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most humble, most devoted, and most obsequious servants" they "have the honour to be." Their very language seems to be in a hurry; since it is in a great part composed of monosyllables, and two of them, again, are often run into one: the great quantity of monosyllables looks like an abridged way of writing, a kind of short-hand. The English talk little, I suppose, that they may not lose time: it is natural, therefore, that a nation which sets the highest value upon time, should make the best chronometers, and that all, even among the poorer classes, should be provided with watches. The mail-coach guards have chronometers worth eighty pounds sterling, because they must take care never to arrive five minutes past the hour appointed. At the place of their destination, relations, friends, and servants, are already collected to receive passengers and parcels. When a machine is so complicated as England is, it is essential for everything to be exact, or the confusion would be ruinous.' pp. 213-16.

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'Double an Englishman's time, and you double his riches." How fine a compliment to the national industry.' These specimens will shew that Count Pecchio has studied the English character with no unfavourable result. Some of his observations bespeak even a strong partiality as well as no ordinary penetration. Our fair country women have pleased him so well, that he has married an English lady. He praises highly the English system of education, that which prevails among the better classes; objecting only, against the excess of reading which leaves the mind no time to digest its food, and the use of stays! The young women of England', remarks the Count, under a stormy and inconstant sky, have hearts and minds peaceful and serene, always equable and always docile: My amiable countrywomen, ' under a heaven perpetually smiling, have minds and hearts always in a tempest.' He speaks from the opportunities he has had, of judging of the manners of that class of society which in England is the best informed, the most hospitable, the most beneficent, and the most virtuous of all; and which, being there ' immeasureably more numerous than in any other country, forms, 'so to speak, the heart of the nation'. As to the higher classes, he adds, they almost every where have a strong resemblance to ' each other and model themselves on the same code of caprice, etiquette, prejudice, and nothingness.' Their manners may be learned from Parini, "Don Juan", or "Almack's". May the pestilence of foreign manners never descend lower!

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The Author's observations on the Opposition in the House of Commons, do credit to his discernment. At first, he was led, he says, to regard the exertions of the opposition members as the 'mere professorship of eloquence'. But a person who studies the national organization of England', soon changes his opinion.

In the first place, he perceives that if the opposition does not conquer, it at least hinders the enemy (whoever he may be, liberal or not)

from abusing his victory, or consummating an unjust conquest. It is like the dike of a river, which cannot assist its current, but keeps it in, and compels it to follow its course. The advantage of the opposition does not consist so much in the good that it effects, as in the evil that it prevents. It keeps awake the attention, the patriotism, the distrust of the people; it propagates in general the right opinions, it is the born protector of the injured and the oppressed, the harbinger of all improvements, of all liberal institutions. Suppose that, by accident, the opposition is composed of persons in favour of absolute power: to procure adherents, they will be obliged to mask their sentiments, to hold the language of justice and freedom,-like those proud and tyrannic Roman patricians, such as the Appii and Opimii, who, to gain their suffrages for the consular dignity, descended to mix among and to flatter the common people; or, like Dionysius, who, when on the throne, crushed out the very blood of the people, and, when he was hurled from it, played the buffoon to the populace, and got drunk in the public taverns. But the action of the minority is not immediate. An opinion cannot be formed and propagated and popularized in a few months, nor sometimes in a few years. The abolition of the slavetrade cost Wilberforce twenty years of persevering application. Every year repulsed, every year he returned to the assault, printing pamphlets, convening public meetings of philanthropists, collecting notices and documents on the barbarous cruelties practised on board of the vessels engaged in the horrible traffic, and thus exciting the imaginations and melting the hearts of his fellow citizens, he broke at length with the multitude into the temple of justice and triumph.

The resistance of the opposition is not useful to the nation alone, but to the government itself. Without it, every administration would soon corrupt, and degenerate into infamy, and its existence would be threatened, either with a slow-consuming or a rapid and violent destruction. Napoleon, at the time that every will bent before his, was compelled, in order to get at the truth, to take sometimes the advice of the opposition in his council of State, rather than that of his own ministers, as will appear upon consulting the sittings of 1809 respecting the liberty of the press. In December 1825, when Mr. Brougham informed the Ministry, that he intended to propose a revision of the law of Libel, a newspaper attached to the government, which was then opposed to him, expressed much pleasure at the circumstance, observing, that between the two contrary opinions of two first-rate statesmen, such as Brougham and the Secretary Peel, there would be found a third, which would reconcile the interests of the liberty of the Press, with the claims of justice for the repression of its licentiousness. While the nation continues to prosper under the principles of the Ministry, the opposition does nothing but prevent its wandering too far from the path; but when it feels itself in a state of suffering and decline, under the existing management of affairs, the nation finds other principles at hand, other men and another party already matured, and prepared to guide the vessel of the state in a different direction. All republics, both ancient and modern, have been perpetually agitated by the two contrary winds of the aristocratic and democratic factions, and although the former at every step passed from the hands of one of these

parties into those of the other, they went on prospering for several centuries, in the midst of the oscillation, produced by these changes. In a free government, the shock of two parties, and the apparent discord, are in reality only a contest which shall render the country happy. Filangieri says that this emulation is at bottom nothing better than the love of power, but as this power can never be attained nor preserved except by promoting the general good, it can be no very great concession to call it Patriotism. The two opposite forces, which oblige free governments to run along a middle line, are like those which regulate the motions of the celestial bodies: opposition produces the same good effects in the moral world. All governments deteriorate into tyranny without it: in the absence of criticism, which is their opposition,-what would literature, and the arts become? We should still be under the yoke of the commentators on Aristotle; we should still have the atoms of Epicurus in physics, and the crystal heavens of Ptolemy in astronomy. If the Winklemanns, the Mengses, and the Milizias, had not kept bad taste within its bounds, painting would have become a caricature, and architecture a heap of crudities. Except for criticism, the Gongoras would still hold the foremost rank in Spain, the Mariveaus in France, the Marinis in Italy: without Baretti's literary scourge," the Arcadia of Rome would probably be still in higher esteem than the French Academy, and the Italians would have become so many Arcadian shepherds, with their pipes hung round their necks. Without the struggle between duty and sacrifice, would there be any virtue or heroism in the world? What is England itself with regard to the rest of Europe, but "the Opposition," which always throws its weight into the scale on the side of the weak and oppressed, in order to preserve the equilibrium?' pp. 141-45.

'England the refuge of the oppressed', is the title of a very interesting chapter, containing biographical notices of some illustrious foreign exiles in England. Justice is not always done, 'nor can it always be done, in the English Parliament; but in'justice is at least published to all the world by the sound of the trumpet. This is nobly said, and may teach Englishmen to value more those glorious institutions which enable our Senators to make their voice heard to the recesses of the council-chambers and courts of despots, and not wholly without effect.

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We bave not room to notice the Author's observations on our religious sects-Unitarians, Methodists, Baptists, Quakers. Of the Unitarians, he gives as favourable an account as would have been supplied by one of themselves. His information with regard to the rest of the forty-seven sects', seems chiefly taken from that most imbecile and pernicious production, Evans's "Sketch of. 'all Denominations." But the Author discovers so much candour and liberality of feeling, that we cannot quarrel with him for blunders for which he is hardly responsible. Unfeignedly we wish, that, on the subject of religion, he would take the only fair or satisfactory means of informing himself, by consulting the word of God. His "Observations" are, altogether, the most in

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telligent, discriminating, and instructive that we have ever seen from the pen of a foreigner; very superior, in every respect, to the superficial remarks of Mirabeau, or even the vivid, but flippant delineations of the German Prince.'

With

Art. VI. Heath's Book of Beauty. M.D.CCC.XXXIII. Nineteen beautifully finished Engravings, from Drawings by the First Artists. By L. E. L. 8vo. Price in Morocco, 17. 1s. London. 1832.

BEAUTIFUL in many respects we must admit this splendid

volume to be. The engravings are beautiful specimens of the art, and the tales are really beautiful compositions. It is a book of beauty, but not of beauties. We do not know what has of late happened to our Artists, but, whether it be owing to favouritism, to caprice, or to the adoption of some new standard of beauty, or whether beauty itself is going out of fashion, or whatever explanation may be given, this volume presents by no means the first instance in which we have been puzzled to account for the lavishing of the powers of the pencil and the burin upon subjects so unattractive, or at least so little conformable to our ideas of loveliness and grace. In the present volume, out of the nineteen female beauties, Gulnare is a fright; Grace St. Aubyn might be lovely with a nose half the length of that which, not Nature, but the artist has given her; Laura is decidedly unpleasing; Lucy Ashton has little pretensions to beauty; Lolah is in the sulks, and her mouth is the very type of ill-temper; Meditation might be styled Affectation; and Geraldine has more character than beauty. The others, we admit, are happier specimens of varied beauty. Leonora is a lovely blonde, with the genuine mild, serene beauty of the English lady. Rebecca is romantically beautiful, a creature of poetry, looking like a fragile charm that a rude breath might dissolve. The Enchantress has an oriental cast of feature as well as of costume, which comports with her look of witchery. Medora is a Grecian beauty. Belinda looks as if descended from a picture gallery of the age of Sir Charles Grandison. The Mask is a portrait of a dazzling creature with that witching expression which no Englishman wishes to see in the woman he esteems. Donna Julia, The Bride, and Madeline are also, each in a different style, beautiful. But too much praise can hardly be given to the Artists. As a series of plates, they are of the highest merit.

To these plates, originally designed as illustrations of Lord Byron's Poems, and Scott's Novels, Miss Landon has been employed to accommodate a series of tales, in which she has exhibited a power of imagination and a skill in composition far exceeding any thing that we could have anticipated from her former

productions. She must pardon us for saying that we much prefer her prose to her verse. At the same time the powers of mind displayed in her present production shew, that she might have written far better poetry had she not been misled by the applause lavished on her first clever, but immature uncultivated efforts. Encouragement is sunshine to genius: Flattery is the forcing glass. But of late L. E. L. has seemed to be pruning her talents, and has appeared as a writer in a new character. These tales are framed for the amusement of the polite and gay. The volume is for the drawing-room or the boudoir. Of the general tendency of such works of imagination, we have often had occasion to express our opinion. But it is due to the present Writer to bear our testimony to the feminine propriety and chastity of sentiment as well as of style, which characterize these tales. Of the elegance of the composition, our readers will judge from the subjoined specimens.

Water-the mighty, the pure, the beautiful, the unfathomablewhere is thy element so glorious as it is in thine own domain, the deep seas? What an infinity of power is in the far Atlantic, the boundary of two separate worlds, apart like those of memory and of hope! Or in the bright Pacific, whose tides are turned to gold by a southern sun, and in whose bosom sleep a thousand isles, each covered with the verdure, the flowers, and the fruit of Eden! But amid all thine hereditary kingdoms, to which hast thou given beauty as a birthright, lavishly as thou hast to thy favourite Mediterranean? The silence of a summer night is now sleeping on its bosom, where the bright stars are mirrored, as if in its depths they had another home and another heaven. A spirit, cleaving air midway between the two, might have paused to ask which was sea, and which was sky. The shadows of earth and earthly things, resting omen-like upon the waters, alone shewed which was the home and which the mirror of the celestial host.

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'But the distant planets were not the only lights reflected from the sea; an illuminated villa upon the extreme point of a small rising on the coast, flung down the radiance from a thousand lamps. From the terrace came the breath of the orange-plants, whose white flowers were turned to silver in the light which fell on them from the windows. Within the halls were assembled the fairest and noblest of Sicily. A king, or more, the Athenian Pericles, might have welcomed his most favoured guests in such a chamber. The walls were painted in fresco, as artists paint whose present is a dream of beauty, and whose future is an immortality. Each fresco was a scene in Arcadia: and the nymphs who were there gathering their harvest of roses, were only less lovely than the Sicilian maidens that flitted past.' pp. 1, 2.

'Somerset House conveys the idea of a Venetian palace; its Corinthian pillars, its walls rising from the waters, its deep arches, fitting harbour for the dark gondola, the lion sculptured in the carved armsall realises the picture which the mind has of those marble home

VOL. IX.-N.S.

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