and plainness, and with considerable candour and impartiality between contending systems. I wish you would have the goodness to give him any advice that you think would be useful to him, either as an observer, or as a reporter of his observations. For it is likely that he will pursue this study in the same way for two or three years to come, and he has every disposition to be taught and improved. Do not you think the Geological Society are in a right track for improving the science, by collecting minute local descriptions of the surface of the whole country? This volume of their Memoirs contains one or two papers by their traveller, Dr. Berger; I should like to hear what you think of thein.

You ask me to tell you how I am employing my leisure. Alas! I am never systematic in execution, though abundantly so in my schemes. Besides, the air and scenery in which I live at present are so agreeable, that I have hardly done any thing since I came but drink the light by sun and by moon, and read Homer. One of my resolutions was to go through the Iliad; Greek is always a task for a Scotsman; and I rather think I have enjoyed it more here, and read it more currently, than I could have done in London. This sea, with its beautiful shores, and the neighbouring mountain, explain him better than a score of scholiasts. I have another set of books, to fill me with meditations of another kind: Machiavel's Discourses on Livy, Montesquieu's Greatness and Decline of the Romans, Hume's Political Discourses, and Burke's tracts on the French Revolution. I have read them at different times, till they are quite familiar; but I have never before brought them together, so as to compare them, and make them as it were sit in council, in my hearing upon the same points. My purpose in studying them,

is to apply their reasonings to the awful and desperate circumstances of our own time, and to apply these circumstances to their reasonings. I have, besides all this, brought two other books, which I do not know that I shall find time to open; Playfair's Illustrations, and Paley's Natural Theology.

You thus see my retreat from law and little politics. In my volume of Hume's Essays there are two which set me a thinking upon some of your speculations; that on Tragedy, and that on the Delicacy of Taste and Passion, particularly the last. I wish you would examine the speculations which he has just raised in these two

essays.

Here is a fact for you. A gentleman whom I met with about three weeks ago, told me he was present at the execution of a man upon the wheel, at Hanover, not many years ago. The malefactor was a soldier, his crime a robbery with atrocious violence. He knew he was condemned to die, but the manner of his death was not told him till he was brought upon the scaffold. The person who gave me the account stood very near him, when it was communicated to him that he was to be broke on the wheel. The instantaneous effect upon his mind was, that he looked at his limbs, his arms, his legs -one after the other. He submitted to his fate with fortitude.

Affectionately yours,

FRA. HORNER.

LETTER CLXXVI.* TO J. A. MURRAY, ESQ.

My dear Murray,

Torquay, 14th Sept. 1811.

I am very happy to have got some intelligence, though indirectly, of your projected journey. Jeffrey I hear is coming to London, and you are to be his travel

ling companion. This is a most agreeable arrangement for you. You will get to London before the next quarterly Report about the King, which has always been a period of much political gossip, intrigue, and speculation; and a favourable time for using one's eyes and ears. The character of the Regent appears to be now thoroughly developed; he has evidently none of the ambition, good or bad, that his station inspires into all manly minds; but is as devoid of activity in public concerns, as I always believed him to be of public principle. The life he leads is one of stupid, superannuated profligacy, which is disturbed by fearful anxieties, lest the public should discover his habits and haunts: he has been on a visit to Lord Hertford's, at Ragley, and the newspapers were all carefully cautioned and paid to make no mention of it. Instead of the business and ardour which would have been natural to a man in the vigour of life; becoming sovereign of such a people as this, at such a moment of their history, nothing is known of him, but such languid luxury, and effeminate profusion, as we read of at Paris, in the last years of Louis XV.

At present he is completely under the management of the Duke of Cumberland and Lord Yarmouth; of the former it is not a year since he used to express openly the worst opinion; the latter is, by the general opinion of every body, considered to be one of the very worst men living, wholly unprincipled in every particular, but with considerable talents from nature. He ingratiated himself with the Prince not long before the Regency was formed, and assumed the management of his household expenses and bed-chamber politics. He will perhaps not have temper or manners to maintain his ascendancy very long; he disgusted many of the nobility at the fête in Carlton House, by a vulgar

insolence which he could not conceal; and the Prince is very likely to discard him on an instant, for some unguarded freedom. In the meanwhile he has the direction of repairs at Carlton House, which are to cost half a million; though the Prince means, as soon as he is King, to remove to Buckingham House, which will also need repairs.

It is very hard to believe that the transactions of government in Ireland are not in the same character of a crooked intriguing policy, for the purpose of managing the Prince. Have you any hesitation in thinking that Opposition ought to take up this matter in Parliament in the most decided manner, without any more of that forbearance and reserve which they practised last session?

If the Irish judges support their government, in the construction of the Convention Act, we ought to move for the repeal of so abominable a statute, and in discussing it have no mercy for the judges. If by any unlooked-for turn of patriotism, or fear in the judges, they should construe the act as it seems to me it ought to be, then we shall have a much freer game to play, by an attack upon the administration alone; but, in either event, I feel very anxious that Opposition should go resolutely to the attack, without any compromise towards the Regent. It is not unlikely that Parliament will meet before the legal question can be decided at Dublin;

in that case, ought we not to act without any delay, assuming our own construction of the act to be clear and indubitable? I have not the least faith in any stories of secret intelligence possessed by government, as to designs on the part of the Catholics; if government is sincere, they may have been frightened by the appearance of a little more eagerness among the Catholics, when they believed the day of emancipation was at last coming on; and the show of a little more determination and system, when they found that day bring them a fresh disappointment. I am much more inclined to believe that Percival and the Archbishop of Canterbury have worked upon Lord Manners, who is a timid man, and very bigoted. The conduct of the Wellesleys in all this business is very pitiful, for they have no bigotry on the subject.

It would appear now, I think, that there is some relaxation in the violence of the King's disorder, and that the height to which it rose two months ago was probably owing to the heat of the season. As I understand he is better in health, I begin to think it likely that we shall have the question of restrictions to dispose of in Parliament; that will not fail to be a pleasant scene. I suppose the coronation of his wife is a matter that may be left to the new king's fancy. If he means any farther indignities, or to impose any hardships upon her, it will be disgraceful to the nation to suffer them; with all her folly and low vices, she is a stranger; and though she has not conducted herself in her disgrace so as to deserve any respect, she has already been used very ill. Remember me to Sydney, if he is with you.

Sincerely yours,

FRA. HORNER.