this was the case, however, he appears to have wandered from their tenets into the wastes of scepticism; and a sectary, who had reasoned himself into an infidel, could be friend neither to the church of England, nor the doctrines which she teaches. His opinions of state affairs were perhaps a little biassed by the frequent visits of the excise men, who levied taxes on his commodities, for the purpose of maintaining a war which he disapproved of. It was most natural that a person who considered tax-gatherers as extortioners, and the soldiers who were paid by the taxes, as licensed murderers, should conceive the whole existing state of human affairs to be wrong; and if he was conscious of talent, and the power of composition, he might, at the same time, naturally fancy that he was called upon to put it to rights. No opinion was so prevalent in France, and none passed more current among the admirers of French philosophy in Britain, as that the power of framing governments, and of administering them, ought to remain with persons of literary attainments; or, in other words, that those who can most easily and readily write books, are therefore best qualified to govern states. Whoever peruses the writings of the late ingenious Madame de Stael, will perceive that she (one of the most remarkable women certainly in her time) lived and died in the belief, that revolutions were to be effected, and countries governed by a proper succession of clever pamphlets. A nation which has long enjoyed the benefit of a free press, does not furnish so many believers in the omnipotence of literary talent. Men are aware that every case may be argued on both sides, and seldom render their assent to any proposition merely on account of the skill with which it is advocated or illustrated. The editor of this.work was never one of those who think that a good cause can suffer much by free discussion, and admits Mr. Bage's novels into the collection of British novelists, as works of talent and genius, though differing entirely both from his political and theological tenets. It is a kind of composition more adapted to confirm those who hold similar opinions with the author, by affording them a triumph at the expense of their opponents, than to convince those who may be disposed calmly to investigate the subject. They who are disposed to burn an obnoxious or unpopular person in effigy, care little how far his dress and external appearance are exaggerated; and, in the same way, it requires little address in an author, to draw broad caricatures of those whom he regards as foes, or to make specious and flattering representations of such as he considers as friends. They who look on the world with an impartial eye, will scarcely be of opinion, that Mr. Bage has seized the true features which distinguish either the upper or lower ranks. The highest and the lowest rank in society are each liable indeed to temptations, peculiarly their own, and their relative situation serves to illustrate the wisdom of the prayer, "Give me neither poverty nor riches." But these peculiar propensities, we think, will in life be found considerably different from the attributes ascribed to the higher and

lower classes by Mr. Bage. In most cases, his great man resembles the giant of the ancient romance of chivalry, whose evil qualities were presumed from his superior stature, and who was to be tilted at and cut to pieces, merely because he stood a few inches higher than his fellow mortals. But the very vices and foibles of the higher classes are of a kind different from what Bage has frequently represented them. Men of rank, in the present day, are too indif ferent, and too indolent, to indulge any of the stormy passions, and irregular, but vehement desires, which create the petty tyrant, and perhaps formerly animated the feudal oppressor. Their general fault is a want of energy, or, to speak more accurately, an apathy, which is scarcely disturbed even by the feverish risks to which they expose their fortune, for the sole purpose, so far as can be discerned, of enjoying some momentary excitation. Amongst the numbers, both of rank and talent, who lie stranded upon the shores of Spenser's Lake of Idleness, are many who only want sufficient motives for exertion, to attract at once esteem and admiration; and among those, whom we rather despise than pity, a selfish apathy is the predominating attribute.

In like manner, the habits of the lower classes are far from affording, exclusively, that rich fruit of virtue and generosity which Mr. Bage's writings would teach us to expect. On the contrary, they are discontented, not unnaturally, with the hardships of their situation, occupied too often in seizing upon the transient enjoyments which chance throws in their way, and open to temptations which promise to mend their condition in life, at least to extend the circle of their pleasures at the expense of their morals.

Those, therefore, who weigh equally, will be disposed to think that the state of society most favourable to virtue, will be found amongst those who neither want nor abound, who are neither sufficiently raised above the necessity of labour and industry, to be satiated by the ready gratification of every wild wish, as it arises, or so much depressed below the general scale of society, as to be exasperated by struggles against indigence, or seduced by the violence of temptations which that indigence renders it difficult to re

sist.

Though we have thus endeavoured to draw a broad line of distinction between the vices proper to the conditions of the rich and the poor, the reader must be cautious to understand these words in a relative sense. For men are not rich or poor in relation to the general amount of their means, but in proportion to their wants and their wishes. He who can adjust his expenses within the limits of his income, how small soever that may be, must escape from the temptations which most easily beset indigence; and the rich man, who makes it his business, as it is his duty, to attend to the proper distribution of his wealth, shall be equally emancipated from those to which opulence is peculiarly obnoxious.

This misrepresentation of the different classes in society is not the only speculative error in which Bage has indulged during these VOL. VII. No. 41.-Museum.

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poetic narratives. There is in his novels a dangerous tendency to slacken the reins of discipline upon a point, where, perhaps, of all others, society must be benefited by their curbing restraint.

Fielding, Smollet, and other novelists, have, with very indifferent taste, brought forward their heroes as rakes and debauchees, and treated with great lightness those breaches of morals, which are too commonly considered as venial in the male sex; but Bage has extended, in some instances, that license to females, and seems at times even to sport with the ties of marriage, which is at once the institution of civil society most favourable to religion and good order, and that which, in its consequences, forms the most marked distinction between man and the lower animals. All the influence which women enjoy in society-their right to the exercise of that maternal care which forms the first and most indelible species of education; the wholesome and mitigating restraint which they possess over the passions of mankind; their power of protecting us when young, and cheering us when old-depend so entirely upon their personal purity, and the charm which it casts around them, that, to insinuate a doubt of its real value, is wilfully to remove the broadest corner-stone on which civil society rests, with all its benefits, and with all its comforts. It is true, we can easily conceive that a female like Miss Ross, in Barham Downs, may fall under the arts of a seducer, under circumstances so peculiar as to excite great compassion, nor are we so rigid as to say that such a person may not be restored to society, when her subsequent conduct shall have effaced recollection of her error. But she must return thither as an humble penitent, and has no title to sue out her pardon as a matter of right, and assume a place as if she had never fallen from her proper sphere. Her disgrace must not be considered as a trivial stain, which may be communicated by a husband, as an exceeding good jest, to his friend and correspondent; there must be, not penitence and reformation alone, but humiliation and abasement in the recollection of her errors. This the laws of society demand even from the unfortunate; and to compromise farther, would open a door to the most unbounded licentiousness. With this fault in principle is connected an indelicacy of expression frequently occurring in Bage's novels, but which, though a gross error in point of taste, we consider as a matter of much less consequence than the former.

Having adverted to this prominent error in Mr. Bage's theory of morals, we are compelled to remark that his ideas respecting the male sex are not less inaccurate, considered as rules of mental government, than the over indulgence with which he seems to regard female frailty. Hermsprong, whom he produces as the ideal perfection of humanity, is paraded as a man, who, freed from all the nurse and all the priest has taught, steps forward on his path, without any religious or political restraint, as one who derives his own rules of conduct from his own breast, and avoids or resists all mptations of evil passions, because his reason teaches him that

they are attended with evil consequences. In the expressive words of our moral poet, Wordsworth, he is

"A reasoning, self-sufficient thing,

An intellectual all-in-all."

But did such a man ever exist? Or are we, in the fair construction of humanity, with all its temptations, its passions, and its frailties, entitled to expect such perfection from the mere force of practical philosophy? Let each reader ask his own bosom, whether it were possible for him to hold an unaltered tenor of moral and virtuous conduct, did he suppose that to himself alone he was responsible, and that his own reason, a judge so peculiarly subject to be bribed, blinded, and imposed upon by the sophistry with which the human mind can gloss over those actions to which human passions so strongly impel us, was the ultimate judge of his actions? Let each reader ask the question at his own conscience, and if he can honestly and conscientiously answer in the affirmative, he is either that faultless monster which the world never saw, or he deceives himself as grossly as the poor devotee, who, referring his course of conduct to the action of some supposed internal inspiration, conceives himself, upon a different ground, incapable of crime, even when he is in the very act of committing it.

We are not treating this subject theologically; the nature of our present work excludes such serious reasoning: but we would remind, even in these slight sketches, those who stand up for the self-sufficient morality of modern philosophy, or rather sophistry, that the experiment has long since been tried on a large scale. Whatever may be the inferiority of the ancients in physical science, it will scarce be denied, that in moral science they possessed all the lights which the unassisted reason, that is now referred to as the sufficient light of our paths, could possibly attain. Yet, when we survey what their system of ethics did for the perfection of the human species, we will see that but a very few even of the teachers themselves have left behind them such characters as tend to do honour to their doctrines. Some philosophers there were, who, as instructers in morality, showed a laudable example to their followers; and we will not invidiously inquire how far these were supported in their self-denial, either by vanity, or the desire of preserving consistency, or the importance annexed to the founder of a sect; although the least of these motives afford great support to temperance, even in cases where it is not rendered easy by advanced age, which of itself calms the more stormy passions. But the satires of Juvenal, of Petronius, and, above all, Lucian, show what slight effect the doctrines of Zeno, Epictetus, Plato, Socrates, and Epicurus, produced on their avowed followers, and how little influence the beard of the stoic, the sophistry of the academician, and the self-denied mortification of the cynics, had upon the sects which derived their names from these distinguished philosophers. We will find that these pretended despisers of sensual

pleasure shared the worst vices of the grossest age of society, and added to them the detestable hypocrisy of pretending, that they were all the while guided by the laws of true wisdom and of right

reason.

If, in modern times, they who owned the restraint of philosophical discipline alone have not given way to such gross laxity of conduct, it is because those principles of religion, which they affect to despise, have impressed on the public mind a system of moral feeling unknown till the general prevalence of the Christian religion; but which, since its predominance, has so generally pervaded European society, that no pretender to innovation can directly disavow its influence, though he endeavours to show that the same results which are recommended from the Christian pulpit, and practised by the Christian community, might be reached by the unassisted efforts of that human reason to which he counsels us to resign the sole regulation of our morals.

In short, to oppose one authority in the same department to another, the reader is requested to compare the character of the philosophic Square in Tom Jones, with that of Bage's philosophical heroes; and to consider seriously, whether a system of ethics, founding an exclusive and paramount court in a man's own bosom for the regulation of his own conduct, is likely to form a noble, enlightened, and generous character, influencing others by superior energy and faultless example; or whether it is not more likely, as in the observer of the rule of right, to regulate morals according to temptation and to convenience, and to form a selfish, sophistical hypocrite, who, with morality always in his mouth, finds a perpetual apology for evading the practice of abstinence, when either passion or interest solicit him to indulgence.

We do not mean to say that, because Bage entertained erroneous notions, he therefore acted viciously. The history of his life, so far as known to us, indicates a contrary course of conduct. It would seem, from his language, as we have already said, that he had been bred among the strict and benevolent sect of friends, and if their doctrines carried him some length in speculative error, he certainly could derive nothing from them to favour laxity of morals. In his fictitious works, the quakers are always brought forward in an amiable point of view; and the characters of Arnold, and particularly of Miss Carlile, are admirable pictures of the union of talent, and even wit, with the peculiar manners and sentiments of these interesting and primitive persons. But, if not vicious himself, Bage's leading principles are such as, if acted upon, would introduce vice into society; in men of a fiercer mould, they would lead to a very different line of conduct from his own; and, such being the case, it was the editor's duty to point out the sophistry on which they are founded.

The works of Bage, abstracted from the views which we have endeavoured to point out, are of high and decided merit. It is scarce possible to read him without being amused, and, to a certain