for choosing his own place of residence. Did it never occur to the sapient proposer of this measure, that its immediate effect would be to drive the property out of the country as well as the owner, and to make the temporary resident abroad a permanent alien? But there is no end to the inconsistencies of this class of politicians, who, in their blind selfishness, would compel the labouring poor to emigrate, that they may be relieved from the burthen of supporting them, and would oblige the poor gentry to come back to England that they may uphold the taxes and the tax-eaters.

One word as to the charge that a long residence abroad is injurious to the moral character both of our men and women,-a dangerous and ticklish subject upon which the Reviewer delicately touches en passant, just as the Egyptian dogs sip the water of the Nile as they run, for fear of the crocodiles. Of all the cant of our most canting countrymen, none is so vain and false as the assertion that we are superior to the rest of the world in virtue and religion. If our claims rested upon the puritanical rigour with which we observe the Sabbath, and all the external forms of devotion, upon the repulsive coldness of our manners, the apparent prudery and squeamishness of our females, the number and variety of our churches and chapels, our Bible, Tract, and Vice-suppressing Societies, and our innumerable institutions for the professed object of upholding morality; if our claims admitted of no surer criteria than these, it might be difficult to reject them. But what is the result of all this bustling austerity and noisy sanctity? for the result is the only question of importance. Let us compare the number of people annually committed to prison for offences of every sort, the number actually tried, condemned, transported, and executed, with the similar delinquents in other European countries, according to their respective populations, and it will be found that the English are not only the most abandoned and vicious people in Europe, but perhaps in the whole world. I should be sorry to take the residents abroad as a fair average specimen of our countrymen; since many of them are compulsory exiles from the most discreditable motives, but such as they unfortunately are, I maintain without hesitation, that they are much more likely to corrupt our Gallic neighbours, than to receive from them any additional moral taint; an opinion which the French themselves loudly express in the indignant alarm that their own manners may be vitiated by the intercourse. That in the purlieus of the Palais Royal you may find plenty of those divinities qui s'humanisent avec tout le monde, cannot be denied, but you must at least go to seek them; they do not, as with us, disgustingly and openly obtrude themselves upon the eyes of wives and daughters. Immodesty at least wears a veil in France; they have no such gross, beastly, and public abominations as the lobbies of our theatres. The averment that many of our countrymen become listless idlers abroad, or betake themselves to gambling for want of an excitement, is founded in truth; but it must be recollected that the same individuals would have been loungers in Pall Mall and subscribers to Crockford's, instead of occasional visitants to the Salon des Etrangers at Paris. The existence of this, and other minor evils may be conceded, but are there no great and counterbalancing advantages, which, in their meliorating effects upon both nations, nay, upon the world at large, may well atone for the petty, selfish, and financial objections urged by our monitor? Boldly

do f maintain that there are. He contemplates the steam-engine with awe and admiration, and speculates upon the purposes to which its formidable physical powers may be applied in the event of war. I behold, in the limitless means of national intercourse which it affords, a great moral agent by the instrumentality of which war itself will be rendered of much less frequent occurrence, if it be not altogether prevented. If the facilities of inter-communication continue to increase as they have done in the last ten years, and this is likely to be the case in an augmented ratio, there will be such a friendly fusion of the two nations, such a dispelling of prejudices, such a transformation of blind hatred and bitterness into feelings of brotherhood and mutual esteem, that neither people will easily allow themselves to be pitted against each other. By a commixture of minds each will be morally humanized and improved, just as a physical melioration is effected by crossing the breed in animals. Except with the devout ultras of both countries, the blasphemous notion that France and England are natural enemies is already exploded and execrated; monarchs themselves may grow wiser and better, struck with the same compunctious visitings as the Devil, who, according to Ariosto, having invented a carbine, threw it into a river out of compassion to mankind. Subjects, at all events, on either side of the Channel, instructed by, and appreciating each other, and guided to a knowledge of their true interests by a free press in both countries, will not be readily led, like a hired gang of brutal gladiators, to cut each other's throats for the exclusive profit or amusement of their governors. They will discover that a general history of all wars might be entitled a history of the particular passions of ministers. That sort of patriotism which consists in a bravo-like readiness to murder and rob our neighbours, or in hating the great mass of our fellow-creatures under the pretext of loving an insignificant fraction of them, (a feeling which is at direct variance with the doctrine inculcated by Jesus Christ in the parable of the good Samaritan,) will be condemned as an unchristian and devilish error, invented by rulers for the subjection and torment of mankind; and war, that great scourge of humanity, will consequently be of much less frequent occurrence, as well as of mitigated ferocity.

If the Reviewer' could have raised his eyes above the grovelling, narrow fiscal interests of a particular class in a particular country, if he could have entertained the enlarged, liberal, and long-reaching views of a philanthropist, if he had reflected that the number of English Residents in France, their intermarriages with the French, and the perpetually increasing personal, friendly, and commercial ties between the two nations, are daily multiplying the chances for the long preservation of peace, and the increase of human happiness, he would have seen a glorious counterpoise to the evils he has enumerated, even had the major part of them been real instead of imaginary. Nay more, with respect to the revenue itself, the darling object of his solicitude, he would have been forced to confess, if there be any truth in the view we have taken, that the English Residents Abroad, by diminishing the probabilities of war, are doing a thousand times more for the finances of their country, than if they could be laid under immediate and heavy contribution, by visiting them with his favourite panacea and punishment a Property

Tax!

THE PHILOSOPHY OF CLUBS, NO. IV.

We have nearly outlived that infatuated predilection for the metropolis, which, in spite both of reason and fact, so long convinced us that no other soil or climate is propitious to intellectual culture. London is unquestionably the seat of patronage; the fountain-head from which a thousand streams are perpetually springing to refresh and fructify the growth of all kinds of ingenuity and talent; "native," as well as "hospitable to famous wits," and with the genial rays of public encouragement, warming into life, or calling from their hiding-places, genius and merit wherever they are to be found. Take into the account her indiscriminate and ill-directed munificence-her ostentatious but undiscerning bounties, which have covered the land with countless hosts of impostors, who have no earthly claim to the proud recompenses that enable them to shove aside their more deserving competitors but the impenetrable front with which their pretensions are set forth, and the extravagant self-estimates (the more extravagant, the more likely to succeed) by which they impose on a credulity, which is for ever the willing accessary to its own deception,-let this be weighed, and our reverence for London, as the exclusive parent and nurse of literary excellence, will probably be abated. She must, indeed, draw within her vortex a considerable portion of our provincial talent; the spurious and doubtful kinds will naturally fly to her; but it is equally certain, that no despicable part of the really intellectual commonwealth of Great Britain is still to be found in their distant retirements, far, far beyond the reach of her allurements.

It is a class of talent too that stands high; neither oppressed by an unseemly distrust of its powers, nor fearful of vindicating its rightful place; for a provincial life strengthens the inward consciousness of desert; a consciousness that raises it above all external estimates, and that fevered love of outward applause which is the worst disease of the literary character. But the men of this class are, of all others, the least fitted for the elbowing and justling of the metropolis. The capital that they carry to that great mart may be of unquestionable solidity; but they have not the indifference, the insensibility, the recklessness as to the means of arriving at their end, that so frequently ensure success to less scrupulous adventurers, who start with the advantage of having little to lose. They had been smit from their youth upwards with the love of Wisdom, and in the stillness of their souls, dedicated themselves to her worship; and nothing but pure and undefiled truth, at once simple in form, and immutable in essence, showed to their eyes like wisdom. But give them a sample or two of a London conversation amongst your professed diners out-they would soon feel how far they had wandered from the clime of their beloved philosophy. What a cold neutrality as to those presiding principles, the strictest deference to which, in their honest discussions, they had habitually paid and exacted-how easy and polite the nonchalance with which the most sacred points of the controversy are mutually conceded! How bitter the sneer, how heart-withering the laugh, how freezing the enthusiasm of inward conviction! How all this would make them sigh with regret for the ingenuous converse of their little provincial circles! As for that Truth, in whose pursuit they had grown pale over the midnight lamp,

and trod a toilsome pilgrimage of laborious reading and solitary abstraction, whom they revered bright in her native panoply, and resistless in her native strength-in the intellectual societies of London they would ask for her in vain, or find in her place, and usurping her name, a Lady-of-Loretto-like image, laden with fanciful ornaments by the pretended priests of her worship, who had despoiled her of her real wealth, and encumbered her shrine with false and tinsel decorations; a sort of varnished falsehood, "fucata falsitas," Lord Coke somewhere quaintly calls it, dipped in the dyes of every opinion, that Fashion, the prolific mother of "all monstrous, all prodigious things," has hatched into ephemera! existence.

Nor is it" considering the matter too curiously," to trace a distinction not always apparent, but sufficiently marked, if minutely observed, between the literature of London, I mean that which is every day issuing from her loins, and that which is nurtured in the provinces. The metropolitan author retained and fed to minister to the taste of the public must necessarily be the mere creature of its applause; the moment it is withdrawn from him, both he and his productions exist no more; or let him dare to trust himself to the promptings and aspirations of his own genius, and attempt a new and untrodden track, he will probably pay in neglect and oblivion the penalty of his rashness. The buyers of his work are the weighers and aulnagers of its merit; its sale is the standard of its excellence. What avails his own secret diffidence, or even his decided condemnation of it? It is reversed by the general approbation. Is this an ennobling process? Such an author is the slave of the public; he is not the independent master of his own faculties; for they must do suit and service to the caprice and fashion of the hour. Whereas, it is by no means an idle paradox to assert with Montaigne, that the writer himself, if he is worth one farthing, is the best, nay the only judge of his production-his own genuine suffrage the most infallible test of its goodness. For he alone has taken the just dimensions of his powers, and is the most acquainted with their character and idiosyncrasy. The cause is heard, indeed, with closed doors, but the verdict is uninfluenced by the extrinsic judgments of the public. Self-love and vanity are excluded, because they are the mere echoes within a man's own bosom of the applauses of the multitude. It is they who are fearful of this silent inquisition, that take refuge in popularity. On the other hand, were it possible to get at the real feelings of authors, even of those who revel the most in public praise, they would be found the most inclined to undervalue it in secret. The advocate, knowing the weakness of the cause he pleads, disowns the triumph, if an undiscerning jury decides in his favour.

But the unpublished literature of provincial men of letters, the product for the most part of whole lives of contemplation, embodying the genuine history of the mind and feelings that composed it, because destined only" paucis ostendi," to a few privileged friends, or serving only for the private solace of its authors, if it could but see the light, might perhaps put to the foil a large proportion of that which is actually oppressing our shelves. Gibbon puts it as a distressing problem, whether, if the choice were given us of recovering the lost books of Livy, by the sacrifice of those which we possess, we should be gainers by the exchange. Might not a similar equation of chances, and one equally per

plexing, be propounded between the publication of the suppressed, and the loss of the existing literature of our time? An immense mass and volume of mind, inlaid with the richest gems of the heart and the fancy, and now slumbering in obscurity, like the undivulged wealth of the ocean, thus redeemed-might it not be another restoration of letters, or the herald of new and unthought of revolutions in the moral and civil condition of humanity? I have seen unsunned treasures of genius reluctantly dragged from the escrutoire of a provincial man of lettersthe fruits indeed of a secluded meditation, but filled with a deep and varied knowledge of intellectual and insensate things-evincing habitual converse with all the beauty of form and of hue that glows upon our earth, breathing a love of the fair, the decorous in morals, and an exquisite sense of the harmony and loveliness of the affections that bind us to each other, or lift up our hearts with joy and thankfulness to Heaven. Was he who had watched over the silent growth of his work from the first threads and filaments of thought, and beheld it gradually assuming its form and its complexion-was he insensible to its merit? No. The standard by which he tried it, and found it good, was perfect in his mind. Had it been sent into the world, it would have been tried by he knew not what rules of judgment, or have had to run the gauntlet of he knew not what tastes and caprices, and the thousand arbitrary tribunals in which Fashion pronounces her decrees. But the man was happier in the obscurity, or rather the utter oblivion of his work, than if the consenting acclaim of a thousand tongues had rung its praises. The consciousness that it was essentially good, supplied his mind with continued streams of delight and satisfaction. D'Alembert tells us that he found similar complacencies in the study of mathematics; because it is a science in which the sense of proficiency is purely intrinsic, and that proficiency as susceptible of proof too, as the subjects with which that study is conversant. So it is with the productions of genius-a poem, or even a philosophical analysis of our intellectual nature. these, self-criticism, however laudatory, cannot err, because their criteria are fixed and unerring. The objects they delineate, are as enduring as the frame of external nature, immortal and unchangeable as the soul of man.

In

I have marked many of these provincial men of letters, when with a violence that uprooted all their dearest and most cherished habitudes, they have been transplanted to our modern Babylon. Their speculations, pursued in stillness and solitude, unfitted them for our intellectual circles, where all intensity of emotion, and all warmth and strenuousness of discourse, in which retired scholars are prone to indulge, are put down by the conventions of artificial life. They were too sensitive to push their way through her crowds, too proud to ask a share in her blind flatteries, or her still blinder dispensations of emolument. It was an atmosphere, from which they shrank, as the bud from the tyrannous breath of the North. All the aspirings that lonely meditation had nursed, or municipal praise incited, were insufficient to bear them up amidst the mingled tides of fashion, prejudice, and caprice, which it required "hearts of controversy" to stem. I have seen, too, the provincial aspirant to London fame,-his dreams of fortune dissipated, his hopes of reputation vanished,-return a repentant wanderer to the place in which he thought his genius had been too long confined and cabinned.