ten deaths and forfeit twenty kingdoms than patiently submit to the indignity of having his right called in question. It is said, Charles X. is a goodnatured man: it may be so, and that he would not hurt a fly; but in that quarrel he would shed the blood of millions of men. If he did not do so, he would consider himself as dead to honor, a recreant to fame, and a traitor to the cause of kings. Touch but that string, the inborn dignity of kings and their title to 66 solely sovereign sway and masterdom," and the milk of human kindness in the best-natured monarch turns to gall and bitterness. You might as well present a naked sword to his breast, as be guilty of as word or look that can bare any other construction than that of implicit homage and obedience. There is a spark of pride lurking at the bottom of his heart, however glozed over by smiles and fair speeches, ever ready (with the smallest opposition to his will) to kindle into a flame, and desolate kingdoms. Let but the voice of freedom speak, and to resist "shall be in him remorse, what bloody work soever" be the consequence. Good-natured kings, like good-natured men, are often merely lovers of their own ease who give themselves no trouble about other people's affairs but interfere in the slightest point with their convenience, interest, or self-love, and a tigress is not more furious in defence of her young.

While the Royal Guards were massacreing the citizens of Paris, Charles X. was partridge-shooting at St. Cloud, to show that the shooting of his subjects and the shooting of game were equally among the menus plaisirs of royalty. This is what is meant by mild paternal sway, by the perfection of a good-natured monarch, when he orders the destruction of as great a number of people as will not do what he pleases, without any discomposure of dress or features. Away with such trifling! There is no end of the confusion and mischief occasioned by the application of this mode of arguing from personal character and appearances to public measures and principles. If we are to believe the fashionable cant on this subject, a man cannot do a dirty action because he wears a clean shirt: he cannot break an oath to a nation, because he pays a gambling debt; and because he is delighted with the universal homage that is paid him, with having every luxury and every pomp at his disposal, he cannot, under the mask of courtesy and good humor, conceal designs against a Constitution, "smile and smile and be a tyrant !" Such is the logic of the Times. This paper, "ever strong upon the stronger side," laughs to scorn the very idea entertained by our restless and mercurial neighbors" (as if the Times had nothing of the tourniquet principle in its composition) that so amiable, so well-meaning and prosperous a gentleman as Charles X. should nourish an old and inveterate grudge against the liberties of his country or wish to overturn that happy order of things which the Times had so great a share in establishing. But he no sooner verifies the predictions of the French journalists and is tumbled from his throne, than the Times with its jolly, swaggering, thrasónical air falls upon him and calls him all the vagabonds it can set its tongue to. We do not see the wit of this, any more than of its assuring us, with unabated confidence, that there is not the least shadow of foundation for the apprehensions of those who are perverse enough to think, that a Ministry that have set up and countenanced the Continental despotisms, and uniformly shown themselves worse than indifferent to the blood and groans of thousands of victims in foreign countries (sacrificed under their guarantee of the deliverance of mankind) may have an arriere-pensee against the

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liberties of their own. We grant the premises of the Times in either case, that the French king was good-humored and that the Duke has a vacant face; but these favorable appearances have not prevented a violent catastrophe in the one case and may not in the other. Mr. Brougham a short time ago, in a speech at a public meeting, gave his hearty approbation of the late Revolution in France, and clenched his argument by asking what fate an English monarch would merit, and probably meet, who acted in the same manner as the besotted Charles; who annulled the liberty of the press, who prevented the meeting of the representatives of the people, who disfranchised four-fifths of the electors by an arbitrary decree, and proposed to reign without law, and raise the taxes without a Parliament? This is not exactly the point at issue. A more home question would be, what fate a king of England would deserve, not who did or attempted all this in his own person, but who fearing to do that, as the next best thing and to show which way his inclinations tended, aided and abetted with all the might and resources of a people calling itself free, and tried to force back upon a neighbouring state, by a long and cruel war and with the ruin of his own subjects, a king like Charles X., who by every act and circumstance of his life had shown himself hostile to the welfare and freedom of his country, and whose conduct, if repeated here, would justly incur the forfeiture of his own crown? It would be "premature," in the judgment of some, to give an opinion on this subject till after the thing has happened, and then it would be neither loyal nor patriotic to condemn the conduct of our own cabinet; but we hope at least that the next time the English government undertake to force a king upon the French people, they will send them a baboon instead of a 'Bourbon, as the less insult of the two!-To return to the question of personal politics. Our last king but one was a good domestic character; but this had little or nothing to do with the wisdom or folly of his public measures. He might be faithful to his conjugal vows, but might put a construction on some clause in his Coronation-oath fatal to the peace and happiness of a large part of his subjects. He might be an exceedingly well-meaning, moral man, but might have notions instilled into him in early youth respecting the prerogatives of the crown and the relation between the sovereign and the people, that might not quit him to his latest breath, and might embroil his subjects and the world in disastrous wars and controversies during his whole reign. His son succeeded him without the same reputation for domestic virtue, but adopted all the measures of his father's ministers. If the private character and the public conduct were to be submitted to the same test, this could not have happened. But the late king was cried up for his elegant accomplishments, and as the fine gentleman of his family; and this, with equally sound logic, atoned for the absence of less showy qualities, and stamped his public proceedings with the character of a wise and liberal policy. We are already assured of a fortunate and peaceful reign, because the present king looks pleased and good-humored on his accession to the crown; though the smallest cloud in the political horizon may scatter the ruddy smiles and overcast the whole prospect.

Mr. Coleridge complains, somewhere, of politicians who pretend to guide the state and yet have ruined their own affairs. Would the author of the Ancient Mariner apply the same rule to other things, and affirm that no one could be a pet or a philosopher who had not made his for

tune? One would suppose, that all the people of sense and worth were confessedly on one side of the question in the great disputes in religion or politics that have agitated and torn the world in pieces, and all the knaves and fools on the other. This is hardly tenable ground. Charles IX., of happy memory, was we believe a good tempered man and a most religious prince: this did not hinder him from authorizing the massacre of St. Bartholomew and shooting at the Huguenots out of the palace-windows with his own hands. This was the prejudice of his time: we have still certain prejudices to contend with in ours, which have nothing to do with the looks, temper or private character of those who hold them. We wonder at the cruelties and atrocities of religious fanatics in former times, and would not have them repeated: were none of these persecutors honest, conscientious men? Take any twelve inquisitors: six of them shall be angels and the other six scoundrels, yet they will all agree in one unanimous verdict, condemning you or me to the flames for not believing in the infallibility of the Pope. This is the thing to be avoided by all means; and not to lose our time in idle discussions about the amiableness of the characters of these pious exterminators, nor in admiring the fineness of their countenances, nor the picturesque effect of the scenery and costume. Charles X., the gay and gallant Count d'Artois, wears a hair shirt, is fond of partridge-shooting, and wanted to put a yoke on the necks of his subjects. The last is that on which isssue was joined. Let him go where he chooses, with a handsome pension; but let him not be sent back again (as he was once before) at the expense of millions of lives !*

* Even then I should not despair. The Revolution of the Three Days was like a resurrection from the dead, and showed plainly that liberty too has a spirit of life in it; and that the hatred of oppression is "the unquenchable flame, the worm that dies not."

ESSAY VI.

ON THE WRITINGS OF HOBBES.*

In the following Essays I shall attempt to give some account of the rise and progress of modern metaphysics, to state the opinions of the principal writers who have treated on the subject, from the time of Lord Bacon to the present day, and to examine the arguments by which they are supported. In the first place it will be my object to show what the real conclusions of the most celebrated authors were, and the steps by which they arrived at them: to trace the connexion or point out the difference between their several systems, as well as to inquire into the peculiar bias and turn of their minds, and in what their true strength or weakness lay. This will undoubtedly be best done by an immediate reference to their works whenever the nature of the subject admits of it, or whenever their mode of reasoning is not so loose and desultory as to render the quotation of particular passages a useless as well as endless labor. In the History of English Philosophy, of which I published a prospectus some time ago, I intended to have gone regularly through with all the writers of any considerable note who fell within the limits of my plan, and to have given a detailed analysis of their several subjects and arguments. But this would lead to much greater length and minuteness of inquiry than seems consistent with my present object, and would besides, I am afraid, prove (what Hobbes, speaking of these subjects in general, calls) "but dry discourse." To avoid this as much as possible, I shall pass over all those writers who have not been distinguished either by the boldness of their opinions or the logical precision of their arguments. Indeed I shall confine my attention more particularly to those who have made themselves conspicuous by deviating from the beaten track, and who have struck out some original discovery or brilliant paradox; whose metaphysical systems trench the clos

*The following Essays form part of a series of Lectures delivered with very great effect by my father at the Russell Institution, in 1813. I found them with other papers in an old hamper which many years ago he stuffed confusedly full of MSS. and odd volumes of books, and left in the care of some lodging-house people, by whom it was thrown into a cellar, so damp that even the covers of some of the books were fast mouldering when I first looked over the collection. The injury to the MSS. may be imagined. Some of the lectures indeed, to my deep regret, are altogether missing, burnt probably, by the ignorant people of the house; and I have had the greatest difficulty in preparing those which remain for the press. They are, however, most valuable.-Note by the Editor.

est on morality, or whose speculations, by the interest as well as novelty attached to them, have become topics of general conversation.

Secondly, besides stating the opinions of others, one principal object which I shall have in view will be to act as judge or umpire between them, to distinguish, as far as I am able, the boundaries of true and false philosophy, and to try if I cannot lay the foundation of a system more conformable to reason and experience, and, in its practical results at least, approaching nearer to the common sense of mankind, than the one which has been generally received by the most knowing persons who have attended to such subjects within the last century; I mean the material or modern philosophy, as it has been called. According to this philosophy, as I understand it, all thought is to be resolved into sensation, all morality into the love of pleasure, and all action into mechanical impulse. These three propositions, taken together, embrace almost every question relating to the human mind, and in their different ramifications and intersections form a net, not unlike that used by the enchanters of old, which, whosoever has once thrown over him, will find all his efforts to escape vain, and his attempts to reason freely on any subject in which his own nature is concerned, baffled and confounded in every direction.

This system, which first rose at the suggestion of Lord Bacon, on the ruins of the school-philosophy, has been gradually growing up to its present height ever since, from a wrong interpretation of the word experience, confining it to a knowledge of things without us; whereas it in fact includes all knowledge relating to objects either within or out of the mind, of which we have any direet or positive evidence. We only know that we ourselves exist, the most certain of all truths, from the experience of what passes within ourselves. Strictly speaking, all other facts of which we are not immediately conscious, are so in a secondary and subordinate sense only. Physical experience is indeed the foundation and the test of that part of philosophy which relates to physical objects: further, physical analogy is the only rule by which we can extend and apply our immediate knowledge, or infer the effects to be produced by the different objects around us. But to say that physical experiment is either the test or source or guide of that other part of philosophy which relates to our internal perceptions, that we are to look to external nature for the form, the substance, the color, the very life and being of whatever exists in our minds, or that we can only infer the laws which regulate the phenomena of the mind from those which regulate the phenomena of matter, is to confound two things entirely distinct. Our knowledge of mental phenomena from consciousness, reflection, or observation of their correspondent signs in others is the true basis of metayhysical inquiry, as the knowledge of facts, commonly so called, is the only solid basis of natural philosophy.

To say that the operations of the mind and the operations of matter are in reality the same, so that we may always make the one opponents of the other, is to assume the very point in dispute, not only without any evidence, but in defiance of every apperance to the contrary. Lord Bacon was undoubtedly a great man, indeed one of the greatest that have adorned this or any other country. He was a man of a clear and active spirit, of a most fertile genius, of vast designs, of general knowledge, and of profound wisdom. He united the powers of imagination and understanding in a greater degree than almost any other writer. He was one of the strongest