day of my parting with him, I had an contrive to issue to the light of day soon enough for a morning call upon a philosopher of such early hours; and in the evening I concluded that he would be generally abroad, from what he had formerly communicated to me of his own habits. It seems however that he afterwards held conversaziones at his own rooms; and did not stir out to theatres quite so much. From a orother of mine, who at one time occupied rooms in the same house with him, I learned that in other respects he did not deviate in his prosperity from the philosophic tenor of his former life. He abated nothing of his peripatetic exercises; and repaired duly in the morning, as he had done in former years, to St. James's Park,—where he sate in contemplative ease amongst the cows, inhaling their balmy breath and pursuing his philosophic reveries. He had also purchased an organ, or more than one, with which he solaced his solitude and beguiled himself of uneasy thoughts if he ever had any. The works of Walking Stewart must be read with some indulgence: the titles are generally too lofty and pretending and somewhat extravagant; the composition is lax and unprecise, as I have before said; and the doctrines are occasionally very bold, incautiously stated, and too hardy and high-toned for the nervous effeminancy of many modern moralists. But Walking Stewart was a man who thought nobly of human nature: he wrote therefore at times in the spirit and with the indignation of an ancient prophet against the oppressors and destroyers of the time. In particular I remember that in one or more of the pamphlets which I received from him at Grasmere he expressed himself in such terms on the subject of Tyrannicide (distinguishing the cases in which it was and was not lawful) as seemed to Mr. Wordsworth and myself every way worthy of a philosopher: but, from the way in which that subject was treated in the House of Commons, where it was at that time occasionally introduced, it was plain that his doctrine was not fitted for the luxurious and relaxed morals of the age. Like all men who think nobly of human nature, Walking Stewart thought of it hopefully. He also allowed himself to look too lightly and indulgently on the afflicting spectacle of female prostitution as it exists in London and in all great cities. This was the only point on which I was disposed to quarrel with him; for I could not but view it as a greater reproach to human nature than the slave-trade or any sight of wretchedness that the sun looks down upon. I often told him so; and that I was at a loss to guess how a philosopher could allow himself to view it simply as part of the equipage of civil life, and as reasonably making part of the establishment and furniture of a great city as police-offices, lamp-lighting, or newspapers. Waiving however this one instance of something like compliance with the brutal spirit of the world, on all other subjects he was eminently unworldly, childlike, simple-minded, and upright. He would flatter no man: even when addressing nations, it is almost laughable to see how invariably he prefaces his counsels with such plain truths uttered in a manner so offensive as must have defeated his purpose if it had otherwise any chance of being accomplished. As he spoke freely and boldly to others, so he spoke loftily of himself: at p. 313, of "The Harp of Apollo," on making a comparison of himself with Socrates (in which he naturally gives the preference to himself) he styles "The Harp,' &c. "this unparalleled work of human energy." At p. 315, he calls it "this stupendous. work" and lower down on the same page he says—" I was turned out of school at the age of fifteen for a dunce or blockhead, because I would not stuff into my memory all the nonsense of erudition and learning; and if future ages should discover the unparalleled energies of genius in this work, it will prove my most important doctrine--that the powers of the human mind must be developed in the education of thought and sense in the study of moral opinion, not arts and science." Again, at p. 225 of his Sophiometer, he says:"The paramount thought that dwells in my mind incessantly is a question I put to myself-whether, in the event of my personal dissolution by death, I have communicated a!! the discoveries my unique mind possesses in the great master-science of man and nature." In the next page he determines that he has, with the exception of one truth,viz. "the latent energy, physical and moral, of human nature as existing in the British people." But here he was surely accusing himself without ground: for to my knowledge he has not failed in any one of his numerous works to insist upon this theme at least a billion of times. Another instance of his magnificent self-estimation is—that in the title pages of several of his works he announces himself as "John Stewart, the only man of nature* that ever appeared in the world." By this time I am afraid the reader begins to suspect that he was crazy: and certainly, when I consider every thing, he must have been crazy when the wind was at NNE: for who but Walking Stewart ever dated his books by a computation drawn-not from the creation, not from the flood, not from Nabonassar, or ab urbe conditâ, not from the Hegira-but from themselves, from their own day of publication, as constituting the one great æra in the history of man, by the side of which all other æras were frivolous and impertinent? Thus, in a work of his given to me in 1812 and probably published in that year, I find him incidentally recording of himself that he was at that time" arrived at the age of sixty-three, with a firm state of health acquired by temperance, and a peace of mind almost independent of the vices of mankind-because my knowledge of life has enabled me to place my happiness beyond the reach or contact of other men's follies and passions, by avoiding all family connexions and all ambitious pursuits of profit, fame, or power." On reading this passage I was anxious to ascertain its date; but this, on turning to the title-page, I found thus mys of Nature;"-which arose from his contrasting on every occasion the existing man of our present experience with the ideal or Stewartian man that might be expected to emerge in some myriads of ages; to which latter man he gave the name of the Child of Nature. * In Bath he was surnamed "the Child teriously expressed: "In the 7000th year of Astronomical History, and the first day of Intellectual Life or Moral World, from the æra of this work." Another slight indication of craziness appeared in a notion which obstinately haunted his mind that all the kings and rulers of the earth would confederate in every age against his works, and would hunt them out for extermination as keenly as Herod did the innocents in Bethlehem. On this consideration, fearing that they might be intercepted by the long arms of these wicked princes before they could reach that remote Stewartian man or his precursor to whom they were mainly addressed, he recommended to all those who might be impressed with a sense of their importance to bury a copy or copies of each work properly secured from damp, &c. at a depth of seven or eight feet below the surface of the earth; and on their death-beds to communicate the knowledge of this fact to some confidential friends, who in their turn were to send down the tradition to some discreet persons of the next generation; and thus, if the truth was not to be dispersed for many ages, yet the knowledge that here and there the truth lay buried on this and that continent, in secret spots on Mount Caucasus-in the sands of Biledulgerid-and in hiding places amongst the forests of America, and was to rise again in some distant age and to vegetate and fructify for the universal benefit of man,—this knowledge at least was to be whispered down from generation to generation; and, in defiance of a myriad of kings crusading against him. Walking Stewart was to stretch out the influence of his writings through a long series of Aananda to that child of nature whom he saw dimly through a vista of many centuries. If this were madness, it seemed to me a somewhat sublime madness: and I assured him of my cooperation against the kings, promising that I would bury "The Harp of Apollo" in my own orchard in Grasmere at the foot of Mount Fairfield; that I would bury "The Apocalypse of Nature" in one of the coves of Helvel lyn, and several other works in several other places best known to myself. He accepted my offer with gratitude; but he then made known to me that he relied on my assistance for a still more important service-which was this: in the lapse of that vast number of ages which would probably intervene between the present period and the period at which his works would have reached their destination, he feared that the English language might itself have mouldered away. "No!" I said, "that was not probable: considering its extensive diffusion, and that it was now transplanted into all the continents of our planet, I would back the English language against any other on earth." His own persuasion however was that the Latin was destined to survive all other languages; it was to be the eternal as well as the universal language; and his desire was that I would translate his works, or some part of them, into that language.* This I promised; and I seriously designed at some leisure hour to translate into Latin a selection of passages which should embody an abstract of his philosophy. This would have been doing a service to all those who might wish to see a digest of his peculiar opinions cleared from the perplexities of his peculiar diction and brought into a narrow compass from the great number of volumes through which they are at present dispersed. However, like many another plan of mine, it went unexecuted. * I was not aware until the moment of writing this passage that Walking Stewart had publicly made this request three years after making it to myself: opening the Harp of Apollo, I have just now accidentally stumbled on the following passage, This stupendous work is destined, I fear, to meet a worse fate than the Aloe, which as soon as it blossoms loses its stalk. with the loss of both its stalk and its soil; This first blossom of reason is threatened for, if the revolutionary tyrant should triumph, he would destroy all the English books and energies of thought. I conjure my readers to translate this work into La tin, and to bury it in the ground, communicating on their death-beds only its place of concealment to men of nature." From the title page of this work, by the way, I learn that "the 7000th year of Astronomical History" is taken from the Chiposed) with the year 1812 of our computanese tables, and coincides (as I had suption. On the whole, if Walking Stewart were at all crazy, he was so in a way which did not affect his natural genius and eloquence--but rather exalted them. The old maxim, indeed, that "Great wits to madness sure are near allied," the maxim of Dryden and the popular maxim, I have beard disputed by Mr. Coleridge and Mr. Wordsworth, who maintain that mad people are the dullest and most wearisome of all people. As a body, I believe they are so. But I must dissent from the authority of Messrs. Coleridge and Wordsworth so far as to distinguish. Madness is often little more than an enthusiasm highly exalted; the animal spirits are exuberant and in excess; and the madman becomes, if he be otherwise a man of ability and information, all the better as a companion. A child, in the happiest state of its existence, does not know that it is happy.Such a madness, if any, was the madness of Walking Stewart: his health was perfect; his spirits as light and ebullient as the spirits of a bird in spring-time; and his mind unagitated by painful thoughts, and at peace with itself. Hence, if he was not an amusing companion, it was because the philosophic direction of his thoughts made him something more. Of anecdotes and matters of fact he was not communicative of all that he had seen in the vast compass of his travels he never availed himself in conversation. I do not remember at this moment that he ever once alluded to his own travels in his intercourse with me except for the purpose of weighing down by a statement grounded on his own great personal experience an opposite statement of many hasty and misjudging travellers which he thought injurious to human nature: the statement was this, that in all his countless rencontres with uncivilized tribes, he had never met with any so ferocious and brutal as to attack an unarmed and defenceless man who was able to make them understand that he threw himself upon their hospitality and forbearance. On the whole, Walking Stewart was a sublime visionary: he had seen and suffered much among men; yet not too much, or so as to dull the genial tone of his sympathy with the sufferings of others. His mind was a mirror of the sentient universe.-The whole mighty vision that had fleeted before his eyes in this world, the armies of Hyder Ali and his son with oriental and barbaric pageantry, the civic grandeur of England, the great desarts of Asia and America,-the vast capitals of Europe,-London with its eternal agitations, the ceaseless ebb and flow of its "mighty heart,"-Paris shaken by the fierce torments of revolutionary convulsions, the silence of Lapland, and the solitary forests of Canada, with the swarming life of the torrid zone, together with innumerable recollections of individual joy and sorrow, that he had participated by sympathy-lay like a map beneath him, as if eternally copresent to his view; so that, in the contemplation of the prodigious whole, he had no leisure to separate the parts, or occupy his mind with details. Hence came the monotony which the frivolous and the desultory would have found in his conversation. I however, who am perhaps the person best qualified to speak of him, must pronounce him to have been a man of great genius; and, with reference to his conversation, of great eloquence. He was a man of genius, but not a man of talents; at least his genius was out of all proportion to his talents, and wanted an organ as it were for manifesting itself; so that his most original thoughts were delivered in a crude state--imperfect, obscure, half developed, and not producible to a popular audience. He was aware of this himself: and, though he claims every where the faculty of profound intuition into human nature, yet with equal candour he accuses himself of asinine stupidity, dulness, and want of talent. He was a disproportioned intellect, and so far a monster: and he must be added to the long list of original-minded men who have been looked down upon with pity and contempt by commonplace men of talent, whose powers of mind-though a thousand times inferior- -were yet more manageable, and ran in channels more suited to common uses and common understandings. [Mr. Stewart has produced a book on a subject on which there has been a scarcity of writers. Jamaica is an object of great interest, and a work treating of this Island, by an enlightened author, has long been a desideratum; such a person is Mr. Stewart, an opinion in which we shall be justified by every reader of the following passages.] THE MAROONS. THOU a formidable tribe of the Maroons. In The first alarming insurrection of the slaves took place in 1690; but the enormities committed were chiefly confined to the parish of Clarendon. 1760 a most formidable insurrection of the Coromantees, one of the most ferocious of the African tribes, broke out in the parish of St. Mary, and soon spread into other districts of the island. It appeared that the whole of that tribe throughout the island were accessary to that rebellion. A dreadful massacre of the defenceless whites, in various parts of the interior, ensued. The object of the insurgents was of course the total extermination of the whites. Happily, however, they were at length subdued, and some terrible examples were made of the most active of their leaders. Notwithstanding this severity, another insurrection was attempted at St. Mary's only five years after, which, however, was disconcerted through the precipitation of the ringleaders. Happily, for the whites, the insurgents wanted the skill and prudence to plan, combine, and direct, their movements; they possessed a fearful odds of physical and numerical strength, but they knew not how to wield it. Prior to the first insurrection, bodies of slaves had at different times absconded from their masters, and established themselves in the fastnesses of the woods; these became rallying points to other fugitive slaves:† at length they became so numerous and daring as to make incursions on the whites, carrying havock and dismay wherever they went. This is the first origin of the Maroons. Under a bold and desperate leader, called Cudjoe, they at length bade defiance to the government, and carried on a regular warfare against it. Parties of whites were sent in pursuit of this banditti, and skir mishes often took place between them, with various success, but most commonly in favour of the Maroons, from their being more accustomed to traverse the mountainous woods, and better acquainted with the fastnesses and retreats they afforded. When hard pressed, and like to be discomfited, they retired into these fastnesses; from which they |