At the moment when we are rising from these reflections, we are suddenly arrested by the general groan of the yet uncorrupted part of the nation, at the discovery of the most atrocious plot which has ever disgraced and saddened English history. Of the individuals accused we say nothing :-their several cases, with all the qualifying or mitigating circumstances that attach to each, will be weighed by the calumniated justice of England, in a balance which was never made to swerve by the influence of partiality, nor to tremble by the contagion of popular alarm. But that the most horrible crime has been meditated, has been agreed upon by numbers, has been matured for execution, has been only not committed, all thinking men, of whatever political sentiments, believe; and it is a circumstance which we are unable to contemplate without the profoundest emotions of grief, anxiety, and apprehension.

When an illustration so cogent is afforded of the progress made by the doctrines, or rather by the impiety of assassination, must we not fear that the shocking industry with which the crime has been recommended by one portion of the press, and the lamentable ingenuity with which it has been palliated by another from which better things might have been hoped, have produced a much more extensive effect than has yet betrayed itself in action? This, this is our fear and our grief;-unless the utmost vigilance is employed, we feel the dreadful apprehension that other explosions of crime barely unperpetrated, or even-but we dare not finish the sentence -may inflict on us sensations of a yet acuter sorrow than now agitates the bosoms not only of all the good, but of all not wholly reprobate. Deep impressions sedulously made on the minds of too many of the vulgar,-criminal suggestions, long familiarized,the instinctive horror of crime first relaxed, and then wholly laid aside, these are by no means negative agents; in times of public distress or commotion, their tendency is to be fatally in action. They are living principles, and they live for the destruction of society. These horrible stains, then, these foul concretions,— must be removed, or they will canker fatally; they must undergo a timely lustration, or they will perhaps force on themselves a lustration of fire,

penitusque necesse est

'Multa diu concreta modis inolescere miris.' In what manner this purification may best be accomplished,* there is no need to discuss as a question of legislation or policy. The legislature will, we trust, never want promptitude in upholding the cause of order and morals; and the vigilance of the Executive Government, on the recent occasion, has been beyond praise. Our concern is with individuals; that is, in the proper and constitutional sense of the term, with the people. It is on the minds of these that we wish to enforce the impression of the noxiousness and

atrocity of the new creeds of reform. The propagation of such doctrines is not a matter of indifference to any member of society, is, on the contrary, most deeply interesting to us all. What a degree of insecurity, for example, would the prevalence of the practice of assassination alone, shed over the whole surface of private life! What a loss of that social confidence hitherto so characteristic of England! No expedient can be unnecessary, for the purpose of expelling such principles,-of blunting these envenomed arrows that fly by noonday,-of exorcising this malignant spirit, whose deeds affront the sun. Let all then who have power or influence, be persuaded, that no worthier occasion will ever exist of employing either. By precept, by example, by the generous application of all the means within their reach, let them labour to uphold the national morals and religion under one of the severest persecutions by which they have been assailed since the period of the Reformation. It is not by instructing the people in geometry and arithmetic and philosophy and political economy, (though we certainly would not debar them from a ready access to liberal knowledge of any description,)—but by inculcating on their minds, according to the extent of our respective opportunities, a reverence for those sound and tried principles from which the virtues and the great achievements of their ancestors equally sprung,-that we can hope to render them thoroughly proof against the contagion of the disorganizing maxims of radicalism. All other defences against such an enemy are likely to prove unavailing. This kind goeth not out, but by the use of arms of immortal temper.

[The following passage will be interesting to our readers,—animadverting upon the article from the Edinburgh Review which precedes,--and giving a specimen of ministerial notions upon the policy of Louis XVIII.

From Blackwood's Edinb. Mag.-March, 1820.]

THE political offences of Lord Grenville are traced up by his reviewer to their source, in the school of Edmund Burke, whose hallowed shade is impiously evoked to sustain the insolence of Whiggish derision. The student of his works, upon whom the loftiness of his imagination, and the serene grandeur of his intellect, have left a suitable impression, will fancy to himself the scornful composure with which he would have bidden away from him the tame vulgarity of his assailant's arguments, and the impertinent freedom of his buffoonery. He will imagine how the high and haughty thought, solicitous of the real dignity, and prescient of the coming destiny of the species, would, as it rushed through the fervid spirit of the sage, have embraced and dissolved the petty cavils of the earth-born critic. He will imagine him absorbed in

high communion with the spirit of wisdom, undisturbed by the inaudible murmurs of dissent, as they rise from the immeasurable depths, at the bottom of which it has been the will of nature to station this pert censor of his opinions, and forward detracter from his fame. It is not to the man who can quibble about the failure of emigrant expeditions, or exult over the partial success of Jacobin audacity, that it has been given to fathom the mighty mind of Burke-to sound the depth, or appreciate the magnificence of his views. It was Burke's to grapple with the undying and allpervading spirit of the mighty evil of which he devoted himself to the abatement; the power of this narrow and acrimonious censor is bounded to the humbler function of toiling after the material shapes and sensible details in which it developes itself. The critic is "of earth, earthy,"-and let him not be forgetful, therefore, of the humility of his caste, and the insuperable mediocrity of his destination. Although, with the common perspicacity of a peasant's gaze, he may have marked the movements and recorded the vulgar epochs of revolution, let him not presume, in any other attitude than that of reverence, to approach the mighty spirit of him, who has left in his works an entire chart of the interesting phenomena, exact in science, perfect in comprehension, and richly illuminated with the unfading colours of genius.

We know not, we confess, why the partial abandonment of Mr. Burke's system by the restored government of France, should be welcomed with such an air of triumph as it appears to be by this reviewer. The unmeasured abuse of the French emigrants has ever been a favourite topic with our English Jacobins, just because they have been unfortunate, we suppose, and may, it is thought, be abused with impunity. The gentle and forgiving temper of the Revolutionists and Bonapartists, so fully exemplified in the late history of Europe, has ever been discreetly and modestly contrasted with the bloody and vindictive spirit of the Royalists, thirsting for power and plunder, and eyeing in perspective the mangled victims of their superannuated rage. The Jacobins of France knew well that they had committed crimes to satiety, and that some slight retaliation might be expected, even from the subdued and broken spirit of their Royalist victims; and while their hands were yet red with blood, and their hearts all but glutted with plunder, they began to set up a cry about the horrors of retaliation, which they pretended to deprecate, although they did not dread them, just that they might have a pretext for trampling in the dust those who had already been so long bowed down by adversity. The English Jacobins loudly echoed the cry of their French brethren, and have endeavoured to misrepresent the Royalists as an epitome of all that is stupid and implacable. The restored monarch of France, if he did not, as indeed he could not, believe those VOL. I

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vulgar and revolting calumnies, seems, however, to have been intimately persuaded, from the moment of his return to France, that he was treading upon half-extinguished embers, and to have been treacherously advised that the admission of the Royalists to favour would prove the spark which should rekindle the flames of rebellion. The result of such councils upon his first restoration was to enclose him in a circle formed of all the putrid glitter of revolu tion, which was quickly dissolved for the exemplification of new and frightful treasons. But terror or infatuation appears to have mastered his better understanding-experience has lost with him its ordinary power of instruction. The same fatal empiricism has made him reiterate the experiment of alienating himself from the steadfast and persecuted friends of his house, and confiding in the treachery of a gang of adventurers, whose hearts overflow with the blackest hatred of his name and dynasty; and the natural result has been, that, after a series of giddy rotations, ominous to the stability of his throne, and of which the King himself has been the sport rather than the constitutional spring, the array of high and titled traitors round his person, rather appearing to vouchsafe to him their protection, than to win his favour by their merit or fidelity, has nerved the murderous hand of a kindred but vulgar being to perpetrate a frightful crime, of which the avowed object was the utter extinction of the Bourbon race. It was with its usual felicity that the Edinburgh Review seized such a moment to boast the partial triumph of the Revolution-to assert the preferable claims of its worthies over the insulted and persecuted Royalists-and to exult in the abandonment thus far of Mr. Burke's system, to whose sound and honest advice, as deducible from his immortal works, had the restorers of the French monarchy listened, they would not assuredly have left to the world the revolting spectacle, or the contagious example, of successful crime-nor to the unhappy King of France the odious protection of insolent and menacing villany.

ART. IV. INTRODUCTION-to the Retrospective Review.-London, February, 1820.

THE accumulation of books has ever been regarded with some degree of jealousy-an inundation of paper and print seems to have been thought as formidable to the ideas of men, as an inun dation of water to their houses and cattle. In these latter times, the danger to be apprehended has been deemed so imminent, that various dykes or mud-banks have been established and supported, for the purpose of being interposed between the public and the threatened danger. Reviews have sprung up, as rapidly, and as well armed, [to change the metaphor,] as the fabled warriors from the teeth

sown by Cadmus, to stand in the gap in the hour of need; but it has been "whispered in the state," that, like the same sons of the earth, these self-elected champions, neglecting the public weal, have turned their arms against each other-that having cleared a ring for themselves under the false pretext of a public cause, they have ceased to exhibit themselves in any other character than that of intellectual gladiators; with literature for an arena-the public for spectators and weapons poisoned with party malice and personal slander.

However this may be, the "cacöethes scribendi," or rather, "cacöethes imprimendi," is regularly set down, as a disease as urgently demanding medical aid, as a disorder of the frame, a typhus, or a dropsy. The writers of satire, ever since the times of Horace and Juvenal, have been exclaiming, that all the world were scribbling. That the number of books has been increasing -is increasing-and ought to be diminished-is the deliberate resolution even of those who esteem themselves friendly to literature. That a great book is a great evil, is stamped with the sanction of ages-it has passed into a proverb. If, however, the evil of a book is to be measured by its bulk, the mischief we shall do is small; while at the same time, the good we propose to effect, if estimated on a scale of this kind, is such as must call down upon us the approbation of all favourers of the proverb-since it is one of our objects, and indeed no small part of the design of this work, to reduce books to their natural size; a process which we apprehend will compress many a distended publication into a very insignificant tenement. Let no man weep, as the Thracians did, over the birth of a child, and cry, "another book is born unto the world." For the space we shall empty is greater than that which we hope to fill, should even our future labours ever rival the "piled heaps" of the most favoured periodical that exists. Though some books will undoubtedly stand the test of the critical touchstone, which we propose, from time to time, to apply to the productions before us, and appear the brighter for the trial; many a well-looking and well-bound volume, will fall into ashes in our bands, as the tempting fruit does, which is said to float on the surface of the Dead Sea; while from others, ponderous and unwieldy, the essential ingredients shall be disengaged from the superfluous matter, and the deposit presented either for the amusement or instruction of our readers.

The only real evil to be apprehended from the enormous increase in the number of books, is, that it is likely to distract the attention, and dissipate the mind, by inducing the student to read many, rather than much. The alluring catalogue of attractive title-pages, unfixes the attention, and causes the eye to wander over a large surface, when it ought to be intently turned upon a