Winter loves to war, In my memory crag and castle, church and learned hall, shall shine Brightly, with the seven hills glorious of fair Bonn upon the Rhine.

J. S. B. FAHRGASSE BONN, _August 1851_.

THE REFORM MEASURES OF 1852.

Lord John Russell's new measure of Representative Reform has resolved itself into the shape of a negation. It is, perhaps, the most abortive and unsatisfactory scheme that was ever presented to the nation. It is not good enough to be accepted by one section of politicians, at least as a permanent gift--not so utterly bad as to excite the anger of another, though it may well challenge their contempt. It is not based upon any new principle--it hardly even professes to alter or improve any principle at present acknowledged. It amounts to little more than an arbitrary lowering of the electoral qualification. Small boroughs are to retain their privileges, submitting only to an infusion of new blood from villages in their respective neighbourhoods. Large towns remain as they were, but with a lower scale of voters. So with counties. Every man paying 40s. a-year of direct taxes is to have a vote. This seems to be the whole measure of reform as regards constituencies. It is an alteration in towns from £10 to £5, and in counties from £50 to £20. For the future, no property qualification is to be required from members; and the Parliamentary oaths are to be qualified, so that every kind of unbeliever may enter. The legislature ceases to be Christian.

Considering that the scheme has been brought forward by the Whigs purely for party purposes, and to postpone, if possible, their expected ejection from office, we are surprised that it is not more democratical. We leave others to inquire why no second crusade has been made against the close boroughs--why Calne, for example, and Arundel, and Tavistock, are not to figure in a new schedule of disfranchisement. We can conjecture sufficient reasons, without pushing speculation far. But--putting aside the religious question, which Lord John Russell has most indecorously mixed up with a mass of electoral details--we should really like to know what party, or what class of men, this measure is intended to satisfy. That is, we must maintain, a consideration of primary importance. All are agreed that it is not for the benefit of the nation that the constitution should be perpetually tinkered. Even Lord John does not broadly avow his predilection for annual repairs; though, in the true spirit of an itinerant metallurgist, he proposes, in 1852, a new solder for the constituencies of Ireland, in place of that which he gratuitously applied in 1851. If Parliaments are habitually to reform themselves, whether at the instigation or against the will of ministers, it is quite evident that all hope of discharging the real business of the nation is at an end. If repairs are needed, let them by all means be made; but let the work be done in such a substantial manner that it shall last for a given time, and not subject us to the perpetual annoyance of new experiments.

Now, we think it must strike every one that the projected measure of the present session is so far from being a permanent settlement, that, if carried, it must lead to an immense deal of future agitation. The Radicals do not even affect to deny this. They express themselves disappointed with the limited amount of the scheme. They wish for the suppression of the smaller boroughs, the enlargement of the urban constituencies, electoral divisions, household suffrage, vote by ballot, and triennial, if not annual, parliaments. These are their avowed objects--for what ultimate purpose we need not inquire; and they very candidly state that they will not rest satisfied until they obtain them. They will accept Lord John Russell's measure as an instalment, but nothing more. They think that the lowering of the franchise is a step in the right direction, because they calculate that it will give them more immediate power, but they will not take it as a settlement. Next year, if this bill should be carried, though we hardly think the Ministry will survive long enough to reach it, they are again to be in the field, busy, warlike, and active as ever; and the agitation is not to cease until their demands are satisfied. But will it cease even then? Hardly. The Chartists have the next turn, and they, too, doubtless, will insist upon _their_ schemes, all the more practicable because the intervening barriers have been taken down. So that, if the peace and quiet of the nation, and the real efficiency of Parliament as a working and legislative body, are worthy to be taken into account, it appears that Lord John Russell's measure will, if enacted, neither promote the one nor the other.

Looking simply at the broad features of the measure, with the reservation which we have already made, and without investigating the details, a shallow observer might conclude that it is calculated to do much immediate mischief. We cannot style it a revolutionary measure, simply because it lowers the franchise from a point which, twenty years ago, was arbitrarily assumed, without any shadow of reason, as the correct one. The five-pounder may be, and often is, quite as intelligent a person as the ten-pounder. But where is the line of demarcation to be drawn? If property or rent is to be the qualification and criterion, it must be drawn somewhere, else there is no answer to the Chartist; and if you once begin the system of diminishment, there is no possibility of any stoppage. Tile electoral shillings are like King Lear's hundred knights: they will be beaten down until the final question is asked, "What needs one?" and then the triumph will be complete.

Is this desirable? In the name of everything sacred and dear to us--in the name of intelligence, education, and common sense, we answer, No! We have but to look across the Channel to see what are the effects of universal suffrage; and surely there is no man in this country infatuated enough to wish that our free constitution should be exchanged for alternate anarchy and despotism. That is not the wish of the nation--nay more, we venture to say that it is not the wish of the nation that any experiment should be made tending in the least degree towards any such consummation. We have watched--most attentively--for the last two years, the movements of the so-called reformers; and we are satisfied that, had they been left to themselves, their agitation must have died out as surely as a fire expires for want of fuel. The faggot-master, in the present instance, has been her Majesty's Prime Minister.

The electoral franchise is a privilege which, for its own sake, is very little coveted by the people of this country. Even in the towns, men who possess the qualification are exceedingly backward to enrol themselves; and often, when enrolled, they positively decline to vote. A rush to the poll, as every electioneering agent knows, is seldom a spontaneous movement--indeed, the general difficulty is to overcome the _vis inertiæ_. We think this feeling may be carried too far, but undoubtedly it exists; and the proof of it is, that in most large constituencies, but a small portion of those who are qualified to vote appear at the poll, except under circumstances and on occasions of peculiar excitement. Nay, more than this, unless a case of very strong grievance can be made out and established, it is difficult to prevail upon the men of the middle classes to lend their countenance to or attend public meetings for any political object.

The last general election did, in reality, cause little excitement. The conduct of Sir Robert Peel--we shall not now call it his manoeuvre--had disposed of the question of Free Trade for the time; and no one, whatever might be his secret thoughts or forebodings, wished for an immediate reversal of that policy, until the effects of the experiment became apparent. Therefore a Free-Trade House of Commons was returned, and the Ministry had it all their own way. Undoubtedly they have declined in influence, since then. But why? Simply because their policy was then undergoing the test of experience, and the result has proved adverse to their anticipations. There is no other reason. If it should be said that their unpopularity is owing to the continuance of the hated Income-tax, we can only reply that Free-Trade and the Income-tax are inseparable; and that, so long as Sindbad chooses to call himself a Free-Trader, he must submit to carry the Old Man of the Sea upon his shoulders. But the constituencies were quiet. Except when accidental elections took place, which generally terminated in the defeat of the ministerial candidates, the electoral view could not be ascertained. But there were held in every county, and in the metropolis itself, immense meetings of those who thought themselves wronged by the chicanery of a former Minister--not demanding a readjustment of the franchise, but simply requiring that the general voice of the electoral body might be taken on the subject of their complaint. Thus the only classes in the country who could allege a specific and substantial grievance, were utterly silent upon the subject of a reform in the constitution. They had faith in the justice of their cause, and believed that, sooner or later, that cause must prevail, without the intervention of any violent remedy.

It was only in one or two of the large towns that any attempt at agitation for an increase of the suffrage was made. For such agitation it was difficult to find even a tolerable pretext. According to the political and commercial views of the reformers, the system established in 1832 had worked wonderfully, nay, marvellously well. They could, in fact, point to no practical grievance affecting life, liberty, or property, such as could only be remedied by a strong organic change. They could not accuse the House of Commons of turning a deaf ear to the representations of the urban population. But as, in the absence of reason, a pretext was necessary, they reared one up in the cry for economy and retrenchment. Supposing that there had been any grounds for such a demand, that our national expenditure was too great, and our finances unduly squandered, it is difficult to understand the chain of reason which connects the cure of these things with a change in the representative body. But, in truth, nothing could be more monstrous than such an allegation. When forced to specify and particularise the nature of their proposed reductions, the agitators could only refer to our military and naval establishments, and the expense of our colonial empire. If any doubt at all existed in the minds of men as to such points, that doubt has since been removed. After all the trash that has been uttered at Peace Congresses and Manchester gatherings, it has become clear, even to the meanest capacity, that our establishments, instead of being too large, are in reality too small, and insufficient even for our defence! We have no desire now to discuss such matters. We allude to them simply for the purpose of showing that the one pretext of the would-be agitators for a representative reform has given way under their feet.

If the anticipations of those agitators had been fulfilled--if they had carried, as they proposed, a sweeping measure of reform, based upon household or universal suffrage--and if, in consequence, the majority of the House of Commons had consisted of men professing the opinions of Mr Cobden, and resolute to put them into practice, into what a state of anarchy and abject terror would this country now have been thrown! Without a fleet to scour the Channel, without an army to defend our shores, we should have been at the mercy of almost any assailant. Yet such were the results which Mr Cobden and his friends distinctly contemplated, and which they proposed to bring about by lowering the franchise, and giving a large accession of political power to the manufacturing towns.

It is creditable to the sense of the country that the agitation totally failed--in fact, there never was any agitation at all. The electors generally abstained from giving countenance to any meetings on the subject of reform. Sir Joshua Walmsley and Mr Joseph Hume undertook journeys for the purpose of stirring up the embers, but they nowhere could create a blaze. Delegates, who represented nobody but themselves, assembled at Manchester, in the vain hope of hoaxing the country into the belief that there was a very general feeling in favour of radical reform. They might have spared themselves the trouble. Never was there so ludicrous a failure. The central English meeting was held under such sorry auspices that even Messrs Muntz and Scholefield, the members for Birmingham, declined to attend it. The conduct of the whole scheme reflected no credit on the strategy of Mr John Bright, who acted as generalissimo on this occasion. The Edinburgh meeting, held shortly afterwards, was, in every sense of the word, contemptible. With hardly any exceptions, it was avoided and abjured by every man of station, intelligence, wealth, and respectability within the city. In fact, the movement broke down. The Radicals wished to demonstrate that public feeling was with them; and their demonstration resulted in a clear proof that public feeling was against them.

Radical reform, therefore, is clearly not wanted, and would not be tolerated by the nation. Lord John Russell's measure, however, not being violently radical in itself, though convenient for the ulterior designs of Radicalism, will doubtless be supported by those who now perceive that they cannot at present hope to carry a broad scheme of democracy. It is, therefore, proper that we should consider whether any of the objections that can be urged to the larger scheme apply equally to the lesser one.

In our opinion, it will be impossible for Lord John Russell to prove the preamble of his bill. He certainly has not established, as yet, the necessity, or even the policy, of such a change in our representative system; nor can he hope to show that this measure of his has been called for by, or is calculated to meet, the requirements of the great bulk of the community. It is a gratuitous offering on his part: no one has asked it at his hand. Let us see, then, how he attempts to justify his introduction of this measure. To preface any measure with a justification is impolitic, because it implies the existence of a serious doubt in the mind of the speaker. He begins with one of these rhetorical commonplaces which has always a counterpart or opposite, either of which may be selected, as Aristotle tells us, according to the option of the speaker. We shall quote his own words:--

"The state of affairs in which I bring forward this motion ought to be satisfactory to Parliament and to the country. During four years we have seen the continent of Europe torn by convulsions; during that period the aspect of this country has been tranquil, and any threatened danger has been averted by the general spirit and unanimous feeling of the people. It appears to me that this is a proper time for considering whether any further extension can be given to the right of voting, consistently with the principles of the constitution, by which the prerogatives of the Crown, the authority of both Houses of Parliament, and the rights and liberties of the people, are equally secured."

So far good. But we are almost old enough to recollect the time when the same speaker, on the occasion of moving a previous measure of reform, had recourse to the counterpart of this commonplace. _Then_ a reform in the constitution was necessary because the people were discontented; _now_, a reform is necessary because the people are contented. State the proposition in any mode you please, the argument resolves itself into that; alter the argument, and you must subtract from the present instance the plea of necessity, and fall back immediately upon the minor one of expediency. But as neither the satyr of the fable, nor the ventilating Dr Reid, can compete with Lord John Russell in the art of blowing hot or cold as occasion requires, we need hardly dwell upon this evident self-contradiction. It is, however, not a little remarkable, that he cautiously abstains from averring that there has been anything like a general demand for an extension or alteration of the suffrage. We confess that we were not prepared for this abstinence. The Whigs are not usually so scrupulous in their statements, at least since they began to enlist prosperity as a standing argument on their side; therefore it was with an agreeable surprise that we marked Lord John's implied admission, that nobody had thought it worth their while to solicit that boon which he was so gracious as to accord. It is beyond a doubt that he was wise in limiting himself thus. The right and practice of petitioning Parliament against any existing grievance is well known to the people, and is held _in viridi observantia_. Can any man believe that, if reform was really and substantially the wish of a large section of the community, the tables of both Houses of Parliament would not be groaning under the weight of the accumulated mass of petitions? Nothing of the kind has happened. Such petitions as have been presented to the House of Commons do not pray for moderate and gradual reform, but for universal suffrage, vote by ballot, annual parliaments, electoral districts, and all the other abominations dear to the hearts of the in-dwellers of Marylebone. The extension they require is specific, not couched in general terms. Lord John's measure will receive from them just the same consideration which would be bestowed upon a cup of milk and water, by an inveterate gin drinker whose soul was bent upon a dram. We are decidedly of opinion, and will remain so until we have proof to the contrary, that the class which Lord John Russell now proposes to enfranchise is supremely indifferent to the privilege. We used to be told that one particular reason for fixing the limit of the franchise at ten pounds, was the hope that the possession of that right would be so strongly desired, as to act as a wholesome spur and incentive to industry. That view seems to have been given up. The people will not work up to the franchise, so the standard of the franchise is to be lowered to their reach! Very convenient legislation this, but somewhat slovenly withal.

If, then, we are correct in our premises, Lord John Russell is volunteering a measure, which is asked for by nobody, which will satisfy nobody, and which, so far from settling the question permanently, must be regarded as a stimulus to farther agitation. He is, although he may not know it himself, on the highway to universal suffrage. People had begun to consider the ten pound clause in the old Reform Bill as something equivalent to a principle--now, her Majesty's chief adviser unsettles that faith, descends fifty per cent, and proclaims to the world that a further discount may probably be expected, if a material increase shall take place in the circulation of newspapers and periodicals, thereby, as supposes, testifying the augmented intelligence of the nation! It is really no laughing matter. Such was one of the leading arguments of the Prime Minister of Great Britain in justification of his scheme, and we can only hope that it was founded upon intense ignorance of the state of our present periodical literature. That the elements of education--that is, the power of reading and writing--are more generally diffused among the lower orders than formerly may be true, though we greatly doubt it; but that has nothing to do with the question at issue. No argument is required to convince us that some of the class which the noble Lord intends to admit to the franchise, possess much more than the mere rudiments of education; the question ought to be, whether what they do read is likely to fit them for discharging the important duty of selecting and sending proper representatives to Parliament. Let Lord John Russell, or any other legislator who may be of his way of thinking, but take the trouble to send to Manchester or Birmingham for weekly sets of the political, religious, literary, and moral miscellanies, which are most eagerly bought up and perused--let them read those carefully through, and consider well their tenor--and we are satisfied that the sturdiest advocate for progression would shudder to commit the fate of his country to men who were daily and weekly imbued with the principles inculcated by such publications. It is utterly absurd to talk of the mere increase of schools, as if such increase implied education in the proper sense of the word. At the schools a boy is taught to read and write, but he is not taught, and never can be taught, what he ought to read, and what he ought to abstain from reading hereafter. His mind is simply made photographic. He can take in and retain the ideas of others; and, unfortunately, the expressed ideas which come most naturally, easily, and perhaps most palatably within his reach, are precisely those which are most dangerous to his morals, and most likely to give him false views of society, and to unfit him for a proper discharge of his duties alike as a Christian and a subject. Lord John Russell, we are thoroughly convinced, is at this moment entirely ignorant of the kind of literature which is current among, and greedily devoured by the operative classes. It is no wonder that such should be the case. We confess, quite frankly, that our attention was drawn to the subject, not much more than two years ago, by certain representations made by publishers on the subject of the paper duty as affecting popular publications. Being unable to reconcile their statements with certain facts which came under our own knowledge, we thought it advisable to institute an inquiry, and in the course of that we collected copies of such works as were most generally circulated among the working classes. We are most happy to admit that some of them were entirely unexceptionable in their tone and doctrine. Many men are working among the operative classes with a true knowledge of their calling, and a sincere and devout intention to dedicate themselves to the task of raising the minds of the people, by inculcating sound principles of economy, morality, and healthful and religious feelings. But these constitute the exceptions, not the rule. The political journals which have the largest circulation are something more than Radical; they are, if not avowedly, at least in spirit, republican. The Peerage and the Established Church are the institutions which they assail with the most undisguised ferocity; and no means which falsehood can suggest are left unemployed to turn both into contempt, and to inflame the minds of the people against the aristocracy and the clergy. Personality, vituperation, and ignorance, are the characteristics of those journals. Lord John Russell, we suspect, would hardly have ventured to lay so much stress upon this educational argument, had he been aware of the manner in which he is habitually mentioned by those oracles of the lower orders. We have read descriptions of and commentaries upon himself, his character, and his measures, which assuredly were the reverse of flattering, as they were clearly calumnious and wicked. Several of the works of fiction, which are most greedily bought up, are utterly loathsome and depraved. The public appetite is not to be sated, as in days gone by, with mere melodramic romance, and tales of the wild and wonderful--there must be a relish of cantharides in the dish in order to make it palatable. We seldom hear anything nowadays of our old friends, the benevolent robber, the mysterious monk, the misanthropical count, or the persecuted damsel--these characters belonged to past times; our caterers for the public taste deal exclusively with the present. The nobleman of these fictions, whether he be old or young, is invariably a profligate and a seducer. No imaginable combinations of vice are too revolting for him--no villany too hideous to deter him. The heroine usually is "a daughter of the people," who sometimes successfully resists and sometimes falls a victim to the arts of the noble miscreant. But in either case, she is compelled to go through various stages of temptation and trial, which are described in glowing colours. Brothels, both public and private, are represented with an abominable minuteness of detail. So are clubs and gambling-houses, in which the aristocracy are represented as squandering the hard-won earnings of the poor. Compared with such writers, Eugene Sue appears almost a pattern of austere morality; and we believe that no man who has had the curiosity to inspect his works can misunderstand the force of that observation. Then there are biographies, in which the modern Plutarch gives a detailed and circumstantial account of such worthies as O'Connor who was murdered by the Mannings, giving due prominence to his personal intrigues from boyhood downwards. For the younger portion of the community there are cheap editions of pickpocket prowess, both in the narrative and the dramatic form, and enticing details of the exploits of divers other ruffians and burglars. All of these publications are illustrated by woodcuts, some of which, though not by any means the majority, display a considerable degree of artistical accomplishment.

Such is the favourite reading of the lower orders--such the practical application of their boasted educational powers. Unless education can go beyond this, we regard it not as a blessing, but as a curse. This is not the kind of liberty of the press which was contended for by Milton--it is a base license, calculated to deprave the morals, and pervert the understanding of the people. If the case be as we have stated it--if it is an undeniable fact that such are the doctrines and views inculcated by some of those publications which have an immense sale in the manufacturing districts--surely we may be excused if we hesitate to admit that the education of the lower orders is such that they can be safely intrusted with the franchise. It is not true that they are compelled to take this kind of literary diet for lack of better food. With them it is absolute choice. There are, as we have already said, many cheap journals and publications of an unexceptionable character, but, unless our information is altogether erroneous, these are neglected and put aside for the others of a vicious tendency.

Now, it does appear to us, though we shall be glad to be informed to the contrary, that the qualification which Lord John Russell proposes to establish in the towns and boroughs will admit a large proportion of the class for which such publications are intended, to the possession of the franchise. We are sure, at all events, that it will bring in a large mass of those whose political opinions are represented by the _Weekly Despatch_. Indeed, it seems to us very like household suffrage under another name. If we take a house rated at the annual value of £5, we shall find that the tenant of it is paying only 2s. 6d. per week, which appears to be very nearly the minimum of rent in large towns. If the reader will look at Mr Mayhew's interesting and instructive work, _London Labour and the London Poor_, he will find in the 42d. number, at page 231, a statement of the rent usually paid by the operative scavengers of the metropolis. Mr Mayhew gives us two estimates of the rent of those who have regular work and pay--the one being 3s., and the other 3s. 6d. per week. Now, it must be obvious that a qualification which admits the scavenger, can hardly exclude any one else; so that, in reality, in so far as regards towns, it would be difficult to push democracy further. We should like to ask Lord John Russell if he really and sincerely believes that the scavengers, as a class, are proper, fit, and competent persons to return members to Parliament? It is very easy to talk in general terms about the growing intelligence and increasing education of the people; but we should much prefer, in a matter of this sort, to be instructed by actual facts. We are not of opinion that the lower classes in this country are better educated or more enlightened than they were formerly; and we have been unable to find any evidence at all to justify such an assertion. What evidence does exist upon the subject leads us to form a conclusion directly opposite; and we beg to draw the attention of our readers to the following tables. The first shows the number of criminals throughout England and Wales who could neither read nor write. The investigation embraces a period of ten years--from 1839 to 1848 inclusive--the average annual number of criminals being 27,542:--

NUMBER OF CRIMINALS IN ENGLAND AND WALES UNABLE TO READ OR WRITE.

Year. Number. 1839, 8,196 1840, 9,058 1841, 9,220 1842, 10,128 1843, 9,173 1844, 7,901 1845, 7,438 1846, 7,698 1847, 9,050 1848, 9,691

Here, certainly, there are no signs of educational improvement; on the contrary, the last year, with but one exception, exhibits the greatest amount of ignorance. But in case this list should not be thought a fair one, it being quite possible that education may not yet have penetrated so low as the class of society which affords the largest contribution to crime, let us adopt another, which is liable to no such exception. The following is an abstract of the number of persons in England and Wales who at their marriage signed the register by marks, in consequence of their being unable to write; and it extends over precisely the same period. The average annual number of persons married was 261,340:--

NUMBER OF PERSONS MARRIED IN ENGLAND AND WALES UNABLE TO WRITE THEIR NAMES.

Year. Number. 1839, 100,616 1840, 104,335 1841, 99,634 1842, 94,996 1843, 101,235 1844, 107,985 1845, 118,894 1846, 117,633 1847, 104,306 1848, 105,937

The result of the whole is, that out of every hundred persons married during the above years in England and Wales, _forty could not write their names_; and the ignorance in 1848 was much greater than in 1839!

Really, with these facts before us, we cannot but wonder at the temerity of Lord John Russell in using the following language on the occasion of the introduction of his measure:--

"But there is another ground which I confess has great influence on my mind, and it was that ground which formed a case for the original proposition of reform in 1822, namely, the growing intelligence and education of the people. _I could prove, if I were not afraid of wearying the House by going into statistics--I could show_ by the number of newspapers and of books, by the great number of schools established since 1831, that a great increase has taken place in intelligence among the people. _But I do not think the proof necessary_, as the experience of every honourable member is sufficient to induce him to concur in my statement, and to say that the franchise given in 1831 might be made more extensive at the present time."

Why did he not prove it? Certain we are of this, that the House of Commons would neither have shown nor felt any weariness at listening to statistics which could satisfactorily establish that the people of this country were rising in the scale of intelligence. But it was utterly impossible for Lord John Russell, dexterous as he is, to prove facts which have no foundation. He durst not appeal to such tests as that afforded by the register of marriages; and therefore he calmly assumes "intellectual improvement," just as his colleagues were in the habit of assuming "prosperity," without any substantial proof; and he applies for corroboration to that most unsatisfactory source, "the experience of every honourable member"! We say, however, that this is a matter in which no juggling or evasion can be allowed. The question of lowering the suffrage is one of the deepest importance to the nation; and if Lord John Russell rests, as he undoubtedly does, the greater part of his case upon the increased intelligence of the nation, he must prove that, if he can, to the entire satisfaction of the country, and we challenge him to do it. But it is quite evident that the noble lord has no confidence in his own statement. Towards the close of his speech we find him using the following language, which we cannot regard as altogether consistent with the passage which we have already quoted:--

"Sir, I trust that when this enlarged franchise is given, we shall next see the government of this country, in whosesoever hands it be, consider most seriously and earnestly the great question of the education of the people. _This question of the franchise is not alien from that other one of providing that the instruction, the education of the people, should be in a better state than it now is._ I am convinced that if, after a measure of this kind, in another session of Parliament, this House shall consider the means of establishing a really national system of education, they will confer one of the greatest blessings which can be conferred upon this country; a measure for which, I believe, the people are now almost prepared, and which, after further discussion, I do trust might be carried with very nearly a general assent."

Surely it must occur to every one to ask why the noble philanthropist, entertaining such strong and generous views on the subject of national education, has delayed so very long reducing them to a practical form? Instead of consuming the last session in fruitless debates to carry through the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, the provisions of which have already become a dead letter, to the gross scandal and positive detriment of the cause of Protestantism, Lord John Russell might have occupied himself wisely and profitably by promoting the general advancement of education throughout the country. We fear, however, that his present educational zeal is not one whit more earnest and real than his indignation against Papal aggression. We are getting used to these promissory notes of the noble lord, as also to his accommodation bills, which sometimes are drawn to supersede them. We know quite well what purpose is intended to be served by his hints of grand national improvements to be proposed "in another session of Parliament." The purpose is Whig supremacy, and the perpetuation of that family and oligarchical alliance which is the sole principle of the present Ministry. But, supposing him to be in earnest, what sort of a logician does he prove himself? If education is, or ought to be, one of the conditions of the franchise, what shall we say to the man who first gives the franchise and then proposes to educate? This certainly is the most notable instance which we have seen in our day of that process which is properly expressed by the metaphor of "putting the cart before the horse." Undoubtedly the question of the franchise is not alien from that of the education of the people--knowledge and power may very well go hand in hand together; but in this instance Lord John Russell proposes to give the power first, and to impart the knowledge at some more convenient season. In our view, it would be quite as rational a proceeding to intrust the conduct of a railway engine and train, to a party wholly ignorant of the nature of the machinery, on the understanding that, at some future period, he was to acquire a knowledge of its working!

May we be allowed to express, with all humility--although in doing so we may be subjected to the charge of being behind the march of modern intellect--our very serious doubts whether the class which Lord John Russell proposes to enfranchise, is, on the whole, adequate to the proper discharge of the electoral duties? It may be a prejudice upon our part, but we cannot think that a scavenger or a dustman is as likely to form a correct opinion of the qualities which ought to recommend a candidate as the man who has enjoyed the advantages of a superior education. We hesitate to put the costermonger on an exact political equality with the philosopher. We think, for the sake of the general welfare and security, that he should not be so placed; because it is very obvious that, if this bill passes into a law, the general average intelligence of the electors will be greatly lowered, and a fearful preponderance given to the unlettered over the lettered classes. Below a certain point you cannot expect to find generally such a degree of imparted intelligence--though you may find much natural shrewdness--as ought to prevail among those who are intrusted with political power. Therefore we cannot but regard the urgent and admitted necessity for general education as a direct argument against the arbitrary lowering of the franchise; and we further think, that the franchise, if conferred in this way, will, in many cases, be morally detrimental to the people who receive it. We all know that, under the present system, corrupt practices have prevailed to a very odious extent. The late disclosures at St Albans show us that bribery is more common and widely diffused than any one would willingly believe; and there are good grounds for suspecting that even the metropolis of England is not altogether untainted. The mischief has become chronic. There are places, possessing the privilege of returning members to Parliament, in which the vote of almost every man is rated at a certain sum; and unless a candidate is willing to satisfy these demands, he may as soon hope to stop the Thames as to succeed in the object of his ambition. This is a monstrous evil; but we cannot see how it is to be cured by the admission of a new class of electors, more straitened in circumstances, and therefore more liable to be swayed by pecuniary influence, than even the older one. The bribery will continue; the number of the bribed will be enlarged; but the dividend per head will be smaller. Now, we entertain very strong opinions upon this same matter of bribery. We hold it to be the foulest blot in the working of the British Constitution; and we say advisedly, that nothing can be done to purify the system, short of an enactment enforcing rigorous pains and penalties, both on those who are proved to have tendered, and on those who are proved to have accepted, a bribe. There is no other way of dealing with corruption. Under the ballot--which many of the Radical reformers represent as a sure and certain check, but which we hope, for the sake of manhood and truth, will never be enacted--bribery could most easily be reduced to a system of organised betting. What could be simpler than for an agent, if the ballot were in operation--thus, be it remarked, precluding the possibility of an after inquiry--to offer bets of a certain amount to every man on the roll, that Mr So-and-so would _not_ be returned, naming the opponent of his employer, and paying these, very honourably, whenever the event came off? The present bill does nothing whatever to prevent bribery; and although the "Corrupt Practices at Elections Bill," which has also been introduced, may facilitate an inquiry into the peculiar circumstances of any suspicious case, we greatly doubt the soundness of the principle upon which it professes to be based. Lord John Russell's view seems to be shortly this, that when it can be shown that corrupt practices prevail, the offending borough or constituency is to be disfranchised, and its privileges transferred to some other place which is not at present represented. He assumes that bribery prevails only in small boroughs, and he looks upon these as a fund which, some time or other, will become available for the supply of towns which ought, from their importance, to have a further share in the representation. We doubt both the accuracy and the morality of this view. Bribery is not confined to small constituencies; it has been practised largely in others. The only constituency in Scotland known positively to be tainted, numbers between 1800 and 1900 electors. Is London itself so virginal that no suspicion has been raised as to the purity of its electoral fame? We can hardly believe that it was made the subject of an unfounded calumny. Now, if justice is at all to be observed in matters of this sort, it is difficult, nay impossible, to understand why small corrupt constituencies are to be disfranchised, while larger ones are to be allowed to escape unpunished. And what is to be the criterion for disfranchisement? Let us suppose the case of a constituency of 2000, whereof one-half are proved to be bribed--a number more than sufficient to pervert the true expression of that constituency's opinion--are the remaining thousand electors, who have not participated in such practices, to be deprived of their privilege on account of the sins of their neighbours? This, we apprehend, would be neither just, politic, nor practicable; yet, if we understand him aright, Lord John Russell proposes to adopt this method with regard to small constituencies. Then again, it is alleged that there are places which, from their growing importance, ought to have representatives. If so, surely the present was the proper time to have supplied that want. There would have been but Petty regret for the extinction of Calne and divers other places, which, by some miracle or other, escaped disfranchisement twenty years ago, and which do not represent any interest, public or private, entitled to Parliamentary consideration. As it is, the "places of growing importance"--we wish we had been favoured with an accurate list of these--must wait until the corruption alleged to exist in the smaller boroughs shall extend itself to the villages which are now hung on as pendants, and until the taint is no longer endurable by a human nostril. Is there not something grossly absurd and unstatesmanlike in the proposition, which would make places of admitted importance dependent for their chance of representation on the possible increase of corruption?

We do not deny that there are several anomalies in the present distribution of representation, but not one of these is touched by the provisions of this measure. We are clearly of opinion that it would have been far better for the interests of the country had matters been allowed to remain undisturbed. It is plain that there was no general call for such a measure; and we have already pointed out several most serious objections to the proposed lowering of the franchise in the burghs. But if the question of reform of the representation is really to be taken up, it should be approached in a very different spirit from that which seems to have dictated this slovenly and imperfect scheme. The whole system should be considered and examined from its very foundation; and, in particular, the soundness of the principle which makes the possession of the suffrage depend upon a property qualification ought to be deliberately discussed. Several schemes, which have been proposed during the last year or two, are deserving of serious thought. One of these, suggested by Mr Stapleton,[20] formerly the private secretary of Mr Canning, is, at all events, worth consideration, and is certainly much preferable to a plan for bestowing power upon ignorance. He proposes that a considerable number of members of the House of Commons, from eighty to a hundred, should be returned by the different learned professions, and large public institutions, just as is presently done in the case of the universities. He says, with much show of truth,--

"Is it not then a matter of extreme wonder that, in a legislature consisting of six hundred and fifty-six members, only six should be returned by the _learning_ and _education_ of the nation? Is it not unaccountable, that when the body of the old House of Commons was thrown by the Medeas of the day into their seething cauldron of reform, in order to infuse into its aged limbs livelier and more vital powers, it should never have occurred to these daring men to create some constituencies composed exclusively of educated persons above the suspicion of bribery, who would select their representatives for no other motives than that they believed them to be the best men at once to understand and to promote the imperial interests of Britain's almost boundless dominions? But is not this still more extraordinary when there existed no need for the creation of such bodies, seeing that they existed already made to their hands; seeing that they are to be found in all the professions to which English gentlemen belong?"

[20] _Suggestions for a Conservative and Popular Reform in the Commons House of Parliament._ By AUGUSTUS G. STAPLETON, B.A. Hatchard, London.

Mr Stapleton then proceeds to give an outline of his plan, which we need not discuss, because, under present circumstances, we deprecate any change whatever, on the general ground that no change is wanted by the nation. It is impossible that any kind of constitution can be made absolutely perfect; and therefore, when we have a constitution which, at all events, is satisfactory to the majority, we see no reason to disturb it. We have no objection to amendments which do not infringe upon a principle already laid down, and tacitly acquiesced in by all parties; indeed, we shall presently have to notice some amendments which might advantageously be introduced with regard to the representation of Scotland; but we do so solely because Ministers have insisted upon making themselves agitators, and have, therefore, in a manner, forced the discussion upon us. We do not think a new Reform Bill necessary; and we very much doubt whether this one will be read a second time; nevertheless, as it has been introduced, we are justified in pointing out such obvious improvements as might be made without any lowering of the franchise.

We do not pretend to possess that degree of information which would justify us in criticising the details of the English Reform Bill, introduced specially by the Premier. We shall say nothing of the tinkering process which he proposes to apply to the lesser boroughs, or of the curious selection of the places which are set down in the schedule by way of additions to them. We are not qualified from personal knowledge to speak of those matters, but we rejoice to observe that the subject is in the hands of that practised anatomist, _The Times_, whose dissection, so far as it has gone, is an exposition of insufferable corruption. But we have a word or two to say regarding the new Reform Bill for Scotland, to which we earnestly entreat the attention of our countrymen, whatever may be their shade of political opinion. We regard the matter as a national one of the utmost importance; and we shall try to approach it without any feeling of prejudice.

Of late years there has been a prevalent feeling in Scotland, that this portion of the United Kingdom did not receive full justice in the distribution of representatives which was made in 1832. That view has been over and over again stated and illustrated in journals widely differing from each other in general politics, but agreeing as to that particular point; and we shall presently have occasion to notice some of the leading arguments which were employed. We think it, however, right to say, that the entire change which was made in the Scottish representative system by the act of 1832, rendered it very difficult for the framers of that measure to calculate with certainty on its results. They had few data from which they might calculate the probable amount of the constituencies; and it is quite possible that they thought it safest, in the case of a population hitherto unused to open elections, to be parsimonious rather than liberal in the allotment of the members.

But twenty years have since then gone by. The people of Scotland are now as well used to elections as their southern neighbours; and it is admitted on all hands that intelligence and education are at least as widely diffused in this country as elsewhere. Therefore, now that the question of reform has been again brought forward, and a new bill introduced for amending our representation, it is incumbent upon us to consider whether the allotment of members made to Scotland is a just one; and that we can only ascertain by instituting a comparison with certain constituencies of England. We must be very cautious in doing so, to avoid exaggeration of any kind, and not to leap at rash conclusions by contrasting the constituency of this or that small English borough with a large Scottish one, possessing the same amount of political power. We must remember that there are many anomalies even in the English representation; and we must not try to make out a stronger case than we really have, by setting, for example, Calne, with its 159 electors, against the populous county of Perth with 4806 on the roll. We have overwhelming arguments on our side for an increase of the representation, if it should be determined that any kind of change is to be made, without having recourse to extremes.

We shall consider this matter simply on its own merits, without any reference whatever to the proposed increase of the franchise; our observations upon that point being applicable alike to the constituencies of England and of Scotland. We shall take the electoral rolls as they stand at present, and state our case from them.

By the Reform Act of 1832, every English county returns at least two members to Parliament--many of them possess a larger privilege. Yorkshire has six members; twenty-five counties, being divided, send four each; seven have the privilege of three.

No Scottish county returns more than a single member to Parliament; the number of the whole being precisely that which was fixed by the Act of Union.

Now, if, in 1832, no addition had been made to the English county representation, we should perhaps have no reason to complain. But such addition was made, to a very large extent; and now that a period of accounting has come, at the instance of the Prime Minister, it is our duty to see that, if there is to be a change at all, we are at least allowed something like a measure of justice.

Let us take the case of ten Scottish counties returning only _ten_ members:--

Scottish Counties. No. of Constituency.

Perthshire, 4806 Aberdeenshire, 4022 Ayrshire, 3823 Lanarkshire, 3785 Fife, 3211 Forfarshire, 2882 Dumfriesshire, 2520 Renfrewshire, 2450 Stirlingshire, 2257 Mid-Lothian, 2071 ------ Constituency of ten Scottish} counties returning } _ten_ members, } 31,827

Let us now contrast that table with another containing the electoral statistics of ten English counties, or divisions of counties, returning _twenty_ members to Parliament:--

English Counties. No. of Constituency.

Notts, N. D., 3817 Notts, S. D., 3539 Cambridge County, 3757 Hants, N. D., 3580 Salop, S. D., 3445 Sussex, W. D., 3289 Northumberland, 3063 Huntingdon County, 2892 Wilts, S. D., 2539 Rutland, 1908 ------ Constituency of ten English } counties returning } 31,829 _twenty_ members, }

Here is an aggregate constituency, almost exactly equal in amount; and yet the number of members returned by the English is precisely double of that returned by the Scottish counties.

This is a monstrous inequality; and it cannot be defended by reference to other anomalies. There can be no reason why Perthshire should not stand at least on an equality with Rutland, or why the metropolitan county of Scotland should not be put upon an equality with it. If the Tweed is to be an imaginary boundary, not separating two distinct nations, but flowing through one cordially united--and if, again, we are called upon, even partially, to remodel the constitution--let this enormous discrepancy in political power be immediately remedied, as remedied it can be, if Lord John Russell chooses to deal with the trash of small English boroughs as he ought to do. We, on our side, would have no objection whatever to make concessions. One or two of our Scottish counties are, in point of population and constituency, hardly worthy of the name. Bute, which was separated from Caithness in 1832, and which has only a constituency of 491, principally derived from the little town of Rothesay, might conveniently be incorporated with Dumbartonshire. Sutherland, with a wretched constituency of 207, ought certainly to be annexed to its nearest neighbour, Caithness; and, if further consolidation were required, Selkirk might be annexed to Peebles. In this way, only seven additional seats would be required to satisfy the just claims of the leading Scottish counties--claims which, if not satisfied just now, since the Whig Ministry have chosen to unsettle existing arrangements, will certainly be preferred hereafter, with possibly less temperance of tone than would be proper on the present occasion.

If the case needs further elucidation, we shall be glad to elucidate it. Without descending to the small English boroughs which return one member each, here is a list of twenty, each of which returns _two_ members. The number of the constituency in none of them reaches 400; and we do not believe that any man in the country will maintain that the best of them is entitled to the same consideration which should be given to Perthshire or Mid-Lothian.

English Boroughs with two members each. No. of Constituency.

Bodmin, 381 Tewkesbury, 378 Buckingham, 376 Ripon, 365 Devizes, 358 Totness, 362 Marlow, (Great) 357 Evesham, 352 Wycombe, 346 Tavistock, 336 Cockermouth, 332 Chippenham, 314 Lymington, 287 Harwich, 272 Richmond, 262 Marlborough, 254 Andover, 252 Honiton, 240 Knaresbro', 230 Thetford, 210 ---- Constituency of twenty } English boroughs returning } 6264 _forty_ members, }

It cannot, even on the ground of other existing anomalies in the representation, be considered fair that twenty English boroughs, none of which are of any separate importance, should, with an aggregate constituency of only 6264, return to Parliament _ten members more than are allowed to the whole counties of Scotland_, the constituency of which amounts to 50,943.

With regard to the Scottish burghs, fewer changes are required; but three at least, whose constituency is above 2000, ought to possess the same privilege as Edinburgh and Glasgow, of returning two members each. These are--

Burghs. Constituency.

Aberdeen, 4547 Dundee, 2964 Leith, &c., 2027

Surely this is a reasonable demand. The great importance of these towns, as seats of manufacture and commerce, cannot be denied; and it is not just that their interests should be disregarded for the sake of maintaining intact a few nomination boroughs in the South.

Since the passing of the Reform Bill of 1832, two manufacturing towns in the south of Scotland have greatly increased in importance. These are Hawick and Galashiels. We would propose that these towns, along with Peebles and Innerleithen, should be erected into a new group of burghs, with the privilege of returning one member to Parliament. In this way, the constituency of Roxburghshire, now amounting to 2033, would be reduced below the point of 2000, which we have assumed, both in counties and burghs, as the number entitling us to demand an increase of representation; and the principal objections to the amalgamation of Peebles and Selkirk counties would at once be removed.

Finally, we would urge upon the legislature, in the event of any organic change being seriously discussed in Parliament, as a measure not less of expediency than of justice, the propriety of giving a fair representation to the Scottish universities. It is not creditable to the learning of this country, and not conducive to the welfare of these important national institutions, that they should be placed on a lower footing than the universities of the other kingdoms. As a proof of the detrimental effects of this neglect, we may state the notorious fact, that so far back as the year 1826, a Royal Commission was issued for the inspection and visitation of the Scottish universities. The visitation was held; an immense mass of information was collected; and, after an inquiry of unusual duration, the whole proceedings of the Commissioners, along with detailed reports, were printed and laid before Parliament. Since then, not the slightest notice has been taken of these reports, nor any effect given to the recommendations of the Commissioners--a circumstance which we can only attribute to the utterly unrepresented state of the universities. Let the Scottish universities, therefore, be adequately represented; St Andrews being combined for electoral purposes with Edinburgh, and the two Colleges of Aberdeen with the University of Glasgow. In this way, by the addition of two members, the learning of Scotland would have a direct voice in the legislature.

Such is the nature of the Reform Bill which, in our humble opinion, ought to have been introduced for Scotland, supposing that any change in the existing system was really advisable. It would be a very perilous experiment indeed to lower the franchise here, especially in the burghs. Our constituencies, we are glad to say, have hitherto, with scarcely any exception, maintained their character for purity, a circumstance which we attribute very much to the non-existence among them of a class corresponding to the freemen and potwallopers. But to descend lower in the scale would be to invite the very evil from which Lord John Russell professes to recoil in horror. We need not, however, again enforce that division of our argument. If there is to be any reform at all, it should be a substantial, not a theoretical one; and in dealing with the Scottish measure we have attempted to point out the real improvements which ought to be made on the existing arrangements, without departing in any way from the spirit or principles of the Reform Act of 1832.

Let us shortly recapitulate our views with regard to Scottish Reform.

We would give to ten counties, the constituency of each of which is at present above 2000, an additional member each.

We would give to three burghs, with the same amount of constituency, an additional member each.

We would erect a new group of burghs, with the privilege of returning one member.

We would give the Scottish universities the right of returning two members.

This would imply an addition of sixteen members to Scotland; but there are three counties which, from their proximity to others, and the smallness of their constituencies, might well be amalgamated, just as Ross is at present with Cromarty, Clackmannan with Kinross, and Elgin with Nairn. The numbers of the amalgamated constituencies would stand as follows:--

Dumbarton and Bute, 1805 Caithness and Sutherland 49 Peebles and Selkirk, 905

with some slight deduction in the latter case for the small towns separated from the counties, and erected into a group of burghs along with Hawick.

Thus, only thirteen new members would be required for Scotland; and surely, when we limit our demand so far as to desire no additional representation for any existing constituency which does not exceed 2000, we cannot be charged with extravagance. Lord John Russell, if he must needs unsettle his own handiwork, and assume, for the future, the part of a mere political cobbler, can very easily spare us the required number: at all events, if he does not, his bills should be summarily rejected. Hitherto we have not asked for reform, or for any increase in the number of our national representatives. We were contented to leave matters as they were, so long as no change was proposed. But now that the proposal for a change has been made, and made on the part of Ministers, the people of Scotland will be strangely wanting in duty to themselves, and in fidelity to their country, if they do not insist upon a fair measure of justice. And they must do it early. Upon the arrangement made with regard to the English boroughs, depends our sole chance of increased Scottish representation. If we wait until the English bill has passed into a law, we need not hope to extort from the ministry the concession of a single member.

We ought, perhaps, to say--for it is as well to exhaust the subject--that we have no objection to make to the minor measures of detail contained in the Lord Advocate's Scottish bill. He stated, very truly, that the manufacture of fictitious votes was a system which ought to be put an end to; and also, very fairly, that no one political party was more chargeable than another with blame in this matter. Without, then, inquiring too curiously into the origin of the system, we shall simply express our entire concurrence in the sentiments of the learned lord, and our acquiescence in the remedy which he proposes.

We cannot, however, regard the Scottish measure otherwise than as entirely subsidiary to that proposed by Lord John Russell for England. In our opinion, the noble lord has brought an old house about his ears. He wants to do two things which are hardly reconcilable. He seeks to retain the nomination boroughs, with such change only as may give a colour for their retention; and, at the same time, in other places, to increase the popular franchise; and this he has managed in so clumsy a way, that he has only succeeded in unsettling what was fixed, without providing for stability for the future. Even if the Radical party were contented with his measure--which they are not--and if they religiously abstained from urging their peculiar panaceas on our acceptance, it is quite plain that sufficient matter of discord must arise out of this bill, to give full employment to the Legislature for several years to come. It is an inflammatory, not a sedative prescription: it is rather a blister than an opiate. In the Reform Bill of 1832, a distinct principle can be traced, though the details are not always consistent with it. In this measure there is no principle at all. It is on all hands allowed that, in one respect at least, the Reform Act has not improved the character of the Legislature. Under its operation, a class of men decidedly inferior to their predecessors in talent, training, sagacity, and mental acquirement, have found their way into Parliament. Questions of national import are less considered--certainly less thoroughly understood, than formerly; and class interests, too often antagonistic to sound general policy, are advocated, with a selfish and pertinacious zeal. It may be said that this is an evil inseparable from popular representation; and so it is, to a certain extent: but the evil will be greater or less according to the prejudice or the enlightenment of the representatives. It is a huge mistake to suppose, though it is constantly assumed by public writers, and even made matter of boast by orators upon the hustings, that men are sent to the House of Commons to represent this or that class, community, or interest, without reference to any other consideration. They are sent there for no such purpose. The whole tenor of their deliberations ought to be directed towards the general wellbeing of the community; and if this principle is disregarded, public debate degenerates into a contest of classes. We shall find, on observation, that very large constituencies rarely send distinguished statesmen to Parliament; the reason for which, as we take it, is, that the representative is expected to identify himself entirely with the peculiar interests of the electors. We require from judges, who administer the laws, an entire absence of any personal interest in the suit which is brought before them. We cannot exercise the same strictness in the case of those who make the laws; but this at least is clear, that the higher the representative standard can be raised in point of intelligence, the better. And how is this to be secured? Not, certainly, by lowering the franchise, as Lord John Russell proposes, so as to let in a flood of ignorance and prejudice upon the existing electoral body--not certainly by increasing the number of those who estimate every measure solely by the effect which it is calculated to have upon themselves. We all know that, in addressing popular assemblies, the first and most effective appeal which the demagogue can make, is directed to the self-interest of his audience. It must always be so--for this plain reason, that ill-educated men, who have neither the leisure nor the capacity for reflection, invariably act upon the motive of self-interest. They know, or think they know, what would be good for themselves; and very seldom, indeed, do they take pains to investigate further. Hence the popularity with the lower orders of such subjects as the reduction of taxation, no matter by what means accomplished--as the demolition of the Established Church, as the cheap loaf, and many others. They will not listen to--or, if they do, they cannot understand--any arguments to the contrary; and they measure out their favour to the speaker or candidate, precisely according to the degree in which he coincides with their own prejudices. Orators, ancient and modern, who understood their art, have invariably attempted to reconcile their conclusions with the self-interest of their audiences, rather than appeal to the higher motives of truth, justice, or moral obligation. It is on account of this natural tendency that, after such deliberation as Lord John Russell has mercifully allowed us, we are forced to express our conviction that his proposed measures are eminently mischievous and impolitic. Being so, and entertaining very serious doubts whether he really expected to carry them, they seem to us eminently stupid, and, when taken in conjunction with other recent exhibitions, we can hardly resist the conclusion that, as a political leader, Lord John Russell has very nearly fulfilled his mission.

Such are the views which have occurred to us on perusing the draughts of the contemplated measures. Some points we could well desire to have reconsidered, had the necessary time been allowed us; on others--such, for example, as the changes which ought to be made on the existing system of Scottish representation--we have long ago formed a calm, deliberate, and dispassionate opinion. The haste with which Lord John Russell seems inclined to force on his incongruous measures, argues but little confidence, on his part, of their actual wisdom, or of their fitness to withstand scrutiny. It is, of course, desirable that no measure should be unnecessarily delayed; but there is a wide difference between the fair and proper determination of a Minister to have his project discussed with all convenient speed, and that indecent hurry which deprives the country at large, and the organs of public opinion, of the opportunity of duly considering his plan, and weighing it as its importance deserves. Lord John Russell, in this instance--we are sorry that we cannot use a milder expression--has attempted a discreditable _coup-de-main_. Up to the last moment the nature of his proposed measures was not divulged to the public, although he had ample means within his power of affording general information. Yet no sooner was the bill brought in--it not even having been printed or tabled when leave was given to introduce it--than a single fortnight was arbitrarily fixed as the intervening period before the second reading, upon which, in the general case, the principle of a bill depends! We do not profess to be adepts in Parliamentary lore and precedent, but it does strike us that, when no urgency can be alleged, a measure of this sort, affecting as it does the whole interests of the Empire, and involving a change which, if not organic, is certainly enormous, ought most assuredly to be submitted to the public for a reasonable time before it is forced through the House of Commons. However late examples on the other side of the Channel may have prepossessed Lord John Russell in favour of long secresy and rapid subsequent action, we cannot as yet allow him to assume the functions of a dictator. Were he a wiser man than he has shown himself to be, his schemes might require less deliberation; but he cannot now expect, after his many failures and abortive devices, that any party will take him on trust; or repose, without full investigation, confidence in his powers of statesmanship. What is worse, there is a general impression abroad that the Cabinet has not been at unity regarding the nature of the measure to be proposed. We can readily believe it. In a junta so constituted, there must have been considerable clashing of private and of public interests; and if it should turn out that the former have prevailed, it needs, we think, little argument to show that the greater was the necessity for giving the public time to deliberate seriously upon a question of such paramount importance. We have outlived the days of "_sic volo, sic jubeo_." We recollect the time when Lord John Russell assumed the bearing of a Tribune of the people; and if his memory is defective on that point, we refer him to Mr Roebuck's lately published _History of the Whig Ministry_. He may now, if he chooses, disown the part; but if so, he must submit to the fate which has overtaken all lapsed Tribunes. He is not now without competitors. The modern Sicinius Velutus and Junius Brutus, genuine Tribunes of the people, are watching him as closely as their prototypes did Coriolanus; and he is not the less selected for their victim, because, at the present moment, they appear to b, favourably disposed. What urgency was there on the present occasion? If for twenty years it has not been thought necessary to make any violent change on the working of the constitution, surely a longer period than a fortnight ought to have been granted, in order that men, both within and without the Houses of Parliament, might consider the principle and master the details of a measure which is entirely to alter the electoral arrangements of the empire. We cannot help thinking that, if Lord John Russell could have calculated upon any considerable degree of public support--if he had expected to see monster-meetings held in the towns for the purpose of backing up his schemes--he would not have exhibited such unmistakable symptoms of hurry. If the coin which he tenders is a good one, and of sound metal, it will bear inspection; if, on the contrary, it is a mere counterfeit, there is the more need of scrutiny. That it is counterfeit, we have not the least shadow of a doubt. It is not always our fortune to coincide in the political opinions advocated by the _Times_; but we are glad that, in the present instance, there is no difference in our views as to the practical working of the measure, one certain result of which would be the continual introduction of new elements of strife into the Legislature. "We have not alluded," says a late writer in the _Times_, "to a tithe of the evils incident to the protracted and detailed operation now recommended by the Premier. Every Parliament, every Session, every election--and we have, on the average, a new member once a fortnight--the fires of party spirit would be fed with a new politico-judicial process. Borough would be dragged into Parliament in requital for borough, and the result would be a series of angry retaliations, or of disgraceful compromises. We do not hesitate to avow our belief, that the operation of gradual reforms, advised by Lord John Russell, would take up at least one-third of the time of the House of Commons for the next twenty years, and, after all, disappoint the intentions of its author, by driving Parliament to some much larger measure than any it has yet seriously entertained. The last Reform Act was a summary, a severe, and, in some respects, a final measure. Accordingly, the wounds it inflicted were soon healed, and in two or three years everybody acquiesced in it. The present measure is expressly made not to be final. The ship leaves the port with the fire already smouldering in its cargo, the leak already gaping in its timbers; and, instead of an end of controversy, we have only the beginning of the end."

Our old acquaintance, the Jew Bill, now figures as a clause in the new measure of reform. It seems as if the introduction of a vast flood of electoral ignorance would not altogether satisfy the noble lord. The House of Commons, in order to approach his ideas of perfection, must also cease to be Christian. Is this a bill which ought, in any shape, to receive the support of the people of England?

POSTSCRIPT.

Just as our last sheets were passing through the press, we learn that the Ministry have resigned. We are not surprised by the intelligence. We are exceedingly glad, however, to think that they cannot draw upon the country for any fund of credit on account of their proposed reform measures, which clearly was their object; and that, by general acquiescence, their scheme, even before discussion, was condemned. We do not claim for the author of "Cupid in the Cabinet," which appeared in our last Number, the possession of _clairvoyance_; nevertheless, his vaticination has been most signally and literally fulfilled.

_Printed by William Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh._

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Transcriber's note:

Minor typographical and punctuation errors have been corrected without note. Irregularities and inconsistencies in the text have been retained as printed.

Mismatched quotes are not fixed if it's not sufficiently clear where the missing quote should be placed.

The cover for the eBook version of this book was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.