of Lords,_ p. 256. "They are summoned _for their advice in point of
law_, and the greater dignity of the proceedings" of the
Lords.--(_Blackst, Comm._ p. 167.)

[8] 1 _Blackstone's Commentaries,_ p. 69.

[9] Opinions of the Judges, &c.--(Pp. 1-3.)

[10] Opinions of the Judges, p. 23.

[11] 3 _Blackstone's Commentaries_, p. 395.

[12] We quote from the edition of Lord Denman's judgment, sanctioned by
himself, and edited by D. Leahy, Esq., (one of the counsel in the
cause.)

[13] A "_demurrer_" is the mode by which any pleading, civil or
criminal, is denied to be (whether in form or substance) sufficient in
point of _law_; and a _plea_ is the mode by which is denied the _truth_
of the _facts_ which the pleading alleges.

[14] Opinions of the Judges, p. 19.

[15] Vol. I., pp. 68-9.

[16] Williams v. Germaine, 7 Bar. and Cress. 476.

[17] Opinions of the Judges, p. 17.

[18] Judgment, (by Leahy,) p. 36.

[19] Opinions of the Judges, p. 28.

[20] Judgment, &c., p. 43.

[21] Opinions of the Judges, p. 28.

[22] Lord Denman's judgment.

[23] Ditto.

[24] Ante.

[25] West's Symbolography, and Jacob's and Tomlin's Law.

[26] Opinions of the Judges, p. 29.

[27] 2 Bla. Comm. 169; and see Mr Christian's Note.

MY COLLEGE FRIENDS.

No. I

JOHN BROWN.

Did you ever happen to know a man who spent a whole Christmas vacation
in Oxford, and survived it? I did. And this is how it came to pass.

"Frank," said the governor one evening after dinner, when the
conversation had turned upon my approaching return to college, and the
ticklish question of supplies had been disposed of--"when the deuce do
you mean to go up for your degree? I have a notion this next term is
your fifteenth, young man?"

"Why no, sir--that is, not exactly; you know"----

"Oh! true--I forgot that confounded rustication business. Well, it's
your fourteenth at all events, and I think that's enough."

"Well, sir, I was thinking to have a shy at it after Christmas."

"Shy at it! You've always been _shying_ at it, I think. I hope it mayn't
end in a _bolt_, Master Frank!"

I laughed dutifully at the paternal wit, and promised to go to work in
earnest the moment I reached Oxford.

This was a resolution announced periodically like the ballot question,
and with much the same result. So the governor only shook his head,
yawned, looked at the bottle, which stood between us nearly empty, and
prepared apparently for an adjournment.

"I'll tell you what, sir," said I, emptying what remained in the
decanter into my glass, and swallowing it with a desperate energy
befitting the occasion, "I'll stay up the Christmas vacation and read."

"The deuce will you! Why, Frank," continued the governor, sorely
puzzled, "you know your cousins are coming here to spend the Christmas,
and I thought we should all make a merry party. Why can't you read a
little at home? You can get up something earlier, you know--much better
for your health--and have two hours or so clear before breakfast--no
time like the morning for reading--and then have all the day to yourself
afterwards. Eh, why not, Frank?"

"If you'll allow me to ring for another bottle of this Madeira, sir, (I
declare I think it's better than our senior common-room have, and they
don't consider theirs small-beer,) I'll tell you.----I never could read
at home, sir; it's not in the nature of things."

"I doubt whether it's much in your nature to read any where, Frank: I
confess I don't see much signs of it when you are here."

"In the first place, sir, I should never have a room to myself."

"Why, there's the library for you all day long, Frank; I'm sure I don't
trouble it much."

"Why, sir, in these days, if there are any young ladies in the house,
they take to the library as a matter of course: it's the regular place
for love-making: mammas don't follow them into the company of folios and
quartos while there are three volumes of the last novel on the
drawing-room table; and the atmosphere is sentimentality itself; they
mark favourite passages, and sigh illustrations."

"Precious dusty work, Frank, flirtations among my book-shelves must be;
but I suppose the girls don't go much beyond the bindings: they don't
expect to get husbands by being blue."

"Not exactly, sir; reviews and title-pages constitute a good part of
modern literary acquirements. But upon my honour, sir, one hears young
ladies now talk of nothing but architecture and divinity. Botany is
quite gone out; and music, unless there's a twang of Papistry about it,
is generally voted a bore. In my younger days--(really, sir, you needn't
laugh, for I haven't had a love affair these two years)--in my younger
days, when one talked about similarity of tastes and so forth, it meant
that both parties loved moonlight, hated quadrilles, adored Moore's
Melodies, and were learning German; now, nine girls out of ten have a
passion for speculative divinity and social regeneration."

"Ay, one sort of nonsense does just as well for them as another: your
cousin Sophy bothers me to build an Elizabethan pigsty, and wanted her
poor mother to dance with the butler in the servants' hall last
Christmas, when the fellow was as drunk as an owl: I hope it mayn't end
in her figuring off herself with the footman; for Sophy is rather a pet
of mine, and a right-down English girl after all. But, Frank, if you
can't read in peace in the library, you surely could have a room fitted
up for yourself up stairs; and you shall have the great reading-desk,
with lights, that was your grandfather's, that stands in my little
sanctum; (he made more use of it, poor man, than I do;) or I don't know
but what I might spare you the little room itself, if it would suit
you--eh?"

"Oh, my dear father! I wouldn't disturb you on any account," said I,
rather alarmed at the extent of my worthy parent's liberality in the
cause, and fearing it might end in the offer of the whole family to pack
themselves in the attics, and leave me a first floor to
myself--calculating, too, the amount of hard reading commensurate with
such imposing preparations. "What would become of the justice business
of the parish, sir, if we shut up your tribunal? I don't suppose my
mother would like to have the constables and the illegitimates
introduced either into the drawing-room or the kitchen," (this was, as I
meant it to be, a poser; if Mr Hawthorne senior had a hobby, it was his
magisterial authority.) "The fact is, that at home, up-stairs or
down-stairs, I couldn't read. I should have not only my own idleness,
but the various idlenesses of the whole family combined, to fight
against. My sisters would be knocking at the door every half hour, if
only to ask how I was getting on: Bob would tease me to come out
skating, and Charles would start me perpetually after wild-ducks or
woodcocks. And you yourself, sir, if I am not much mistaken, would think
it odd if I didn't take a ride with you as usual after breakfast. Then
one can't be expected to crawl about one's books by candlelight on a
winter's morning; and after a six o'clock dinner who can read? After tea
you know, sir, my mother always likes a rubber when I'm at home; and if
you are going to have those girls, Jane and Sophy, down this
Christmas"----

"Ah! well--I see, Frank; I'm afraid it's a hopeless case. Perhaps you
had better stay up at Oxford after all; you won't have much to disturb
you there, I suppose. If you don't get moped to death, I certainly don't
see what's to hinder your reading. You don't feel inclined to try North
Wales in the winter, I suppose, eh?"

"No, sir," said I, swallowing a last glass of Madeira at a gulp, and
rising, to cut short a conversation which was beginning to take rather
an awkward turn--"No, sir, not exactly."

"Why, I don't know, Frank: why not? you'd find the climate cooler, you
know," persevered the governor, as he followed me into the drawing-room.

So in Oxford it was settled that I should stay; a tolerable character
for the last term or two, and the notorious fact that I was going up at
Easter, ostensibly for a class, obtained me the necessary permission:
strange that, in the University, one should require leave to read! My
friends, John Brown and Harry Chesterton, were to stay up too; and we
promised ourselves some hours of hard work, and many merry ones
together. The vice-principal and one of the juniors, the only fellows
that would be in residence, were both gentlemen, and always treated the
under-graduates as such; we should get rid of the eternal rounds of beef
and legs of mutton that figured at the commoners' table in hall; there
would be no morning chapel; and altogether, having had nearly enough of
the noisy gayety of a full term, we looked forward to the novelty of a
few quiet weeks in college with a degree of pleasure which surprised
even ourselves.

But alas! under-graduates are but mortals, and subject to somewhat more
than the ordinary uncertainties of mortal life. It wanted but a week to
the end of term; all our plans were settled. Brown was to migrate from
his own rooms in "Purgatory"--as we used to call the little dark back
quadrangle, where, from sheer laziness, which made him think moving a
bore, he had remained ever since his first location there as a freshman,
up three pair of stairs; so that, when his intimate friends wished to
ascertain if he was at home, we used to throw a stone through the
window--and was to take up his abode in "Elysium," where he would be
Chesterton's next-door neighbour, and in the same number as myself. We
were to have a quiet breakfast in each others' rooms in turn every
morning; no gross repast of beef-steaks and "spread-eagle" fowls, but a
slight relish of anchovy toast, potted shrimps, or something equally
ethereal; and the _chasse-café_ limited to one cigar and no bottled
porter. It was cruel to interfere with such unexceptionable
arrangements; but a college, though it have a head, has no heart worth
mentioning; and, in an evil hour, they rusticated John Brown. At least
they forbade his staying up the Christmas vacation; and, for the credit
of my friend's character, let me explain. Why John Brown should have
been a person particularly distasteful to the fellows of ---- College,
was a matter at first sight rather hard to understand. He was not what
is called a rowing man; was never found drunk in the quad, or asleep at
the hall lecture; never sported a pink, or drove a team; was not known
to have been concerned in any of the remarkable larks which occurred in
our times; was neither an agent in the Plague of Frogs, nor an actor in
the private theatricals; was not a member of the Agricultural Society,
which made the remarkable experiments with clover and ryegrass in the
college quadrangle; had no talent for midnight howling, sang very small
in a chorus, capped all the fellows diligently, and paid his battels to
the minute. He was known to have asked twice for the key of the library,
put down his name for the senior tutor's pet lecture in "Cornelius
Nepos," bought the principal's sermon on the "Via Media," and was
suspected of having tried to read it. He was not clever enough to sneer
at the tutors, or stupid enough to disgust them. He was too sleepy to
keep late hours, too fat to pull in the boat, too stingy to give
supper-parties. How on earth came the fellows not to like John Brown? "A
most respectable man," the principal always said he was. "Sir," said he
to his anxious father, when, at the end of his second term, he took the
opportunity of a professional visit to Oxford to call to know how the
hope of the Browns was progressing--"Sir, I consider your son a most
respectable person: I may say a most respectable person;" and as the
principal had taken wine with him once at dinner, and bowed to him at
collections, and read "Mr John Brown" twice upon a card at the end and
beginning of term, and thus had every opportunity of forming an opinion,
and expressed that opinion oracularly, in a Johnsonian fashion, Governor
Brown was satisfied. How did the fellows come not to like John
Brown?--pronounced "most respectable" by the principal--declared by his
scout to be "the quietest gentleman as he ever a knowed;" admitted by
the under-graduates to be "a monstrous good fellow, but rather slow;"
how came John Brown to fail in recommending himself to the favour of his
pastors and masters--the dean and tutors of ----? Why, in the first
place, John Brown, the elder, was a wine-merchant; a well-educated man,
a well-behaved man; but still a wine-merchant. Now the dean's father
was--I beg his pardon, had been--a linen-draper; neither well-educated
nor well behaved; in short, an unmitigated linen-draper. Consequently
the dean's adoration of the aristocracy was excessive. There are few
such thorough tuft-hunters as your genuine Oxford Don; the man who,
without family or station in society, often without any further general
education and knowledge of the world than is to be found at a country
grammar-school, is suddenly, upon the strength of some acquaintance with
Latin and Greek, or quite as often, from having first seen the light in
some fortunately endowed county, elevated to the dignity of a
fellowship, and permitted to take rank with gentlemen. The "high table"
in hall, the Turkey carpet and violet cushioned chair in the common
room, the obsequious attention of college servants, and the more
unwilling "capping" of the under-graduates, to such a man are real
luxuries, and the relish with which he enjoys them is deep and strong.
And if he have but the luck to immortalize himself by holding some
University office, to strut through his year of misrule as proctor, or
even as his humble "pro," then does he at once emerge from the obscurity
of the family annals a being of a higher sphere. And when there comes up
to commemoration a waddling old lady, and two thin sticks of virginity,
who horrify the college butler by calling the vice-principal "Dick," no
wonder that they return to the select society of their native town with
an impression, that though Oxford was a very fine place, and they had
real champagne, and wax candles, and every thing quite genteel, and dear
Richard was very kind, still they did think he was grown rather proud,
as he never once asked after his old acquaintances the Smiths, and
didn't like to be teased about his old flame Mary. No wonder that in the
visits, few and far between, which, during the long vacation, the
pompous B.D. pays to his humble relations in the country, (when he has
exhausted the invitations and the patience of his more aristocratic
friends,) they do not find a trace remaining of the vulgar boy, who,
some twelve years ago, quitted the seat of the provincial muses to push
his fortunes in the University of Oxford. In vain does his uncle give up
his after-dinner pipe, and in place of the accustomed Hollands and
water, astonish the dusty decanter with port of an unknown vintage in
honour of his illustrious nephew; in vain does the good old lady
afore-mentioned, the unworthy mother of so bright a son, quit the
instruction of pious Mr Jabez Jenkins, the "Independent" minister, and
turn orthodox and high-church for the nonce, when her dearly beloved
Richard "officiates" for the rev. the vicar; no ties of home or kindred,
no memories of boyhood, no glow of early recollections, touch the
case-hardened parasite of college growth; and when he has banished his
younger brother to Australia, under pretext of making his fortune,
married both his sisters, and erected a cheap monument to the
linen-draper's widow as the "relict of the late Thomas Thompson,
_Esquire_," he waits in peaceful expectation of a college living, with
the consciousness of having done his duty by his relations, and
delivered himself from a drag upon his new career. I do not mean to set
too high a value on gentle birth, or to limit nobility of character by
that of blood; I believe my tailor to be one of nature's gentlemen, (he
never duns,) and I know my next neighbour, Sir John, thirteenth baronet
as he is, to possess the soul of a huckster, because he sells his fruit
and game: still these are the exceptions, not the rule; and there are
few cases of men rising from low origin--rising, that is, from
circumstances, not from ability--not the architects, but the creations
of their own fortunes, (for that makes all the difference)--who do not
carry with them, through all the gradations of their advancement, the
plebeian instincts, while they forget, perhaps, the homely virtues of
the class from which they spring. There is a nobility of birth, seldom
to be counterfeited or mistaken, wholly irrespective of the rank and
wealth which are either its graceful accompaniments or its insufficient
substitutes; fostered and strengthened by early habits and education,
but none the less originally innate--as much an endowment from heaven as
beauty, strength, or talent, and more valuable than all. Many men have
the tact to adapt themselves to the station and the society to which
they have risen, however much above their own level; they acquire the
habits and the tastes, seldom the feelings, of a gentleman. They act the
character well; it is carefully studied, and on the whole well
sustained; it is a correct and painstaking performance, and the points
tell distinctly; but there is throughout that indirect appeal to the
audience which marks it to be only acting. They are more studiously
aristocratic than the aristocracy, and have a horror of vulgarity which
is in itself essentially vulgar.

And such a man was the dean of ----. On the philosophic principle of
hating all to whom we are under obligations, if there was any thing he
cordially detested, it was trade. His constant aim was to forget his
unfortunate origin himself, if possible to lead others who knew him to
forget it, and to keep strangers from knowing it at all. And as he
shrank from every shape and sound plebeian, so he industriously
cultivated every opening to "good society." There was not a member of
his own college, graduate or under-graduate, of any pretensions to
family, who could not speak from experience of the dean's capital
dinners, and his invariable urbanity. No young honourable, or tenth
cousin to an honourable, ever got into a row, that he had not cause to
bless the dean's good offices for getting him out. And if some of the
old stagers contented themselves with eating his dinners, and returning
them in the proportion of one to five, the unsophisticated gratitude of
youth, less cunning in the ways of the world, declared unhesitatingly,
in its own idiomatic language, "that old Hodgett was a regular brick,
and gave very beany feeds." And so his fame travelled far beyond his own
collegiate walls, and out-college honourables and gentlemen-commoners
were content to make the acquaintance, and eat the dinners that were so
freely offered. And as the dean had really some cleverness, and "a
well-assorted selection" of anecdotes and illustrations "from the best
markets," (as his worthy father would have advertised it,) and could
fill the chair at his own entertainments with ease if not with
gracefulness, and moreover was not close with his purse-strings, and
could always be reckoned safe for a L.20 note if a dun was troublesome,
(well knowing that even under-graduates make exceptions in favour of
debts of honour,) he became, among his younger friends especially, a
very popular man. And when those who had enjoyed his good fare, and
profited by his friendly offices with duns and proctors, found that,
after all, he was "nobody," all they said was, that it was a pity, and
that he was a monstrous good fellow none the less. And one invited him
to spend the Christmas with him down at the governor's in Kent, where
there was to be a regular houseful, and merry-making of all sorts, and
another would have him into Norfolk in September for the shooting--(the
dean never shot, but wisely said nothing about it until he got into
good quarters, when he left his younger friends to beat the stubbles,
while he walked or drove with Lady Mary and Lady Emily, and eat the
partridges;)--so that on the whole he felt himself rather an ill-used
individual if there was a week of the vacation for which he had not an
invite. If such a rare and undesirable exception did happen, seldom
indeed did he bestow himself, even for a day or two, upon his mother and
sisters at Nottingham; and never did he, by any oversight, permit a
letter to be addressed to him there; if it could not conveniently bear
the address of some of his titled entertainers, it was to meet him at
his college, to which he usually retired to await, with sufficient
discontent, an invitation, or the beginning of term; while he took pains
to have it understood, that his temporary seclusion was hardly spared
him from the hospitable importunities of those whom he delighted to call
"his many friends," in order to attend to important business.
Occasionally, indeed, it would happen that the natural sagacity of some
old English gentleman, or the keen eye of an experienced courtier, would
fathom at a glance the character of his son's invited guest, and treat
him with a distant politeness which he could neither mistake nor get
over; but, on the whole, his visits among his aristocratic entertainers
were agreeable enough, and he was not a man to stick at an occasional
trifle. His youthful _protégés_ were glad to be able to repay in the
country many kind offices at Oxford, and to become patronizers in their
turn; and the seniors redoubled, in the case of their son's friend, the
hospitality and courtesy they would have readily shown to a stranger,
and were not eager to scrutinize the motives which might have induced
him to be civil to the hopeful stripling, whom, in their partial view,
the whole university might well have delighted to honour.

In the eyes of such a man, John Brown was not likely, at first starting,
to find much favour. Had he been a rich man, and sported the velvet cap
and silk gown, the unhappy fact of his father's being in trade might
have been winked at. If not in the front rank of the dean's friends he
might have filled a vacant seat occasionally at his dinner-table, and
been honoured with a friendly recognition in the quadrangle. At it was,
he did not condescend to remember that such a man was on the college
books. Happy ignorance, if only it could have lasted. But one unlucky
morning a late supper party had decidedly thinned the attendance at the
hall lecture; and Mr Hodgett, having been disappointed of an invitation
to a very select dinner at the principal's, was in no very benignant
humour, and "hauled up" the defaulters. Among them was one of the dean's
pets--who, having done the same thing a dozen times before, was rather
astonished at the summons--and the usually regular John Brown. What
excuses the rest of the party made is immaterial. John, I believe, said
nothing, beyond a remark as to his having been rarely absent. The
result, however, was, that he and the rest got an imposition, which cost
them half-a-guinea each to get done by the under-cook, (it was Greek
_with_ the accents, which comes expensive,) while the Honourable Lumley
Skeffington was dismissed with a jocular reproof, and an invitation to
breakfast. Now, if Mr Skeffington had had the sense to have kept his own
and his friend's counsel, this might have been all very well. But being
a somewhat shallow-pated youth, and a freshman to boot, he thought it a
very fine thing to talk about at his next wine-party, and boast that he
could cut lecture and chapel when he pleased--the dean and he understood
each other. Brown happened to be present; (for though not good company
enough for the dean, he was for his betters; your _parvenu_ is far more
exclusive in his society than your born gentleman;) he quietly enquired
into the facts; and finding that what he had before been inclined to
consider as undue severity in his own case, was positively an injustice
compared with that of another, appreciating thoroughly the character of
the party he had to deal with, and coupling the present with certain
previous minor snubbings from the same quarter, he from that moment
declared war.

Now, the Rev. Mr Hodgett, sedate and dignified as he was, had better
have danced a hornpipe in his thinnest silks amongst a bed of stinging
nettles, or have poked sticks into a wasp's nest, or amused himself with
any other innocent recreation, than have made an enemy of John Brown. It
was what he himself would have called a wrong move, and it played the
deuce with his game. John was the very man who could annoy him, and he
did. None of us knew he had so much ingenuity, or so much malice in his
composition, until he commenced his hostilities against the dean. The
fact was, he was more piqued, perhaps, than any other man in college
would have been by so small a matter. Too sensible to be really ashamed
of being the son of a man in trade, he was conscious, nevertheless, that
it was in some sort a disadvantage to him, and that, descended as he was
from an old and once knightly line, (his father had been an ill-used
younger son,) he did not quite occupy his proper position in the world.
His feeling of this made him sensitive to a fault; it led him rather to
shun than to seek the society of his contemporaries; and much as he was
esteemed by myself and others who knew him well, I will not say that he
was a universal favourite. Men did not understand him: at that time of
life (alas, why not always?) most of us are open and free-hearted; they
did not relish his shy and reserved manner, his unwillingness to take
the initiative in any social intercourse, his _exigéance_ to a certain
extent of those forms which the freedom of college friendship is apt to
neglect. "Why didn't you turn into my rooms the other night, when you
came in from Oriel?" said I to him early in our acquaintance. "Hobbs
says he told you I had some men to supper."--"You didn't ask me," was
the quiet reply.--"I couldn't see you, or else I should; but you might
have known I wanted you; don't serve me such a trick as that again, old
fellow." But it let me into a secret of his character, and ever after
that, I was as particular in my invitations as possible. Men thought him
proud, and cold, and touchy, which he was not; and stingy, which he
scorned to be, from his contempt for ostentation in any shape. The
rarity of his wine-parties, and his never having other wines produced
than port or sherry, he himself explained to me--"Men would say, it was
easy for me to sport claret and champagne, when I could get them for
nothing." But if an unthinking freshman broke out in praise of the said
excellent port or sherry, (as indeed they might well be pardoned for
doing, considering the quality of what they commonly imbibed,) he would
say at once--"Yes, I believe it is good; I know my father considers it
so, and it has been in bottle above twelve years." There was no shirking
the question for a moment. And excellent wine he got for me from his
father, at a moderate price, at his own offer. Hating then, as he did
undisguisedly, the tuft-hunting and affectation of _haut-ton_, which was
so foreign to his own nature, he felt, perhaps excusably, annoyed at
their palpable existence and apparent success, in a man, whose station,
as he said, ought to have kept him from meanness, if it could not give
him dignity.

At all events, his method of retaliation--"taking down the dean"--as he
called it was most systematic and persevering. He let the matter of the
imposition pass over quietly; was for some months doubly attentive to
all his college duties; carefully avoided all collision with his
adversary; kept out of his way as much as he could; and whenever brought
into contact with him, was as respectful as if he had been the
Vice-chancellor. This had its effect: John began to rise in the dean's
good graces; and when he called upon him in the usual course of
etiquette, to mention that he should be absent the vacation of three
days which intervenes between the two short terms, the meeting, on one
side at least, was almost cordial. A day or two after his return, (he
had been to visit a friend, he said,) we were in his rooms at breakfast
together, when the dean's scout entered with his master's compliments to
request Mr Brown's company to breakfast. Then it was that John's eyes
dilated, and he rubbed his hands, as soon as the door was shut, with an
excitement rather unusual.

"Do you know who breakfasts with the man to-morrow? Do you, Hawthorne?"

"Why, I had a message this morning," said I, "but I don't mean to go. I
shall have a headach or something to-morrow. I have no notion of going
there to eat my own bread and butter, and drink his very bad tea, and
see a freshman swallow greasy ham and eggs, enough to turn the stomach
of any one else; and then those Dons always make a point of asking me to
meet a set of regular muffs that I don't know. The last time I went,
there were only two reading-men in spectacles, perfect dummies, and that
ass, young Medlicott, who talks about hunting, and I believe never
crossed the back of anything higher than a donkey."

"You had better come to-morrow; perhaps you will have some fun."

"Why, who is going there, do you know?"

"I haven't a notion; but do come. I must go, and we will sit together,
and I'll get the cook to send up a dish of deviled kidneys for you."

There was something in his eye as he said this which I could not make
out, and it rather puzzled me to find him so willing to be of the party
himself. However, he was an odd fellow, so I promised to go, and we
parted; certainly with little anticipation on my part of what the "fun"
was to be.

Nine o'clock the next day arrived, and punctual to the minute might be
seen two freshmen, from opposite corners of the quadrangle, steering for
the dean's rooms. Ten minutes afterwards, an interesting procession of
coffee-pots and tin-covers warned me to finish my toilet; and following
them up the staircase, I found a tolerably large party assembled.

"Just in time--just in time, Mr Hawthorne," said the dean, who appeared
to be in high good-humour, "as my old pupil, Sir Charles Galston, used
to say, (you don't know him, do you? he's your county man, too, I
believe,)--as he always used to say, 'Gad, Hodgett, just in time to see
the muffins break cover!' ha, ha! Take those tins off, Robert."

We sat down, and for some time every thing went on as slow as it usually
does at breakfast parties. At length, taking advantage of a pause, after
laughing his loudest at one of our host's stories, John Brown broke out
with "How is Mrs Hodgett, sir?"

If Mrs Hodgett, instead of the dean's most respectable mother, had been
his lawful wife, hitherto unacknowledged through fear of losing his
fellowship, he could not have looked more thoroughly horrified. I myself
was considerably taken aback; some of the other men, who knew the
reverend gentleman's tenderness on the subject of his family connexions,
picked their chicken-bones, and stirred their coffee with redoubled
attention. John Brown and the two freshmen alone looked as cool as
cucumbers.

"Eh? oh--h," stammered the party addressed, "quite well, thank
you--quite well. Let me give you some of this--oh, it's all gone! We'll
have some more; will one of you be kind enough to ring? My friend,
Lord"----

"No more for me, thank you, sir, I beg," said John. "Have you heard from
Mrs Hodgett since the vacation?"

"No--yes; oh dear, yes, several times!" (It was about five days back.)
"She was quite well, thank you. In town at present, I believe. You were
in town during the vacation, I think, Mr Wartnaby? Did you meet your
uncle Sir Thomas there, or any of the family?"

"Sir T-T-Thom...." began young Wartnaby, who stammered terribly.

"I beg your pardon, sir," struck in John Brown, "are you sure Mrs
Hodgett is in town? I saw her in Nottingham myself on Friday; I made my
first acquaintance with her there, and a very charming old lady she is."

Mr Hodgett's confusion could only be rivaled by Mr Brown's perfect
self-possession. I began to see the object of his kind enquiries; so,
probably, did the victim himself. The other men who were present
thought, I suppose, that it was only an unfortunate attempt of John's to
make himself agreeable; and while some were amused by it, a more
considerate friend kicked my shins in mistake for his, under the table.

"She certainly told me, sir, she should be going up to London in a few
weeks, to purchase her winter stock, I think she said; but I did not
understand that she was to be there now."

John had got on thus far before his enemy could rally at all; but the
dean grew desperate, and resolved to make a diversion at all hazards;
and as he reached his hand out, apparently in quest of a slice of toast,
cup, saucer, and a pile of empty plates, went crashing on the floor.

"Bless me, how very awkward!" said he, with a face as red as fire.

"Never mind, sir," said a freshman from Shrewsbury, just entered who had
not opened his lips before, and thought it a good opportunity; "it's all
for the good of trade."

Never was a stale jest so unconsciously pointed in its application.
Brown laughed of course, and so did we all; while the dean tried to
cover his confusion by wiping his clothes--the cup having been an empty
one. The freshman, seeing our amusement, thought he had said a very good
thing, and began to talk very fast; but nobody listened to him.

"Talking of trade," mercilessly continued the tormentor, "I was
uncommonly pleased with Nottingham the other day. Your brother-in-law,
Mr Mogg, was exceedingly civil to me, (I took the liberty of mentioning
your name, sir;) he showed me the whole process of stocking-making; very
interesting indeed it is--but of course you have seen it often; and I
really think, for a small establishment, Mr Mogg's is one of the best
conducted I ever saw. You don't know Mr Mogg, Hawthorne, do you? Get the
dean to give you a letter to him, if you ever go to Nottingham; a very
good sort of man he is, and has his whole heart in his business. 'Some
men are ashamed of their trade, sir' said he; 'I a'n't. What should I
do, I should like to know, if trade was ashamed of me?' And really Mrs
Mogg"----

"Ah yes!" said Mr Hodgett, hitherto overwhelmed by John's eloquence, (he
never talked so fast,) and utterly at a loss how to meet it, "Mogg is a
great man in his line at Nottingham. I shouldn't wonder if he was member
some day; he has a large wholesale connexion."

"And retail, too, sir," chimed in John. "I bought six pair of the nicest
sort of stockings there I have seen for a long time: did I show them to
you, Hawthorne? 'These,' said Mr Mogg, 'I can recommend; I always'"----

"If you won't take any more coffee, gentlemen," said the dean, jumping
up and looking at his watch, "I am afraid, as I have an appointment at
ten"----

"I declare, so have I," said Brown; "but I had quite forgotten it, our
conversation has been so very agreeable. Good-morning, sir; and if you
are writing to Mrs Hodgett, pray make my compliments." And with this
Parthian shaft he quitted the field.

Having adjusted the difficult questions which are apt to arise as to the
ownership of caps and gowns, the rest of the party took leave. The
facetious freshman, after putting in an ineffectual claim upon one or
two of the most respectable of the caps, at last marched off with the
dean's, as being certainly more like the new one he had bought the day
before, than the dilapidated article with a broken board and half a
tassel, which was the tempting alternative, and possessing also the
common property of having a red seal in it. He was not allowed, however,
to remain long in peaceful possession of his prize. Scarcely had he
reached his rooms, when Robert, the dean's scout, came to inform him
that he had left his own cap (which Robert presented to him with a grin)
behind him, and taken away Mr Hodgett's in mistake; enlightening him, at
the same time, as to the fact, that fellows' caps, by special exemption,
were "not transferable." And when he ventured to send back by Robert an
apology, to the effect that the very ancient specimen could not at all
events be his, and a humble request that the dean would endeavour to
ascertain which of his friends whom he had met at breakfast had also
"made a mistake," that official, remembering his happy _debût_ as a
conversationalist, instantly sent for him, and read him a severe lecture
upon impertinence.

Of course we were no sooner fairly landed in the quadrangle, than all
who had any acquaintance with Brown surrounded him with entreaties for
an explanation. What possessed him to make such a dead set at the dean?
How came he to be so well up in the family history? How long had he had
the pleasure of an acquaintance with dear old Mrs Hodgett? And who
introduced him to Mr Mogg?

It turned out that John had made an expedition to Nottingham during the
vacation on purpose; he had called on the old lady, whose address he had
with some difficulty obtained; presented his card, "Mr John Brown, ----
Coll.;" stated that he was a stranger, very desirous to see the lions of
Nottingham, of which he had heard so much; and having the honour of
knowing her son, and the advantage of being at the same college with
him, and having so often heard her name mentioned in their many
conversations, that he almost felt as if she was his intimate
acquaintance, had ventured to intrude upon her with a request that she
would put him in the way of seeing the town and its manufactures to the
best advantage. Much taken, no doubt, by John's polite address, which by
his own recapitulation of it must have been highly insinuating, and
delighted to see any one who could talk to her about her son, and to
learn that she herself was talked about among his grand friends in
Oxford, the worthy Mrs Hodgett begged John Brown to walk in; and finding
that there was nothing high about him, and that he listened with the
greatest interest to all her family details and reminiscences, she took
courage to ask him to eat a bit of dinner with her and her daughter at
two o'clock, after which she promised him the escort of her son-in-law,
Mr Mogg, the principal (that was what they called them up at Nottingham,
just as they did in Oxford, she observed) of the great stocking-house
over the way. Such a man he was! she said; every bit as good as a book
to a stranger; "he knowed every think and every body." John assured her
such universal knowledge was not common among principals of houses in
Oxford; and declared that he should appreciate the services of such a
guide proportionately. And as an introduction to the whole family was
just the thing he wanted, he at once accepted the invitation with many
thanks. In short, an arrangement was made which pleased all parties;
all, that is, with the exception of Mr Spriggins, the head shopman, who
usually took his meals with the family, but on that day, to his great
disgust, not being considered of quality to meet their unexpected guest,
(not being a principal,) received intimation that his dinner would be
served in the counting-house. The dinner passed off, no doubt, much more
satisfactorily than more formal affairs of the kind. John had a good
appetite and good-humour, and so had the old lady; and no doubt, even in
Miss Hodgett's eyes, the young Oxonian was no bad substitute for Mr
Spriggins. Even that gentleman, could he have foreseen all that was to
follow from this visit, would have exchanged for his blandest smile the
stern glance with which he regarded, from the little back window of the
counting-house, the procession of John, with Miss Hodgett under his arm,
from the drawing-room, to take the seat which should have been his;
would have made him his most obsequious bow, and regarded him as the
best customer that had ever come inside their doors.

But perhaps I am wronging Mr Spriggins in assuming that he thought the
usurper of his rights worthy of a glance at all: and certainly I am
anticipating my story. John dined with the old lady; drank her currant
wine in preference to her port, ate her seed biscuits, and when Mr Mogg,
in pursuance of a message from his mother-in-law, called to renew in his
own person the offer to show his relation's distinguished friend, (Mrs
Hodgett had hinted her suspicions that John Brown was a nobleman,) he
was ready, though rather sleepy, to commence his lionizing. Mr Mogg was
exceedingly civil, showed him every thing worth seeing, from the castle
to the stocking-frames; and by the time they returned together to supper
at the old lady's, they had become very thick indeed. John called the
next day and took his leave of both parties, with a promise not to pass
through Nottingham without renewing his acquaintance, and that he would
not fail to mention to his friend the dean how much he had been
gratified by his reception; both which pledges he scrupulously redeemed.

Mr Hodgett's indignation was unbounded; if the united powers of
vice-chancellor, doctors, proctors, and convocation, could, by rummaging
up some old statute, have expelled John Brown for paying a visit to
Nottingham, he would have moved the university to strive to effect it.
Happily these powers never are united, or there is no saying what they
might not do. So John remained a member of the college still. The dean
seldom looked at him if he could help it; he tried once the soothing
system by praising him at collections, but it only elicited from John a
polite enquiry after Mr and Mrs Mogg.

What man could do to extricate himself from his unfortunate position,
the dean did. He wrote off immediately to his mother, entreating her, by
her hopes of his advancement in life, not to allow the name of Hodgett
to be any longer contaminated by any touch of linen-drapery. He
suggested that she should at once make over the business to her foreman,
Spriggins, reserving to herself an interest in the profits, and retire
to a small and genteel cottage in the suburbs, where no impertinent
intruder could detect the linen-draper's widow. She, worthy old soul,
though it did grieve her, no doubt, to part with her shop, in which were
centred the interests and associations of so many years, yet would have
set fire to it with her own hands, and emigrated to America--though she
knew it only as a place where banks always broke, and people never paid
their debts--if it could in anyway have furthered his interests whom she
loved better than he deserved. She always looked upon him as a
gentleman, and did not wonder he wished to be one, though she herself
had no manner of taste for becoming a lady.

But in the simplicity of her heart, she planned that even this sacrifice
to her motherly affection might be turned to some account in the way of
trade. Accordingly, there appeared in the _Nottingham Herald_ an
advertisement, extending across two columns, headed with imposing
capitals, by which the public were informed that Mrs Hodgett being about
to decline her long-established linen-drapery business in favour of Mr
Spriggins, the whole stock was to be turned into ready money
immediately, "considerably below prime cost;" by which means the public
had no doubt an opportunity of giving full value to Mrs H. for sundry
old-fashioned patterns and faded remnants, which the incoming Spriggins
would otherwise have "taken to" for a mere song.

Now, since the time that John Brown began first to take so deep an
interest in the Hodgett family, he had regularly invested fourpence
weekly in a copy of the _Nottingham Herald_. By this means he had the
satisfaction of congratulating the dean upon the birth of a nephew, in
the person of a son and heir of the Moggs: and though so carefully did
that gentleman avoid all communication with his tormentor, that he was
obliged for two whole days to watch an opportunity to convey the
intelligence; yet, as he finally succeeded in announcing it in the
presence of the tutor of a neighbouring college, who was a profound
genealogist and a great gossip, his pains, he declared, were
sufficiently repaid. The eagerness with which he pounced upon the
advertisement may be imagined; and finding, from a little _N. B._ at the
bottom, that handbills with further particulars were to be had at the
office, he lost no time in procuring half a dozen by post; and one
morning the usual receptacles for university notices, the hall-door and
the board by the buttery, were placarded with staring announcements, in
red and black letters, six inches long, of Mrs HODGETT'S speculation.
One was pushed under the dean's door; one stuck under the knocker at the
principal's; one put into the college letterbox for "the senior
common-room;" in short, had good Mrs Hodgett herself wished to have the
college for her customers, she could hardly have distributed them more
judiciously.

In short, no pains were spared by John Brown to tease and worry the dean
with all the particulars of his family history, which he would most have
wished to bury in oblivion. And to do him justice, he in his turn spared
no pains to get rid of John Brown. He would have allowed him to cut
lectures and chapels _ad libitum_, if he thus could have spared all
personal intercourse, and escaped his detested civilities. Finding that
would not do, he tried the opposite course, and endeavoured either to
get him rusticated at once, or to disgust him with the college, and thus
induce him to take his name off. John was cautious--very cautious; but a
war against the powers that be, is always pretty much of an uphill game;
and so at last it proved in his case.

John had another enemy in the college, of his own making too; this was
Mr Silver, the junior tutor. He was a man of some scholarship and much
conceit; took a first class when very young, having entered college a
mere schoolboy, and read hard; got his appointment as tutor soon after,
and sneered at older men on the strength of it. He pretended to be
exceedingly jocular and familiar with his pupils, but was really always
on the alarm for his dignity. His great delight was to impress the
freshmen with an idea of his abilities and his condescension. "Always
come to me, Mr ----, if you find any difficulties in your reading--I
shall be most happy to assist you." This language, repeated to all in
turn, was, not unnaturally, literally understood by the matter-of-fact
John Brown; who, perhaps, could see no good reason why a college tutor
should _not_ be ready to aid, as far as he could, the private studies of
those who are so often in want of sensible advice and encouragement.
However, it did not occur to him, when he took up to Mr Silver's rooms
one morning after lecture, a passage that had puzzled him, that he was
doing a very odd thing, and that the tutor thought so. As these
consultations became more frequent, however, he began to perceive, what
other men were not slow to tell him, that Mr Silver thought him a bore.
And the moment this flashed upon him, with his unfortunate antipathy to
any thing like humbug, he began another war of independence. He selected
crabbed passages; got them up carefully by the help of translations,
scholiasts, and clever friends; and then took them up hot to Mr Silver.
And when he detected him slurring a difficulty instead of explaining it,
or saying there was no difficulty at all, John would bring up against
him his array of objections to this or that rendering, and arguments for
and against various readings, &c., till Mr Silver found himself fairly
out of his depth. At first this puzzled him, and he very nearly
committed the mistake of pronouncing John Brown a first-rate scholar in
the common-room; but when he found his performance at lecture did not by
any means keep pace with the remarkable erudition sometimes displayed by
him in private, he began in his turn to suspect the trick. He dared not
refuse to play his part, when called upon, in these learned discussions,
though he dreaded them more and more; for his college reputation was at
stake, and there were some among the older fellows who looked upon him
as rather an assuming young man for understanding what they did not
pretend to, and would have been glad to have had a joke against him; but
he began cordially to hate John Brown; he gave him all the difficult
bits he could at lecture; sneered at him when he dared; and practised
all those amiable embellishments which make schoolmasters and tutors
usually so beloved, and learning in all its branches so delightful.

It is not to be wondered at, then, if John's kind friends somewhat
damaged his reputation among the Dons, and watched their opportunity to
annihilate him. It came, and they were down upon him at once. Some
half-dozen noisy men, the survivors of a supper-party, had turned into
Brown's rooms (he seldom sat up so late) for a parting cigar. Having
accomplished this, they took it into their heads to dance a quadrille in
the middle of the covered thoroughfare, for the benefit of the echo, to
the music of six individual tunes sung in chorus. So strange a
performance brought down some of the fellows; the men were not
recognised, but traced to Brown's rooms. He refused to give up their
names--was declared contumacious; and, in spite of the good-natured
remonstrances of the principal and one or two of the others, his enemies
obtained a majority in the common-room; and it was decided that John
Brown was too dangerous a character to be allowed to remain in college
during vacation. But they had not got rid of him yet.

About two miles out of Oxford, on the C---- road, if any one takes the
trouble to turn up a narrow lane, and then follow a footpath by the side
of the canal, he will come to one of the most curious-looking farmhouses
that he (or at least I) ever met with. It is a large rambling
uninhabited-looking place; the house, as is not unusual, forming one
side of a square enclosure, of which the barns and outhouses make up the
rest. The high blank walls of these latter, pierced only here and there
by two or three of the narrowest possible lancet-holes, give it
something the air of a fortification. Indeed, if well garrisoned, it
would be almost as strong a post as the Chateau of Hougoumont; with this
additional advantage, that it has a moat on two sides of it, and a
canal, only divided from it by a narrow towing-path, on a third. The
front (for it has a front, though, upon my first visit, it took me some
time to find it, it being exactly on the opposite side to the approach
at present in use, and requiring two pretty deep ditches to be crossed,
in order to get at it from the direction)--the front only has any
regular windows; and of these, most of the largest are boarded up,
(some, indeed, more substantially closed with brick and mortar) in order
to render it as independent as possible of the glazier and the assessor
of taxes. There is a little bridge, very much decayed, thrown across the
narrow moat to what was, in former days, the main entrance; but now the
door was nailed up, the bridge ruinous, and the path leading to it no
longer distinguishable in the long rank grass that covered the wet
meadows upon which the house looked out. It was a place that filled you
involuntarily with melancholy feelings; it breathed of loneliness and
desolation, changed times and fallen fortunes. I never beheld it but I
thought of Tennyson's "Mariana in the moated Grange"--

    "Unlifted was the clicking latch,
    Weeded and worn the ancient thatch
    Upon the lonely moated Grange."

Brown and I, in some of our peregrinations, had stumbled upon this old
house; and after having walked round it, and speculated upon its
history, made our way through an open door into the spacious court-yard.
If the outside looked desolate, however, the interior was lively enough:
cattle, pigs, geese, ducks, and all the ordinary appurtenances of a
well-stocked farm, gave token that the old place was still tenanted; and
a large mastiff, who stalked towards us with a series of enquiring
growls, evidently demanding our business, and suspicious of our good
intentions, made us not at all sorry to see a stout good-natured-looking
dame, a perfect contradiction to the poet's woe-worn "Mariana," who,
after bidding Boxer hold his noise, volunteered a compendious history of
herself and husband in answer to our simple question as to the name of
the place. How good Farmer Nutt and herself had lived there for the last
seventeen years; how the old place belonged to Squire somebody, and
folks said that some gentry used to live in it in times past; what a
lonesome-like life they thought it when they first came, after living in
the gay town of Abingdon; how, by degrees, they got to think it pretty
comfortable, and found the plashy meadows good pasturage, and the house
"famous and roomy-like;" this, and much besides, did we listen to
patiently, the more so because an attempt or two at interruption only
served to widen the field of her discourse. The wind-up of it all,
however, was, that we were asked to walk in and sit down, and so we did.
A civil farmer's wife, a very common character in most parts of England,
is, I am sorry to say, somewhat too much of a rarity about Oxford;
whether their tempers are too severely tried by the "fast men," who hunt
drags and ride steeple-chases to the detriment of young wheat and
new-made fences; or by the reading-men, who, in their innocence, make
pertinacious visits in search of strawberries and cream in the month of
March, or call for the twentieth time to enquire the nearest way to
Oxford, (being ignorant of all topography but that of ancient Rome and
Athens;) or whether they regard all gownsmen as embryo parsons and
tithe-owners, and therefore hereditary enemies; whatever be the reason,
it generally requires some tact to establish any thing like a friendly
relation with a farmer or his wife in the neighbourhood of the
university. However, Mrs Nutt was an exception; and nothing could exceed
the heartiness with which she set out her best wheaten bread and rich
Gloucester cheese, and particular ale--an advance towards further
acquaintance which we met with due readiness. In short, so well were we
pleased with the good dame's hospitable ways, and her old-fashioned
house, and even with her good-humoured loquacity, that our first visit
was not our last. The farmer himself, a quiet, good-natured, honest
yeoman of about sixty, who said very little indeed when his wife was
present, (he had not much chance,) but could, when disposed, let out
many a droll story of "College Gents" in bygone days, when he was a
brewer's apprentice at Abingdon, came, by invitation, to taste the
college tap, and carried home in each pocket a bottle of wine for "the
missus."

When John Brown, Esquire, found his intentions of wintering within the
walls of ---- so unexpectedly defeated, he cast about diligently in his
own mind for a resting-place for himself, his books, and a nondescript
animal which he called a Russian terrier. Home he was determined not to
go--any where within the boundaries of the University, the College were
equally determined he should not stay; and we all settled that he would
fix himself for the vacation either at Woodstock, or Ensham, or
Abingdon; the odds were in favour of the latter place, for John was a
good judge of ale. It was not, therefore, without considerable
astonishment that one morning, at breakfast in my room, after devouring
in rigid silence a commons of broiled ham for two, and the last number
of _Pickwick_, (John seldom laughed, but read "Boz" as gravely as he
would Aristotle,) we heard him open his heart as follows:--

"I say, old fellow, where do you think I am going to put up this
vacation?"

"Really, John, you're such an odd fellow it's impossible to guess; if it
had been summer, I shouldn't have been at all surprised to hear of your
having pitched a tent at Bullingdon, or hired a house-boat, and lived
Chinese fashion on the river; but I suppose you would hardly think of
that plan at this time of the year."

"Nonsense, man; you know the Moated Grange, as you call it--old
Nutt's!--I've taken lodging there."

"The Grange! Well, there's no accounting for tastes; but if there were
any empty rooms in the county jail, I almost think I should prefer them,
especially when one might possibly get board and lodging there gratis."

"Don't be absurd; I shall be very comfortable there. I'm to have two
rooms up-stairs, that will look very habitable when they've cleaned down
the cobwebs, and got rid of the bats; Farmer Nutt is going to lay poison
for the rats to-night, and I can go in, if I like, on Monday."

"Upon my honour, John, Chesterton and I can never come and see you in
that miserable hole."

"Don't, then; I'm going there to read: I sha'n't want company."

It turned out that he was really in earnest; and the day after the
University term was ended, the Grange received its new tenant. We went
down there to instal him; it was the first time Chesterton had seen the
place, and he was rather envious of our friend's selection, as he
followed him up-stairs into the quaint old chambers, to which two
blazing log-fires, and Mrs Nutt's unimpeachable cleanliness, had
imparted an air of no little comfort. The old oaken floor of the
sitting-room had been polished to something like its original richness
and brilliancy of hue, and reflected the firelight in a way that warmed
you to look at it. There was not a cobweb to be seen; and though old
Bruin snuffed round the room suspiciously, Farmer Nutt gave it as his
conscientious opinion that every rat had had a taste of the "pyson."
There was no question but that if one could get over the dulness of the
place, as far as accommodation went there need be little cause to
complain.

"I shall get an 18-gallon of Hall and Tawney, and hire an easy-chair,"
said John, "and then _won't_ I read?"

Full of these virtuous resolutions we left him; and how he got on there
my readers shall hear another day.

                                        H.

THE TOMBLESS MAN. A DREAM.

BY DELTA.

    I.

    I woke from sleep at midnight, all was dark,
    Solemn, and silent, an unbroken calm;
    It was a fearful vision, and had made
    A mystical impression on my mind;
    For clouds lay o'er the ocean of my thoughts
    In vague and broken masses, strangely wild;
    And grim imagination wander'd on
    'Mid gloomy yew-trees in a churchyard old,
    And mouldering shielings of the eyeless hills,
    And snow-clad pathless moors on moonless nights,
    And icebergs drifting from the sunless Pole,
    And prostrate Indian villages, when spent
    The rage of the hurricane has pass'd away,
    Leaving a landscape desolate with death;
    And as I turn'd me to my vanish'd dream,
    Clothed in its drapery of gloom, it rose
    Upon my spirit, dreary as before.

    II.

    Alone--alone--a desolate dreary wild,
    Herbless and verdureless; low swampy moss,
    Where tadpoles grew to frogs, for leagues begirt
    My solitary path. Nor sight nor sound
    Of moving life, except a grey curlew--
    As shrieking tumbled on the timid bird,
    Aye glancing backward with its coal-black eye,
    Even as by imp invisible pursued--
    Was seen or heard; the last low level rays
    Of sunset, gilded with a blood-red glow
    That melancholy moor, with its grey stones
    And stagnant water-pools. Aye floundering on,
    And on, I stray'd, finding no pathway, save
    The runlet of a wintry stream, begirt
    With shelvy barren rocks; around, o'erhead,
    Yea every where, in shapes grotesque and grim,
    Towering they rose, encompassing my path,
    As 'twere in savage mockery. Lo, a chasm
    Yawning, and bottomless, and black! Beneath
    I heard the waters in their sheer descent
    Descending down, and down; and further down
    Descending still, and dashing: Now a rush,
    And now a roar, and now a fainter fall,
    And still remoter, and yet finding still,
    For the white anguish of their boiling whirl,
    No resting-place. Over my head appear'd,
    Between the jagged black rifts bluely seen,
    Sole harbinger of hope, a patch of sky,
    Of deep, clear, solemn sky, shrining a star
    Magnificent; that, with a holy light,
    Glowing and glittering, shone into the heart
    As 'twere an angel's eye. Entranced I stood,
    Drinking the beauty of that gem serene,
    How long I wist not; but, when back to earth
    Sank my prone eyes--I knew not where I was--
    Again the scene had shifted, and the time,
    From midnight to the hour when earliest dawn
    Gleams in the orient, and with inky lines
    The trees seem painted on the girding sky.

    III.

    A solemn hour!--so silent, that the sound
    Even of a falling leaflet had been heard,
    Was that, wherein, with meditative step,
    With uncompanion'd step, measured and slow,
    And wistful gaze, that to the left, the right,
    Was often turn'd, as if in secret dread
    Of something horrible that must be met--
    Of unseen evil not to be eschew'd--
    Up a long vista'd avenue I wound,
    Untrodden long, and overgrown with moss.
    It seem'd an entrance to the hall of gloom;
    Grey twilight, in the melancholy shade
    Of the hoar branches, show'd the tufted grass
    With globules spangled of the fine night-dew--
    So fine--that even a midge's tiny tread
    Had caused them trickle down. Funereal yews
    Notch'd with the growth of centuries, stretching round
    Dismal in aspect, and grotesque in shape,
    Pair after pair, were ranged: where ended these,
    Girdling an open semicircle, tower'd
    A row of rifted plane-trees, inky-leaved
    With cinnamon-colour'd barks; and, in the midst,
    Hidden almost by their entwining boughs,
    An unshut gateway, musty and forlorn;
    Its old supporting pillars roughly rich
    With sculpturings quaint of intermingled flowers.

    IV.

    Each pillar held upon its top an urn,
    Serpent-begirt; each urn upon its front
    A face--and such a face! I turn'd away--
    Then gazed again--'twas not to be forgot:--
    There was a fascination in the eyes--
    Even in their stony stare; like the ribb'd sand
    Of ocean was the eager brow; the mouth
    Had a hyena grin; the nose, compress'd
    With curling sneer, of wolfish cunning spake;
    O'er the lank temples, long entwisted curls
    Adown the scraggy neck in masses fell;
    And fancy, aided by the time and place,
    Read in the whole the effigies of a fiend--
    Who, and what art thou? ask'd my beating heart--
    And but the silence to my heart replied!
    That entrance pass'd, I found a grass-grown court,
    Vast, void, and desolate--and there a house,
    Baronial, grim, and grey, with Flemish roof
    High-pointed, and with aspect all forlorn:--
    Four-sided rose the towers at either end
    Of the long front, each coped with mouldering flags:
    Up from the silent chimneys went no smoke;
    And vacantly the deep-brow'd windows stared,
    Like eyeballs dead to daylight. O'er the gate
    Of entrance, to whose folding-doors a flight
    Of steps converging led, startled I saw,
    Oh, horrible! the same reflected face
    As that on either urn--but gloomier still
    In shadow of the mouldering architrave.

    V.

    I would have turn'd me back--I would have fled
    From that malignant, yet half-syren smile;
    But magic held me rooted to the spot,
    And some inquisitive horror led me on.--
    Entering I stood beneath the spacious dome
    Of a round hall, vacant, save here and there,
    Where from the panelings, in mouldy shreds,
    Hung what was arras loom-work; weather-stains
    In mould appear'd on the mosaic floors,
    Of marble black and white--or what was white,
    For time had yellow'd all; and opposite,
    High on the wall, within a crumbling frame
    Of tarnish'd gold, scowl'd down a pictured form
    In the habiliments of bygone days--
    With ruff, and doublet slash'd, and studded belt--
    'Twas the same face--the Gorgon curls the same,
    The same lynx eye, the same peak-bearded chin,
    And the same nose, with sneering upward curl.

    VI.

    Again I would have turned to flee--again
    Tried to elude the snares around my feet;
    But struggling could not--though I knew not why,
    Self-will and self-possession vaguely lost.--
    Horror thrill'd through me--to recede was vain;
    Fear lurk'd behind in that sepulchral court,
    In its mute avenue and grave-like grass;
    And to proceed--where led my onward way?
    Ranges of doorways branch'd on either side,
    Each like the other:--one I oped, and lo!
    A dim deserted room, its furniture
    Withdrawn; gray, stirless cobwebs from the roof
    Hanging; and its deep windows letting in
    The pale, sad dawn--than darkness drearier far.
    How desolate! Around its cornices
    Of florid stucco shone the mimic flowers
    Of art's device, carved to delight the eyes
    Of those long since but dust within their graves!
    The hollow hearth-place, with its fluted jambs
    Of clammy Ethiop marble, whence, of yore,
    Had risen the Yule-log's animating blaze
    On festal faces, tomb-like, coldly yawn'd;
    While o'er its centre, lined in hues of night,
    Grinn'd the same features with the aspick eyes,
    And fox-like watchful, though averted gaze,
    The haunting demon of that voiceless home!

    VII.

    How silent! to the beating of my heart
    I listen'd, and nought else around me heard.
    How stirless! even a waving gossamer--
    The mazy motes that rise and fall in air--
    Had been as signs of life; when, suddenly,
    As bursts the thunder-peal upon the calm,
    Whence I had come the clank of feet was heard--
    A noise remote, which near'd and near'd, and near'd--
    Even to the threshold of that room it came,
    Where, with raised hands, spell-bound, I listening stood;
    And the door opening stealthily, I beheld
    The embodied figure of the phantom head,
    Garb'd in the quaint robes of the portraiture--
    A veritable fiend, a life in death!

    VIII.

    My heart stood still, though quickly came my breath;
    Headlong I rush'd away, I knew not where;
    In frenzied hast rushing I ran; my feet
    With terror wing'd, a hell-hound at my heels,
    Yea! scarce three strides between us. Through a door
    Right opposite I flew, slamming its weight,
    To shut me from the spectre who pursued:
    And lo! another room, the counterpart
    Of that just left, but gloomier. On I rush'd,
    Beholding o'er its hearth the grinning face,
    Another and the same; the haunting face
    Reflected, as it seem'd, from wall to wall!
    There, opening as I shut, onward he came,
    That Broucoloka, not to be escaped,
    With measured tread unwearied, like the wolf's
    When tracking its sure prey: forward I sprang,
    And lo! another room--another face,
    Alike, but gloomier still; another door,
    And the pursuing fiend--and on--and on,
    With palpitating heart and yielding knees,
    From room to room, each mirror'd in the last.
    At length I reach'd a porch--amid my hair
    I felt his desperate clutch--outward I flung--
    The open air was gain'd--I stood alone!

    IX.

    That welcome postern open'd on a court--
    Say rather, grave-yard; gloomy yews begirt
    Its cheerless walls; ranges of headstones show'd,
    Each on its hoary tablature, half hid
    With moss, with hemlock, and with nettles rank,
    The sculptured leer of that hyena face,
    Softening as backwards, through the waves of time,
    Receded generations more remote.
    It was a square of tombs--of old, grey tombs,
    (The oldest of an immemorial date,)
    Deserted quite--and rusty gratings black,
    Along the yawning mouths of dreary vaults--
    And epitaphs unread--and mouldering bones.
    Alone, forlorn, the only breathing thing
    In that unknown, forgotten cemetery,
    Reeling, I strove to stand, and all things round
    Flicker'd, and wavering, seem'd to wane away,
    And earth became a blank; the tide of life
    Ebbing, as backward ebbs the billowy sea,
    Wave after wave, till nought is left behind,
    Save casual foam-bells on the barren sand.

    X.

    From out annihilation's vacancy,
    (The elements, as of a second birth,
    Kindling within, at first a fitful spark,
    And then a light which, glowing to a blaze,
    Fill'd me with genial life,) I seemed to wake
    Upon a bed of bloom. The breath of spring
    Scented the air; mingling their odours sweet,
    The bright jonquil, the lily of the vale,
    The primrose, and the daffodil, o'erspread
    The fresh green turf; and, as it were in love,
    Around the boughs of budding lilac wreathed
    The honeysuckle, rich in earlier leaves,
    Gold-tinctured now, for sunrise fill'd the clouds
    With purple glory, and with aureate beams
    The dew-refreshen'd earth. Up, up, the larks
    Mounted to heaven, as did the angel wings
    Of old in Jacob's vision; and the fly,
    Awakening from its wintry sleep, once more
    Spread, humming, to the light its gauzy wings.

    XI.

    A happy being in a happy place,
    As 'twere a captive from his chains released,
    His dungeon and its darkness, there I lay
    Nestling, amid the sun-illumined flowers,
    Revolving silently the varied scenes,
    Grotesque and grim, 'mid which my erring feet
    Had stumbled; and a brightness darting in
    On my mysterious night-mare, something told
    The what and wherefore of the effigies grim--
    The wolfish, never-resting, tombless man,
    Voicelessly haunting that ancestral home--
    Yea of his destiny for evermore
    To suffer fearful life-in-death, until
    A victim suffer'd from the sons of men,
    To soothe the cravings of insatiate hell;
    An agony for age undergone--
    An agony for ages to be borne,
    Hope, still elusive, baffled by despair.

    XII.

    Thus as an eagle, from the altitude
    Of the mid-sky, its pride of place attain'd,
    Glances around the illimitable void,
    And sees no goal, and finds no resting-place
    In the blue, boundless depths--then, silently,
    Pauses on wing, and with gyrations down
    And down descends thorough the blinding clouds,
    In billowy masses, many-hued, around
    Floating, until their confines past, green earth
    Once more appears, and on its loftiest crag
    The nest, wherein 'tis bliss to rest his plumes
    Flight-wearied--so, from farthest dreamland's shores,
    Where clouds and chaos form the continents,
    And reason reigns not, Fancy back return'd
    To sights and sounds familiar--to the birds
    Singing above--and the bright vale beneath,
    With cottages and trees--and the blue sky--
    And the glad waters murmuring to the sun.

FRENCH SOCIALISTS.[28]

Socialism, as well in this country as in France, may be regarded as an
offset of the French Revolution. It is true that, in all times, the
striking disparity between the conditions of men has given rise to
Utopian speculations--to schemes of some new order of society, where the
comforts of life should be enjoyed in a more equalized manner than seems
possible under the old system of individual efforts and individual
rights; and it may be added that, as this disparity of wealth becomes
more glaring in proportion as the disparity of intelligence and
political rights diminishes, such speculations may be expected in these
later times to become more frequent and more bold. Nevertheless we
apprehend that the courage or audacity requisite to attempt the
realization of these speculative schemes, must confess its origin in the
fever-heat of the French Revolution. It required the bold example of
that great political subversion to prompt the design of these social
subversions--to familiarize the mind with the project of reducing into
practice what had been deemed sufficiently adventurous as reverie.

What a stride has been taken since those olden times, when the
philosophic visionary devised his Utopian society with all the freedom,
because with all the irresponsibility, of dreams! He so little
contemplated any practical result, that he did not even venture to bring
his new commonwealth on the old soil of Europe, lest it should appear
too strange, and be put out of countenance by the broad reality: but he
carried it out to some far-off island in the ocean, and created a new
territory for his new people. A chancellor of England, the high
administrator of the laws of property, could then amuse his leisure with
constructing a Utopia, where property, with all its laws, would undergo
strange mutation. How would he have started from his woolsack if any one
had told him that his design would be improved upon in boldness, and
that such men as his own carpenter and mason would set about the
veritable realization of it! At the present time nothing is more common
or familiar than the project of changing entirely the model of society.
"To subvert a government," writes M. Reybaud of his own country men, "to
change a dynasty or a political constitution, is now an insignificant
project. Your socialist is at peace with kings and constitutions; he
merely talks in the quietest manner imaginable of destroying every
thing, of uprooting society from its very basis."

Indeed, if the power of these projectors bore any proportion to their
presumption, our neighbours would be in a most alarming condition. To
extemporize a social system, a new humanity, or at least a new
Christianity, is now as common as it was formerly, on leaving college,
to rhyme a tragedy. The social projector, sublimely confident in
himself, seems to expect to realize, on a most gigantic scale, the fable
of Mesmerism; he will put the whole world in _rapport_ with him, and it
shall have no will but his, and none but such blind, imitative movements
as he shall impress on it. And it is to a sort of _coma_ that these
projectors would, for the most part, reduce mankind--a state where there
is some shadow of thought and passion, but no will, no self-direction,
no connexion between the past and present--a state aimless, evanescent,
and of utter subjugation. Fortunately these social reformers, however
daring, use no other instruments of warfare than speech and pamphlets;
they do not betake themselves to the sharp weapons of political
conspiracy. They must be permitted, therefore, to rave themselves out.
And this they will do the sooner from their very number. There are too
many prophets; they spoil the trade; the Mesmerizers disturb and
distract each other's efforts; the _fixed idea_ that is in them will not
fix any where else. Those who, in the natural order of things, should
be dupes, aspire to be leaders, and the leaders are at a dead struggle
for some novelty wherewith to attract followers. We have, for instance,
M. Pierre Leroux, most distinguished of the _Humanitarians_, the last
sect which figures on the scene, bidding for disciples--with what, will
our readers think?--with the doctrine of metempsychosis! It is put
forward as a fresh inducement to improve the world we live in, that we
shall live in it again and again, and nowhere else, and be our own most
remote posterity. We are not assured that there is any thread of
consciousness connecting the successive apparitions of the same being;
yet some slight filament of this kind must be traceable, for we are
informed that M. Leroux gives himself out to have been formerly Plato.
He has advanced thus far in the scale of progression, that he is at
present M. Leroux.[29]

Still the frequent agitation of these social reforms cannot be, and has
not been, without its influence on society. It is from this influence
they gain their sole importance. Such schemes as those of St Simon, of
Fourier, and of our own Robert Owen, viewed as projects to be realized,
are not worth a serious criticism. In this point of view they are
considered, at least in this country, as mere nullities. No one
questions here whether they are feasible, or whether, if possible, they
would be propitious to human happiness. But the constant agitation in
society of such projects may be no nullity--may have, for a season, an
indisputable and very pernicious influence. As systems of doctrine they
may not be ineffective, nor undeserving of attention; and in this light
M. Reybaud, in the work we now bring before our readers, mainly
considers them.

M. Reybaud has given us a sketch of the biography and opinions of the
most celebrated of those men who have undertaken to produce a new scheme
of human life for us; he has introduced his description of them and
their projects by some account of the previous speculations, of a
kindred nature indeed, but conducted in a very different spirit, of
Plato, Sir Thomas More, and others; and he has accompanied the whole
with observations of his own, which bear the impress of a masculine
understanding, a candid judgment, and a sound, healthy condition of the
moral sentiments. The French Academy has distinguished the work by
according to it the Montyon prize--a prize destined annually to the
publication judged most beneficial to morals; and in this judgment of
the Academy every private reader, unless he has some peculiar morality
of his own, will readily acquiesce.

Our author is not one of those who at once, and without a question,
reject all schemes for the amelioration of society; nor has he sat down
to write the history of these social reformers for the mere purpose of
throwing on them his contempt or irony. He has even been accused, it
seems, by some of his critics, of manifesting too much sympathy with the
enthusiasts he has undertaken to describe. He tells us, in the preface
to his second edition, that he has encountered the contradictory
accusations of being too severe, and too indulgent, towards them; from
which he concludes, that he cannot have widely departed from the tone
which truth and impartiality would prescribe. This is a conclusion which
authors are very apt to draw; they very conveniently dispatch their
several critics by opposing them to each other. But this conclusion may
be drawn too hastily. Two contradictory accusations do not always
destroy each other, even when they are made by judges equally
competent. The inconsistency may be in the author himself, who may, in
different portions of his work, have given foundation for very opposite
censures. In the present case, although we have already intimated that
M. Reybaud writes with a spirit of fairness and candour, we cannot admit
him to the full benefit of the conclusion he draws in his own favour,
from the opponent criticisms he has met with. There are individual
passages in his work which it would be difficult to reconcile with each
other, and which invite very different criticisms. On some occasions he
appears to attribute a certain value to these tentatives at social
reform, and intimates that they may probably be the precursors, or may
contain the germ, of some substantial improvement; whilst at other
times, he scourges them without pity or compunction, as a species of
moral pestilence. He seems not to have been able, at all moments, to
defend himself from the _vertige_ which possesses the personages of whom
he is writing; like a certain historian of witchcraft, whom we have
somewhere read of, who had so industriously studied his subject that a
faith in the black art imperceptibly gained upon him. The narrative goes
on to say, that the unfortunate historian of witchcraft attempted to
practise the knowledge he had obtained, and was burned for a wizard. But
there the analogy will certainly fail. M. Reybaud soon recovers from the
visionary mood, and wakes himself thoroughly by inflicting the lash with
renewed vigour upon all the other dreamers around him.

This shadow of inconsistency is still more perceptible when speaking of
the lives and _characters_ of his socialists. Sometimes the reader
receives the impression that an egregious vanity, an eccentric ambition,
and perhaps a little touch of monomania, would complete the picture, and
sufficiently explain that conduct, of a hero of socialism. At another
time his enthusiasts assume a more imposing aspect. St Simon sacrificing
his fortune, abjuring the patronage of the court, dying in extreme
poverty--Charles Fourier refusing all entrance into commerce that would
implicate him with a vicious system, and pursuing to the end, amidst
want and ridicule, the labours of social regeneration--our own Robert
Owen quitting ease and fortune, and crossing the Atlantic for the New
World, there to try, upon a virgin soil, his bold experiment of a new
society;--these men rise before us endowed with a certain courage and
devotion which ought to command our admiration. We see them in the light
of martyrs to a faith which no one shares with them--sacrificing all,
enduring all, for a hope which _is_ of this world, for schemes which
they will never see realized, for a heaven which they may prophesy, but
which they cannot enter; manifesting, in short, the same obstinacy of
idea, and the same renouncement of self, which distinguish the founders
of new religions. And indeed we are not disposed to deny, that in their
character they may bear a comparison, in many points, with religious
impostors. There is this striking difference, however, in the effect of
their teaching: the religious impostor has often promised a paradise of
merely voluptuous enjoyment, but he has promised it as the reward of
certain self-denying virtues to be practised here on earth; whilst the
socialist insists upon bringing his sensual ill-ordered paradise,
wherein all virtue is dispensed with as superfluous, here, at once, upon
this earth we have to live and toil in.

The first volume of the work contains an account of the life and
writings of St Simon, Fourier, and Owen. The second is very
miscellaneous. We encounter, to our surprise, the name of Jeremy Bentham
in the category of socialists, and are still more startled to learn that
the Utilitarians derive their origin from Robert Owen! It is a jumble of
all sects, religious and political, in which even our Quakers are
included in the list of social reformers--our excellent _Friends_, who
assuredly have no wish whatever to disturb the world, but seek merely to
live in it as it is, with the additional advantage of being themselves
particularly quiet and comfortable. But we are so accustomed to the
haste of negligence of the majority of French writers whenever they
leave their own soil, (unless the literature or concerns of a foreign
country be their special subject,) that we are not disposed to pass any
very severe censure on M. Reybaud; and still less should we do him the
injustice to prejudge his qualifications as an historian of his own
countrymen, by the measure of accuracy he may display in that part of
his work which relates to England. It is a part of his work which we
have but slightly perused; our attention has been confined to the
socialists of France.

Amongst these founders of society, and constructors of Mahometan
paradises, Fourier is, we believe, the least known in this country. Some
brief account of him will, we think, be acceptable; more especially as
some of his ideas, leaving the narrow circle of his disciples, have
found partisans amongst men who, in other respects, have a reputation
for sobriety of thought. Our readers need not fear that we shall
overwhelm them with all the institutions, plans, projects,
arrangements--the complete _cosmogony_, in short, of this most laborious
of the tribe. A very little of such matter is quite enough. One may say
with truth that it is such stuff,

    "Whereof a little more than a little
    Is by much too much."

Nothing is more charming to the imagination than the first general idea
of some new community, where all men are to be happy, every body active,
benevolent, reasonable. But the moment we leave this general idea, enter
upon particulars, and set about the arrangements necessary for this
universally comfortable state of things, there is nothing in the world
more tedious and oppressive. Proposals for new political institutions
are sufficiently wearisome; but proposals for earthly elysiums, which
are to embrace the whole circle of human affairs, become insupportably
dull. It is child's play, played with heavy granite boulders. No; if we
were capable of being seduced for a moment into the belief of some
golden age of equality, where a parental government, presiding over all,
should secure the peace and prosperity of all, we should need no other
argument to recover us from the delusion than simply to _read on_, and
learn how this parental government intends to accomplish its purpose.
When we find that, in order to be relieved from domestic cares, we are
to have _no home at all_; that our parental government, in order to
provide for our children, begins by taking them away from us; when we
picture to ourselves the sort of wooden melancholy figures we must
become, (something like the large painted dolls in a Dutch garden, stuck
here and there without choice or locomotion of their own,) we speedily
lose all inclination to enter upon this discipline of happiness. We quit
with haste this enchanted garden, which turns out to be an enormous
piece of clockwork, and embrace with renewed content the old state of
personal freedom, albeit attended with many personal inconveniences.
Whilst reading of Utopian schemes, the idea has very vividly occurred to
us: suppose that some such society as this, where land and wives, money
and children, are all in common, had been for a long time in existence,
and that some clever Utopian had caught an inkling of the old system so
familiar to us, and had made the discovery that it would be possible,
without dissolving society, to have a wife of one's own, a house of
one's own, land and children of one's own. Imagine, after an age of
drowsy clockwork existence, one of these philosophers starting the idea
of a free society, of a social organization based upon individual rights
and individual effort--where property should not only be possessed, but
really _enjoyed_--where men should for the first time stretch their
limbs, and strain their faculties, and strive, and emulate, and endure,
and encounter difficulties, and have friendships. What a commotion there
would be! How would the younger sort, rebelling against the old rotten
machine in which they had been incarcerated, form themselves into
emigrating bands, and start forth to try upon some new soil their great
experiment of a free life! How would they welcome toil in all its
severity--how willingly practise abstinence, and suffer privation, for
the sake of the bold rights which these would purchase!--how willingly
take upon themselves the responsibility of their own fate to enjoy a
fortune of their own shaping! Hope herself would start from the earth
where she had been so long buried, and waving her rekindled torch, would
lead on to the old _race_ of life!

_Charles Fourier_ was the son of a woollen-draper at Besançon. Two
circumstances in his early history appear to have made a strong
impression upon him. When he was a child, he contradicted, in his
father's shop, some customary falsehood of the trade, and with great
simplicity revealed the truth; for this he was severely reprimanded.
Afterwards, when he was of the age of nineteen, and a clerk in a
merchant's house at Marseilles, he was present at a voluntary submersion
of grain, made in order to raise the price in the market. These
circumstances, he used to say, opened his eyes to the nature of human
relations. Falsehood and selfishness, systematic falsehood and
selfishness without a shadow of scruple, were at the basis of all our
commercial dealings. It was time, he thought, that a new order of things
should arise, founded upon veracity and a harmony of interests.

For himself, his part was taken. He became the man of one idea. "We
might rather say of him," writes M. Reybaud, "that he traversed the
world, than that he lived in it." He refused to enter into any
commercial dealings that might implicate him in the existing system, and
warp his feelings in favour of it; and exercised to the last, for a bare
subsistence, the mere mechanical employment of a copying clerk. He never
understood the art of making for himself two separate existences: one in
the domain of fiction or of thought; the other in the land of reality.
He passed all that might be called his life in the ideal world of his
own creating.

According to Fourier, there is but one deep and all-pervading cause of
the miseries of man: it is, that he does not comprehend the ways of God,
or, in other words, the laws of his own being. If humanity does not
_work well_, and with the same harmony that the planetary system
exhibits, it is because he is determined to impress upon it other
movements than those the Creator designed. Between the creature and the
Creator there has been, as he expresses it, a misunderstanding for these
five thousand years past.

The great error, it seems, that has been committed, is the supposing
that there are any passions of man which require to be restrained. God
has made nothing ill--nothing useless. You have but to let these
passions quite loose, and it will be found that they move in a beautiful
harmony of their own. These _attractions_--such is his favourite
word--are as admirably adjusted as those which rule over the course of
the planets. _Duty_, he says, is human--it varies from epoch to epoch,
from people to people. _Attraction_--that is to say, passion--is divine;
and is the same amongst all people, civilized and savage, and in all
ages, ancient and modern. At present the passions are compressed, and
therefore act unhappily; in future, they shall be free, satisfied, and
shall act according to the law they have received from God. To yield to
their impulse is the only wisdom; to remove whatever obstacles society
has placed in the way of their free exercise, is the great task of the
reformer.

Fourier does not hesitate to place himself by the side of Newton, in
virtue of his discovery of this new law of attraction. If any comparison
can be made, we think--inasmuch as to unravel the problem of humanity is
a greater task than to elucidate the movements of the planets--that
Fourier was warranted in placing himself infinitely above Newton.
Unfortunately, there is this difference between the two, that Newton's
law explains existing phenomena, while Fourier's explained phenomena
that do _not_ exist--that are, however, to exist some day.

Having established his fundamental law of the attraction of the
passions, (which, he finds, amount to the number of twelve, and, in this
respect, to bear some occult analogy to the sidereal system, the
prismatic colours, and the gamut,) he has nothing to do but to set them
fairly at work. This he does, and discovers that they form men into
delightful communities, or _phalanges_, of about eighteen hundred men
each. Here nothing shall be wanting. Whether it is love or labour,
_attraction_ supplies all. "Labour will be a charm, a taste, a
preference--in short, a passion. Each man will devote himself to the
occupation that he likes--to twenty occupations, if he likes twenty. A
charming rivalry, an enthusiasm always new, will preside over human
labour, when, under the law of attraction, men will be associated by
_groups_, the last social fraction--by _series_, which are the
association of groups--by _phalanges_, which are the association of
series."--(P. 123.)

The dwelling-place of a _phalange_ will be called a _phalanstère_--an
edifice commodious and elegant, wherein, while the convenient
distribution of the interior will be first considered, the claims of
architecture will not be forgotten. It will be a vast structure of the
most beautiful symmetry, testifying by its magnificence to the splendour
of the new life of which it is to be the scene. Galleries, baths, a
theatre, every thing conducive to a pleasurable existence, will be found
in it. A strict equality of wealth is no part of the scheme of our
socialist; but every one will have a sufficiency, and will obtain
apartments and provisions in the _phalanstère_ suitable to his fortune.
M. Fourier further guarantees, that there shall be no vanity amongst the
rich, and no mortification felt by the poorer brethren of the
establishment.

As to the expense of this _phalanstère_, M. Fourier undertakes to
construct it for what the building of four hundred miserable cottages
would cost, which would not accommodate a much greater number of
individuals, and which would fall to pieces after a few years. And as to
housekeeping, would not one enormous kitchen replace to advantage four
hundred small and ill-appointed kitchens? one vast cellar four hundred
little cellars? one gigantic washhouse four hundred damp, wretched
outhouses, not worthy of the name? Add to which, that much may be done
in these gigantic kitchens and washhouses by the judicious introduction
of a steam-engine, which might also be employed in supplying all the
apartments with water.

Labour, proceeding with such facility, such ardour, such enthusiasm,
as it will do in the _phalanstère_, must bring in enormous
profits--quadruple, as M. Fourier thinks, of what our present
ineffective means produce. It is in the division of these profits that
our socialist has been thought particularly happy; here it is that he
introduces his famous formula, "to associate men in capital, labour, and
talent," (associer les hommes en capital, travail, et talent.) The whole
profits of the community are first to be divided into three portions;
one for capital, one for labour, and one for talent--say four-twelfths
for capital, five-twelfths for labour, and three-twelfths for talent.
The portion allotted to the capitalists can create no difficulty--it
will be divided amongst them in proportion to the amount of capital they
severally supply. But a difficulty presents itself in the distribution
of the other two portions. Are all species of labour, and all
descriptions of talent, to be equally remunerated, or by what rule shall
their several rewards be determined? M. Fourier declares that the
labours _necessary_ to the community shall be most highly recompensed;
then those that are _useful_; and last of all, those which administer,
as the fine arts, only to pleasure and amusement. For this determination
he gives a sound reason, but one which we ought not to have heard from
the centre of a _phalanstère_; it is, that necessary labours are nearly
all of a repugnant nature, and should therefore be most amply rewarded.

To determine the degree of talent the individual has displayed, the
principle of election is called in. There is, however, a high order of
talent which is considered quite apart. Great artists, great
mechanicians, great writers--these belong to no _phalange_, but to
humanity. The world will charge itself with their remuneration. They
will be relieved from the usual condition of labour; and when, after a
long repose, they have produced a work, (how it comes to be known what
bird will lay the golden egg till the egg is laid, we are not told,)
then will a jury, assembled at the metropolis of the world, which will
be built on the site of Constantinople, vote them a recompense.
"Imagine, for example, Jacquart or Watt, Newton or Corneille, presenting
themselves before this august tribunal--Jacquart with his loom, Watt
with his steam-engine, Newton with his theory of attractions, Corneille
with his most beautiful tragedy. At the instant, to the exclusion of all
delays and hazards of fame, there would be voted to these great men a
remuneration, to be levied on all the _phalanges_. Suppose only five
francs on each _phalange_, and that there were five hundred thousand
_phalanges_ on the globe, the jury would have accorded a sum of
2,500,000 francs; Jacquart would not have been compelled to die in a
state bordering on indigence, after having enriched the universe."

Fournier was in person short, thin, and pale, but his melancholy and
pensive physiognomy bore traces of his long, unquiet, and ungrateful
labours. A simple clerk, he did not venture, when he published his
writings, to sign them with any other name than that of _Charles_,
declaring himself ready, under that name, to answer any objections that
might be addressed to him. Alas! there were few objections addressed to
him; Charles got no readers; men pitied or ridiculed him as a visionary.
Repulsed by the surrounding world, there remained nothing for him but to
live in that creation of his own, in which, at all events, he reigned
supreme. In his reveries he found his only happiness. He walked glorious
in the midst of joyful enthusiastic multitudes, who saluted him as their
benefactor, and proclaimed him as their sovereign; he spoke to these
beings, the children of his dreams, in a language which he alone
comprehended; he built his _phalanstère_, peopled, organized it;
conducted himself the labours of his harmonic groups, founded his towns,
his capitals, nay, his capital of the world, which he erected on the
Bosphorus, uniting the east and west, the north and south. There he
placed with his own hand the laurel, decreed by his million of
phalanges, on the brow of the greatest philosopher of his age. "These
festivals of the imagination," says M. Reybaud, "were the only pleasures
that relived the long, and gloomy, and proud poverty of Fourier."

One trait we cannot pass over, as it seems, so to speak, to have a
psychological value. Such was his habit of ordering and arranging all
things, that _Charles_ not only undertook to regulate the affairs of
men, and redress the inequalities of their several destinies, but he
took into his consideration the inequalities of the several climates of
the earth, and very seriously occupied himself with redressing their
anomalies. To him, as he walked the streets of Paris, the severe cold of
the North Pole was disquieting, and a subject of uneasiness; it was part
of his mission to temper and subdue it, and tame it for the habitation
of men. Perhaps the heat from those gigantic kitchens in his
_phalanstères_ might help him in his task. At all events, this and other
gross atmospheric irregularities were not be endured in the world which
he was planning.

There are two things, M. Reybaud remarks, especially reprehensible in
the theory of Fourier and of kindred socialists--First, the confounding
happiness with enjoyment, and the legitimating of all our passions; and
Secondly, the egregious expectation of moulding mankind by an external
or social organization, without calling in aid the virtues of the
individual. The one necessarily follows on the other. The chain of error
is manifest, and leads, as a chain of error may be expected to do, to
inextricable confusion. If mere enjoyment, if the gratification of our
senses and passions, be the highest aim and condition of the human
being, it follows that all moral discipline, all self-denial, must be
regarded as so much defect, so much imperfection, so much manifest
failure in the world-scheme. That lofty gratification which men have
been accustomed to attribute to self-control, to abstinence practised
under a sense of duty, or in the cause of justice, this is to be
measured off as so much simple misery, or so much negation of enjoyment.
Let all restraint be discarded: let man be free; but yet, as the good of
the whole is to be consulted in all societies, and in the new society is
consulted in an eminent degree, the individual thus released from all
self-control must be ruled despotically, or, if you will, moulded,
fashioned, mechanized by the laws of the community; for we suppose it
will be admitted, whatever M. Fourier tells us of his discovered law of
attraction, that a very stringent legislation must bind together that
harmonic society, which begins by giving loose rein to all the passions
of mankind. How the two are to be practically reconciled--how the utmost
license of the individual is to be combined with the utmost and most
minute supervision of the laws, we leave the socialist to determine.
Such is the miserable tissue of error and confusion which these projects
present to view.

These socialists are fond of inventing new Christianities, and in some
_salons_ in Paris it is, or was till very lately, the fashion to have a
new Christianity propounded every full moon. New enough! They present at
least a sufficient contrast with the old Christianity, and in no other
point more than in this--the complete dependence for the formation of
the character of individuals on the art of grouping and regimenting
them. Christianity has supported for ages monastic institutions,
institutions the most counter to the passions of men, solely by its
strong appeal to the individual conscience. St Simonian institutions, or
delightful _phalanstères_, will in vain flatter every passion and
indulge every sense; if they leave the conscience inert, if nothing is
built on the sense of duty, they will no sooner rise but they will
crumble back again into dust.

But we do not touch upon these fundamental errors of the socialists,
with the superfluous view of showing the impossibility of realizing
their schemes; we note them because their recognition demonstrates at
once the ill influence which must attend on the teaching and constant
agitation of such schemes. On the one hand, all our desires authorized,
and self-control put out of countenance as a mere marplot; on the other
hand, perpetual representations that a government or social organization
could effect every thing, or almost every thing that can be desired for
the happiness of man. What must follow but that men learn to indulge
themselves in a very lax morality, and to make most extravagant demands
on the government, or the legislative force of society? Their notions of
right and wrong, and their ideas of the duty and office of government,
become equally unsettled and erroneous.

We have the authority of M. Reybaud--and we could bring other
authorities if it were necessary--for saying that, in France, the habit
of attributing the vices of individuals, not to their own weakness or
ungoverned propensities, but to the malorganization of society, has
shown itself in a strange and ominous indulgence to crime. It was the
old fashion, he says, upon hearing of any enormity, to level our
indignation against the perpetrator; it is now the mode, to direct it
against that culpable abstraction, society. Society is, indeed, the sole
culprit. When the novelist has detailed some horrible assassination, or
gross adultery, he exclaims, Behold what society has done! The criminal
himself passes scathless; if, indeed, he may not put in a claim to our
especial sympathy, as having been peculiarly ill-used by that society,
whose duty it manifestly was to make him wise, and humane, and happy.
Man, in his individual capacity, is not to be severely criticised; the
censure falls only upon man in his aggregate and corporate capacity.
Polite, at all events. No one can possibly take offence at reproofs
leveled at that invisible entity, the social body; or suppose for a
moment that he is included in the censure. It used to be thought that
the aggregate was made up of individuals, and that, in order to
constitute a well-ordered community, there must be virtuous and
well-ordered men. The reverse is now discovered to be the truth.
_First_, have a well-ordered and divinely happy community, and then the
individual may do as he likes; as our comedian says, "his duties will be
pleasures."

It is a perilous habit to fall into at the best--that of regarding the
present condition of society as something doomed to destruction. But the
evil is unmistakeable and most pernicious, when it is proclaimed, that
in the new and expected order of things, the old morality will be
entirely superfluous, a mere folly, an infliction on ourselves and
others. Why take care of the old furniture, that will be worse than an
incumbrance in the new premises? Why not begin at once the work of
battery and destruction?

The influence which these speculations exert in unsettling men's notions
upon the duties of government, on the first principles of political or
social economy, is less glaring, but not, on this account, the less
prejudicial. Men, who are far from embracing entirely any one of the
schemes of these socialists, fall into the habit of looking for the
relief and amelioration of society to some legislative invention, some
violent interference with the free and spontaneous course of human
industry. The _organization of industry_ is the phrase now in high
repute; repeated, it is true, with every variety of meaning, but always
with the understanding, that government is to interfere more or less in
the distribution of wealth, in the employment of capital, and the
exercise of labour. The first principles on which modern civilization is
based, are taxed as the origin of all the evils that afflict society.
All our soundest maxims of political economy are discarded and
disgraced. That each man shall be free in the choice and practice of his
trade or calling--that the field of competition shall be open to
all--that each individual shall be permitted to make the best bargain he
can, whether for the wages of his labour or the price of his
commodities--all these trite but invaluable maxims are incessantly
decried, and nothing is heard of but the evils of competition, and the
unequal recompense of labour. In their fits of impotent benevolence,
these speculative physicians assail, as the cause of the existing
distress, those principles which, in fact, are the conditions of all the
prosperity we have attained, or can preserve, or can hope in future to
attain.

This title of the individual, whether workman or capitalist, to the
control and conduct of his own affairs--this "fair field and no favour"
system--is not to be described as if it were a mere theory of political
economy, and disputable like some other branches of a science not yet
matured. It is the great conquest of modern civilization; it is the
indispensable condition to the full development of the activity and
enterprise of man. The liberation of the artisan and the labourer, is
the signal triumph of modern over ancient times whether we regard
classic or Gothic antiquity. Viewing things on a large scale, it may be
considered as a _late_ triumph; and, without depreciating its value, we
may easily admit that there remains much to be done in the cultivation
of the free artisan, to enable him to govern himself, and make the best
of his position. But any scheme, which, under the pretext of
ameliorating his position, would place him again under tutelage, is a
scheme of degradation and a retrograde movement. He is now a freeman, an
enrolled member of a civilized state, where each individual has, to a
great extent, the responsibility thrown upon himself for his own
well-being; he must have prospective cares, and grow acquainted with the
thoughtful virtue of prudence. That release from reflection, and anxiety
for the future, which is the compensating privilege of the slave or the
barbarian, he cannot hope any longer to enjoy. Whatever its value, he
must renounce it. He must become one of us, knowing good and evil,
looking before and behind. In this direction--in the gradual improvement
of the labourer--lies our future progress, progress slow and toilsome,
little suited to the socialist who calculates on changing, as with the
touch of a wand, the whole aspect of society.

We said that some of the ideas of Charles Fourier had been adopted by
men who do not exactly aspire to the rank of social reformers. We will
give an instance, which at the same time will illustrate this tendency
to introduce legislation on those very subjects from which it has been
the effort of all enlightened minds, during the last century, to expel
it. A M. Ducpetiaux, a Belgian, who comes vouched to us for a safe and
respected member of society by the number of titles, official and
honorary, appended to his name, in a voluminous and chiefly statistical
work, _Sur la Condition des Jeunes Ouvriers_, wherein his views are in
the main temperate and judicious, declares himself a partisan of some
system similar to what Fourier points out in his famous
formula--_associer les hommes en capital, travail, et talent_. He
requires a union of interest, a partnership in fact, between the
capitalist and the workman. M. Ducpetiaux does not lay down the
proportion in which the profits are to be divided between them; he is
too cautious to give any figures--there are some ideas which do not bear
the approach of arithmetic--but he adopts the principle. It is thus that
he speaks in his introductory chapter.

     "In so conflicting a state of things[30] there remains but one
     remedy: to re-establish violated equity, to restore to the
     producers their legitimate share of what is produced, to bring
     back industry to its primitive aim and object--such is the work
     which is now, by the aid of every influence, individual and
     social, to be prosecuted. It is not a partial relief that is
     called for, but the complete restoration (réhabilitation
     complète) of the labourer. The mark which ages of servitude
     have impressed upon his front, cannot be effaced but by an
     energetic and sustained effort. The palliatives hitherto
     employed, have only exposed the magnitude of the evil. This
     evil we must henceforth attack in its origin, in the
     organization of labour, and the constitution of society.

     "What is the existing base of the relations between master and
     workman? Selfishness. Every one for himself, that is, every
     thing for me and nothing, or the least quantity possible, for
     others. Here is the evil. A blind and bitter contest must
     spring from this opposition of interests. To put an end to this
     there is but one means: the recognition of the law of union,
     (la loi de solidarité,) by virtue of which interests will
     amalgamate and divisions disappear. This law is the palladium
     of industry; refuse to acknowledge it, and every thing remains
     in a state of chaos: proclaim it, and every thing is remedied,
     every thing prospers. The capitalist comes in aid of the
     workman as the workman comes in aid of the capitalist; it is a
     common prosperity they enjoy, and if any thing menaces it, they
     are united for its defence. The law of union puts an end to an
     unfeeling employment of our fellow men, (_à l'exploitation
     brutale;_) it replaces men in their natural position; it
     re-establishes amongst them the relations of respect, esteem,
     and mutual benevolence which Christian fraternity demands; it
     substitutes association for rivalry; it restores to justice her
     empire, and to humanity its beneficence."

Translating all this into simple language, there is to be a partition by
the legislature, according to some rule of natural equity, between the
capitalist and the labourer, of the proceeds of their common enterprise.
We confess ourselves utterly incapable of devising any such rule of
equity. The share which falls to the capitalist under the name of
profits, and the share which falls to the labourer under the name of
wages, is regulated under the present system by the free competition
amongst the labourers on the one hand, and the capitalists on the other;
it is the result of an unfettered bargain between those who possess
capital and those who practise industry. This is, at all events, an
intelligible ground, and has in it a species of rough equity; but if we
desert this position, and appeal to some natural rule of justice to make
the division, we shall find ourselves without any ground whatever. For
what are the rights of capital in the face of any _à priori_ notions of
justice? We shall stumble on from one vague proposition to another, till
we find ourselves landed in the revolutionary doctrine of the equal
imprescriptible rights of man. This is the first stage at which we can
halt. Judged by this law of equality, the capitalist is but one man, and
capital is but another name for the last year's harvest, or the
buildings, tools, and manufactures which the labourers themselves, or
their predecessors, have produced. The utmost the ex-capitalist could
expect--and he must practise his handicraft before he can be entitled
even to this--is to be admitted on a footing of equality in the
extensive firm that would be constituted of his quondam operatives.

We often observe, in this country, an inclination manifested to regulate
by law the rate of wages, not with the view of instituting any such
naturally equitable partition, but of establishing a _minimum_ below
which life cannot be comfortably supported. These reasoners proceed, it
will at once be admitted, not on the rights of man, but on the claims of
humanity. To such a project there is but one objection; it will
assuredly fail of its humane intention. It is presumed that the
competition amongst the workmen to obtain employment has so far
advanced, that these cease to obtain a sufficient remuneration for their
labour. The thousand men whom a great capitalist employs, are
inadequately paid. The legislature requires that they should be paid
more liberally. But the amount which the capitalist has to expend in
wages is limited. The same amount which sustained a thousand men, can,
under the new scale of remuneration, sustain only nine hundred. The nine
hundred are better fed, but there is one hundred without any food
whatever. Our well-intentioned humanity looks round aghast at the
confusion she is making.

Suppose, it may be said, that a law of this description should be passed
at so fortunate a conjuncture, that it should not interfere with the
existing relations between the capitalist and the workman, but have for
its object to arrest the tendency which wages have to fall; suppose that
the legislature, satisfied with the existing state of things, should
pronounce it a punishable offence to offer or accept a lower rate of
remuneration, would not such a law be wise? The answer is obvious. If
there is a tendency at any time in wages to fall, it is because there is
a tendency in population to increase, or in capital to diminish;
circumstances, both of them, which it is not in the power of criminal
jurisprudence to wrestle with.

We hear political economy frequently censured by these advocates for
violent and legislative remedies, for paying more attention to the
accumulation than the distribution of wealth. But in what chapter of
political economy is it laid down, that the distribution and enjoyment
of wealth is a matter of less moment than its production and
accumulation? The simple truth is, that the same law of liberty, which
is so favourable to the accumulation of wealth, provides also the best
distribution which human ingenuity has yet been able to devise. Less has
been said on this head because there was less to say. But surely no sane
individual ever wished that property should accumulate merely for the
sake of accumulation, that society should have the temper of a miser,
and toil merely to increase its hoards. Still less has any one
manifested a disposition to confine the enjoyment of wealth to any one
class, treating the labourer and the artisan as mere tools and
instruments for the production of it. The fundamental principles of
political economy to which we have been alluding, and with which alone
we are here concerned, will be always found to embrace the interests of
the _whole_ community. They should be defended with the same jealousy
that we defend our political liberties with.

It was with regret we heard the argument we have just stated against the
legislative interference with the rate of wages, introduced in the
discussion of the _ten-hours' bill_, and applied against the principle
of that measure. It was plainly misapplied. Why do we not relish any
legislative interposition, on whatever plea of humanity, between workmen
and capitalist? Because it will fail of its humane intention. We should
heartily rejoice--who would not?--if a reasonable _minimum_ of wages
could be established and secured. But it cannot. Is the legislature
equally incompetent when it steps in to prevent children and very young
persons from being overworked; from being so employed that the health
and vigour of ensuing generations may be seriously impaired, (which
would be a grave mistake even in the economy of labour;) from being so
entirely occupied that no time shall remain for education? We think not.
The legislature is not in this case equally powerless. It may here
prevent an incipient abuse from growing into a custom. The law cannot
create an additional amount of capital to be distributed over its
population in the shape of an advance of wages, but the law can say to
all parents and all masters--you shall not profit by the labour of the
child, to the ruin of its health, and the loss of all period for mental
and moral discipline. Such an overtasking of the child's strength has
not hitherto been an element in your calculation, and it shall not
become one.

All these various schemes--socialist or otherwise--of legislative
interference, take their rise from the aspect, sufficiently deplorable,
of the distress of the manufacturing population; and it is almost
excusable if the contemplation of such distress should throw men a
little off their balance. But it is not so easily excusable if men, once
launched on their favourite projects, endeavour to prove their necessity
by heightened descriptions of that distress, and by unauthorized
prophecies of its future and continual increase. What a formidable array
of figures--figures of speech as well as of arithmetic--are brought down
upon us with gloomy perseverance, to convince us that the manufacturing
population of this country is on the verge of irreparable ruin! We think
it right to put our readers upon their guard against these over-coloured
descriptions. Even when Parliamentary reports are quoted, whose
authority is not to be gainsaid, they ought to defend themselves against
the _first_ impression which these are calculated to make. The facts
stated may be true, but there are _other facts_ which are not stated
equally true, and which the scope and purpose of such reports did not
render it necessary to collect. If, in this country, there is much
distress, if in some places there is that utter prostration of mind and
body which extreme poverty occasions, there is also much prosperity;
there is also, in other places, much vigorous industry, receiving its
usual, and more than its usual recompense. If there are plague-spots in
our population, there are also large tracts of it still sound and
healthy. Set any one down to read list after list of all the maimed and
halt and sick in our great metropolis, and the whole town will seem to
him, for the time being, one wide hospital: he must throw open the
window and look on the busy, animated, buoyant crowd that is rushing
through the streets, before he shakes off the impression that he is
living in a city of the plague.

Without a doubt, he who approaches the consideration of the distress of
the labouring classes, should have a tender and sympathizing spirit; how
else can the subject possess for him its true and profound interest? But
it is equally necessary that he bring to it a cultivated and
well-disciplined compassion; that he should know where, in the name of
others, he should raise the voice of complaint, and where, in the name
of suffering humanity at large, he should be silent and submit. It
should always be borne in mind, that it is very difficult for persons of
one condition of life, to judge of the comparative state of well-being
of those of another condition. An inhabitant of cities, a man of books
and tranquillity, goes down into the country, without previous
preparation, to survey and give report of the distress of a mining or
agricultural district. In what age since the world has been peopled,
could such an individual be transported into the huts of peasants, or
amongst the rude labours of the miner, without receiving many a shock to
his sensibility? Perhaps he descends, for the first time in his life,
the shaft of a coal-mine. How foul and unnatural must the whole business
seem to him!--these men working in the dark, begrimed, half-naked, pent
up in narrow galleries. He has gone to spy out hardships--he sees
nothing else. Or perhaps he pays his first visit to the interior of the
low-roofed crazy cottage of the husbandman, and is disgusted at the
scant furniture and uninviting meal that it presents; yet the hardy
labourer may find his rest and food there, with no greater share of
discontent than falls to most of us--than falls, perhaps, to the
compassionate inspector himself. We have sometimes endeavoured to
picture to ourselves what would be the result if the tables were
turned, and a commission of agricultural labourers were sent into the
city to make report of the sort of lives led there, not by poor citizens
or the lowest order of tradesmen, but by the very class who are occupied
in preparing largo folio reports of their own distressful condition.
Suppose they were to enter into the chambers of the student of law--of
the conveyancer, for example. They make their way through obscure
labyrinths into a room not quite so dark, it must be allowed, nor quite
so dirty as the interior of a coal-mine, and there they find an unhappy
man who, they are given to understand, sits in that gloomy apartment, in
a state of solitary confinement, from nine o'clock in the morning till
six or seven in the evening. They learn that, for several months in the
year, this man never sees the sun; that in the cheerful season when the
plough is going through the earth, or the sickle is glittering in the
corn, and the winds are blowing the great clouds along the sky, this
pale prisoner is condemned to pore over title-deeds which secure the
"quiet enjoyment" of the land to others; and if they imitate the oratory
of their superiors, they will remark upon the strange injustice, that he
should be bound down a slave to musty papers, which give to others those
pastures from which he never reaps a single blade of grass, and which he
is not even permitted to behold. These commissioners would certainly be
tempted to address a report to Parliament full of melancholy
representations, and ending with the recommendation to shake out such
unhappy tenants into the fields. It would be long before they could be
brought to understand that he of the desk and pen would, at the end of
half an hour, find nothing in those fields but a mortal _ennui_. To him
there is no _occupation_ in all those acres; and therefore they would
soon be to him as barren as the desert.

If there is any apparent levity in the last paragraph we have penned, it
is a levity that is far from our heart. There is no subject which gives
us so much concern as this--of the undoubted distress which exists
amongst the labouring population, and the necessity that exists to
alleviate and to combat it. Coming from the immediate perusal of Utopian
schemes, promising a community of goods, and from the reconsideration of
those arguments which prove such schemes to be delusive and mischievous,
the impression that is left on our mind is the profound conviction of
the duty of government, to do whatever lies really in its power for the
amelioration of the condition of the working classes. The present system
of civilized society works, no doubt, for the good of the whole, but
assuredly _they_ do not reap an equal benefit with other classes, and on
them falls the largest share of its inevitable evils. May we not say
that, whatever the social body, acting in its aggregate capacity, _can_
do to redress the balance--whether in education of their children, in
sanatory regulations which concern their workshops and their dwellings,
or in judicious charity that will not press upon the springs of
industry--it is _bound_ to do by the sacred obligation of justice?

FOOTNOTES:

[28] _Etudes sur les Réformateurs, ou Socialistes Modernes._ Par M.
LOUIS REYBAUD.

[29] We shall perhaps take some opportunity to speak separately of M.
Leroux's work, _Sur l'Humanité_. It is a work of very superior
pretension to the writings of MM. St Simon, Fourier, and others, who
must rather be regarded as makers of projects than makers of books. M.
Leroux has the honour of indoctrinating George Sand with that mysticism
which she has lately infused into her novels--by no means to the
increase of their merit. When M. Leroux was reproached by a friend for
the fewness of his disciples, he is said to have replied--"It is true I
have but one--_mais, que voulez-vous?--Jésus Christ lui-même n'avait que
douze_."

[30] He had been drawing the usual painful picture of the distress of
the manufacturing classes, and citing for his authority some English
journal. In doing this he has made a somewhat alarming mistake. The
colloquial phrase _job-work_ has perplexed, and very excusably, the
worthy Belgian, and he has drawn from a very harmless expression a
terrible significance. "Partout le travail est le métier de job
(job-work) comme disent les Anglais--_un métier à mourir sur le
fumier_." In another place he has understood the _turn out_ of our
factories as the expulsion of the artisans by the master manufacturers.

MARSTON; OR, THE MEMOIRS OF A STATESMAN.

PART XIV.

    "Have I not in my time heard lions roar?
    Have I not heard the sea, puft up with wind,
    Rage like an angry boar chafed with sweat?
    Have I not heard great ordnance in the field,
    And Heaven's artillery thunder in the skies?
    Have I not in the pitched battle heard
    Loud 'larums, neighing steeds, and trumpets clang?"

                                        SHAKSPEARE.

Europe had never seen so complete or so powerful an army as that which
was now assembled within sight of Valenciennes. The city was already
regarded as in our possession; and crowds of military strangers, from
every part of the Continent, came day by day pouring into the allied
camp. Nothing could equal the admiration excited by the British troops.
The admirable strength, stature, and discipline of the men, and the
successes which they had already obtained, made them the first object of
universal interest; and the parades of our regiments formed a daily
levee of princes and nobles. It was impossible that soldiership could be
on a more stately scale. Other times have followed, which have shown the
still statelier sight of nations marching to battle; but the hundred
thousand men who marched under Cobourg to take up their positions in the
lines of Valenciennes, filled the eye of Europe; and never was there a
more brilliant spectacle. At length orders were sent to prepare for
action, and the staff of the army were busily employed in examining the
ground. The Guards were ordered to cover the operations of the pioneers;
and all was soon in readiness for the night on which the first trench
was to be opened. A siege is always the most difficult labour of an
army, and there is none which more perplexes a general. To the troops,
it is incessant toil--to the general, continual anxiety. The men always
have the sense of that disgust which grows upon the soldier where he
contemplates a six weeks' delay in the sight of stone walls; and the
commander, alive to every sound of hazard, feels that he yet must stand
still, and wait for the attack of every force which can be gathered
round the horizon. He may be the lion, but he is the lion in a
chain--formidable, perhaps, to those who may venture within its length,
but wholly helpless against all beyond. Yet those feelings, inevitable
as they are, were but slightly felt in our encampment round the frowning