a few years ago, was produced in the barracks of Barbadoes, by a system of cleanliness.

In England, most of the longevity now proved, of that which was formerly asserted-of longevity ancient and modern-has been found to the north of the Humber, and to the west of the Severn. It seems to have always run in a line from the south of the Tees, in a south-west direction, towards Herefordshire. There are very few cases of extreme longevity attributed to the midland, southern, and eastern counties. There is one case, that of John Balls, who died in Northamptonshire, on the 5th of April, 1705, (if it be true,) aged 126; a case of John Wilson, of Warkingworth, Suffolk, who lived to 116; and we have just seen the case of Ingleby, who died at Battle Abbey, in Sussex, in 1798, at the age of 117.

We may form some idea of the want of data and of authenticated facts that has hitherto prevailed on this subject of life and population, from the extraordinary circumstance that even Dr. Price committed the monstrous absurdity of calculating that the population of all England and Wales had decreased by one-fourth since the Revolution of 1688.

It seems remarkable that fewer cases of excessive longevity, real or fictitious, are to be found in those counties in which the average of human life is the greatest. Shropshire and Yorkshire (even if allowance be made for the greater extent of the latter) claim the greatest number of excessively-long lives; and yet the average duration of existence in these counties is less than that of Cardigan, Cornwall, and Gloucestershire, in two of which the population is entirely agricultural, whilst in one (Cornwall) it is maritime and mining; and in Yorkshire, a great portion of it is not only manufacturing, but employed in manufactures very destructive to life. The average of existence in Lancashire is low, from its population being manufacturing, and yet a number of the highest cases of longevity are to be found in that county.

A theory prevails that long life runs in families, and yet Sir John Sinclair found that, amongst 508 persons who had passed the age of eighty, only 303 could make it appear that they had even one parent, male or female, who had been as old as themselves. All data upon the subject is involved in confusion; and it must be still more confused: for although we have better means than formerly for arriving at statistical facts and details, individual habits become more diversified as commerce increases, as the powers of intermixture and change of locality are multiplied; and as knowledge, mixed with error, and diversified to infinity, is diffused amongst all classes, both of rich and poor, individual diversities become beyond all calculation, and defy all powers of classifying and generalizing. Alcohol slays its thousands and tens of thousands amongst the poor, and quackery, with ill-directed passions, performs the same service for the rich-quackery, not only advertised and wholesale, but individual and secret. A short digressive anecdote, which I had from a friend, may be both illustrative and amusing.

Sitting in the parlour of an eminent administerer of very useful medicated baths, in Marlborough-street, a gentleman entered the room full of sturdy health, and overflowing with fine animal spirits.

"Sir," said he, "I suppose you are going to take a medicated bath 2"

"No, Sir, I am waiting for a friend who is taking one; thank God, I have perfect health."

66 Sir, I take one every day, well or ill, and generally two a day." "I have never taken five shillings-worth of medicine in my life.". "Oh! Sir, I see you are a most temperate liver."

No, Sir, I am ashamed to say, that from eighteen to the present hour I have been the reverse. Of all men living, my poor father was the most regular and temperate, and his afflictions were many, severe, and fatal."

found any witnesses

of extreme old age, he questioned them as to their habits, and made memoranda of their answers. He discovered that the temperate and intemperate were about equal, but he found that all healthy persons and long-livers were early risers. You, Sir, must be a VERY, VERY early riser a very early riser indeed?"

Quite the reverse, Sir, my Parliamentary duties are such, that, in London, my average hour of going to bed is three in the morning, and my hour of rising twelve."

After this, it was clear that not a word I said, or had said, was believed. The theorist imagined that the consistency of health with irregularity and late hours was so impossible, that the assertion was a most impudent imposition.

Sir," cried he, in a tone of offended consequence, " only try the experiment. Go to bed and get up early, and when you rise, you will find yourself able to grasp your handful of halfpence, at arms-length, as firmly as a giant; get up next day an hour later, and you will grasp them feebly; get up the next day two hours later, and you will find you cannot grasp them at all-no, Sir, not at all."

"Bless you, Sir, get up any hour I may, I can grasp, as firmly as a vice, more sovereigns than I shall ever possess."

"Sir," said this victim of quackery, evidently disbelieving every word I said, "I was going down Regent-street yesterday, when I felt in my

head I don't know how-it was a certain sort of I don't know what-an indescribable something-a ah-a ah-I can't exactly explain myself, but you must know very well what I mean; so I went into a doctor's shop, and I said, give me three grains of calomel, seven of jalap, four of rhubarb, with-and-and-all of which I find agree with my constitution; and so, Sir, I took the dose, and went home, and I said to my wife, Now, my dear, I will take no food to-day-I am determined to give nature fair play.'

66

Zounds, Sir," said I, breaking out into a feigned fit of impatience, and almost of indignation, " is that what you call fair play ?—you turn your stomach into a doctor's shop-you swamp, overwhelm poor nature— Burke her, till she is nearly extinct, and this you call giving nature fair play!-a plague on such fair play!"

Here the bath was announced, and the sturdy, non-ailing gentleman went to take his cure for his non-ailments!

But returning to the subject of longevity, it is to be observed that certain classes of men live to a great age, such as painters (painters and glaziers are the reverse): Da Vinci, Michael Angelo, Titian, Guercini, Guido, Maratti, lived to a good old age. The musicians have lived long; and, notwithstanding all that is said against sedentary employments, we

shall find that men who live by the brain, who are educated, and, consequently, whose nervous systems are more called into exertion than the muscular, exceed in longevity the labouring classes, even when they are well fed, and not over-worked.

Dr. Cheyne commences his Essay on Health by saying that he who lives medically lives miserably. By excess of gluttony and drinking he had brought himself to a prodigious size, and suffered under all the worst effects of excessive plethora; he reduced his diet to eight ounces of flesh and twelve of bread, with one pint of wine per diem, and he got rid of his enormous bulk, and of all his complaints, and lived to the age of seventy-two. This quantity of food he considered the maximum requisite for a hard-working man.

The sources of longevity, and, what is of more consequence, of health whilst we live, have always been classed under six heads :-parentage, air, diet, exercise, sleep, and government of the passions. In going deeply and extensively into the subject, the exceptions to all these elements of long life are found almost as numerous as the examples; and the only infallible, uniform, and universal inference that can be drawn is, that, cæteris paribus, men live longest, and enjoy the best health, who most abstain from wine, spirits, or alcohol under any shape.

SONNET.

TO WINTER.

GONE are those hours that bless'd the cherish'd theme
Of the bard's glowing and devoted lay,
While winter frowning on his dreary way
Comes blighting the young fancy's ardent dream.
Lo! from his front what gathering terrors teem,
And from his eye, where dwells the sickly ray
And fev'rish brightness of the year's decay,

What envious tints o'er lifeless nature gleam.
Rude is his form,-and hark! his angry voice

From the bleak north comes joyless o'er the plain;
It breathes of tempest, and the bitter strain

Bids no warm bosom with a throb rejoice.

Thou hoary tyrant! the lyre's soul would fain
Consign thee to thy regions-back again!

OMICRON.

Dec.-VOL. XLII. NO. CLXVIII.

2 K.

THE POLICY OF ENGLAND WITH REFERENCE TO

FRANCE AND SPAIN.

STRIP a Spaniard of his virtues and you make him a Portuguese,” is one of the sayings of proud Spain. Portugal may retort upon her neighbours-" Strip a Portuguese of his honesty, and you make him a modern Spaniard."

It may be safely affirmed that all men of all parties in this country are united in a common feeling of disgust at the conduct of the Queen Regent's Government in regard to its financial position. The honest are disgusted with the knavery, the knaves with the folly of its proceedings. That the Carlists should refuse to recognize the loans which a constitutional government had contracted would excite no surprise; but that they who profess themselves the regenerators of their country should have inflicted upon it an incurable wound-that they who, in the face of the world, have raised the standard of liberty, and assumed the title of patriots, should be the first to sully the purity of the one, and to proclaim the effrontery and invalidity of their pretensions to the other-may neither be passed by as a matter of course, nor escape with the license of contempt.

Spain had invoked the aid, and appealed to the sympathy of England in behalf of her constitutional infant, the palladium of her infant constitution; and that invocation was answered, and that sympathy felt by those who were honestly interested in the happiness and prosperity of the great family of nations; and though many were averse to the cause of the Regent, believing that that of Don Carlos was legitimate, and that the aim of the Constitutionalists was not liberty but anarchy-not improvement but revolution; yet it cannot be doubted that even among those whose prudence distrusted the Constitutionalists, there were many whose secret hearts leaped within them at the idea of Spanish regeneration, who would have been foremost as the advocates of that cause if its adherents had justified their hopes. The Cortes' Declaration of Rights spoke home to the hearts of Englishmen. Its simplicity, its manliness, its moderation, were so many claims to our respect; it gained more than our respect it reminded us of the time when we too had had a struggle with despotism-it excited our sympathies and our hopes that Spain might follow where England had led. The recollection of Somers was revived by Martinez, and the Declaration of the Spaniard reminded us so strongly of the Bill of Rights of our countrymen, that we turned with affection to the patriots of Spain.

Alas! while our eyes were yet fixed upon Spain with a generous and fond anxiety for her liberty and her fame, the unwelcome truth was exhibited that the Government of Madrid was unworthy of our sympathy. It must be proclaimed with the trumpet-tongues of a free people that the first requisite of freedom is honesty; that the slave is more respectable than the rogue. If the Government of Torreno is bent upon exhibiting to the world the spectacle of utter degradation-if we are unwillingly to be convinced that the principles of just patriotism which his party had professed were assumed merely as a blind in less prosperous days, to be laid aside in the first moments of incomplete success, then M. Torreno and his party must be told that in such circumstances England will cease

to take an interest in their concerns, and will regard with indifference the success or failure of their enemies that as far as Spain is concerned, England will look with indifference upon the struggles of Carlists and Christinos. Nay, the despotism which, by its very darkness, brings into brighter contrast the fair, unsullied face of English liberty will be preferred by this country to that dishonesty which, under the disguise of the counterfeit, exposes the genuine liberty to reproach.

Though these words be harsh, they are not unkind; they are uttered not in anger but in sorrow; they are wrung from a too sanguine believer in the advent of Spanish regeneration. Must we then despair of this desired consummation? Has the leaven of corruption so leavened the whole mass? Is Spain to be for ever marked with the darkest black upon the Map of Europe? Is the boast of her greatness to be reversed, and the sun set for ever upon her dominions? We will not despair of her resurrection-we will hope, we will pray for better and happier days. In the deepest gloom of our anticipations, that Declaration of Rights is visible-all is not lost in a country where so noble a charter has been proclaimed. We see in it a justification of our hopes. Come what may, that Magna Charta will remain a monument that, at the end of Ferdinand's reign, the knowledge and the love of freedom were not utterly extinguished among Spaniards-that there were some at least who were worthy of enjoying it. Lamentable as the state of Spain may be at this moment, there appears no reason for doubting that it has even already made such advances in amelioration as render a continued progression inevitable. It is not merely that despotic has been converted into representative monarchy, which every Englishman must consider the one thing paramount in government; but measures have been introduced which, cutting away the very foundations whereon the old abuses rested, have created a necessity for completing the repairs of the reparable parts of the edifice.

The abolition of the mesta, and the introduction of a system of universal education, are two of the new measures which strike at the very root of the most palpable evils. The latter requires no comment; but the former, the mesta, is fortunately unknown in this country. It has been computed that there are about thirteen millions of sheep in Spain, and they may be divided into two classes, the migratory and the stationary flocks. Of the former about six millions may be estimated as the number enjoying the privileges of the mesta. These privileges are the right of passing through all lands arable or pasture, and of pasturing the flocks upon the grounds in passing; in some instances of fixing, at their own discretion, the amount to be paid to the landholders, and in the remainder, of receiving the pasturage gratis. The owners of lands in the districts in which these rights are established are compelled not only to forbear from inclosing their property, in order that the merinos may have free entrance and exit, but to keep a certain quantity of land in pasture, in order that the merinos may profit by their visit. If it be supposed that the practical working of this theoretical abuse be anything similar to our "right of common," and that it affords a maintenance to the one ewe lamb of many a poor peasant, who could no otherwise pay for its subsistence, such a supposition is at variance with the whole history of Spanish abuses. The migratory flocks are the property, not of the poor man, but the rich; not of the peasant, but of the wealthy noble, and of