LETTER VIII.

to wait till the world had discovered justice I have done you. Fareand done it justice. But since this is well! not the case, every thing cries out, that you must bend your feelings to Edinburgh, March, 1811. your situation, or your situation will Prophetic truth dwelt upon your become merely nominal. If you ex- lips when you addressed to me those pect that those, who pay you for words which I recalled to your recolwhat you do, will dispense, in you, lection in my last letter. I have with all those exterior homages, already verified them, and in the compliances, cringings, and servility, dark perspective of futurity I anticiwhich are naturally looked for, and pate a still more fatal confirmation. almost as naturally paid, you are mis- Why did I not listen to you, or why taken Examine your own breast, was this sanguine temperament fated and you will find that you are expect to me like a curse? Shall I accuse ing from others what you yourself heaven, or shall I condemn myself? would be the last to give. If a trades- Alas! in either case I am to be pitied. man, for example, have an uncivil, View me, my friend, as a madman indifferent manner of treating his who builds a stately edifice, where he customers, we seek another. The is to live happily, and just when it is rich make little distinction. When completed levels it to the dust! they pay their money they do not dis- What is man that he would thus criminate whether they pay it for break down the barriers which his trinkets, or for graceful utterance, it fellow creature has erected as the is enough that they pay it, and that safeguard of his own peace? I do you want it. Rest assured you will not recognise his power; and because find this to be the case; and there re- I do not,am I therefore to be depressed mains for you only one of two evils, beneath my level, and driven from either to forego your former charac- my rank in society? Away with ter, to assume an exterior deportment those distinctions that would confound essentially hostile to your native feel- the laws of nature! ings, to belie the thoughts of your Experience has indeed taught me, mind, and to stifle the sentiments of that upright, open, manly behaviour, your heart; to assent without convic- that unbending rectitude, are most tion, and to praise without truth; and unwelcome to the sons of wealth and for this you will be rewarded with pride. Gold has so corrupted their enough to preserve existence; or you hearts, that the very approach of must maintain your present notions, them inspires terror and disgust. act from them, disdain mean com- They envelope themselves in the pliances, assert your independence, thick mist of ignorance; they are scorn the wealthy fool who would awe you by his riches, remain unshaken in your principles, humble the proud man that would insult you, though armed with the glittering gewgaws which gold can purchase; and for this-you will be suffered to pine in poverty and obscurity; be despised as a man who does not know his place; or be ridiculed for endeavouring to unite contradictions, by entering the house of your employer with the manly consciousness of what you

are."

drunk with the rank fumes of selfimportance; and while they strut about with such antic tricks, as make a wise man weep, they fancy they are filling the station that Providence has assigned them! Oh! but there is more in this, my friend, than we dream of! Heaven, in its eternal decrees, ordains nothing but what is fit; and short-sighted man should tremble to blame what he cannot comprehend. Yet, the very instinct of nature prompts us to crush the venomous, the loathsome, and the destructive animals of creation, though equally the work of that hand which temper ed the soul of man! You may apply this as your fancy directs.

Oh, my friend these were your words, and at the time I smiled to hear them! Shall I say it? I thought you affected the sententious gravity of wisdom, to dazzle by an idle pa- It is true, my air-built visions have rade of worldly prudence. Forgive vanished; my fabrics of imagination me! My next shall tell you what have fallen! There they lie, never

some idea how far you are likely to prosper; whether you are to be a naturalized Caledonian for a few years, or whether disappointment is to turn your capricious steps back again to London? Do enlighten my mind upon all these points, and let me, at least, know your immediate situation, views, and hopes."

Thus you begin your letter, half taunting, half reproachful, half friendly; and what shall I reply to it? Truth, unblushing truth. Then, my dearest friend, I have little to tell you that will give you pleasure. I have, indeed, as you say, been now almost two months in this capital; but alas! the hopes with which I entered it have much abated. Not only my sanguine, but even my moderate hopes are blighted; and they have consequently assumed an humble tone. I now begin to perceive what you, my friend, often urged to me, but in vain, when I first unfolded my project to you.

with the same placid indifference, and the same happy acquiescence. Do not deceive yourself. By an early indulgence in those high-strained notions which you partly owe to nature, but more to volition, you have considerably narrowed the sphere of your activity; there are but a few peculiar circles of action in which you can appear with happiness or with advantage to yourself; beyond those you become not only miserable, but must degenerate into a behaviour which would be called affected, and which most men would very justly censure. You expect, for example, that in your projected plan you will be able to unite two extremes which must for ever repel each other. You imagine that it will be easy to preserve ad your present ideas of dignity and independence of character, with that conduct which your new situation will exact from you. You may do it, and I have no doubt will; but if you do it, it will prove a rock on which you You are going to a country," you must infallibly split. Do not so said, "where every face will be strange strangely confound situations. That to you-where there will not be one line of behaviour, which in one is human being to lend you an assisting highly proper, and even confers imor a directing hand; and you are go- portance upon a person, becomes in ing with the vain expectation of ac- another ridiculous and inconsistent. quiring, by your industry, such a In your present station in society, you competency for the passing day, as may indulge in those feelings which you deem necessary. The thing is by I have described with safety, and you no means impossible to many men, can scarcely carry them too far as long but I fear much it is so to you. You as they produce happiness to yourself, have adopted from meditation, from for you are completely independent books, and from nature, sentiments in the only intelligible meaning of which I can neither wholly approve the word. But if you do what you nor wholly condemn. They are of a propose, you totally alter the case, structure very ill fitted for the active and you must immediately model scenes of life. You have indulged a your conduct to your affairs, or your morbid delicacy of feeling, by no affairs cannot prosper. Judge dispasmeans compatible with a happy exist- sionately, and you will see that this ence in this world. You are like must be so; look round the world, a man who fancies he can exist only from the highest to the lowest, and in a particular atmospheric tempera- you will see that it is written with inture, and who must consequently al- delible characters upon the destiny of ways keep to his own chamber. I man. Great and superlative merit will not deny that this refinement is alone can entitle a man to deviate the source of many pleasures to the from the common road, and even possessor, and confers a certain cha- then the world merely tolerates Lim; racter, which is attractive and amia- it never approves, but often wonders, ble; but I am convinced the pain overbalances the pleasure. Without reflecting upon this particular quality, which thus distinguishes you, you imagine that it is easy to tread the same path as your fellow travellers;

and sometimes pities. To great, or to superlative merit, you do not, I know, pretend, in the line of exertion which you have chosen, and even if you possessed it, you would be constrained since it has hitherto remained untried

LETTER VIII.

What is man that he would thus break down the barriers which his fellow creature has erected as the safeguard of his own peace? I do not recognise his power; and because I do not,am I therefore to be depressed beneath my level, and driven from my rank in society? Away with those distinctions that would confound

to wait till the world had discovered justice I have done you. Fare and done it justice. But since this is well! not the case, every thing cries out, that you must bend your feelings to Edinburgh, March, 1811. your situation, or your situation will Prophetic truth dwelt upon your become merely nominal. If you ex- lips when you addressed to me those pect that those, who pay you for words which I recalled to your recolwhat you do, will dispense, in you, lection in my last letter. I have with all those exterior homages, already verified them, and in the compliances, cringings, and servility, dark perspective of futurity I anticiwhich are naturally looked for, and pate a still more fatal confirmation. almost as naturally paid, you are mis- Why did I not listen to you, or why taken Examine your own breast, was this sanguine temperament fated and you will find that you are expect to me like a curse? Shall I accuse ing from others what you yourself heaven, or shall I condemn myself? would be the last to give. If a trades- Alas! in either case I am to be pitied. man, for example, have an uncivil, View me, my friend, as a madman indifferent manner of treating his who builds a stately edifice, where he customers, we seek another. The is to live happily, and just when it is rich make little distinction. When completed levels it to the dust! they pay their money they do not discriminate whether they pay it for trinkets, or for graceful utterance, it is enough that they pay it, and that you want it. Rest assured you will find this to be the case; and there remains for you only one of two evils, either to forego your former character, to assume an exterior deportment essentially hostile to your native feel- the laws of nature! ings, to belie the thoughts of your Experience has indeed taught me, mind, and to stifle the sentiments of that upright, open, manly behaviour, your heart; to assent without convic- that unbending rectitude, are most tion, and to praise without truth; and unwelcome to the sons of wealth and for this you will be rewarded with pride. Gold has so corrupted their enough to preserve existence; or you hearts, that the very approach of must maintain your present notions, them inspires terror and disgust. act from them, disdain mean com- They envelope themselves in the pliances, assert your independence, thick mist of ignorance; they are scorn the wealthy fool who would awe you by his riches, remain unshaken in your principles, humble the proud man that would insult you, though armed with the glittering gewgaws which gold can purchase-and for this-you will be suffered to pine in poverty and obscurity; be despised as a man who does not know his place; or be ridiculed for endeavouring to unite contradictions, by entering the house of your employer with the manly consciousness of what you

drunk with the rank fumes of selfimportance; and while they strut about with such antic tricks, as make a wise man weep, they fancy they are filling the station that Providence has assigned them! Oh! but there is more in this, my friend, than we dream of! Heaven, in its eternal decrees, ordains nothing but what is fit; and short-sighted man should tremble to blame what he cannot comprehend. Yet, the very instinct of nature prompts us to crush the venomous, the loathsome, and the destructive Oh, my friend! these were your animals of creation, though equally words, and at the time I smiled to the work of that hand which temperhear them! Shall I say it? I thought ed the soul of man! You may apply you affected the sententious gravity this as your fancy directs. of wisdom, to dazzle by an idle pa- It is true, my air-built visions have rade of worldly prudence. Forgive vanished; my fabrics of imagination me! My next shall tell you what have fallen! There they lie, never

are."

to rise again, and I am left in gloomy though it be all my sorry table offer, solitude to muse over their ruins, and think of what they once promised. Multa renascentur quæ jam cecidere, Cadentque quæ nunc sunt in honore.

And Sallust us tells us that "corporis et fortuna bonorum, ut initium, finis est; omnia orta occidunt, et aucta senescunt:" but to the prophecy of the poet I am too sick of hope to trust; and I can find no consolation in the moral of the historian; my fortunes have not yet risen, for they were blighted in the bud; they grew not old, for they perished in the bloom and flush of youth. Yet it is vexatious to think how they have fallen. I see many round me whom I know to be my inferiors in real worth, prospering even to their utmost, and that because they have bartered the sweetest privilege of life for money! In their eyes the world is but a bauble; a sort of theatre on which they do not blush to play the character of fool, pimp, or parasite, satisfied if it bring money to their pocket. At home, in their own houses, they think they wipe off the stigma, and do away the thousand little indignities which the day's slavery has heaped, upon them, when they bully their servants, and tyrannise over their wife and children. Thus it is that corrupt custom flows in an even channel from the throne to the cottage; and thus it is that men forego their native privileges, and receive the kicks and buffets of a saucy world, because they know that they too can transmit these kicks and buffets to a microcosm of their own. Like Iago," Put money in their purse," is their saving maxim; and when they sit down in the evening, infamous and degraded, contentment creeps o'er their dull souls as they count the day's gains, and they rise on the morrow to run the same race

feel the blessed consciousness that that crust comes with no stains to my mouth; than revel in all the luxuries that wealth can purchase, mixed with the bitter pain reflection would inflict, when I cast a gloomy eye upon the past, and called to mind through what dirty and disgusting channels this high-prized gold had come.

I have made up my mind. I will continue to be what I have been, and leave the rest to Providence. I can not, if I would, go cringing to great men's doors, offer myself to work, set forth may qualifications, tell what wonders I could perform if they would honour me with their commands, and profess what gratitude I should feel for their kind favours. Oh! I have seen men in this town, men who carry it high in the world, and look about them with a haughty mien, who have so confounded their manhood, honesty and virtue, with time-serving servílity, with parasitical fawning, and with low, base-minded flattery, that I have blushed to think they knew themselves no better. I would not barter with such, my humble, my obscure, my friendless condition, for all that profusion could tempt me with. No: I will endeavour to be content with little; trust in that God that ordains every thing; smile at, and pity those who know me not; despise those who would practise on me; keep to my books, and seek, in them, for those pictures of dead virtue which my heart has sighed for in vain, in this theatre of living man.

[To be continued.]

On the POWER and PRIVILEGES of
the House of COMMONS in COM-
MITTING for LIBEL.
THE power of the House of Com-

in the same dirty road. And is it mons to commit for alleged with such men, my friend, that I libels and contempts, is now finally, must dispute the prize of existence? settled by the determination of the With such men that I must contend King's Bench, and the mode of en for superiority of infamy, and descend forcing the speaker's warrant by the to all the servile arts of slander, de- verdict of a jury. It may, however, traction, flattery, and egotism? No. perhaps be yet allowable to question Rather come bitterest poverty, with the arguments on which the former all its most dreaded evils; rather let determination rests, and to shew that me, while I eat my crust of bread, it is not by law that this power is esta

never yet been shewn,and it cannot be shewn, for there is no act of the legis lature to sanction the power of either House; the matter lies in a very small compass, and it requires very little argument to prove that a power of commitment which is not yet acknowledged in any of our law books, which treat of legal arrests, is a power not emanating from the legislatare, but from a particular branch of

blished, but by the discretion of tive statutes, enacted for the projudges, exercised in opposition to the tection of the subject's liberty against law. A brief history of the House of the arbitrary power of the crown: Commens will shew by what gradual and by what law the Commons can encroachments they have proceeded do that which the crown can not, has from privilege to power, and finally triumphed over the liberties of the people, so far as not only to commit to prison, for an indefinite time, all those who offend their delicacy, but have, by one bold stride, enforced the warrant of their speaker by the aid of military violence. The grounds of Lord Ellenborough's determination, though perhaps incorrectly and insufficiently reported in the periodical prints, furnish ample matter for it assuming that power; and though comment to all those who prefer the written law of the realm to the oral decrees of judges; and first, his lordship is reported to have said, That in a civil process no man has a right to break open an outer door, but the law holds another doctrine when it comes to cases of public injury; in this I imagine he alludes to those cases in which the king is a party-but surely he will not attribute to the House of

Lord Ellenborough is reported to have called the House of Commons a court of Parliament, and Judge Bailey to have called it a court of judicature, when it exercises the power of trial without a jury or exculpatory witnesses, it is neither the one nor the other if the English constitution exists as described by that great luminary of the law Judge Blackstone.

Lord Ellenborough lays down a Commons an executive power equal maxim as a ground of justification to that of the crown, for it is gene- for that extraordinary proceeding, rally considered as one of the excel- against which Sir Francis Burdett lences of our constitution, that the brought his action, which no one, who three different branches of the legis- values the doctrine of general conse lature are distinct in their powers and quences, will pretend to controvert; functions, except when united for he says, that wherever the public be the purpose of legislation. To invest nefit is concerned, private security the other branch of the legislative must give way to it. I agree to his power with the attributes of the exe- deduction, but I deny his premises: cutive, is to confound that distinction, I deny that it is for the public good and to subject the people to an that the Commons should exercise abridgment of their liberty further the arbitrary power of commitment, than is requisite for the execution of much less can I ever allow that they the law.

It is worthy of remark, that Lord Ellenborough boldly makes the distinction between the personal privileges of the members requisite for the performance of their duty, and what he calls the vindictive privileges of the House, or more properly their power; and that distinction does not appear to have taken place earlier than the reign of Henry VIII. when the first exertion of power seems to have been used by the committal of two refractory sheriff's officers. The power of commitment is no doubt justified by precedents, but it mast be remembered, that all these precedents are in direct violation of posi

should strengthen that power by military aid. It has been said, that if their power could be justified by precedents, there are precedents sufficient, but for the violent process of breaking into a private house, in execution of the speaker's warrant, there is no precedent, it is without any example, and therefore it is boldly justified by analogy-a new mode of reasoning in law, and hardly allow able in divinity, though frequently resorted to by divines, through defect of positive evidence.

Butler, an ingenious and subtle metaphysician, has argued from things certain to things uncertain, but with all his ingenuity he has deduced no