Now, Mr. Hardcastle, I would not censure this: the idea is novel, and does no harm: but why should a man push his neck into a halter to sustain a catch or glee?

I do not understand rightly in what the greatness | vented new rhymes in profusion, by such words of your poets, and such like, may be certified to as trackschuyt, Wageninghen, Skiermonikoog, rest. Who would have imagined that the youth Bergen-op-Zoom, and whatever is appertaining to who was carried to his long home the other day, the market-places of fish, flesh, fowl, flowers, and I mean my Lord Rochester's reputed child, Mr. legumes, not to omit the dockyards and barGeorge Nelly, was for several seasons a great poet? racks and ginshops, with various kinds of essences Yet I remember the time when he was so famous and drugs. a one, that he ran after Mr. Milton up Snow-hill, as the old gentleman was leaning on his daughter's arm from the Poultry, and, treading down the heel of his shoe, called him a rogue and a liar, while another poet sprang out, clapping his hands and crying "Bravely done, by Beelzebub! the young cock spurs the blind buzzard gallantly!" On a scrivener representing to Mr. George the respectable character of Mr. Milton, and the probability that at some future time he might be considered as among our geniuses, and such as would reflect a certain portion of credit on his ward, and asking him withal why he appeared to him a rogue and a liar, he replied, "I have proofs known to few: I possess a sort of drama by him, entitled Comus, which was composed for the entertainment of Lord Pembroke, who held an appointment under the king, and this John hath since changed sides, and written in defence of the Commonwealth."

Having had some concern in bringing his reputed father to a sense of penitence for his offences, I waited on the youth likewise, in a former illness, not without hope of leading him ultimately to a better way of thinking. I had hesitated too long: I found him far advanced in his convalescence. My arguments are not worth repeating: he replied thus. "I change my mistresses as Tom Southern his shirt, from economy. I can not afford to keep few; and I am determined not to be forgotten till I am vastly richer. But I assure you, doctor Burnet, for your comfort, that if you imagine I am led astray by lasciviousness, as you call it, and lust, you are quite as much mistaken as if you called a book of arithmetic a bawdy book. I calculate on every kiss I give, modest or immodest, on lip or paper. I ask myself one question only; what will it bring me?" On my marvelling and raising up my hands, "You

are too

Mr. George began with satirising his father's friends, and confounding the better part of them with all the hirelings and nuisances of the age: with all the scavengers of lust and all the link-churchmen," he added with a laugh, boys of literature; with Newgate solicitors, the patrons of adulterers and forgers, who, in the long vacation, turn a penny by puffing a ballad, and are promised a shilling in silver for their own benefit, on crying down a religious tract. He soon became reconciled to them, and they raised him upon their shoulders above the heads of the wittiest and the wisest. This served a whole winter. Afterward, whenever he wrote a bad poem, he supported his sinking fame by some signal act of profligacy, an elegy by a seduction, a heroic by an adultery, a tragedy by a divorce. On the remark of a learned man that irregularity is no indication of genius, he began to lose ground rapidly, when on a sudden he cried out at the Haymarket, there is no God. It was then surmised more generally and more gravely that there was something in him, and he stood upon his legs almost to the last. Say what you will, once whispered a friend of mine, there are things in him strong as poison, and original as sin. Doubts however were entertained by some on more mature reflection, whether he earned all his reputation by his aphorism: for soon afterward he declared at the Cockpit, that he had purchased a large assortment of cutlasses and pistols, and that, as he was practising the use of them from morning to night, it would be imprudent in persons who were without them, either to laugh or to boggle at the Dutch vocabulary with which he had enriched our language. In fact, he had in

hot in all your quarters for the calm and steady contemplation of this high mystery."

He spake thus loosely, Mr. Hardcastle, and I confess I was disconcerted and took my leave of him. If I gave him any offence at all, it could only be when he said, "I should be sorry to die before I have written my life," and I replied, "Rather say, before you have mended it."

"But, doctor," continued he, "the work I propose may bring me a hundred pounds." Whereunto I rejoined, "That which I, young gentleman, suggest in preference, will be worth much more to you."

At last he is removed from among the living. Let us hope the best; to wit, that the mercies which have begun with man's forgetfulness, will be crowned with God's forgiveness.

Hardcastle. I perceive, my lord bishop, that writers of perishable fame may leave behind them something worth collecting. Represented to us by historians like your lordship, we survey a light character as a film in agate, and a noxious one as a toad in marble.

Burnet. How near together, Mr. Hardcastle, are things which appear to us the most remote and opposite! how near is death to life, and vanity to glory! How deceived are we, if our expressions are any proofs of it, in what we might deem the very matters most subject to our senses! the haze above our heads we call the heavens, and the thinnest of the air the firmament.

PETER LEOPOLD AND THE PRESIDENT DU PATY.

Leopold. I know, M. Du Paty, that your compliments can not stifle nor supersede your sincerity; and that if I seriously ask your opinion on the defects of my Code, you will answer me as seriously. The President bowed, and, observing that Leo-lators; many know perfectly what has been estapold had paused, replied.

President. The glory of self-possession and of abstinence from bloodshed is shared by Sweden in the same age. And indeed, although it might be called by a less intelligent and a less impartial judge invidiousness and detraction, I can not but remark that some of the best Englishmen of that period were no better than robbers.

Leopold. Robbers they were; but they also were better than robbers. Courage, which ought to be generous, was rapacious; and Genius, which ought to be tutelary, was destructive. Few rise to eminence in a calm; and of those who attain it in a stormier season, the names for the most part are perishable. Not so Raleigh's.

President. France has produced many quite as illustrious in the union of wisdom, eloquence, and enterprise, as he was; and finding such characters by no means extraordinary, has forgotten them.

would only demonstrate their imperfection; but | best soldiers on the continent, fled before them I will insist on the documents of the Latin writers from one region of America to another, and over de re rustica, who give particular directions on all the seas, while opulent cities were sacked by the breed of house-dogs for the safeguard of the a boat's crew of buccaneers. farms, however far removed be the subject from cattle and cultivation. Nothing similar has entered into the scheme of any modern author on agriculture. Added to which, there is hardly a Latin writer, whether in prose or poetry, whatever be his subject, who does not say something about thieves; so familiar was the idea. The word itself extended, in more than one direction, beyond the character it first designated; Plautus calls a soldier latro, Horace, a servant fur. The Romans, who far excelled us in the greater part of their institutions, were much behind in what by way of excellence we call the police. Hence in early times an opening to theft, among a people less influenced than any other by continence and honour. In many whole provinces of England, France, and Holland, and throughout the kingdoms of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, the countryman may sleep in perfect security with his doors wide-open: but, among the Italians, not in a single village, not in a single house, from Como to Reggio. The windows in every dwelling in Florence, even of your own palace, are barricaded by grates of iron; in other words, every dwelling, your own among the rest, holds forth in the censor's face a libel against the government. The fault is partly in the laws and partly in the magistrature; for there is no nation so easily coerced by fear as this. I recommend no cruelty: but those laws are cruel which are illusory, dilatory, or costly, to such as appeal to their protection; not those which award a stated and known severity of punishment for proven offences. The latter are no more so than a precipice or a penknife. I may leap down the one, I may cut my throat with the other; I may do neither.

Sisto Quinto is the only sovran who appears to have acted uniformly according to the national character.

Leopold. I see in him, however, that cruel laws do not necessarily make a people cruel. The Romans (I would rather call them the inhabitants of Rome) were less so under Sisto Quinto than before or since; and the English are, and have always been, the most humane of nations, under penal laws the most iniquitous and atrocious.

President. I am desirous of learning why the English appear to have been always so.

Leopold. Look at Spain, at France, at Italy, from 1500 to 1600, a century in which the human race, both in those countries and in England, seems to have been greatly worse than it ever was before or since; and you will rarely find an empoisonment, rarely an assassination of any kind, committed in England for policy or revenge; while every month produces them in rank abundance through Italy, Spain, and France. I attribute it chiefly to the conscious valour of the English, so long displayed over all their enemies. The Spaniards, then esteemed the bravest and

Leopold. I see clearly she has forgotten them, whether I read your historians or your older writers.

President. In regard to integrity and candour; no wickedness in that or any other age is com parable to Bacon's, another great Englishman, who solicited and flattered the Earl of Essex, owed his fortune and dignity to him, and dragged him to the scaffold.

I do not wonder at the villanies of men who have nothing but power and pedigree to support them, and whose names are as perishable as those of their spaniels; but I do wonder at one who is conscious that his must be immortal, fixing a stigma with his own hand upon it, which only the flames that will consume the world can obliterate. The counsellors of Elizabeth were wary and politic; they left magnificent mansions and large estates behind them, and the letters which compose their titles are legible enough; but what were the men intrinsically? Sharpers in Paris are often necessitated to exercise as much ability in doing less mischief. But Bacon, Bacon, to whom the earth had never seen (and was only then about to see) an equal: Bacon, to whom Milton and Shakspeare might have risen and looked up reverentially, was lured away by Avarice in the specious form of Ambition; and Ingratitude, the only fiend as odious, cast him down among worse than dead men from the pinnacle of glory.

I now return from the most memorable of the chancellors to the laws themselves. The laws of England have been the subject of eulogy to many learned and sagacious men. I have read them repeatedly and pondered them attentively, and I discover them often dilatory, often uncertain, often contradictory, often cruel, often ruinous. Whenever they find a man down they keep him so, and the more pertinaciously the more earnestly he appeals to them. Like tilers, in mending one hole, they make another. There is no country in which they move with such velocity

E

regarding pain, torture, death itself, that he might not injure his family. Until the year 1772 a man convicted of felony, or petty treason, incurred what is barbarously and foolishly called "corruption of blood," followed by confiscation of goods, if, after or before his sentence, he acknowledged himself guilty: but if, hoping to save from ruin a family he had already brought to shame, he refused to answer the questions of the court, and neither denied nor confessed his guilt, then he was led back to his dungeon, a little

where life is at stake, or, where property is to be defended, so slowly. I have hardly the courage to state these facts, and want it totally to hazard a reflection on them. Can we wonder that, on a Bench under so rotten an effigy of Justice, sate a Scrogges, a Jefferies, a Finch, a Page! The hand of Law strikes the poor, its shadow strikes the wealthy. The Roman institutions were incomparably better, when the most respectable and the most elevated characters of the republic walked up and down the forum, ready to receive the complaints and to redress the grievances of their fellow-bread and water was given to him, he was cast on citizens. Such was the practice not only in the his back, and he perished by the slow operation time of the republic, but before it under the of an iron weight upon his breast. Blackstone, kings, and after it under the emperors. Law is in his encomium on the English laws, which he become in England not only the most expensive, entitles a commentary on the Constitution, is but the most rapacious and the most dishonest unable to deny or to dissemble this fact. Neverof trades and the most licentious of strolling theless the procedures and administration of comedians are those, who, under the title of bar-justice are better in England than in France: in risters, accompany the English judges in their England it would be an infamy for a person to circuits. In cross-questioning, as they term it, solicit or even to visit a judge on any case, crimior examination of deponents against their client, nal or civil: in France it would be thought a folly they bear no respect whatever to honour or genius and an affront not to do it, and the omission of it or any kind of worth; and the accuser who has would be the loss of the suit. We Frenchmen are been robbed, defrauded, or otherwise injured, has the most delicate people in the world on points of a graver and more intolerable wrong impending honour, and the least delicate on points of justice. over him, not only than what he has already suffered, but even than what the criminal himself, in most instances, has to fear: so shameless is the effrontery, so unrestricted the invective, of barristers. What is peculiar in our times to the English, is, that these alone are the qualities for which the leaders of their Opposition are chosen; and from the Opposition (when the dunghill is well heated) ministers and secretaries, heads and tails, dart across the road before you.

Leopold. I have observed that these worthies begin their course by rowing with their backs against the stream, leaving it to be inferred what feats they can perform when a fare is offered them to go with it. With them we have nothing to do: let us descend again to the lower courts, in which the slowness of reparation is the thing most complained of. Justice in England is perhaps the slower in her movements from a higher sense of the decorous.

President. One would imagine that, in this long minuet of hers, she might take better care not to sweep against and upset the refreshments. Who could suppose that laws, instituted to humanize and civilize mankind, and on the operation of which the eyes of the most acute and virtuous are constantly intent, should retain a degree of ferocity greater than on any occasion they are called upon to correct? and should retain it where the nation has less of it than any other, and where hardly any trace of it is to be discovered out of its tribunals? Yet England, and within these twenty years, saw the worst of tortures inflicted on a criminal, not for his crime, but for his constancy; not for the violation of his country's laws, but for his strict observance of nature's; not for yielding to the solicitations of poverty, or to the seductions of vice, but for dis

Leopold. In other words the most on imaginary things, the least on real. A man's vanity tells him what is honour, a man's conscience what is justice: the one is busy and importunate in all times and places: the other but touches the sleeve when men are alone, and, if they do not mind it, leaves them. Point of honour you may well call it; for such precisely is the space it occupies.

Nothing is so surprising and proves to me so manifestly the moral excellence of the English above all other nations, as their juries. That twelve men should be unanimous, in order to punish an offender, and that neither fear nor corruption should have influenced an individual in the many hundred thousands who have been jurymen, is a miracle in morals and jurisprudence. No other nation could prudently or safely adopt this institution; no Italian legislator could modify it in any way; nor indeed does it appear to me advisable, in the most perfect state to which human nature can be brought, that more than nine in twelve should decide on guilt or innocence. For take the better informed half of the world, put the names into an urn, draw them out at hazard, and by twelves, and you will surely find at least three in that number weak, obstinate, or dishonest.

President. Some of the English laws are wonderfully strange, and equally strange are the expressions. I may be punished for "bringing a man into contempt": as if anyone could be brought into it without stirring a step on his own legs toward it. Aristides may have been laughed at, Phocion may have been reviled; but the judge who should have said that either had been brought into contempt, would have been covered with it himself by every citizen of Athens. The English are somewhat less quick in the apprehension of absurdity: and this expression is not merely an