We turn from this bold avowal of a frailty, surely in Mr. Wakefield, at least, productive of most pitiable consequences, tó appearances of a more engaging nature.

On hearing of an accident which had befallen Mr. Fox in taking the amusement of shooting, his humanity suddenly displays itself in the following undisguised avowal of his sentiments, in letter 23. After an elegant quotation from Cicero he proceeds

"Am I, Sir, indecently presumptuous and free, am I guilty of a too dictatorial officiousness, in pronouncing those pleasures to misbecome a man of letters, which consist in mangling, maiming, and depriving of that invaluable and irretrievable blessing, its existence, an inoffensive pensioner on the universal bounties of the common feeder and protector of all his offspring?"

The answer of Mr. Fox is what his less tender nerves and less scrupulous conscience might have led us to expect

“That-if to kill tame animals with whom one has a sort of acquaintance is lawful, it is still less repugnant to one's feelings to kill wild animals; but then, to make a pastime of it-there is something to be said upon this head.-I admit it to be a questionable subject; at all events, it is a very pleasant and healthy exercise!"

*

What a deal of trouble would this concluding "ratio sufficiens" for "questionable" practices have saved laborious casuists, and their old fashioned, purblind, limping followers! Mr. Wakefield is not, however, to be so put off; but rejoins on his green-coated, gaitered correspondent, "that the question of animal food has no more to do with rural sports than capital punishments with racks and tortures:" he asks if it is " philosophical and humane to leave numbers of animals to perish by pain and hunger, or to occasion the remainder of their lives to be perilous and miserable?" And as to hunting, he roundly tells Mr. Fox "that it is the most irrational and degrading spectacle in the world, and an admirable prolusion to those delectable operations which are transacting in Holland and elsewhere." Mr. Fox in his next letter declines the controversy, by gently throwing before him the shield of " authority and precedent, rather than argument; of excuse, rather than of justification."

We could have wished to see Mr. Wakefield, who had evidently here the right of the argument, and was so eminently "dis

* We trust this mode of reasoning was not in Mr. Fox's purview, when he refers, in letter 10, to literature-as the greatest advantage in troublous times (next to a good conscience) which one man can have over another.

dainful of danger" on all occasions in maintaining that right, equally solicitous for the welfare of his correspondent on some more material points. We could have wished him at least, as a professed Christian, knowing his man, not to have referred Mr. Fox with unqualified and unbounded praise to his favourite Lucretius, and recommended it to his perusal, particularly the termination of the third book, (letter 5,) of which we are bold to say, the chief merit is not its being a favourable specimen of the Lucretian grandiloquentia, but its being the most calm and captivating statement of the atheist's remedies against the fear of death that, perhaps, ever was penned :-this praise, of course, Mr. Fox echoes back in the same accents, and "declares the end of the third book to be perfectly in his memory, and worthy of all that Mr. Wakefield had said of it." Equally inappropriate do we think was the act of "damning with faint praise," in letter 56, the noble and immortal labours of Tertullian in the cause of Christianity. And more than inappropriate, not to say profane, is the application of a scriptural test of virtue to Mr. Fox's merits, in letter 14.-"I am glad I can congratulate you on escaping the inauspicious omen of the scriptures, woe! unto you when all men speak well of you.'" Measured by this test certainly Mr. Fox and his minority will ever stand high in the records of fame: and our condemnation of Mr. Wakefield in adopting it may not be so complete from reflecting, that (in the feelings of an universal charity, doubtless,) he has taken abundant care that the defenders of church and state in opposition to Mr. Fox's views should not be wanting in that same test of their claims on the gratitude and admiration of mankind.

This will lead us, however, to offer a few somewhat more extended remarks on the political complexion of this volume. Though, as we observed at first, the writers have drawn their political notices into very narrow limits; yet considering the nature of those notices, and of their authors, we should ill acquit ourselves of our duty without briefly commenting on them, such as they are.

The volume gathers some interest from its containing some of the last efforts of Mr. Wakefield's pen; having been written chiefly from that which our readers well know to have been nearly the last scene of his earthly labours, viz. Dorchester gaol. With the merits of a sentence which inclosed so much learning and so many respectable qualities, within the gloomy circle of those penal walls for two years, we have at present nothing to do: nor could we, perhaps, if we desired it, estimate the state of public feeling and public danger at that crisis which rendered

expedient the prosecution of Mr. Wakefield and his bookseller, for his answer to Bishop Watson's address to the people of Great Britain. Whatever may have been the case, it was equally likely that we should find Mr. Fox assuring Mr. Wakefield, in letter 10, that there "could be no doubt of the prosecution failing," in the first instance; nor in the next, letter 15, that he was sincerely concerned at the event of his trial.” "The liberty of the press," continues Mr. Fox, “I considered as virtually destroyed by the proceedings against Johnson and Jordan, (Mr. Wakefield's publishers); and what has happened to you I cannot but lament, therefore, the more, as the sufferings of a man whom I esteem, in a cause that is no more." P. 67.

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To say the truth, we are not wholly satisfied with the faint expressions of sympathy uttered by Mr. Fox upon this occasion. His exertions beyond "the cold charity of praise," unlike those of some of the warmer-hearted or fuller-pursed * friends and comforters of Mr. Wakefield, seem to have been limited to an unsuccessful application through Lord Holland to the late Lord Ilchester, and to Mr. Morton Pitt and Mr. Frampton, the present respected magistrates superintending the gaol, for some advantages apparently incompatible with its regulations. Mr. Wakefield seems to have been much more sincere, at least, in his reproaches against both the gaoler and the managers, of what we believe may be called the best constructed and best managed gaol in England. From private information, we understand his language to have been in a high degree provoking and insulting to those persons, and his general conduct to have partaken little of that" meekness of wisdom" so consistent with the conciousness of suffering in a righteous cause. His complaints, to do him justice, were not confined to his own grievances; and may with no great difficulty be conceived to what a length a man might have been carried who always spoke strongly what he felt keenly, and whose mistaken notions of the perfectibility of human nature and of civil society could lead him to such positions as the following

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"As to the prisoners here, not a man among them but would be reformed to a certainty by good instruction from those who proved themselves kindly interested in their welfare by their actions; and it is most afflicting to see them sentenced by the justices to one,

* Mr. Wakefield gained not less than 50002. by his fortunate inclosure-in-Dorchester gaol, through the liberal contributions of his jam

merits on the occasion.

Suspectus, tanquam ipse suas incenderit ædes.

two, &c. to seven years, for the veriest trifles; the miseries sustained by those unhappy people without one effort of instruction and reformation, in the midst of keen hunger," &c.

We'need not add that Mr. Fox, in his reply, treats this specu lation of our philanthropist with perfect silence. And without imputing to the more knowing statesman the calm indifference of a certain "deputy," who "cared for none of these things," we may reasonably suppose a consciousness in Mr. Fox's breast that had he been elevated to the same bench with the Dorchester justice, "the inhumanities of office*" would have left him as little time for instructing, and as little choice in committing vagrants and housebreakers as his fellow justices had; and that no reform, not within the reach of a benevolent, enlightened, and indefatigable Morton Pitt, would have been accomplished by the noisy and ill directed, however well meant, and self-applauding zeal of a Gilbert Wakefield.

But to pass over the prison scene, which no friend to letters or to humanity (speaking under the laws of that amnesty which the faults of departed genus ever claim) can otherwise than behold, particularly in its consequences, with a sorrowful regard, and to return to general politics; we find Mr. Fox by no means maintaining on all occasions the strict silence we have just alluded to. In letters 5, 6, 14, 15, 32, 56, &c. we find these two great political Columbuses complimenting each other with such discoveries as the following.

"My preference for the French," says Mr. Wakefield (reader, remember in 1797), "is merely in a political character. And what can be more deeply sunk in ignominy than we are as a nation, in that view, at the present moment?" (P. 14.) To which answers Mr. Fox, m p. 16, "In regard to (politics) I agree with you in thinking that no nation ever was sunk in more deep ignorance than we seem to be at present; for we are not only in the dark, but have a kind of horror of the light!" We cannot resist the temptation, afforded us by these passages, of contrasting them with the contemporary effusions of one whom more modern reformers will consider as most unexceptionable authority, viz. Mr. Cobbett, upon French enlightenment at that period. Politically considered," says Peter Porcupine, in Observations on American Congress, published in 1797, "the French people are equally enlightened.-First, they approve of

• Vid. G. Wakefield's address to the jury on his trial.

a constitution with an hereditary monarch, whose person they declare inviolable and sacred, and swear to defend him with their lives. Next they murder this monarch, and declare themselves a republic.—This second constitution they destroy, and frame a third, with two chambers and five co-equal kings. After having spent five years in making war, in the name of liberty and equality, upon arms, stars, garters, crosses, and every other exterior sign of superiority of rank, they very peaceably and tamely suffer their masters to dub themselves with what titles they please, and exclusively to assume garbs and badges of distinction far more numerous than those which formerly existed in France." Had Messrs. Wakefield and Fox in these days contrasted French illumination with English darkness, we should, perhaps, not have found the contemporary antidote in Mr. Cobbett's pages. But we will allow this our modern, and we understand now retiring, reformer, that Bonaparte has effectually enlightened the people of France since the days of Peter Porcupine: and when we reflect that, at the period of Mr. Fox's letter above, he had just seceded from the duty of enlightening the English people in parliament, as Mr. Cobbett by the discontinuance of his Register has done at the present period, we should be equally ready to excuse both these gentlemen at the respective periods of their retirement from duty, for "some natural tears" of compassion over the necessarily ensuing state of darkness in England.

In letter 56 we have some curious reasons of Mr. Wakefield's, why petitioning is not likely to be attended with much success. Amongst others he refers to the "more extended speculations of some, who cannot acquiesce in those formalities of language respecting loyalty and parliaments which commonly enter into those petitions!" We confess we looked forward here with some eagerness to the next letter of the British senator, concluding that Mr. Wakefield had at length ventured whither the utmost latitude of constitutional free thinking could never allow Mr. Fox to follow; but the wary statesman answers him to never a word;"—and we are left to deplore in the same strains the abdication by Mr. Fox of an opportunity for instructing his heretical correspondent on the true value and respectability of king, lords, and commons in England, as those in which we have before lamented Mr. Wakefield's omission of duty towards Mr. Fox in regard to the doctrines of Lucretius.T 90 1gba

But petitioning, "even now, in this last stage of degradation," says Mr. Fox, in letter 55, "may not be without its effect." And