In the mean time let us observe that characteristic traits of

Mr. Wakefield also abound in these letters. His powers as a scholar and a critic have been already appreciated with so much accuracy by his kindred tribe as not to need further illustration: his fame has, doubtless, been much injured in this department through the influence of his known literary rashness and overweening self-conceit. The humiliating concession respecting his own Silva Critica, as containing "plurima, quæ sint juveniliter temeraria, arfoodiavura prorsus, et homine critico indigna," might have been well anticipated from the following passage in his own life.

"It always appeared to my mind not only a violation of truth but an act of ingratitude to the "Giver of every good gift," to dissemble or disparage those qualifications which I was conscious of possessing: and I esteemed it not folly only but a fraud-to bestow on ordinary proficients in learning and virtue such commendations as were only due to the genuine possessors of those valuable acquisitions. These dispositions, unconnected or unimpaired, as best pleases the reader's taste, have accompanied me through life: these domineer in my constitution to this very hour," &c.

That they did so, we have more than one melancholy proof in the present letters. It grieves us, but for example's sake, to drag to light against our departed scholar "his frailty from its dread abode," by quoting such passages as the following."I knew my Lucretius must make its way in time against all personal and political opposition, especially when known on the continent." Speaking of a critical nicety which Dr. Parr had in conversation deemed inadmissible, "I made no reply," says our self-complacent critic, but concluded it to have been " unobserved by all readers but MYSELF!" "Excuse me," says he, in another letter, "if I appear positive; it is only in the expression, which one acquires from the study of mathematics; where after constructing the figure it is usual to add,' I say, the triangle so and so, is the triangle required!!"

A more innocent and interesting agreement between Mr. Wakefield's delineations of himself in his life and in these letters appears in the following passages: "At college-a strange fastidiousness, for which I never could account, occasionally took a bewildering possession of my faculties. This impediment commonly recurred in the spring of the year, when I was so enamoured of rambling in the open air that not even emulation itself could chain me to my books." Vol. i. p. 87.

"My appetite," says he, near ten years after, in letter 39, dated Dorchester gaol, (poor fellow!) "my appetite is apt to flag with the hilarity of the season and the tempting appearances of nature; so that I should not much object to a liberation at this time with Lord Thanet and Mr. Ferguson !"

We turn from this bold avowal of a frailty, surely in Mr. Wakefield, at least, productive of most pitiable consequences, to 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 suffici ens" 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 inore 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.

6

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.

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 it 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

"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 50007. by his fortunate inclosure in Dorchester gaol, through the liberal contributions of his friends on the occasion.

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 genius 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, in 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

66

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