and the evidence delivered before the House of Commons, strictly abstained from the use of sugar in his own family.

Meantime, as respected some paramount feelings of my after life, I drew from both parents, and the several aspects of their characters, great advantages. Each, in a different sense, was a high-toned moralist; and my mother had a separate advantage, as compared with persons of that rank, in high-bred and polished manners. Every man has his own standard of a summum bonum, as exemplified in the arrangements of life. For my own part, without troubling others as to my peculiar likings and dislikings, in points which illustrate nothing,-I shall acknowledge frankly, that in every scheme of social happiness I could ever frame, the spirit of manners entered largely as an indispensable element. The Italian ideal of their own language, as a spoken one, is expressed thus-Lingua Toscana in bocca Romana: there must be two elements-the Florentine choice of words, and the Florentine idiom, concurring with the Roman pronunciation. Parodying this, I would express my conception of a society (suppose a household) entirely well constituted, and fitted to yield the greatest amount of lasting pleasure, in these terms,-The morals of the middle classes of England, combined with the manners of the highest; or, more pointedly, by the morals of the gentry, with the manners of the nobility. Manners more noble, or more polished than the manners of the English nobility, I cannot imagine; nor, on the other hand, a morality which is built less upon the mere amiable.. ness of quick sensibilities, or more entirely upon massy substructions of principle and conscience, than the morality of the British middle classes.

Books, literature, institutions of police, facts innumerable, within my own experience, and open to all the world, can be brought to hear with a world of evidence upon this subject. I am aware of the anger which I shall rouse in many minds by both doctrines; but I am not disposed to concede any point of what to me appears the truth, either to general misanthropy and cynicism, to political prejudices, or to antinational feeling. Such notices as have occurred to me on these subjects, within my personal experience, I shall bring forward as they happen to arise. Let them be met and opposed as they shall deserve. Morals are sturdy things, and not so much liable to erroneous valuation. But the fugitive, volatile, imponderable essences which concern the spirit of manners, are really not susceptible of any just or intelligible treatment by mere words and distinctions, unless, in so far as they are assisted and interpreted by continual illustrations from absolute experience. Meantime, the reader will not accuse me of an aristocratic feeling, now that he understands what it is that I admire in the aristocracy, and with what limitation. It is my infirmity, if

Sharpe's Trial of the Slave question in a court of justice— these were the openings: then came Wilberforce, Clarkson's second work, the Evidence before Parliament.

the reader chooses so to consider it, that I cannot frame an ideal of society, happily constituted, without including, as a foremost element, and possibly in an undue balance, certain refinements in the spirit of manners, which, to many excellent people, hardly exist at all as objects of conscious regard. In the same spirit, but without acknowledging the least effeminacy, even in the excess to which I carry it, far better and more cheerfully I could dispense with some part of the downright necessaries of life, than with certain circumstances of elegance and propriety in the daily habits of using them.

With these feelings, and, if the reader chooses, these infirmities, I was placed in a singularly fortunate position. My father, as I have said, had no brilliant qualities: but the moral integrity which I have attributed to his class, was so peculiarly expressed in him, that in my early life, and for many years after his death, 1 occa sionally met strangers who would say to me, almost in the same form of words, (so essential was their harmony as to the thing,)" Sir, I knew your father: he was the most upright man I ever met with in my life." Nobody, that I remember, praised him under the notion of a clever man, or a man of talent. Yet that he was so in some subordinate sense, is probable, both from his success as a man of business, and more unequivocally in other ways. He wrote a book: and though not a book of much pretension in its subject, yet in those days to have written a book at all, was creditable to a man's activity of mind, and to his strength of character, in acting with out a precedent. In the execution, this book was really respectable. As to the subject, it was a sketch of a tour in the midland counties of England, in one octavo volume. The plan upon which it was constructed, made it tolerably miscellaneous; for throughout the tour a double purpose was kept before the reader-viz. of attention to the Fine Arts, in a general account of the paintings and statues in the principal mansions lying near the line of his route; and secondly, of attention to the mechanic arts, as displayed in the canals, manufactories, &c. then rising everywhere into activity, and quickened into a hastier development, by Arkwright and the Peels, in one direction, and in another, by Brindley, the engineer, under the patronage of the Duke of Bridgewater. This Duke, by the way, was guided by an accident of life, concurring with his own disposition, and his gloomy sensibility to the wrong, or the indignity he had suffered, into those ascetic habits, which left his income disposable for canals, and for the patronizing of Brindley. He had been jilted: and in consequence he became a woman-hater-a misogynist as bitter as Euripides. On seeing a woman approaching, he would "quarter," and zig-zag to any extent, rather than face her. Being, by this accident of his life, released from the expenses of a ducal establishment, he was the better able to create that immense wealth which afterwards yielded vast estates to the then Marquis of Stafford, to the Earl of Bridgewater, &c.

In its outline and conception, my father's book was exactly what is so much wanted at this time for the whole island, and was some years ago pointed out by the Quarterly Review as a desideratum not easily supplied-viz. a guide to the whole wealth of art, above ground and below, which, in this land of ours, every square mile, crowds upon the notice of strangers. In the style of its execution, and the alternate treatment of the mechanic arts and the fine arts, the work resembles the well-known tours of Arthur Young, which blended rural industry with picture galleries; excepting only, that in my father's I re.. member no politics, perhaps because it was written before the French Revolution. Partly, perhaps, it might be a cause, and partly an effect, of this attention paid by my father to the galleries of art in the aristocratic mansions; that through- | out the principal rooms of his own house, there were scattered a small collection of paintings by old Italian masters. I mention this fact, not as a circumstance of exclusive elegance belonging to my father's establishment, but for the very opposite reason, as belonging very generally to my father's class. Many of them possessed collections much finer than his; and I remember that two of the few visits, on which, when a child, I was allowed to accompany my mother, were expressly to see a picture-gallery, belonging to a merchant, not much wealthier than my father. In reality, I cannot say anything more to the honour of this mercantile class than the fact, that being a wealthy class, and living with a free and liberal expenditure, they applied a very considerable proportion of this expenditure to intellectual pleasures-to pictures, very commonly, as I have mentioned-to liberal society -and, in a large measure, to books. Yet, whilst the whole body of the merchants in this place lived in a style which, for its mixed liberality and elegance, resembled that of Venetian merchants, there was very little about themselves or their establishments of external splendour, that is, in any features which met the public eye. According to the manners of their country, the internal economy of their establishments erred by too much profusion. They had too many servants; and those servants were maintained in a style of luxury and comfort, not often matched in the mansions of the nobility. Yet, on the other hand, none of these were kept for show or ostentation; and, accordingly, it was not very common to find servants in livery. The women had their fixed and appropriate duties; but the men acted in mixed capacities. Carriages were not very commonly kept ; even where from one to two thousand a-year might be spent. There was in this town a good deal of society; somewhat better in an intellectual sense than such as is merely literary; for that is, of all society, the feeblest. From the clergymen, the medical body, and the merchants, was supported a Philosophical Society, who regularly published their transactions. And some of the members were of a rank in science to correspond with D'Alembert, and others of the leading Parisian

wits and literati. Yet so little even here did mere outside splendour and imposing names avail against the palpable evidence of thingsagainst mother-wit and natural robustness of intellect, that the particular physician who chiefly corresponded with the Encyclopedists, spite of his Buffon, his Diderot, his D'Alembert, by whom, in fact, he swore, and whose frothy letters he kept like amulets in his pocket-book, ranked in general esteem as no better than one of the sons of the feeble; and the treason went so far as sometimes to comprehend his correspondents -the great men of the Academy-in the same derogatory estimate; and, in reality, their printed letters are evidences enough that no great wrong was done them-being generally vapid, and as much inferior to Gray's letters, recently made popular by Mason's life throughout England, as these again are, in spirit, and naïveté-not to Cowper's only, but to many an unknown woman's in every night of the year-little thought of perhaps by her correspondent and destined pretty certainly to oblivion. One word only I shall add, descriptive of my father's library; because in describing his, I describe those of all his class. It was very extensive; comprehending the whole general literature both of England and Scotland for the preceding generation. It was impossible to name a book in the classes of history, biography, voyages and travels, belles lettres, or popular divinity, which was wanting. And to these was added a pretty complete body of local tours, (such as Pennant's,) and topography; many of which last, being illustrated extensively with plates, were fixed for ever in the recollections of children. But one thing was noticeable,-all the books were English. There was no affectation either in my father or mother, of decorating their tables with foreign books, not better than thousands of corresponding books in their mother idiom; or of painfully spelling out the contents, obscurely and doubtfully, as must always happen when people have not a familiar oral acquaintance with the whole force and value of a language. How often, upon the table of a modern litterateur, Tanguid, perhaps, and dyspeptic, so as to be in no condition for enjoying anything, do we see books lying in six or eight different languages, not one of which he has mastered in a degree putting him really and unaffectedly in possession of its idiomatic wealth, or really, and seriously, in a condition to seek his unaffected pleasures in that language. Besides, what reason has any man looking only for enjoyment, to import exotic luxuries, until he has a little exhausted those which are native to the soil? Are Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better indeed than all the waters of Israel? True it is, there are different reasons for learning a language; and with some I have here nothing to do. But where the luxuries of literature are the things sought, I can understand why a Dane should learn English; because his native literature is not wide, nor very original; and the best modern writers of his country, have a trick of writing in German, with a view to a larger au

dience. Even a Spaniard, or a Portuguese, might, with much good sense, acquire at some pains the English or the German; because his own litera. ture, with a few splendid jewels, is not mounted in all departments equally well. But is it for those who have fed on the gifts of Ceres, to discard them for acorns? This is to reverse the old mythological history of human progress. Now, for example, one of the richest departments in English literature, happens to be its drama, from the reign of Elizabeth, to the Parliamentary war: Such another exhibition of human life under a most picturesque form of manners and a stage of society so rich in original portraiture, and in strength of character, has not existed elsewhere, nor is ever likely to revolve upon ourselves. The tragic drama of Greece, is the only section of literature having a corresponding interest or value. Well; few readers are now much acquainted with this section of literature; even the powerful sketches of Beau. mont and Fletcher, who, in their comic delineations, approach to Shakspeare, lie covered with dust; and yet, whilst these things are, some twenty years ago, we all saw the arid sterilities of Alfi. eri, promoted to a place in every young lady's boudoir. It is true, that in this particular instance, the undue honour paid to this lifeless painter of life, and this undramatic dramatist, was owing to the ac ident of his memoirs having been just then published; and true also it is, that the insipid dramas, unable to sustain themselves, have long since sunk back into oblivion. But other writers, not better, are still succeeding; as must ever be the case, with readers not suffi ciently masters of a language, to bring the true pretensions of a work to any test of feeling, and who are for ever mistaking for some pleasure conferred by the writer, what is in fact the pleasure naturally attached to the sense of a difficulty

overcome.

Not only were there in my father's library, no books except English; but even amongst those there were none connected with the Black Letter literature; none in fact, of any kind which presupposed study and labour, for their enjoyment. It was a poor library, on this account, for a scholar or a man of research. Its use and purpose was mere enjoyment, instant amusement, without effort or affectation; but still liberal and intellectual. Living in the country, as most of his order did, my father could not look to a theatre for his evening pleasures-or to any public resort. To a theatre he went only when he took his family; and that might be once in five years. Books, gardens on a large scale, and a greenhouse, were the means generally relied on for daily pleasure. The last, in particular, was so commonly attached to a house, that it formed a principal room in the country-house, with the modest name of The Farm, in which I passed my infancy; it was the principal room, as to dimensions, in a spacious house which my father built

There can be no doubt that this particular mistake has been a chief cause of the vastly ex gg rited appreciation of much that is mediocre in Greek literature.

for himself; and was not wanting, on some scale or other, in any one house of those which I most visited when a school-boy. I may finish my portrait of my father and his class, by saying, that Cowper was the poet whom they generally most valued; that Dr. Johnson, who had only just ceased to be a living author, was looked up to with considerable reverence and interest, upon various mixed feelings; partly for his courage, for his sturdy and uncomplying morality, according to his views, for his general love of truth; and (as usual) for his diction, amongst all who loved the stately, the processional, the artificial, and even the inflated,-with the usual dissent, on the part of all who were more open to the natural graces of mother English, and idiomatic liveliness. Finally, I may add, that there was too little music in those houses in those days; and that the reverence paid to learning, to scholastic erudition, I mean, was disproportionate and excessive. Not having had the advantages of a college education themselves, my father and his class looked up with too much admiration to those who had; ascribing to them, with a natural modesty, a superiority greatly beyond the fact; and, not allowing themselves to see, that business, and the practice of life, had given to themselves countervailing advantages; nor discerning, that too often the scholar had become dull and comatose over his books; whilst the activity of trade, and the strife of practical business, had sharpened their own judgments, set an edge upon their understandings, and increased the mobility of their general powers. As to the general esteem for Cowper, that was inevitable: his picture of an English rural fire-side, with its long winter evening, the sofa wheeled round to the fire, the massy draperies depending from the windows, the tea-table with its "bubbling and loud hissing urn," the newspaper and the long debate,-Pitt and Fox ruling the senate, and Erskine the bar,-all this held up a mere mirror to that particular period, and their own particular houses; whilst the character of his rural scenery, was exactly the same in Cowper's experience of England, as in their own. that, in all these features, they recognised their countryman and their contemporary, who saw things from the same station as themselves; whilst his moral denunciations upon all great public questions then afloat, were cast in the very same mould of conscientious principle as their own. In saying that, I mean upon all questions where the moral bearings of the case, (as in the slave-trade, lettres de cachet, &c.) were open to no doubt. They all agreed in being very solicitous, in a point which evidently gives no concern at all to a Frenchman, viz., that in her public and foreign acts, their country should be in the right. In other respects, upon politics, there were great differences of opinion, especially throughout the American war, until the French revolution began to change its first features of promise. After that, a great monotony of opinion prevailed for many years amongst all of that class.

So

To pass from my father's house to myself, liv

climates did. The next incident I remember, was many months afterwards; my father had, in the interval, made extensive tours to warmer climates; he had visited Lisbon, next 'the Madeiras; and finally St. Kitt's, all to no purpose. He was now returning home to die. For some weeks I remember being about him as he lay on a sofa surrounded with West India productions displayed for my amusement. I was aware by something peculiar in the look and aspect of the house, a depression visible on all faces, and a quiet tread, that some speedy catastrophe was approaching and at length one morning I saw signs which sufficiently indicated that it was then at hand. Dead silence reigned in the house: whispers only audible; and I saw all the women of the family weeping. Soon after, all of us, being then four, able to understand such a scene, were carried into the bed-room in which my father was at that moment dying. Whether he had asked for us, I know not: if so, his senses had left him before we came. He was delirious, and talked at intervals-always on the same subject. He was ascending a mountain, and he had met with some great obstacle, which to him was insurmountable without help. This he called for from various people, naming them, and complaining of their desertion. The person who had gathered us together, raised my father's hand and laid it upon my head. We left the room; and in less than two minutes we heard it announced that all was over.

My father's death made little or no change in the household economy, except that my mother ever afterwards kept a carriage; which my father, in effect, exacted upon his death-bed.

My father's death occurred in 1792. His funeral, at which I and my elder brother were chief mourners, was the first I had attended. Then first it was that the solemn farewell of the English burial-service, Dust to dust, ashes to ashes," and the great eloquence of St. Paul in that matchless chapter of his epistle to the Corinthians, fell upon my ear; and, concurring with my whole previous feelings, for ever fixed that vast subject upon my mind.

It was a mere accident which had introduced her tomy mother's house. Happening to hear from my sister's governess that she and her pupil were going on a visit to an old Catholic family in the county of Durham, (the family of Mr. Swinburne, the traveller in Spain, &c.) she, whose Catholic education, in a French convent, had introduced her extensively to the knowledge of Catholic families in England, and who had herself an invitation to the same place, upon that wrote to offer the use of her carriage to convey all three to Mr. Swinburne's. This naturally drew forth an invitation from my mother, and she came. She must certainly, by what I saw of her ten years after, at the Oxford assizes, have been at this time a most striking creature; and her eloquence was astonishing. Even at that early age, she was already parted from her husband. On the imperial of her carriage, and elsewhere, she described herself as the Hon. Antonina Dashwood L. But, in fact, as only the illegitimate daughter of Lord le D, she was not entitled to that designation. She had, however, received a large fortune from her father, not less than forty thousand pounds. At a very early age, she had married a young Oxonian, distinguished for nothing but a very handsome person: and from him she had speedily separated, on the agreement of dividing the fortune. My mother, agitated between the necessities of hospitality, on the one hand, and her horror, on the other hand, to meet a woman, for the first time in her life, openly professing infidelity, at length fell ill; and this hastened Mrs. L.'s departure; not, however, before I, a child of eight years old, had seen things which nobody else suspected. She admitted me to her bed-room; and more than once her footman, "a man of figure," according to the London term for such persons, upon frivolous pretexts, came to her dressing-room, which adjoined; more than once also I saw him snatch her hand, and kiss itwhilst she, on her part, blushed, and looked round in alarm. What this meant, I had not the least guess; but having always been accustomed to see my mother keep her servants at a distance the most awful, I judged that it must be wrong, and I mentioned it to nobody. Afterwards, however, when the Oxford affair came on, I recollected the incident, and all became plain, Yet, when that also had passed over, and was forgotten, the lady published a book containing her views upon government; which, from many quarters, I heard of as no common performance. But, at that early period in 1794, her talents, her beauty of face and figure, her fine execution on the organ, her scenical skill in sustaining through a short scene some grand dramatic character, like that of Lady Macbeth, her powers of disputation, and, finally, her application of them to so unfeminine a purpose as that of undisguised assaults upon Christianity, combined to leave an impression, as of some great enchantress or Medea, upon all who had been admitted to witness her displays.

I was then nearly seven years old. In the next four years, during which we continued to live at the same house, nothing remarkable occurred, except the visit of a most eccentric young woman, who, about ten years afterwards, made a great noise in the world, and drew the eyes of all England upon herself, by her unprincipled conduct in an affair affecting the life of two young Scottish gentlemen. At this time she was about twenty-two, with a Grecian contour of face, elegant in person, and highly accomplished. In particular, she astonished every person by her performances on the organ, and by her powers of disputation. But these she applied entirely to attacks upon Christianity; for she openly professed infidelity; and at my mother's table, she certainly proved more than a match for all the clergymen of the neighbouring town, some of whom (as the most intellectual persons of that neighbourhood) were daily invited to meet her.

Perhaps I may as well, at this point, anticipate the sequel of her history. In 1804, at the Lent