abhorrence of all levelling and republican doctrines. There is, as Hel vetius observes, a description of men with hearts incapable of virtuous emotion, furiously enraged against every one who wishes to convulse the empire of imposture; who aim against him the very passions themselves despise, and terrify weak minds by incessant harangues on the dangers of novelty and innovation; as if truth must necessarily banish virtue out of the world; as if every thing partaking of its nature was so productive of vice, that no one can be virtuous who is not unenlightened; as if the very essential qualities of morality demonstrated this idea, and consequently that the study of this science was prejudicial to society; they wish to make the people venerate received and established prejudices, in the same manner as the Egyptians of old were kept prostrate before the sacred crocodile of Memphis." (Oldfield, vol. i. p. 508-510.)

"

It is very pleasant to observe how this trenchant writer dis-poses of Mr. Windham and Mr. Burke: The motion (of Mr. Flood for reform) was vehemently opposed by Mr. Windham, who had adopted all the eccentricities and elevations from the rule of right of Mr. Burke, of whom he was the obsequious admirer." And soon after, Mr. Burke himself is presented to us às an "eloquent madman." It must be owned, he has said the newest thing upon Mr. Pitt's character as a minister, which has yet occurred to any enemy of his memory. "His wavering and uncertain policy, so unlike that of a great statesman, is not, however, to be entirely attributed to a want of original genius, but was owing in part to his excessive thirst of popularity." His eulogy on Sir Francis Burdett and Lord Cochrane are in equally good taste, and in his phrase of "the lucky hand of John Felton," we see how patriotically prepared he is to look with complacency upon the adoption of summary expedients in a good cause. But let not the ladies be terrified by these symptoms of a sanguinary disposition in good Mr. Oldfield, for he is really a gallant man, like the philosopher Helvetius, from whom he seems to have borrowed some of his sentiments. Not to mention his anxiety, of which we have had already an instance, about the virtue of the wives and daughters of menial servants and paupers, he will appear by the following passage to take an equal interest in their innocent gratifications.

"They have engrossed within a line of their own drawing, all hares, wild fowls, and fish, as well those which are foreign, as those which are natives of this kingdom; which in their own nature, being wild and wandering, and not subject to restraint, are therefore the natural rights of the first man that can catch them. But these laws have not only subverted this natural right of mankind, but established their own with a bitterness little less than cruelty; for they are guarded and defended with the same selfish spirit that the most niggardly miser would guard his treasure; so that a poor man cannot entertain his longing wife with

a gudgeon of his own catching, without being guilty of felony; or kill a partridge without fine and imprisonment." (Oldfield, i vol. i. p. 495, 496.) et jete og så tunt ? bev yang n puro mejdo 96"

We may now, we think, take leave of Messieurs the reformers Oldfield and Bentham, the great historian and the great philosopher of the sect, leaving them to contest the palm of deteriority. We are truly happy to have done with them; for we have not, since the commencement of the British Review, had a duty more thoroughly disagreeable to perform. We have felt it, however, to be a duty imposed upon us by our sincere love of our country.

"England, with all thy faults I love thee still."

b

At the eve of the ensuing general election, it is the duty of every man to do what he can by argument and exhortation, to prevent that fatal crisis with which these methods of improving us are pregnant; and the more so, as a confederacy appears to be formed between the defamers of our constitution and government at home; the defamers of our victories and sacrifices abroad; and the defamers of our church and its holy and heavenly services. What adds to the sacred call upon all persons worthy of the name of Britons at this awful hour to do their utmost to save the nation, and to stop the people in their career towards despotism under the semblance of enlarging that liberty which is already breaking its conservative restraints, and taking the form of wrong, and insult, and outrage, is the mad support which some amongst us, most elevated in station, are lending to the systematic attacks upon religion and its observances; forgetting that their rank and place in society have no other real or fundamental support, but well-regulated public opinion, and Christian principles of respect for social and civil appointments. We do not hesitate to declare our firm opinion to be, deriving it from a pretty accurate and anxious course of observation, that the demoralizing attempts upon the lower orders in this country are triumphing over all the expedients in motion to diffuse the benefits of education; and that this state of things cannot long exist without a ruinous issue, unless the most vigorous efforts of counteraction are adopted. The two great means of reform are the church and the press; and those who have the patronage of the one, or power to influence the other, have a fearful account to give. In the mean time, it is a prayer which we may perhaps, without presumption, be permitted to make to the Giver of every good and perfect gift, that we and our children may be long preserved from the proffered blessings of these radical reformers of our constitution, and may rather die in the desert, in which they tell us we are sojourning, than taste the milk and honey of their promised land.

Our endeavours, however, must evince our sincerity, and can alone justify a hope of Providential interference in our behalf. The object of these endeavours must be to stay the progress of a growing contempt of the authorities of this world, and of all that concerns the preparation for the next. This is the influence which has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished: and it is an influence mixed up with both aristocratic and democratic ascendency. To check its disastrous course, or turn it backward, is that special reform which the times demand, and which cannot be too rapid or radical. Other reforms of a political kind will naturally and necessarily follow in an order consistent with that process of development which experience is carrying on, and which it is the peculiar excellence of our constitution to promote and adopt. It holds what is good till it proves what is better, maintaining a principle of preservation together with a spirit of improvement, in harmony with the prescribed course in which the best gifts of Providence are carried towards their perfection.

F

ART. II. Beppo, a Venetian Story. 8vo. pp. 50. Murray. London, 1818.

WHEN any new entertainment is observed to be rising fast in fashion and favour in the country, it requires to be watched a little by those who exercise any guardianship over the morals of the community, but which, except when it infects the literature of the day, does not fall under the cognizance of reviewers. Of this description is the practice of what is called quizzing. In its object and character, it is in the moral, not much unlike that which, in the political world, is called the levelling principle: it is by far the most effectual weapon by which virtue and decency can be assailed: it is strong in proportion to the indesert of the person using it, and the dignity of the person or thing against which it is employed. "Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report," are the natural game after which the quizzer is in restless pursuit. The poem before us is a very superior performance of the quizzing kind. It has a double aspect, being at once an apparent parody on Lord Byron's poetry, when dressed in its best attire-the Spenser stanza; and at the same time an attack upon the charities and bonds of social life in a spirit of seeming good humour, careless scorn, and gay indecency.

As far as it can be considered as a burlesque upon Lord Byron's manner, it is harmless and happy. It detracts no more from the high claims of the original than the Battle of the Frogs has had any such effect upon the Iliad of Homer;-a comparison which such of our readers as suspect the poem before us to have really proceeded from the pen of Lord Byron himself will acknowledge to be peculiarly appropriate. And, indeed, as far as the profligacy of sentiment running through this poem of Beppo can be placed to the account of imitation and parody, it is a part of its merit; for the resemblance between the solemn banter, and epicurean sarcasm which mark every page of the Childe Harold, and the derisory ease and ironical pleasantry with which all serious things are treated in this poem of Beppo, is most successfully preserved; so successfully, indeed, that we cannot help yielding to the suspicion that these productions, both original and imitative, are by the same hand.

"None but himself could be his parallel."

If Lord Byron has been his own imitator, his task could not have been difficult; since he had little else to do than to adapt the measure and spirit of a style of poetry, in which he was so habitually conversant to villainy less heroic, and vice in its more domestic and familiar habitudes. And it is worthy of remark also how little of the charm, and vivacity, and melody of this species of versification is lost in treating of subjects the most familiar.

Flexibility and compass, and a certain facility of accommodation to all subjects, whether sublime or mean, sad or humorous, loose or severe, are the privileges of this stanza, on which Spenser has impressed the seal of his genius, and fixed our prejudices for ever. There is besides, in its structure, a sort of quaint simplicity which humours the mock seriousness of the burlesque. Even the imperfections of this verse were favourable to the objects which this writer had in view. The prolixity of the stanza has a tendency to dilute its strength, and sometimes to produce a nerveless expletory line to make up the complement of the verse, which must, for the most part, sustain the thought unbroken to the end; and this is perfectly in harmony with that colloquial humour and familiar cast of expression which is so playful and pleasing throughout this little poem. Put feeling, and virtue, and the interests of human happiness, out of the question; assume the hypothesis of a world without souls; level man to the consideration of brutes; take him out of his moral state; set him at large the vagrant son of nature in full physical freedom to indulge his temperament; suppose all the enclosures of civilized life laid open, and family ties, and "relations dear," and "all the charities of father, son, and brother" fairly out of the way, and then

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this little poem of Beppo, which it is said, but which we are slow to believe, Lord Byron, an English nobleman, an English husband, and an English father, hath sent reeking from the stews of Venice, is a production of great humour and unquestionable excellence. There is throughout the performance an evident care taken to make the ridicule fall not on the manner, or the sentiment, or the principles of Lord Byron's poems, but upon poor unrespected virtuous love, and woman's honour, and rustic shame, and household joys, and hum-drum human happiness. We are quite sure that many a maiden and many a mother, British-born and British-bred, will rise from the perusal of this little delightful display of Italian manners, this light and sportive raillery on the marriage vow, with many troublesome prejudices removed, an encreased dread of being righteous overmuch, and a resolution, in spite of a prying and censorious world, to live in charity with her neighbours of the other sex, though it should be called facility or levity.

In all seriousness, then, we mean to say, that the way in which the writer of this bantering poem has treated the sin of adultery, and all the sanctions by which marriage is made holy and happy, designates it as the product of a mind careless, cold, and callous: for who but a man of such a mind could, at a distance from his country and home, with a full knowledge of what makes that country great and prosperous, her families honourable, her sons manly and true, and her daughters the objects of delicate. and respectful love, send among us a tale of pollution, dipped in the deepest die of Italian debauchery, relieved and recommended. by a vivacity and grace of colouring that takes from the mischief" its apparent turpitude, and disarms the vigilance of virtue.

Madame de Staël, who, amidst her eccentricities and varieties, seems to have possessed a good heart, and had certainly a perspicacious mind, has felt and described with great truth, in many places of her work on Germany, the dreadful force of ridicule, as the auxiliary of vice. In the language of that distinguished lady, this mischievous power has erected for itself a sort of republican government, which pronounces a sentence of ostracism on all that is strong and distinguished in human nature. It undermines love, religion, all things, except that selfishness which cannot be reached by irony, because it exposes itself to censure, but not to ridicule. It was in this spirit that Voltaire composed his Candide, that effort of diabolical gaiety, which appears to have been written by a being of a different nature from ourselves, insensible to our condition, well-pleased with our sufferings, and laughing, like a demon or an ape, at the miseries of that human species with which he has nothing in common." Candide brings into action that scoffing philosophy, so indulgent in appearance, in reality so ferocious.”

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