be of opinion that an alteration in this particular would introduce a total alteration in our government, and would soon reduce it to a pure republic,— and, perhaps, to a republic of no inconvenient form. For though the people, collected in a body like the Roman tribes, be quite unfit for government, yet, when dispersed in small bodies, they are more susceptible both of reason and order; the force of popular currents and tides is, in a great measure, broken; and the public interest may be pursued with some method and constancy. But it is needless to reason any further concerning a form of government which is never likely to have place in Great Britain, and which seems not to be the aim of any party amongst us. Let us cherish and improve our ancient government as much as possible without encouraging a passion for such dangerous novelties.

Complete.

OF INTEREST

L

OWNESS of interest is generally ascribed to plenty of money. But money, however plentiful, has no other effect, if fixed, than to raise the price of labor. Silver is more common than gold; and therefore you receive a greater quantity of it for the same commodities. But do you pay less interest for it? Interest in Batavia and Jamaica is at ten per cent., in Portugal at six; though these places, as we may learn from the prices of everything, abound more in gold and silver than either London or Amsterdam.

Were all the gold in England annihilated at once, and one and twenty shillings substituted in the place of every guinea, would money be more plentiful, or interest lower? No, surely; we should only use silver instead of gold. Were gold rendered as common as silver, and silver as common as copper, would money be more plentiful or interest lower? We may assuredly give the same answer. Our shillings would then be yellow, and our halfpence white; and we should have no guineas. No other difference would ever be observed,- no alteration on commerce, manufactures, navigation, or interest,—unless we imagine that the color of the metal is of any consequence.

Now, what is so visible in these greater variations of scarcity or abundance in the precious metals must hold in all inferior changes. If the multiplying of gold and silver fifteen times makes no difference, much less can the doubling or tripling them.

augmentation has no other effect than to heighten the price of labor and commodities; and even this variation is little more than that of a name. In the progress towards these changes, the augmentation may have some influence, by exciting industry; but after the prices are settled, suitably to the new abundance of gold and silver, it has no manner of influence.

An effect always holds proportion with its cause. Prices have risen near four times since the discovery of the Indies, and it is probable gold and silver have multiplied much more; but interest has not fallen much above half. The rate of interest, therefore, is not derived from the quantity of the precious metals.

Money having chiefly a fictitious value, the greater or less. plenty of it is of no consequence, if we consider a nation within. itself; and the quantity of specie, when once fixed, though ever so large, has no other effect than to oblige every one to tell out a greater number of those shining bits of metal, for clothes, furniture, or equipage, without increasing any one convenience of life. If a man borrow money to build a house, he then carries home a greater load; because the stone, timber, lead, glass, etc., with the labor of the masons and carpenters, are represented by a greater quantity of gold and silver. But as these metals are considered chiefly as representations, there can no alteration arise, from their bulk or quantity, their weight or color, either upon their real value or their interest. The same interest, in all cases, bears the same proportion to the sum. And if you lent me so much labor and so many commodities; by receiving five per cent. you always receive proportional labor and commodities, however represented, whether by yellow or white coin, whether by a pound or an ounce. It is in vain, therefore, to look for the cause of the fall or rise of interest in the greater or less quantity of gold and silver, which is fixed in any nation.

High interest arises from three circumstances: a great demand for borrowing; little riches to supply that demand; and great profits arising from commerce: and the circumstances are a clear proof of the small advance of commerce and industry, not of the scarcity of gold and silver. Low interest, on the other hand, proceeds from the three opposite circumstances: a small demand for borrowing; great riches to supply that demand; and small profits arising from commerce, and these circumstances are all connected together, and proceed from the increase of industry and commerce not of gold and silver.

From his "Essays."

LEIGH HUNT

(1784-1859)

EIGH HUNT was a genius when he wrote "Abou Ben Adhem » if never before or afterwards, but he was always a man of talent and an agreeable writer both of prose and verse. His Italian Poets," while not profoundly critical, is very useful as an introduction to the best Italian literature, and the brief essays of his "Table-Talk » are in every respect so commendable that all sorts and conditions of readers thank him for the prudent foresight which led him to report in writing what he might have said orally at table had he had a Boswell to slip behind the door and make memoranda of it for posterity. He was born at Southgate, England, October 19th, 1784, and he lived to the ripe age of seventy-five, dying August 28th, 1859. The chief incident of his life was his two-years' imprisonment for writing disrespectfully of the Prince Regent in the Examiner, but the "exquisite taste" in which he furnished his cell did not tend to establish his position as a martyr. He was the associate of two generations of famous literary men. Byron patronized him, and he wrote "Recollections of Byron,” which was received with marked disfavor by the poet's friends and without indorsement by his enemies. He wrote several plays and novels, but his best work was done as a poet and essayist.

B

"THE WITTIEST OF ENGLISH POETS »

UTLER is the wittiest of English poets, and at the same time he is one of the most learned, and, what is more, one of the wisest. His "Hudibras," though naturally the most popular of his works from its size, subject, and witty excess, was an accident of birth and party compared with his "Miscellaneous Poems"; yet both abound in thoughts as great and deep as the surface is sparkling; and his genius altogether, having the additional recommendation of verse, might have given him a fame greater than Rabelais, had his animal spirits been equal to the rest of his qualifications for a universalist. At the same time, though not

abounding in poetic sensibility, he was not without it. thor of the touching simile,

"True as the dial to the sun,

Although it be not shin'd upon."

He is au

The following is as elegant as anything in Lovelace or Waller:

What security's too strong

To guard that gentle heart from wrong

That to its friend is glad to pass

Itself away, and all it has,

And, like an anchorite, gives over

This world for the heaven of a lover!"

And this, if read with the seriousness and singleness of feeling that become it, is, I think, a comparison full of as much grandeur as cordiality.

"Like Indian widows, gone to bed,

In flaming curtains to the dead."

You would sooner have looked for it in one of Marvel's poems than in "Hudibras."

Butler has little humor. His two heroes, Hudibras and Ralph, are not so much humorists as pedants. They are as little like their prototypes, Don Quixote and Sancho, as two dreary puppets are unlike excesses of humanity. They are not even consistent with their other prototypes, the Puritans, or with themselves, for they are dull fellows unaccountably gifted with the author's wit. In this respect, and as a narrative, the poem is a failure. Nobody ever thinks of the story, except to wonder at its inefficiency; or of Hudibras himself, except as described at his outset. He is nothing but a ludicrous figure. But considered as a banter issuing from the author's own lips, on the wrong side of Puritanism, and, indeed, on all the pedantic and hypocritical abuses of human reason, the whole production is a marvelous compound of wit, learning, and felicitous execution. The wit is pure and incessant; the learning as quaint and out of the way as the subject; the very rhymes are echoing scourges, made of the peremptory and the incongrous. This is one of the reasons why the rhymes have been so much admired. They are laughable, not merely in themselves, but from the masterly will and violence with which they are made to correspond to the absurdities they lash. The

most extraordinary license is assumed as a matter of course; the accentuation jerked out of its place with all the indifference and effrontery of a reason "sufficing unto itself." The poem is so peculiar in this respect, the laughing delight of the reader so well founded, and the passages so sure to be accompanied with a full measure of wit and knowledge, that I have retained its best rhymes throughout, and thus brought them together for the first time.

Butler, like the great wit of the opposite party, Marvel, was an honest man, fonder of his books than of worldly success, and superior to party itself in regard to final principles. He wrote a satire on the follies and vices of the court, which is most likely the reason why it is doubted whether he ever got anything by "Hudibras"; and he was so little prejudiced in favor of the scholarship he possessed that he vindicated the born poet above the poet of books, and would not have Shakespeare tried by a Grecian standard.

Complete.

CHARLES LAMB

L

AMB was a humanist, in the most universal sense of the term. His imagination was not great, and he also wanted sufficient heat and music to render his poetry as good as his prose; but as a prose writer, and within the wide circuit of humanity, no man ever took a more complete range than he. He had felt, thought, and suffered so much, that he literally had intolerance for nothing; and he never seemed to have it, but when he supposed the sympathies of men, who might have known better, to be imperfect. He was a wit and an observer of the first order, as far as the world around him was concerned, and society in its existing state; for, as to anything theoretical or transcendental, no man ever had less care for it, or less power. To take him out of habit and convention, however tolerant he was to those who could speculate beyond them, was to put him into an exhausted receiver, or to send him naked, shivering, and driven to shatters, through the regions of space and time. He was only at his ease in the old arms of humanity; and humanity loved and comforted him like one of its wisest though weakest children. His life had experienced great and peculiar sorrows; but he kept up a balance between those and his consolations, by the goodness of his heart,