its existence, in the most modified state, and shuffling duplicity of legerdemain, it was merited by those adopted in the brief-happy wordthe brief administration of the wretched Talents; and if we forget them, it is only because we are absorbed by the contemplation of the more heinous villainies of the faction. And, again, we are too well used to hear of England's ruin in the particular of its funds, to be much frightened. Hume-not exactly Joseph, but David, a man a leetle more famous some seventy years ago, pronounced us bankrupt. Many have been the similar prophecies since. In 1796, Tom Paine proved, in a most mathematical manner, that in twenty years from that time, the English funding system would be demolished totally; and Cobbett was so enraptured with the accuracy of the demonstration, that he, as we all know, disinterred a baboon or a negro, (I forget which,) and brought over the bones as the identical skeleton of the brandy-bibbing advocate of the Rights of Man. Cobbett has since put off the date to May 1822; on which day he was to broil himself on a Gridiron; of which he gave an accurate likeness at the beginning of one of his Registers, if the bubble did not burst -if there was not, as he called it, a puff out. I should be sorry, indeed, to hear that he was taken at his word; for I could better spare a better man. Now, sir, I never despaired of the stability of any of the institutions of the country. Before Trafalgar was fought, I said, and enforced my saying by the British argument of a rump and dozen, that the English fleet would sweep the French and Spaniards off the sea. When Buonaparte was moving on Waterloo, I said he would be smashed before the Duke of Wellington; and that the ever-to-be-honoured flag of Old England would wave where the leopards of Harry the King had waved long ago-over the conquered walls of Paris. I was reminded of the talents of Napoleon-his mighty marshals his enthusiastic soldiers his undoubted knowledge of war-his well-won fame as a great captain;-I was assailed besides by the Jacobin slang, of which you will see a specimen in Hobhouse's Letters froin Paris, which always sung defeat and disgrace to England, and rejoiced in the hoped-for approach of a new mess of murder. I made no reply-I merely offered the wager. I said nothing against the arguments, which proved, to the satisfaction of Sir Richard Philipps, and other philosophers, that we should be overthrown; for I trusted in the bayonets and the bottom of the soldiery that NEVER was beaten in the field, and the honour and steadiness of officers, whose backs an enemy NEVER had seen in a rout; and disdained to argue on the subject. That feeling do I carry into everything connected with my country. I trust in our present ministers; not because I care a farthing about any individual statesman among them, but because I know that any ministry put forward to represent Tory feeling, must have the interests of the country in their inmost hearts; and because I know also, that any ministry chosen by that party, which, with about a dozen exceptions, contains all the intellect, in every department of intellect, of England, must have the talents and knowledge requisite for the due guardianship and promotion of those inte rests. The financial bark may be tempest-tost; but lost it will not be, while in the hands of our chancellors. Feeling this as plainly as I feel the goosequill in my fingers, I shall not bother myself with the first three-and-forty pages of the 77th Number of the Edinburgh Review. Sperno HUMUM fugiente penna. (Pardon the pun.) I despise Hume with flying pen, and pass on. The general fama against Joseph is not relieved by the character of the Review, in which his conclusions are adopted as infallible. Do you not remember some of its contributors in former days-Chalmers, I believe; for he used to sully himself by dabbling in the sable stream, before we frightened him away, by our execution of the infidels-gravely asserting, and arguing, page after page, on the assertion, that nine-tenths of the people of England were paupers, supported by poor-rates extorted from the other tenth? This bedlamite proposi As this piece of almost beastly stupidity may appear incredible to those who have forgotten the back Numbers of the Edinburgh-that is, of course, everybody except professional people like ourselves-we shall copy it verbatim. In the 58th Number of that tion, which one would think should have startled anybody with ears of any length short of a yard, was grounded on the fact, that in a year of great distress, 900,000 people were returned as paupers; and the reviewer, with a knowledge of division worthy of the great Joseph himself, discovered, with much art and pains, that that sum is the tenth part of ten millions! Shade of the much-injured Cocker! what an immensity of misery you have escaped, by leaving the terrestrial globe before the days of Whig computers! Article the second, on the Game Laws —a set of rehashed jokes, by the reverend jester of the Edinburgh, Sydney Smyth, who obviously is growing very old-is appended to the name of a poor pamphlet, (concerning which, most judiciously, not a word is said in the Review,) by the Honourable and Reverend William Herbert, the facetious author of Helga, and other excellent jeux-d'esprit, much lauded in the Edinburgh Review, and highly patronized by the confectioners. Let it pass. Valeat quantum. After it, the third article, on the intolerable imposture of Prince Hohenlohe, which is needlessly cut up, may waddle. With them, let the sixth article, on Foreign Wool, spun out by some woolly-brained Balaamite, march in company. And the tenth, on Geology, shall slumber uncut by me.-How interes.ing a selection we have hitherto got through! The fifth article is on the pamphlets lately published by the mem bers of the French royal family. That the simple fact of their being written by persons of that rank, would suffice to get them pretty roundly abused by the Whigamore, was quite to be expected: I own, however, that I did not think he would have had the candour to avow, as he has done, in the very opening sentences of his critique, the existence of such a feeling. He begins, indeed, by a tirade against all royal authors. But I can assure this reviewer, that he is very ill-advised, when he thinks proper to do over again anything which Croker has already handled, as every one will confess who will compare this article with that on the same subject which appeared in the Quarterly. It is a poor exhibition; but the last page is by a different hand from the rest. And what a hand! The editor of the Duchesse D'Angouleme's Memoirs reprobates, with proper gentlemanly feeling, an indecent order made by the villains who were in power when the Bourbon ladies were in captivity. He justly remarks, that the phraseology of the order is untranslateable into English; on which the reviewer flies into a passion, and with great good taste, profound regard for truth, and decorous style of language, reminds us of the unhappy lady-unhappy, because she was profligate-who, for our sins, was given us as a queen. He silences, as he imagines, the editor by one word, “Milan. Talk, indeed, of our language having no name for the act of work, is an article on the Causes and Cure of Pauperism, (p. 262, &c. vol. 29,) and a supplement to it, as inserted in p. 498-501. In the supplement is given an abstract of the House of Commons Report on the subject; by which it appears that the average of paupers in the last three years of the war, amounted to 940,626. On which the reviewer remarks, that the population of England and Wales, as taken from the abstract laid before Parliament in the year 1811, appears to have been 10,150,615; so that the number of persons relieved from the poor's rates, appears to have been 9 in each 10 of the population!!!" The italics are the reviewer's own. "Such," he adds, "is the extraordinary picture, exhibited on the highest authority, of the richest, the most industrious, and most moral population that ever existed. More than nine-tenths of its whole amount occasionally subsisting on public charity!!!!" What a thricedouble ass! But the winding up of the article is one of the most delightful pieces of selfsatisfied blockheadism ever exhibited. "We," quoth the wiseacre," do not mean, however, to resume any part of the argument on this subject; but" (what think you, gentle reader ?)" shall end by merely recommending the facts" (his own italics) “ we have just abstracted, to the serious meditation of all whom they may concern." The facts! Oh! the facts! viz. that nine is more than nine-tenths of a hundred! Valuable facts, indeed; but just as good as Hume's facts, or Earl Grey's facts, or Duke Bedford's facts, or Little Waddington's facts, or Olive of Cumberland's facts, or Henry Brough. am's facts; or, in short, the facts of the whole worshipful party. If Chalmers, as Tim suspects, is the person guilty of this stupendous betise, nothing can be said in his defence, except, perhaps, that he was dozing at the time. Christian charity can suggest no other apology.-C. N. outrage on female delicacy by barbarous treatment-unmanly insult-indecent pryings-disgusting exposures -hired treachery-suborned falsehood! OUR language-the tongue spoken by the KING." [The vermin meant all the insult, the venom, the spite for that name-but with characteristic cowardice, adds, in order to give it an air of technicality," the Lords and Commons of OUR country," p. 108. What name does the writer of that sentence deserve? I believe it is on the tip of everybody's tongue, and I shall willingly leave my readers to give it utterance. insult her husband. With these feelings she came over. Were ministers to suffer such a woman, so stigmatized, so marked out as an object of disgrace by the voice of Europe, to be put at the head of our women, to form a dress circle, to give the pattern of morals? If they did, they were worthy of being turned out-turned out, do I say?-of being kicked out under a shower of spittle. There was not a Tory heart which did not bleed at the necessity of exposing her; but it was indispensible. The villainous Whigs, who never spared calumny against man or woman, (see Peter Pindar, Tom Moore, the Edinburgh Review, Morning Chronicle, Old Bloody, &c. &c.) found it a fine blowing horn to sound the impropriety of assailing female reputation. In point of fact, they might have said the same, if they were retained on the side of Mrs Brownrigg, the apprenticide-a Whig, by the by Why must these people be continually reminding us of the existence and history of the Queen? The time has gone by when this could do them any good, as an instrument to get into power-when she was the organ of insult to the King-whom, it is evident, the wretched creature who wrote this review detests-and when our feel--who was a murderer, though a lady. ings could be annoyed by the necessity of exposing the frailties of a daughter of Brunswick, the sister of him who fell at Waterloo, the mother of the Princess Charlotte, the niece of the King-I beg pardon the niece of GEORGE THE THIRD. I can't help calling him the King-I lived sixty years under his reign: I loved him living: I honour him dead.] There is now no difference of avowed opinion as to her guilt; there never was any difference of actual opinion. The Whigs took her up as they would take up the cause of the devil himself, if they thought it would serve their dirty ends. Everything was done by ministers which could be done, to avoid unpleasant and disgraceful results. A princely revenue was offered her, if she would stay abroad in scenes where her debaucheries could not corrupt English feeling. It was rejected. Ruffians-I shall mention no names, but ruffians they were-went over to her, to inform her of the then unhappy state of feeling in the London mob -a mob always profligate, as must be expected in so huge and motley a population. The duces multitudinis promised their assistance; the hack lawyers pledged their brazen visages and leathern lungs; she was herself reckless. The altar of Belial is admirably pitched by Milton, next that of Moloch homicide-Lust hard by Hate. She did not care if she plunged all England in blood, if she could injure or VOL. XIV. But that now, when all is over, she should be brought forward, is an uncalled-for piece of blackguardism. Who wrote this last page? There is Denman, who on that trial said in Greek, what, if he had said in English, he would have been kicked out of any company, different from that of a brothel-who, because the vulgar pictures of the Emperor Nero represent him as a parricide, an assassin, a tyrant, an incendiary, and a man stained with revolting and unnameable crime, compared, (in a speech, which the Lord Chancellor was to blame-the only thing I ever blamed in his conduct in my life-for listening to without sending the speaker to the Tower,) compared, I say, his King-King George the Fourth-to that prince, and stigmatized him by his name. Is there any other man in the kingdom likely to commit this filthy tirade? I hope not. If I thought Denman could write three sentences, which would pass muster in the eyes of Lindley Murray, I should accuse him of this infamous page in the review. Drop me a note, to give your ideas on the subject. The article on the Baron de Kolli poor work-As for the attacks on the Chancellor-why, they are merely pitiful. It is a wretched thing to see the Edinburgh Review reduced to copy the old, stale, filthy, and refuted lies of the Times or Chronicle. You have already considered, at full length, in 4 T your pages, the whole details of the charges adduced against this eminent lawyer, so that there is no need of my again slaying the slain. The Lord Chancellor himself fully refuted the slanders vented against him in the Lower House of Parliament, when the valorous Whig who brought them forward knew well his Lordship could not answer him. As for the arguments in this Review, they are mere twaddle -as for the facts, they are Whig facts. The only answer they deserve is already in print-a formula cut and dry -which the Review will remember. I SAY, SIR, THAT THAT IS false. I shall not detain you long on the article on our friend Blackwood's Publications. It is a poor thin criticism, in Jeffrey's thinnest style, and, God knows, that is wretched enough. Had we seen it in the poorest literary periodical in the empire, it would not have amazed us. We should rather have reprehended Ebony for hiring so shabby a scribe to puff his books. Scissars and paste work make up the principal matter of the Review, and the critical department is naught. What a wooden-headed critic must not he be, who, from the circumstance of their style, discovers that Adam Blair, and Lights and Shadows, were written by the same person! Their style! He might as well have said, that Cobbett's last Register was written by Jerry Bentham that the Flood of Thessaly came from the pen of Lord Byron that Marmion was concocted by Crabbe -any piece of nonsense, in short. Adam Blair is a story of gloomy sorrow, arising from the indulgence of guilty passions; the other is filled with all the gentle impulses that spring from honourable loves or kindly feelings, and even its sorrow and sin are marked by a gentleness of conception, and language radically distinct from the tempestuous eloquence of Adam Blair. The one is black as midnight at Martinmas-the other glowing and balmy as a dewy morning when the sun in Taurus rides.-This one assertion would damn any critique. I am interrupted. Treat this article as you please, for I can write no more. Friday, 7 o'clock, a. M. It was Mullion who called on me yesterday, and hindered me from writing. The worthy physician kept me up all night, discussing various topics of conversation, and horns of horn," as Glenfruin hath it. He got quite sewed up about one o'clock, The doctor tells me, that in Edin- The opening of the article is a spe- Apropos, Lord B.'s very hard on a certain lawyer, in his 13th Canto of the Don. Who limits all his battles to the bar And senate; when invited elsewhere, truly He shews more appetite for words than war.-P. 48, If his inmost heart could be seen, we should, I am pretty certain, discover that the honour these books have conferred on our Scottish literature is quite forgotten, in the fact of their being produced by men hostile to Scottish Whiggery; and that the most scabby Cockney libeller of Scottish character, provided he was Whig, would receive higher meed of applause for the dirtiest effusion of his dirty talents, from the Edinburgh Review, than the most honourable of the sons of Scotland, if holding by the cause of his country and his God, he was enrolled among the Tories. I have given the real reason of the Review, and I do not thank him for it, either on account of the authors of the novels, or of Blackwood. There is no use in holding farthing candles to the sun. Mr Jeffrey's praise or blame is matter of perfect indifference to men, his superiors in talent in every respect. Let his whigling admirers, or the pluckless shakers at his authority, say what they please, he is but a shallow article-monger, who, by one quackery or other, has obtained the attention of the public, so far as to be called a smart clever man, and to be forgotten by the end of every quarter. In our literature, he has little place even now-when defunct, he will be remembered only by the poring and industrious John Nicholses, (honoured be the name,) of the next century. For such writers as those in hand, I anticipate a very different fate; nay, more, I think the very best things they have, as yet, written, far inferior to what they are capable of writing, and what they assuredly will write. Indeed, in point of fact, Blackwood has published no books at all equal to parts of his Magazine-that is the book of books. Pitch us, therefore, compliments to Auld Clootie. One article remains, on a subject on which I could, and, perhaps, will, if vexed, write a volume-the cause of the West India Planters. But on that, you have had lately an admirable article, and I shall not intrude on your columns now. Suffice it to say, that it behoves Parliament and ministers to look, with a cautious eye, on the whole concern. Let us listen to no pseudo liberality—no mock philanthropy: let us regard it as it interests our brother subjects in the West Indies, their property, and their rights. We have suffered things to come to an alarming crisis, and must nerve ourselves for the result. I impute ill designs to no man, professing zeal in the cause of the slavetrade, except the Whigs, who avowedly have taken it up as a claptrap, without caring for anything but their own aspiration after power; but I hope this great question will be taken out of the hands of irresponsible bodies, guided by men who may be actuated by unworthy motives. If these men have done what they have done through a love of God and man, even though mischief may have resulted from their measures, yet shall their motives have praise at all times from me-but if instead of piety and philanthropy, views of filthy lucre be mixed up in the business-if traces of bales of cotton, barrels of gunpowder, pieces of romals, &c. &c. be found in the process-great indeed is their damnation. Before another year elapses, we shall hear more on the subject. I Mrs T. calls me to breakfast. All well here. How is the hip? If poss. shall be with you on Tuesday. Give the enclosed to Professor Leslie. Yours eternally, T. TICKLER. agree mainly with Tim. Even in the Review, they have let the cloven foot shew forth, as a practised eye will see. The indications are trifling, but indisputable. For instance, he begins his list with the Annals of the Parish, giving it, with Whig accuracy, a wrong date, in order to avoid putting the Ayrshire Legatees, which was the first, and is in reality the germ, of all that writer's best novels, at the head of the series, because it originated in this Magazine. Again, he condemns that pleasant little book, the Steam Boat, in a lumping censure-Why? because its stories were first published in the Magazine, in which he understands i. e. knows right well it originally appeared. Moreover, it contains the very good story of Mrs Ogle of Balbogle, which is not a pleasant recollection for some folk. For the same reason, Lights and Shadows, although bepraised, are rather given the go-by; because two or three of the best of them first appeared in this work-while Margaret |