accomplished by the first lawyer who ever graced the woolsack; but we are not to be crocodiled out of our Christian liberty by a Levite, who thinks there is one law for the rich and another for the poor: and, perhaps, it would give much relief to the learned Lord alluded to, and make his Sunday more a day of rest, if he, who seems so encumbered with his own conscience, were eased of that fiction of law which imposes upon him the keeping the King's; and were relieved of the inconsistency of giving judgment in the House of Peers on appeals from his own Court: he might also be relieved from the task of issuing polite congés d'élire, in addition to the labor of dispensing secular law, and thus be better enabled to attend to his legislative duties. I cannot help suspecting both the law of God and man would be better tended. But, at all events, let us not receive these rebukes from those who rarely behold the interior of a church, except to qualify for place or pension, and to avoid the clutches of the informer; who are thus frugal of their public devotions-apprehensive, I presume, of that reflection on the Pharisees. of old, that they spare their prayers at home, to the end that they may be liberal in public. Thank God, the decency, order, and pious observance of Sunday by the People needs not the confirmation of the court newsman, or the Mirror of Fashion in the Chronicle. I happen to know of a legal apostate, one of the last solicited, who was enticed into the trap at one of the Cabinet feasts of the Pass-over above alluded to; and this cant of sabbatical profanation brought to my mind the story of a loose woman, who wrote to the Pope a case of conscience-whether she was obliged to execute her cat for killing a rat on a Sunday!

Thus, Sir, have I brought blasphemy home: and if a Bishop, on his road from Exeter to Lincoln, spoke the truth, when he is reported to have said, that the devil was abroad among the People; I think I have shown that he walks on both sides the road;-and Bad as he is, the Devil may be abus'd,

2

Be falsely charged, and causelessly accused,
When men, unwilling to be blam'd alone,

Shift off those crimes on him which are their own.

extract, for the benefit of those foreign members of the "Holy Alliance" who are now so zealously upholding legitimacy.

" But Kings are Gods! that title own they must,

Like him be sacred, and like him be just;

If o'er the last the vicious lust prevails,
The sanction dies, and all the Godhead fails;
His high deserts a jest, a ridicule,

And he's more vile than those he ought to rule;
Abandon'd to his crimes, he ought to find
Himself abandon'd too by all mankind :
With the Assyrian Monarch turn'd to grass,
As much a tyrant, and as much an ass;
I know no meaner, abject, monstrous thing,
Than an exalted Devil made a King."

One of the most pregnant evils of the really corrupt Press is, that the principles of the Revolution, which placed the present family on the throne, are daily slandered and denied, in senseless commendation of the battles of Peterloo and Bonny Muir. Every petty pilfering of a mob is dignified with the name of treason, and the right of resisting tyrants confounded with the crime of sedition. As ultra-loyalty is busy, it may not be amiss to quote those sentiments of Sidney, (written long before the Guelphs were even heard of) which promoted that royal family from Hanover to St. James's; and they are quoted without the slightest reference to the present times, but to preserve the recollection of wholesome truths:-" "Tis ill that men should kill one another in seditions, tumults, and wars; but 'tis worse to bring nations to such misery, weakness, and baseness, as to have neither strength nor courage to contend for any thing; to have nothing left worth defending, and to give the name of peace to desolation. I take Greece to have been happy and glorious, when it was full of populous cities, flourishing in all the arts that deserve praise among men: when they were courted and feared by the greatest kings, and never assaulted by any but to his own loss and confusion: when Babylon and Susa trembled at the motion of their arms; and their valor exercised in these wars and tumults, which our author looks upon as the greatest evils, was raised to such a power that nothing upon earth was found able to resist them: and I think it now miserable, when peace reigns within their empty walls, and the poor remains of those exhausted nations, sheltering themselves under the ruins of the desolated cities, have neither any thing that deserves to be disputed among them, nor spirit nor force to repel the injuries they daily suffer from a proud and insupportable monster."

Such are the immutable truths, and the memorable lessons taught by history. And, says a Greek writer, "After treating of our duty to the gods, it is proper to teach that which we owe to our country. For our country is, as it were, a secondary god, and the first and greatest parent. It is to be preferred to parents, wives, children, friends, and all things, the gods only excepted: and if our country perishes, it is as impossible to save an individual, as to preserve one of the fingers of a mortified hand."

O FREEDOM! Sovereign boon of Heav'n!
Great charter with our being giv'n!
For which the patriot and the sage
Have plann'd, have bled thro' every age!
High privilege of human race,

Beyond a mortal monarch's grace!

CHRISTOPHILUS.

'Discourses on Government, Sect. XXVI. Civil wars and tumults not the

greatest evils that can befall nations.

SECOND LETTER

TO THE

RT. HON. FREDERICK J. ROBINSON,

PRESIDENT OF THE BOARD OF TRADE;

THE PRESENT STATE OF THE

CURRENCY:

IN WHICH ARE CONSIDERED, THE EFFECT WHICH THE REPEAL OF THE BANK RESTRICTION ACT HAS

A SECOND LETTER

ON THE PRESENT STATE OF THE

CURRENCY,

&c. &c.

SIR,

Having in the preceding letter discussed some of the sources from which the present distresses of Agriculture have been supposed to spring, I shall now proceed to consider another cause to which they have been ascribed. This is a branch of the subject which involves a question of very great importance, and merits the most candid and temperate discussion. Many are deeply impressed with the idea that the distress which, at the present moment, presses upon the English agriculturist, and which, if not by some means alleviated, must inevitably ruin him, arises principally from the contraction of the circulating medium produced by the operation of what is commonly termed Mr. Peel's bill enacting the repeal of the Bank Restriction Act.

Those who ascribe the difficulties of agriculture to this measure, as their source, assert that the Act passed in 1819, to regulate the standard of our currency, has added nearly one fourth to the exchangeable value of the pound sterling; and that this increase in the value of the pound sterling, produced by a mere act of the legislature, has made an addition of 25 per cent. to the previous outgoings of the farmer. They affirm that his rent, though nominally the same, has really increased one fourth; that his taxes have increased one fourth, and that parochial rates, tithes, and the wages of labor, have increased, at least for a time, in an equal proportion. Rents are at present generally regulated upon what are commonly termed war prices, or upon the standard of value which