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of Hume. Many as are our historian's defects in style, they are fewer and less offensive than Burke's. He never is inflated or unequal: and strong as is the political bias, he gives us the result of his inquiries with a temperate and calm decision. His faults are principally in idiom, and never arise, as Burke's do, from a petulance of display, and a debility of self-command.

“ One clever man's opinion is just as good as another's, if both are equally uninfluenced by passions and feelings of every kind.”

The author here supposes what never existed ; that an opinion can be influenced by every kind of feeling. But, receiving it as unexceptionable, one clever man may be less clever than another. Even if two men could be equal in cleverness (and no two ever were), yet one of them may have examined a thing more attentively than the other, and must consequently be able to form a juster opinion on it.

“ The fate of society for many years hung upon Hasting's impeachment."

How so? what society? Tuman society at large is usually understood by the word society. But the fate not even of English society hung upon this question ; no, nor even the society at Brookes's. Cards would have been shufiled, jokes would hare caused laughter, dinners would have been given, wine would have retained its flavour, whether the Governor of India had been found innocent or guilty.

“ Without being followers of Mr. Burke's political principles, or indiscriminate admirers of his course as a statesman,—the capacity in which he the least shone, especially during the few latter and broken years of his illustrious, checkered, and care-worn life,--we may yet affirm that, with the exception of his writings upon the French Revolation-an exception itself to be qualified and restricted—it would be difficult to find any statesman of any age whose opinions were more habitually marked by moderation."

Yet all his productions, excepting one, which is little better than a college exercise, on the Sublime and Beautiful, appertain to statesmanship. Men of moderate intellects, and unblest by genius, have often governed wisely. The greatest things are the most distinctly :seen, and require less delicacy in the handling. Several men who ruled their people, in circumstances of great difficulty, were unable to manage their families. Augustus, not inferior to Cromwell himself in shrewdness and sagacity, was overmatched in domestic life by the crafty Livia ; and the hand which regulated and controlled the world was ineffectual in the guidance of Julia

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“Speaking of the effects produced by his strong opinions respecting French affairs, Sir James Mackintosh, as justly as profoundly observed to Mr. Horner-So great is the effect of a single inconsistency with the whole course of a long and wise political life, that the greatest philosopher in practice whom the world ever saw, passes with the superficial vulgar for a hot-brained enthusiast.

This opinion of Burke, delivered by Mackintosh, is called “just and profound.” In fact, no hasty expression of Burke himself is half so extravagant as this. - Whom the world ever saw,is the heedless flourish of young writers at the bottom of hot sentences, ill becoming the steadier writing of chancellors or judges.

“For nearly the whole period during which he survived the commencement of the Revolution,-for five of those seven years,-all his predictions, save one momentary expression, had been more than fulfilled : anarchy and bloodshed had" borne sway in France ; conquest and convulsion had desolated Europe ; and even when he closed his eyes upon earthly prospects, he left this portentous meteor, with fear of change perplexing monarchs.' The providence of mortals is not often able to penetrate so far as this into futurity.”

Nevertheless, how many hundreds of publications, in England, France, Italy, and Germany, do we remember, all of them foretelling the devastations of the French Revolution ! the greater part by ignorant priests, or still more ignorant courtiers. These made just as good prophets as Mr. Burke. But it is not only swine and geese that feel by instinct the storm approaching. Not only did sermons and silly men proclaim it loudly ; it was announced to Parliament in the speech of Lord Mornington.

“We have been contemplating a great marvel certainly, not gazing on a supernatural sight; and we retire from it with the belief, that if acuteness, learning, imagination, so unmeasured, were never before combined, yet have there been occasionally witnessed in eminent men greater powers of close reasoning and fervid declamation, oftentimes a more correct taste, and on the question to which his mind was last and most earnestly applied, a safer judgment.'

Certainly they are unmeasured by Lord Brougham. Would any man, in quiet possession of his senses, venture to say that Bacon and Milton, for instance, did not combine a much greater quantity of all these qualities? Burke was indeed a great and wonderful man, if you compare him with the people who sat about him in the House of Commons; but you render him diminutive, and lose him almost out of sight, if you force him back into past ages.

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THE SEMPSTRESS TO HER MIGNONETTE.

I LOVE that box of Mignonette,

Though worthless in your eyes :
Above your choicest hothouse flowers

My Mignonette I prize.
Thank Heaven, not yet I've learn’d on that

A money worth to set-
'Tis priceless as the thoughts it brings-

My box of Mignonette.
I know my own sweet Mignonette

Is neither strange nor rare ;
Your garden flaunters burn with hues

That it may never wear;
Yet on your garden's rarest blooms

No eyes may ever set
With more delight than mine on yours,

My box of Mignonette.
Why do I prize my Mignonette,

That lights my window there ?
It adds a pleasure to delight,

It steals a weight from care ;
What happy daylight dreams it brings !

Can I not half forget,
My long-long hours of weary work,

With you my Mignonette ?
It tells of May, my Mignonette,

And as I see it bloom,
I think the green, bright pleasant spring

Comes freshly through my room ;
Our narrow court is dark and close,

Yet when my eyes you met,
Wide fields lay stretching from my sight,

My box of Mignonette.
What talks it of, my Mignonette ?

To me it babbles still
Of woodland banks of primroses,

Of heath and breezy hill ;

Through country lanes, and daisied fields

Through paths with morning wet,
Again I trip as when a girl,

Through you my Mignonette.
For this I love my Mignonette,

My window garden small,
That country thoughts and scents and sounds

Around me loves to call ;
For this, though low in rich men's thoughts

Your worth and love be set,
I bless you, pleasure of the poor,

My own sweet Mignonette.
Greenwich.

W, C. BENNETT.

HOW THE GREENWOODS GOT OVER THEIR

TROUBLE.

“ PATIENCE !” repeated the man, in the loud and querulous tones of anger.

What do we gain by it?—what will it do for us? - Patience, indeed! The word is a very good one for folks who know nothing of hunger and cold—a fine, religious, peaceable word ; but will it bring back what the parish officers have just robbed us of, and will it give me work-or find food for ourselves and children? Patience! I am sick of hearing of it. The shelter of this poor place was all that saved us from being paupers ; and after paying rates and taxes these fifteen years, without once asking any of it back in parish bread, or parish allowance-because this severe weather has set in, and I have no means of getting a day's work, or of earning a day's wages, to come and take

away the two or three comforts we had about us, and for the sake of five shillings, sell the things that cost us as many pounds, and that—what with hard times, and low wages, and our increasing family, we shall never be able to get together again--I say it is a cruel shame, a downright robbery; and you talk to me of patience! No, no—the poor-house will be our next place. Nell, they will make paupers of us, however hard we strive against it ; and who could have patience with such a chance before them?” And the poor man, with his arms knotted on his breast, and his eyes

bent on the floor, paced to and fro the wretched room, from which, in

NO. XIX.VOL. IV.

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the course of the morning, nearly everything it contained had been stripped for arrears of poor's-rates--though, as Miles Greenwood had said, poverty alone prevented his paying them ; but the authorities had not thought it worth while to make distinctionsand preferred, in their inflexible wisdom, to force a whole family into the house, rather than suffer a man too poor to pay rates, the luxury of a roof independent of it. “Well, neighbour Howe,

· what's the news this morning ?” he inquired, pausing as the latch of the door was raised, and a man in the garb of a farm servant entered ; "anything stirring besides my loss?"

Yes,” replied the other, eyeing the desolate room as he spoke, with a keen look of mingled commiseration and sternness ; “good news for a few, but not o' much use to the most of us. The Barking fishing smacks can't get higher than Tilbury or Greys, on account of the ice in the river ; and two or three of the farmers have got the job of sending the fish up in their waggons ---SO some of us may perhaps get a turn."

“ Please God!” said Miles Greenwood's wife, who sat rocking an infant in her arms, beside a fuming half-alive fire, of dead leaves and frozen branches, that exhaled more moisture than heat ;

some of us begin to want work cruelly.”

Ay, and we may want, missus, all the time this weather lasts,” replied the man. “ I met six or seven of our women on the road to Elmsly this morning,” he continued, “ in all the snow ; poor bodies ! going to appeal against the rates.'

What, the widows ?” inquired Miles.

“ Yes,” continued Joe Howe; “ and if they distrain from them, I shall call it a harder business than your's. I swear they have suffered poorer diet, and less of it, than the people in the

house,' for the sake of having their children left with them, and keeping a roof over their heads ; and instead of receiving the

; thanks of the whole parish for doing it, they are compelled to become paupers themselves, by being obligod, out of their poor means, to help support those that are.

A crying shame!” exclaimed Miles Greenwood, while tears of sympathy trickled down Nell's cheeks. “A crying shame! but mine is a hard case, too, neighbour-a very hard case. This is the first year I have ever failed in paying the poor's-rate, and have never had a farthing from the parish, though I have not always had work, any more than my neighbours, and have five children to maintain. They have taken the poor things' bed, a

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