The messenger having brought the key, I was admitted into Mortlake church, the first glance of whose venerable structure, carried my imagination back through many distant ages, and generated a multitude of interesting associations. Every part of the building bore an air of antique simplicity; and it seemed truly worthy of being the place where the inhabitants of a village ought to meet periodically to receive lessons of moral instruction, and pour forth their thanksgivings to the First Cause of the effects which daily operate on them as so many blessings. Happy system!—so well adapted to the actual condition of society, and so capable, when well directed, of producing the most salutary effects on the temper and habits of the people. Thrice happy man, that parish-priest, who feels the extent and importance of his duties, and performs them for their own reward, not as acts of drudgery, or to gratify selfish feelings! Enviable seat, that pulpit, where power is conferred by law and by custom, of teaching useful truths, and of conveying happiness, through the force of principles, to the fire-sides of so many families! Delightful picture!—what more, or what better, could wisdom contrive?—A day of rest—a place sanctified for instruction—habits of attendance—a teacher of worth and zeal—his precepts carried from the church to the fire-side—and there regulating and governing all the actions and relations of life!

Such, however, is the composition of the picture, only as seen on a sunny day! Alas! the passions and weaknesses of men deny its frequent realization! Authorised instructors cannot enjoy the reputation of superior wisdom without being excited by vanity, and led to play the fool—they cannot understand two or three dialects without becoming coxcombs—they cannot wear a robe of office without being uplifted by pride—and they cannot be appointed expounders of the simple elements of morals, without fancying themselves in possession of a second sight, and discovering a double sense in every text of Scripture! From this weakness of human nature arise most of the mysteries which discredit religion,—hence the incomprehensible jargon of sects—hence the substitution of the shadow of faith for the substance of good works—hence the distraction of the people on theological subjects—and hence, in fine, its too common inefficacy and insufficiency in preserving public morals, evinced, among other bad effects, in its tolerance of vindictive Christian wars.

I appeal, therefore, to conscientious teachers of the people, whether it is not their duty to avoid discussions in the pulpit on mysteries which never edify, because never understood; and to confine their discourses to such topics as those indicated in the Sermon of Jesus on the Mount. Such, at least, appears to be the proper duty of a national establishment! Empirics may raise the fury of fanaticism about mysteries with impunity—every absurdity may, for its season, be embodied in particular congregations—and infidelity, of all kinds, may be proclaimed at the corners of the streets without danger, provided the NATIONAL CHURCH be founded on the broad principles of virtue, and on the practice of those morals which are so beautifully expounded in the New Testament; and provided the parochial clergy do not mix themselves with those visionary topics which depend for success more on zeal and credulity, than on argument or reason. Such a church must flourish, as long as common sense, and a respect for virtue, govern the majority. In this view, I lament, however, that a revision has not taken place of those articles of faith which were promulgated in the sixteenth century, by men newly converted, and perhaps but half converted, from the Romish faith, and taught to a people then unprepared to receive all the changes which reason demanded. As a friend, therefore, to that religion which preserves the public morals, I hope to live to see many of those articles qualified which treat of mysteries conceived in the dark ages of monkish superstition, and countenanced by scholastic logic; considering that such qualification would probably lead to greater concord in matters of the highest importance to society, and serve to establish the Anglican Church on the immoveable bases of reason and truth. It seems, indeed, to be high time that Protestant churches, of all denominations, should come to some agreement in regard to the full extent of the errors which, during twelve centuries, were introduced into the Christian religion by the craft or ignorance of the Church of Rome. Did the early reformers detect the whole of them? And, if in the opinion of discreet persons they did not, or, as is reasonable to suppose, they could not, is it not important to examine conscientious doubts, and to restore the religion of Christ, which we profess, to its original purity, and to THE ONLY STANDARD OF TRUTH, which God has given to man, THE LIGHT OF HIS EXPERIENCE AND REASON.

Such were the considerations that forced themselves upon me, as I paced the aisles of this sanctuary of religion. Nor could I avoid reflecting on the false associations which early prejudices attach to such enclosures of four walls. By day, they are an object of veneration; by night, an object of terror. Perhaps no person in Mortlake would singly pass a long night in this solemn structure, for the fee-simple of half the town! The objects of their fears none could, or would, justify; yet the anticipated horrors of passing a night in a church seems universal! Perhaps some expect, that the common elementary principles which once composed the bodies of the decomposed dead, would, for the occasion, be collected again from the general storehouse of the atmosphere and earth, and would exhibit themselves, on their re-organization, more hurtful than at first. Perhaps others expect that some of those unembodied spirits, with which mythology and priestcraft have in all ages deluded the vulgar,—though no credible evidence or natural probability was ever adduced of the existence or appearance of any such spirits,—would without bodies appear to their visual organs, and torment or injure them!—Yes—monstrous and absurd though it be—such are the prevalent weaknesses created by superstition, and wickedly instilled into infant minds in the nursery, so as to govern the feelings and conduct of ninety-nine of every hundred persons in our comparatively enlightened society.

It should now be well understood, that what is contrary to uniform experience ought to be no object of faith—consequently what no man ever saw, none need expect to see—and what never did harm, none need fear! In this view our poets might aid the work of public education, by dispensing with their machinery of ideal personages, as tending to keep alive that superstition, which a Wordsworth has recently proved to be unnecessary, in a poem that rivals the efforts of the Rosicrucian school. Ought not the ghosts of Shakespeare to be supposed merely as the effects of diseased vision, or a guilty imagination? Ought an enlightened audience to tolerate the mischievous impressions produced on the minds of ignorance or youth by the gross exhibitions which now disgrace our stage in Hamlet, Richard, and Macbeth? We all know that fever of the brain produces successions of spectres or images, the result of diseased organs; but no one ever conceived that such melancholy effects of disease could be seen by healthy by-standers, till our stage-managers availed themselves of vulgar credulity, and dared to give substance to diseased ideas as a means of gratifying their avarice? If Shakespeare intended to give visible substance to his numerous ghosts, he merely conformed himself to the state of knowledge in his day, when Demonology was sanctioned by royal authority, and when the calendars at the assizes were filled with victims of superstition, under charges of witchcraft! It is, however, time that we banish such credulity from the minds even of the lowest vulgar, as disgraceful to religion, education, morals, and reason!

Humanly speaking, I exclaimed—Am I not in the House of God? Is not this puny structure a tribute of man to the Architect of the Universe? What a lesson for man's pride!—look at this building, and behold the Universe! Man is but a point of infinite space, with intellectual powers, bound in their sphere of action to his body, and subject with it to the laws of motion and gravitation! For such a being this may properly be the house of God; but it ought never to be forgotten, that the only house of God is a universe as boundless as his powers, and as eternal as his existence! In relation to man and man's pride, what a sublime and overwhelming contrast is presented by the everlasting NOW, and the universal HERE! Yet how can the creature of mere relations, who exists by generating time, space, and other sensations, conceive of the immutable CAUSE OF CAUSES, to whom his past and future, and his above and below, are as a SINGLE TOTALITY! Wisest of men is he who knows the most of such a Being; but, chained to a point, and governed in all our reasonings by mere relative powers, we can only conceive of ubiquity by the contrast of our locality—of infinity by our dimensions—of eternity by our duration—and of omniscience by our reason! Creatures of yesterday, surrounded by blessings, it is natural we should inquire in regard to the origin and cause of the novel state in which we find ourselves; but the finite cannot reason on the infinite—the transient on the eternal—or the local on the universal; and on such subjects all we can ascertain, is the utter inadequacy of our powers to perceive them clearly. It seems, therefore, to be our duty to ENJOY, to WONDER, and to WORSHIP.

On every side of me I beheld records of the wrecks of man, deposited here merely to increase the sympathy of the living for the place. Perhaps I was even breathing some of the gaseous effluvia which once composed their living bodies: but, the gas of a human body differing in no respect from the gas generated in the great laboratory of the earth's surface, which I breathe hourly; and being in itself innoxious in quantity, if not in quality, I felt no qualms from my consciousness of its source. The putrefactive process decomposes the bodies of all animals, and returns their generic principles to the common reservoirs of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen: through life, the same process, varied in its proportions, is going forward; and the body is constantly resolving itself into the generic principles of nature, which generic principles again serve the purposes of respiration in other animals, and renew other existences as suitably as though they had never before been employed for the same purposes. Hence it is probable that the identical atoms composing any of the elements of nature, may have existed in hundreds of different animals in different ages of the world; and hence we arrive at a principle of metempsychosis, without entangling ourselves in the absurdities with which priestcraft among the Eastern nations has clothed and disguised it.

Various tablets placed around the walls record departed worth in many persons of distinction. I could find no memorials of the impostor Dee, whose aged remains were deposited here. He was one of the last of the race of those men of science who made use of his knowledge to induce the vulgar to believe him a conjuror, or one possessed of the power of conversing with SPIRITS. His journals of this pretended intercourse were published after his death, by one of the Casaubons, in two folio volumes. Lilly's Memoirs record many of his impostures, and there is no doubt but in his time the public mind was much agitated by his extravagancies. The mob more than once destroyed his house, for being familiar with their devil; and, what is more extraordinary, he was often consulted, and even employed in negociations, by Queen Elizabeth. He pretended to see spirits in a small stone, lately preserved with his papers in the British Museum. His spirits appear to have had bodies and garments thick enough to reflect rays of light, though they passed freely in and out of his stone, and through the walls of his room; and organs for articulation, which they exercised within the glass! How slight an advance in knowledge exposes all such impostures! In his spiritual visions, Dee had a confederate of the name of Kelly, who, of course, confirmed all the oracles of his master. Both, however, in spite of their spiritual friends, died miserably—the man by leaping out of a window, and the master in great poverty. Dee is the less excusable, because he was a man of family and considerable learning, a fellow of Trinity-college, Cambridge, and a good mathematician. But, in an age in which one Queen imprisoned him for practising by enchantment against her life, and her successor required him to name a lucky day for her coronation, is it to be wondered that a mere man, like tens of thousands of our modern religious fanatics, persuaded himself that he was possessed of supernatural powers?

Beneath the same pavement, resolved into kindred elements, though when in chemical union so different a totality, lie the remains of that illustrious patriot, Sir John Barnard, who passed a long life in opposing the encroachments on liberty of the ministers of the first and second of the Guelphs. His statue in the Royal Exchange, London, would attest his worth, if the same area was not disgraced by another, of the infamous Charles the Second, thereby confounding virtue and vice. Sir John, like Alderman Barber, acquired fame by his opposition to the Excise Laws, and by other exertions in defence of public liberty, I have been told by one who still remembers him, that he was an active little man, adored by the Common Hall, and much respected by various political parties for his long-tried worth.

On the south side of the Communion-table, I was so well pleased with some verses lately placed on a marble tablet, to record the virtues of the Viscountess Sidmouth, who died June 23, 1811, that I could not refrain from copying them. The Viscount and his family have a pew in the church, and, I am told, are constant attendants at the morning-service on Sundays.

Not that to mortal eyes thy spotless life Shew'd the best form of parent, child, and wife; Not that thy vital current seem'd to glide, Clear and unmix'd, through the world's troublous tide; That grace and beauty, form'd each heart to win, Seem'd but the casket to the gem within: Not hence the fond presumption of our love, Which lifts the spirit to the Saints above; But that pure Piety's consoling pow'r Thy life illum'd, and cheer'd thy parting hour; That each best gift of charity was thine, The liberal feeling and the grace divine; And e'en thy virtues humbled in the dust, In Heav'n's sure promise was thine only trust; Sooth'd by that hope, Affection checks the sigh, And hails the day-spring of eternity.

Whenever the remains of the lord of this amiable woman are deposited on the same spot, I venture humbly and respectfully to suggest, that the tablet to his memory should include a copy of the most eventful document of his life and times. He was prime-minister when, in March 1803, the ever-to-be-lamented message charging the French with making extensive military preparations in the ports of France and Holland, was advised by the ministry to be sent to both Houses of Parliament. During the past year he had obtained the glory of concluding a treaty which restored tranquillity to a suffering world; and yet the virulence of a contemptible Opposition, and the empirical pretensions of an Ex-minister, led him and his colleagues tardily to execute the article which was to restore Malta to its Knights. A demand that this article should be executed, led to discussions since made public, but which, in my opinion, have not justified the character given of them in the message. Nor does it appear that the English ambassador at Paris had inquired or remonstrated with the French Government on the subject of the pretended military preparations. The flame, however, was thus kindled, which spread in due time from kingdom to kingdom; covering the whole earth with blood and desolation, wasting millions of lives in battle, siege, imprisonment, or massacre; and transferring all the rentals and industry of the people of England to the public creditors, to pay the interest of loans and other consequent obligations of the state!

Unhappily the GENIUS of TRUTH was hoodwinked at the time, by the general corruption of the press; and the SPIRIT of PATRIOTISM was overawed by the passionate clamours of a whole people to be avenged for various alledged affronts! But at this distance of time these are merely topics for the lamentation of history! It is now, I fear, too late to institute legislative inquiries; but the case will remain as a beacon to all people, who should be taught by it to consider ministers of the Crown, though as amiable in private life as an Addington, as fallible men, liable to be misled by intrigue or passion, and therefore, in a public sense, not to be credited without other evidence than their own assertions. Let an exemplary INSCRIPTION on the tomb of the minister of that day serve therefore to teach all ministers, never wilfully to depart in the most indifferent act of public policy from THE TRUTH; and warn them to pause before they commit the extensive interests of nations, while they or the people are under the influence of passion. Alas! what frightful mischiefs might have been averted if these considerations had governed the English people, or the English ministry, during the fatal discussions of Lord Whitworth at Paris!

In charity, I hope the Ministry believed that this dispute might have ended with a mere demonstration; and I admit that no man can foresee all the consequences of an action: yet, as the feelings which excited that message and directed those deliberations, continued to influence the Ministry during twelve years warfare, and led to the rejection of seven overtures for peace, made at different times by Napoleon; the character of the age and the future security of the world against wars of aggression, seem to require that the origin of the late war should even yet become an object of solemn parliamentary inquiry. The Crown may have the constitutional power of declaring war, but the ministers of the Crown are responsible for the abuse of that power; and let it be remembered, that the origin of every war is easily tried by tests to be found in Grotius, Puffendorf, Vattel, or other authorities on the laws of nations; and that, without the combination of justice and necessity in its origin, no true glory can be acquired in its progress or in its results.[6]

[6] While these pages were printing, the Common Council of London, the second deliberative assembly in the empire, have presented an address to the Throne, in which they describe the late devastating Wars as "RASH AND RUINOUS, UNJUSTLY COMMENCED, AND PERTINACIOUSLY PERSISTED IN, WHEN NO RATIONAL OBJECT WAS TO BE OBTAINED;" and they add, that "IMMENSE SUBSIDIES WERE GRANTED TO FOREIGN POWERS TO DEFEND THEIR OWN TERRITORIES, OR TO COMMIT AGGRESSIONS ON THOSE OF THEIR NEIGHBOURS." No friend of Truth could wish to see a more correct historical record of these melancholy events; and, whether the authors of them are allowed to drop into the grave by the course of nature, or should expiate their offences on a scaffold, there is not likely to be much difference of opinion about them in the year THREE THOUSAND EIGHT HUNDRED and SIXTEEN. Perhaps FIVE MILLIONS of men, and as many women and children, have fallen victims, in the space of twenty-five years, to attempts, as visionary as wicked, to destroy by the sword the assertion of Principles of Political Justice, which necessarily grew out of the cultivation of reason, and which were corollaries of that INTELLECTUAL PHILOSOPHY of which Bacon laid the foundation, and which has been matured by Selden, Coke, Milton, Sidney, Locke, Bolingbroke, Montesquieu, Blackstone, Rousseau, D'alembert, Hume, De Lolme, Mirabeau, and Fox. Rights of social man derived from such sources cannot be overwhelmed, though a divided people may have been overpowered, though hated dynasties may have been restored, and though Popery, the order of Jesuits, and the Holy Inquisition, may for a season have resumed their ascendency.

I learnt with regret that the improved Psalmody of Gardiner had not yet been introduced into the service of this church, and that the drawling-monkish tunes are preferred to those sublime passages of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, which that gentleman has so ingeniously adapted to the Psalms of David. It might have been expected that every church in the enlightened vicinage of the metropolis would, ere this, have adopted a means of exalting the spirit of devotion, which has received the high sanction of the Regent and the Archbishop of Canterbury, and which exhibits among its patrons nearly the whole bench of bishops. I suspect, indeed, that the shops of the mere trading Methodists attract as many auditors by their singing as by their preaching; consequently, enlarged churches and improved psalmody would serve to protect many of the people from becoming the dupes of that CANT and CRAFT of FANATICISM, which is so disgraceful to the age, so dangerous to religion, and so inimical to the progress of truth and knowledge.

Viewing this church in a statistical point of view, I counted 85 pews, capable of holding about 550 persons, and I learnt that about 100 charity-school and other children sit in the aisles. Hence, perhaps, 600 attend each service; and, if 300 attend in the afternoon who do not in the morning, then we may calculate the attendants on the church-service, in this parish, at about 900. The population is, however, about 2100; from which, deducting 300 children, it will appear that half the inhabitants are dissenters, methodists, or indifferents. Of these, about 200 belong to a chapel for the Independents, and perhaps others attend favourite preachers in the vicinity. Such are the religious divisions of this parish; yet, as there are no manufactories, and the clergyman is well respected, the attendants on the Church may be considered as above even the general average of the Establishment in other parishes.

I was induced to ascend into the belfry, where I found ropes for eight bells—those musical tones, which extend the sphere of the Church's influence, by associations of pleasure, devotion, or melancholy, through the surrounding country. What an effective means of increasing the sympathies of religion, and exciting them by the fire-sides, and on the very pillows of the people! Who that, as bride or bridegroom, has heard them, in conjunction with the first joys of wedded love, does not feel the pleasurable associations of their lively peal on other similar events? Who, that through a series of years has obeyed their calling chime on the Sabbath morning, as the signal of placid feelings towards his God, and his assembled neighbours, does not hear their weekly monotony with devotion? And who is there that has performed the last rites of friendship, or the melancholy duties of son, daughter, husband, wife, father, mother, brother, or sister, under the recurring tones of the awful Tenor, or more awful Dumb-peal, and does not feel, at every recurrence of the same ceremony, a revival of his keen, but unavailing, regrets for the mouldering dead? Thus does art play with our ingenuous feelings; and thus is an importance given to the established Church in the concords of man's nervous system, which renders it unnecessary for its priesthood to be jealous or invidious towards those who dissent from its doctrines for conscience sake. In truth, such is the imposing attitude of the national Church, that, if the members leave the Church to sit under strange pulpits, the incumbent should suspect his doctrines, his zeal, his talents, or his charity in the collection of his dues and tithes. What but gross misconduct in the priest—what but doctrines incompatible with the intelligence of an enlightened age—or what but the odious impost of tithes-in-kind, can separate the people from the building where they first heard the name of God, and which contains the bones of their ancestors?

In conceding to the influence of bells so many services to the establishment which monopolizes them, I must, however, not forget that the power they possess over the nerves, however agreeable or interesting in health, is pernicious, and often fatal, when the excitability is increased by disease? What medicine can allay the fever which is often exasperated by their clangor? What consoling hope can he feel who, while gasping for breath, or fainting from debility, hears a knell, in which he cannot but anticipate his own?—Hundreds are thus murdered in great cities every year by noisy peals or unseasonable knells. Sleep, the antidote of diseased action, is destroyed by the one; and Hope, the first of cordials, is extinguished by the other. The interesting sympathies and services of bells appear to be, therefore, too dearly purchased. In all countries, death-knells and funeral-tollings ought to be entirely abolished; and even the ringing of peals should be liable to be interdicted, at the request of any medical practitioner. Nor ought the sanctuaries of the professed religion of peace and charity to be disgraced at any time, by celebrations of those murderous conflicts between man and man, which too often take place, to gratify the malice and pride of WEAK PRINCES, or sustain the avarice and false calculations of their WICKED MINISTERS. Even in justifiable wars of self-defence, such as the resistance to the unprincipled invasion of William the Norman, or of the English people against the tyrannical Charles, the church of Christ ought only to mourn at the unhappy price of the most decisive victory.

The solemn tick of the parish-clock reminding me of the progress of the day, I hastened down the worn stairs, which indicated the busy steps of generations long returned to their gazeous elements, into the church-yard. The all-glorious sun, mocking the fate of mortals, still shed a fascinating lustre on the southern fields, and reminded me, that the village on my left was the eastern Sheen, so called from the very effect which I witnessed. Several pretty mansions skirted the fields, and the horizon was beautifully filled by the well-grown woods of Richmond Park, the walls of which were but half a mile distant. The path across the meadow would have tempted me to enjoy its rare beauty; but my course lay westward, and I turned from this brilliant scenery of Nature to the homely creations of man in the village street.

Contemptibly as I think of the morals of Dee, yet, as an able mathematician and an extraordinary character, I could not resist my curiosity to view the house in which he resided. It is now a Ladies' boarding-school; and, on explaining the purpose of my visit, I was politely shown through the principal rooms. In two hundred years, it has of course undergone considerable alterations: yet parts of it still exhibit the architecture of the sixteenth century. From the front windows I was shown Dee's garden, on the other side of the road, still attached to the house; down the central path of which, through iron gates, yet standing, Queen Elizabeth used to walk from her carriage in the Sheen road, to consult the wily conjurer on affairs of love and war.

I found the gouvernante of this establishment perfectly intelligent on the subject of her proper business. Her unaffected politeness induced me to take a chair and recruit my strength with a glass of water and a crust of bread. We talked on Education, and particularly on that of females. She agreed that a female pedant is at best a ridiculous character, and that retired graces, personal accomplishments, and useful domestic acquirements, are best adapted to the destiny of woman. We approved of dancing, because it affords social recreation and wholesome exercise; and of music, for its own sake, and as a means of relieving the monotony of the domestic circle in long evenings and bad weather. She considered the study of a foreign language to be partly necessary, as a means of acquiring exact ideas of the science of language generally; and we agreed in preferring the French, for its conversational powers and its universality as a living tongue. Nor did we differ in our views of the necessity of making the future companions of well-educated men intimately acquainted with the leading facts of geography and history, and with the general principles of natural philosophy and chemistry. I ventured to suggest, that the great objection to female boarding-schools, the neglect of the arts of housewifery might be obviated, by causing two of the pupils, of a certain age, to assist in the management of the store-room and kitchen for a week in rotation, during which they should fill up the items of the house-keeper's account-book, and make purchases of the family tradesmen. At this the good lady smiled—Ah, sir, (said she,) yours is a plausible theory, but not one mother in ten would tolerate a practice which they would consider as a degradation of their daughters.—But, (said I,) is not household economy the chief pursuit of nine of every ten of the sex; and is not the system of education incomplete, if not a waste of time, which does not embrace that pursuit as part of the plan? And just for that reason, (said she,) that one in every ten may not have occasion to concern herself in household affairs, the whole avoid them as degrading—each looks for the prize in the lottery of fortune, and therefore all pitch themselves too high—and it would be offensive to the pride and vanity of parents, to suppose that their daughter might have occasion to know any thing of the vulgar employments of the house and the kitchen.—It is the parents, then, (said I, in conclusion,) who require instruction as much as their children.—We agreed, however, in our estimate of the superior advantages which children of both sexes enjoy in the present day, from the improved and extended views of the authors of school-books. She was warm in her praises of the Interrogative System of some recent authors; and I found she was no stranger to the merits of the Universal Preceptor, and of the elementary Grammars of Geography, History, and Natural Philosophy.

As I continued my course towards the site of the ancient residence of the Archbishops of Canterbury, which lies at the western extremity of the village, I could not avoid asking myself, how, in a country abounding in such means of instruction, political fraud has continued so successful? Has education yet effected nothing for mankind, owing to its servility to power? Is the press but a more effective engine for promulgating sophistry, owing to its ready corruption? Is religion in the pulpit but a plausible means of palliating the crimes of statesmen, owing to the ambition of its professors? Would it now be possible to poison Socrates, banish Aristides, and crucify Jesus, for teaching truth and practising virtue? Alas! a respect for that same truth compelled me to say, Yes!—Yes, said I, there never was a country, nor an age, in which artful misrepresentation could be more successfully practised than at this day in Britain! Can the press effectually sustain truth, while no penal law prevents the purse and patronage of ministers and magistrates from poisoning its channels of communication with the people? Can the pulpit be expected to advocate political truth, while the patronage of the Church is in the hands of the Administration of the day? Can education itself be free from the influence of corrupt patronage, or the force of numerous prejudices, while an abject conformity to the opinions of each previous age is the passport to all scholastic dignities? Does any established or endowed school, and do any number even of private schools, make it part of their professed course to teach their pupils the value of freedom, the duties of freemen, and the free principles of the British constitution? Is the system of the public schools, where our statesmen and legislators are educated, addressed to the HEART as well as the HEAD? Is poverty any where more degraded; cruelty to the helpless animal creation any where more remorselessly practised; or the pride of pedantry, and the vain-glory of human learning, any where more vaunted? In short, are the vices of gluttony, drunkenness, pugilism, and prodigality, any where more indulged? Yet, may we not say, as in the days of William of Wykeham, that "Manners make the man!"—and, on the subject of public duties, might we not derive a lesson even from the ancient institutions of Lycurgus?

The best hopes of society are the progressive improvement of succeeding generations, and the prospect that each will add something to the stock of knowledge to that which went before it. But gloomy is the perspective, if the science of education be rendered stationary or retrograde by the iron hand of power and bigotry, and if errors by these means are propagated from age to age with a species of accelerated force. Yet, what signs of improvement are visible in our public schools, wherein are educated those youths who are destined to direct the fortunes of Britain in each succeeding age? Most of these schools were endowed at the epoch of the revival of learning; yet the exact course of instruction which was prescribed by the narrow policy of that comparatively dark age, is slavishly followed even to this hour! Instead of knowledge, moral and physical, being taught in them, as the true end of all education,—those dead languages, which in the 15th and 16th centuries were justly considered as the fountains of wisdom, are still exclusively taught; as though the English language, now, as then, contained no works of taste and information on a par with those of the ancients; and as though such writers as Bacon, Shakespeare, Milton, Newton, Locke, Addison, Pope, Johnson, Blackstone, Hume, Robertson, and Blair, had never lived! Is it not to mistake the means for the end, to teach any language, except as the medium of superior philosophy? And is it not a false inference, to ascribe exclusively to the study of languages, those habits of industrious application, which would grow with equal certainty out of the study of the useful sciences, if pursued with the same system, and for a similar period of time?

Reason demands, however, on this subject, those concessions from the PRIDE of PEDANTRY which that pride will never yield. We seem, therefore, to be destined, by the force of circumstances, to make slow or inconsiderable advances in civilization; and it remains for other nations, the bases of whose institutions are less entangled in prejudices, to raise the condition of man higher in the scale of improvement than can be expected in Britain. We may, as a result of geographical position, attain a certain degree of national distinction; but, if our system of public education cannot be made to keep pace with knowledge, and is not calculated to generate a succession of patriots, who are qualified to sustain liberty at home and justice abroad, we cannot fail to sink in our turn to the level of modern Egypt, Greece, and Italy. Those hotbeds of human genius were ultimately degraded by the triumph of prejudices over principles, by the extinction of public spirit, by the preference of despotism over liberty, and by the glare of foreign conquests. The countries, the soil, and even the cities remain; but, as their youth are no longer trained in the love of truth and liberty, they exist but as beacons to warn other people of their fall and its causes.

I turned aside to view a manufactory of Delft and Stone ware, for which, among potters, Mortlake is famous. A silly air of mystery veiled these work-shops from public view; and, as I professed mine to be a visit of mere curiosity, the conductor's taciturnity increased with the variety of my unsatisfied questions. It was in vain I assured him that I was no potter—that experimental philosophy and chemistry had stript empiricism of its garb—and that no secret, worth preserving, could long be kept in a manufactory which employed a dozen workmen, at 20s. a week. The principal articles made here are those brown stone jugs, of which the song tells us, one was made of the clay of Toby Filpot; and I could not help remarking, that the groups on these jugs are precisely those on the common pottery of the Romans. I learnt, however, that the patterns employed here are not copied from the antique, but from those used at Delft, of which this manufactory is a successful imitation in every particular: and perhaps the Delft manufactory itself is but a continuation of a regular series of stone or earthenware manufactories, from the age of the Romans. Each may have continued to imitate the approved ornaments of its predecessors, till we trace in the productions of this contemporary pottery, the patterns used by the nations of antiquity when just emerging from barbarism. Hunting, the most necessary of arts to the vagrant and carnivorous savage, is the employment celebrated on all these vessels, A stag, followed by ferocious quadrupeds and hungry bipeds, forms their general ornament. I have picked up the same groups among Roman ruins, have often contemplated them in the cabinets of the curious, and here I was amused at viewing them in creations but a week old.

To take off ornamental impressions on plastic clay, was a contrivance which would present itself to the first potters—but perhaps it was the foundation of all our proud arts of sculpture, painting, hieroglyphic design, writing, seal-engraving, and, finally, of printing and copper-plate engraving! What an interesting series!—But I solemnly put the question, Have we arrived at the last of its terms? Is the series capable of no further application, extension, or variation? Have we conceived the utmost limits of its abstractions? Have we examined the powers of all its terms with equal care? In one sense, we may never get beyond a Phidias or a Canova—in another, beyond a Woollet or a Bartolozzi—or, in a third, beyond a Corregio or a David;—but have we sufficiently examined and husbanded the abstractions of Thoth or Cadmus?—Ought not the signs of ideas, ere this, to have become abstract representations; as universal in their signification as ideas themselves?—Ought we to be obliged to study all languages and many characters, in order to comprehend the ideas which are common to the whole human race? Are ideas more numerous than musical sounds, and tones, and tunes? Do not the powers of musical characters and of the telegraph prove the facility and capacity of very simple combinations? Does not the Christmas game of Twenty indicate the narrow range of all our ideas? And is not a fact thereby ascertained, from which we may conceive the practicability of so combining hieroglyphic with arbitrary characters, as to be able to read men's ideas without the intervention of a hundred tongues?

On leaving this manufactory, I proceeded about a hundred yards, through the main street; and, turning a corner on the right, beheld the ancient gateway, now bricked up, and the ruined walls of an enclosure, sanctified, during five centuries, as the residence of thirty-four successors to the see of Canterbury. Learning that the enclosure was occupied by a market-gardener, I could not avoid observing, as a proof of the sagacity of gardeners, and of the luxury which manured these sites, that I have seldom visited decayed religious houses without finding them in possession of market-gardeners! Ah! thought I, as I stopped before the gate, how many thousands of rich donations used to be brought to that portico by superstitious votaries, who considered it as the emblem of the gate of St. Peter, and believed that, if welcomed at the one, they should be equally welcomed at the other! Poor souls—they and their spiritual protectors have alike passed away—and we can now look with the eye of Philosophy on the impotent impostures of one party, and on the unsuspecting credulity of the other!

I was in haste—-yet I could not avoid stopping five minutes—yes, reader, and it is a lesson to human pomp—I could wait but five minutes to contemplate the gate through which had passed thirty-four successive Archbishops of Canterbury, from Anselm, in the time of William the Norman, to Warham and Cranmer, the pliant tools of the tyrant Tudor. As leaders of the Catholic Church, we may now, in this Protestant country, speak, without offence, of their errors and vices. Ambition and the exercise of power were doubtless the ruling passions of the majority, who have shown themselves little scrupulous as to the means by which those passions might be gratified;—yet it would be uncandid not to admit that many men, like the present amiable Protestant archbishop, have filled this See, whose eminent virtue, liberality, and piety, were their principal recommendations—and who doubtless believed all those articles of the Church's faith which they taught to others. They were, in truth, wheels of a machine which existed before their time; and they honestly performed the part assigned them, without disputing its origin or the sources of its powers; prudently considering that, if they endeavoured to pull it in pieces, they were likely themselves to become the first victims of their temerity. Thus doubtless it was with Cicero and the philosophers of antiquity; they found theological machinery powerful enough to govern society; and though, on the subject of the Gods, they prudently conformed, or were silent, yet we are not at this day warranted in supposing that they obsequiously reverenced the absurd theology of the romance of Homer. Of the archbishops who have passed this gate, St. Thomas a Becket was perhaps the greatest bigot; but the exaltation of the ecclesiastical over the temporal power was the fashion of his day; and obedience and allegiance could scarcely be expected of a clergy who, owing all their dignities to the Pope, owned no authority superior to that of the keeper of Peter's Keys to the Gates of Heaven!

I could not, even in thus transiently glancing at these meagre remains, avoid the interesting recollection, that this portico once served as a sanctuary for the contrition of guilt against the unsparing malignity of law. In those days, when bigotry courted martyrdom as a passport to eternal glory, and when, in consequence, the best principle of religion was enabled to triumph over the malice of weak princes and the tyranny of despots, this gate (said I) served as one of many avenues to the emblem of that Divinity to whom the interior was devoted. It justly asserted the authority of the religion of charity, whose Founder ordered his disciples to pardon offences, though multiplied seventy times seven times. Yet, alas! in our days, how much is this divine precept forgotten! Is not the sanguinary power of law suffered to devour its victims for first relapses from virtue, as unsparingly as for any number of repetitions? Do not its sordid agents exult in the youth or inexperience of offenders, and often receive contrition and confession as aggravating proofs of more deliberate turpitude? Has not the modern sanctuary of Mercy long been shut, by forms of state, against the personal supplications of repentance, and against humble representations of venial errors of criminal courts? If sinners would approach that gate, are they not stopped at the very threshold, and obliged to rely on the intercession of some practised minister, or seek the good offices of illiberal clerks? Is this Christendom, the volume of whose faith tells its votaries to knock without fear at the gate of Mercy, and it shall be opened by an Heavenly Father?—or England, where a solemn law enacts, that it is the right of the subject to petition the King, and that all commitments and prosecutions for such petitioning are illegal?—or civilized Europe, where it has so often been asserted that the receiving of petitions, and granting their prayer, is the most enviable branch of royal prerogative? Alas! will the golden mean of reason never govern the practices of men? Must we for ever be the dupes of superstition, or the slaves of upstart authority? Are we doomed never to enjoy, in the ascendancy of our benevolent sympathies, a medium between the bigotry of the Crozier, the pride of the Sceptre, and the cruelty of the Sword?

Nor ought it to be forgotten, that the benevolence which flowed from this portico, served as a substitute for the poor's-rates, throughout the adjoining district. Thus Food, as well as Mercy, appeared to flow from Heaven, through the agency of the Romish priesthood! Thus they softened the effects of the monopolies of wealth, and assuaged the severities of power! And thus, duration was conferred on a system which violated common sense in its tenets; but, in its practices, exhibited every claim on the affections and gratitude of the people! At this gate, and at a thousand others spread over the land, no poor man sought to satisfy his hunger in vain. He was not received by any grim-visaged overseer; not called on for equivocal proofs of legal claims; not required to sell his liberty in the workhouse as the price of a single meal; not terrified by the capricious justice of a vulgar constable; nor in fear of the infernal machine, called a pass-cart—but it was sufficient that he was an hungered, and they gave him to eat—or that he was sick, and they gave him medicine! Such was the system of those times; not more perfect for being ancient, but worthy of being remembered, because justified by long experience. Thrice the relative wealth, and as much active benevolence, are at this day exerted to relieve the still unsatisfied wants of the poor, simply because our workhouses are not regularly provided with an hospitable monastic portico, where temporary wants might be supplied with a wholesome meal, without the formality of regular admission, without proofs of settlement, without the terrors of the House of Correction, or the horrors of a middle-passage in the pass-cart! The tenderest sympathy would then be able to excuse itself from the obligation of granting eleemosynary aid—the act of begging might be justly punished as a crime—and crimes themselves could never be palliated by pleas of urgent want.

This entire site was too much consecrated by historical associations to be passed without further examination. A slight expression of my feelings procured every attention from Penley, the gardener, who told me that his family had occupied it since the revolution, and that he remembered every part above fifty years. He took me to a summer-house, on the wall next the water, the ruins of which were of the architecture of the time of the Plantagenets; and, indeed, the entire wall, above half a mile in circuit, was of that age. Of the ancient palace no vestige remained; and he could guess its precise site only by means of the masses of brickwork which he discovered by digging in certain parts of the garden.

If I was, however, little gratified by remains of the labours of man, I was filled with astonishment at certain specimens of vegetation, unquestionably as ancient as the last Catholic archbishops. Among these were two enormous walnut-trees, twelve feet round the trunk, the boughs of which were themselves considerable trees, spreading above twenty-six yards across. Each tree covered above a rood of ground; and so massy were the lower branches, that it has been found necessary to support them with props. Their height is equal to their breadth, or about seventy feet; and I was surprised to find, that, notwithstanding their undoubted age, they still bear abundance of fine fruit. Mr. Penley assured me, that in his time he had seen no variation in them; they had doubtless attained their full growth in his boyhood, but since then they had maintained a steady maturity. At present they must be considered as in a state of slow decay; but I have no doubt that in the year 1916 they will continue grand and productive trees.

I was equally struck with some box-trees, probably of far greater antiquity. They were originally planted in a semicircle to serve as an arbour; but in the progress of centuries they have grown to the prodigious height of thirty feet, and their trunks are from six to nine inches in diameter.[7] And what was strikingly curious, in the area which they enclose is seen the oval table of the arbour, evidently of the same age. It is of the species of stone called Plymouth marble,—massy, and so well-wrought as to prove that it was not placed there at the cost of private revenues. It was interesting, and even affecting, to behold these signs of comfort and good cheer still remaining, so many ages after those who enjoyed them have passed away like exhalations or transient meteors! I would have sat down, and, with a better conscience than Don Juan, have invoked their ghosts over a bottle of the honest gardener's currant-wine; but he had filled up the elliptical area of the trees with a pile of fagots, of which the old table serves as a dry basement.

[7] The box-wood used in England by the engravers on wood is often twelve inches in diameter; this, however, is not of English growth, but comes from Turkey, where it is held in slight estimation. Of course, when engravings on wood are larger than twelve inches in diameter, two blocks are joined together, for it is only the transverse section that can be wrought for this purpose. The most famous plantations of box in England are on the White-hill, near Dorking; but the trees there are mere sticks and shrubs compared with those at Mortlake; yet many of them are known to be two hundred years old.

What was less wonderful, though to the full as interesting—was the circumstance that the gardener has, at different times, in digging up the roots of his old fruit-trees, found them imbedded in skeletons of persons who were interred in or near the chapel of the archbishops. He told me, that a short time before my visit, in removing a pear-tree, he had taken up three perfect skeletons; and that one of them was pronounced by a surgeon in the neighbourhood to be the frame-work of a man full seven feet high. This probably was an accidental circumstance; for it is not to be supposed that any of the interments on this spot took place in those rude ages when bulk and stature led to rank and distinction, and, by consequence, to costly funerals and encasements of stone, which often surprize us with specimens of an apparently gigantic race. Doubtless, however, here were interred hundreds of pious persons, who calculated, in their last moments, on the protection of this consecrated ground till "the Earth should be called to give up its Dead;" and now, owing to the unsatisfied passion which the first "Defender of the Faith" felt for Anna Boleyn, this consecrated spot, and a thousand similar ones, have been converted into cabbage-gardens!

Perhaps more than one archbishop, many bishops, and scores of deans, angelic doctors, and other reverend personages, lie in this now profaned and dishonoured spot! So great an outrage might, one would have supposed, have led them, according to ordinary notions, again to walk the earth, to despoil the garden, and disturb the gardener's rest! I expressed my fears on this point to the worthy man; but he assured me, these good gentlefolks lie very quiet; and that, if they produced any visible effect, it was as manure, in rendering the part where they lie a little more productive than the other parts. I shuddered at this lesson of humility—Alas! thought I, is it for such ends that we pamper ourselves—that some of us boast of being better than others—that we seek splendid houses and superfine clothing—and render our little lives wretched by hunting after rank, and titles, and riches! After all, we receive a sumptuous funeral, and are affectionately laid in what is called consecrated ground, which some political revolution, or change of religion, converting into a market-garden, our bodies then serve but as substitutes for vulgar manure! If such an end of the illustrious and proud men, whose remains now fertilize this garden, had been contemplated by them, how truly would they have become disciples of the humble Jesus—and how horror-struck would they have been at the fantastic airs which, in their lives, they were giving themselves!—Yet, is there a reader of these pages, the end of whose mortal career may not be similar to theirs?—and ought he not to apply to himself the lesson thus taught by the known fate of the former inhabitants of the archiepiscopal palace of Mortlake?

I shook my head at Penley, and told him, that he was a terrible "leveller," and that, in making manure of archbishops and bishops, he was one of the most effective moralists I had ever conversed with!

In walking round this garden, every part proved that its soil had been enriched from all the neighbouring lands. Whether, according to Dr. Creighton, there are classes of organic particles adapted to form vegetables and animals over and over again; or whether, according to the modern chemistry, all organized bodies consist of carbonaceous, metallic, and gaseous substances in varied combinations; it is certain, that the well-fed priesthood, who formerly dwelt within these walls, drew together for ages such a supply of the pabulum of vegetation, as will require ages to exhaust. All the trees of this garden are of the most luxuriant size: gooseberries and currants in other gardens grow as shrubs; but here they form trees of four or five feet in height, and a circumference of five or six yards. In short, a luxuriance approaching to rankness, and a soil remarkable for its depth of colour and fatness, characterize every part. The abundant produce, as is usual through all this neighbourhood, is conveyed to Covent-Garden market in the night, and there disposed of by salesmen that attend on behalf of the gardeners.

I took my departure from this inclosure with emotions that can only be felt. I looked again and again across the space which, during successive ages, had given birth to so many feelings, and nurtured so many anxious passions; but which now, for many ages, has, among bustling generations, lost all claim to sympathy or notice; and displays, at this day, nothing but the still mechanism of vegetable life. There might be little in the past to rouse the affections; but, in the difference of manners, there was much to amuse the imagination. It had been the focus, if not of real piety, at least of ostensible religion; and, dead as the spot now appeared, its mouldering walls, some of those gigantic trees, and, above all, the box-tree arbour, had, in remote ages, echoed from hour to hour the melodious chaunts and imposing ceremonials of the Romish Church. Here moral habits sanctified the routine of life, and conferred happiness as a necessary result of restraint and decorum—and here Vice never disgraced Reason by public exhibitions; but, if lurking in any breast, confessed its own deformity by its disguises and its secresy. In surveying such a spot, the hand of Time softens down even the asperities of superstition, and the shade of this gloomy site, contrasted with the bright days of its prosperity, inclined me to forget the intolerant policy which was wont to emanate from its spiritual councils. Under those fruit-trees, I exclaimed, lie all that remains of the follies, hopes, and superstitions of the former occupants; for, of them, I cannot remark as of the torpid remains in Mortlake church-yard, that they live in the present generation.—No! these dupes of clerical fraud devoted themselves to celibacy as a service to the procreative Cause of CAUSES, and became withered limbs of their family trees. We can, however, now look on their remains, and presume to scan their errors:—but let us recollect, that, though we are gazers to-day, we shall be gazed upon to-morrow—and that, though we think ourselves wise, we are, perhaps, fated to be commiserated in our turn by the age which follows. Alas! said I, when will the generation arrive that will not merit as much pity from succeeding generations as those poor monks? Yet how wise, how infallible, and how intolerant, is every sect of religion—every school of philosophy—every party of temporary politicians—and every nation in regard to every other nation! Do not these objects, and all exertions of reasoning, prove, that the climax of human wisdom is HUMILITY?

Commending the bones of the monks to the respect of the gardener, whose feelings, to do him justice, were in unison with my own, I proceeded, by the side of the wall, towards the banks of the Thames.

The relics of exploded priestcraft which I had just contemplated in the adjoining garden, led me into an amusing train of thought on the origin and progress of superstition. I felt that the various mythologies which the world has witnessed, grow out of mistakes in regard to the phenomena of SECONDARY CAUSES; all natural phenomena, accordingly as they were fit or unfit to the welfare or caprices of men, being ascribed, by the barbarous tribes who subsequently became illustrious nations, to the agency of good and evil spirits. However absurd might be the follies of these superstitions, they became ingrafted on Society, and were implanted in the opening minds of every successive generation. Of course, the age never arrived which did not inherit the greater part of the prejudices of the preceding age. Reason and philosophy might in due time illumine a few individuals; yet even these, influenced by early prejudices, and a prudent regard for their fortunes and personal safety, would rather support, or give a beneficial direction to, mythological superstitions, than venture to expose and oppose them. Hence it was that the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, continued polytheists through the most brilliant epochs of their history; and hence their philosophers, as Pythagoras, Plato, and others, gave to the whole the plausibility of system, by affecting to demonstrate that the FIRST CAUSE necessarily and proximately generates immortal gods! Hence too it is that philosophers have, in different past ages, undertaken to demonstrate the verity of all religions, and according to the religion of the government under which they lived, they have either supported Polytheism, Theism, Sabinism, Judaism, Popery, or Mahomedanism. The fate of Socrates has never been forgotten by any philosopher who possessed the chief attribute of wisdom—PRUDENCE; and no benevolent man will ever seek to disturb a public faith which promotes public virtue, because the memorials of history prove that no discords have been so bloody as those which have been generated by attempts to change religious faith. This class of human errors can indeed be corrected only by establishing in civilized countries practical and unequivocal systems of toleration; because, in that case, truth and reason are sure, in due time, to establish themselves, while falsehood and fraud must sink into merited contempt.

The fleeting, wild, and crude notions of savages, constituted therefore the first stage in the progress of mythological superstition. Their invisible agencies would however soon have forms conferred upon them by weak or fertile imaginations, and be personified as men or animals, according to the nature of their deeds. To pray to them for benefits, and to deprecate their wrath, would constitute the second stage. In the mean time, individuals who might, by chance or design, become connected with some of these supernatural agencies, would be led, by vivid or gloomy imaginations, to deceive even themselves by notions of election or inspiration; and, then superadding ceremonials to worship, they would form a select class, living, without manual labour, on the tributes offered by the people to satisfy or appease the unseen agencies. This would constitute a third stage. Each priest would then endeavour to extol the importance of the god, of whom he believed himself to be the minister; and he would give to his deity a visible form, cause a temple to be built for him, deliver from it his oracles or prophecies, and affect to work miracles in his name. This would constitute the fourth stage. The terror of unseen powers would now be found to be a convenient engine of usurped human authority, and hence an association would be formed between the temporal and invisible powers, the latter being exalted by the former in having its temples enlarged and its priests better provided for. This would constitute the fifth stage; or the consummation of the system as it has been witnessed in India, Persia, Egypt, Greece, and Italy.—Hence among the Hindoos, those personified agencies have been systematized under the titles of Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, Crishna, &c. Among the Egyptians, they were worshipped in the forms of living animals, and called Osiris, Ammon, Oris, Typhon, Isis, &c. Among the Chaldeans, and, after them, among the Jews, they were classed in principalities, powers, and dominions of angels and devils, under chiefs, who bore the names of Raphael, Gabriel, Michael, Moloch, Legion, Satan, Beelzebub, &c. Among the Greeks, the accommodating Plato flattered the priests and the vulgar, by pretending to demonstrate that their personifications were necessary emanations from THE ONE; and he, and others, arranged the worship of them under the names of Jupiter, Neptune, Minerva, Venus, Pluto, Mars, &c. Among the NORTHERN NATIONS, they assumed the names of Woden, Sleepner, Hela, Fola, &c. Every town and village had, moreover, its protecting divinity, or guardian saint, under some fantastical name, or the name of some fantastical fanatic; and, even every man, every house, every plant, every brook, every day, and every hour, according to most of those systems, had their accompanying genius! In a word, the remains of these superstitions are still so mixed with our habits and language, that, although we pity the hundreds of wretched victims of legal wisdom, who under Elizabeth and the Stuarts were burnt to death for witchcraft; and abhor the ghosts of Shakespeare, his fairies, and his enchantments; yet we still countenance the system in most of the personifications of language, and practise it when we speak even of the spirit of Philosophy and the genius of Truth.

Nor have philosophers themselves, either in their independent systems, or in the systems of the schools, steered clear of the vulgar errors of mythologists. They have in every age introduced into nature active causes without contact, continuity, or proximity; and, even in our days, continue to extort worship towards the unseen and occult powers of attraction or sympathy, and of repulsion or antipathy! It is true, they say that such words only express results or phenomena, and others equivocate by saying there is in no case any contact:—but I reply, that to give names to proximate causes does not correspond with my notions of the proper business of philosophy; and that, in thousands of instances, there is sensible contact, and in all nature some contact of intermediate media, in the affections of which, may be traced the laws governing the phenomena of distant bodies. At the hour in which I write, the recognized philosophical divinities are called Space, Matter, Inertia, Caloric, Expansion, Motion, Impulse, Clustering Power, Elasticity, Atomic Forms, Atomic Proportions, Oxygen, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Chlorine, Iodine, Electricity, Light, Excitability, Irritability, &c. All these have their priests, worshippers, propagandists, and votaries, among some of whom may be found as intolerant a spirit of bigotry as ever disgraced any falling church. As governments do not, however, ally themselves to Philosophy, there is happily no danger that an heretical or reforming Philosopher will, as such, ever incur the hazard of martyrdom; and, as reason decides all disputes in the court of Philosophy, there can be no doubt, but, in this court at least, Truth will finally prevail.

Hail, Genius of Philosophy! Hail, thou poetical personification of wisdom! Hail, thou logical abstraction of all experimental knowledge! I hail thee, as thou art represented in the geniuses of Pythagoras, Thales, Aristotle, Archimedes, Ptolemy, Columbus, Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Boyle, Euler, Buffon, Franklin, Beccaria, Priestley, Lavoisier, Cavendish, Condorcet, Laplace, Herschel, Berzelius, Jenner, Dalton, Cuvier, and Davy; and I hail thee, as thou excitest the ambition of the solitary student of an obscure village, to raise himself among those gods of the human race! How many privations must thy votaries suffer in a sordid world; and how many human passions must they subdue, before they can penetrate thy mazy walks, or approach the hidden sanctuaries of thy temple of Truth! Little thinks the babbling politician, the pedantic linguist, or the equivocating metaphysician, of the watchful hours which thy worshippers must pass,—of the never-ending patience which they must exert,—of the concurring circumstances which must favour their enthusiasm! Whether we consider the necessary magnitude of the library, the ascending intricacy of the books, the multitude of the instruments, or the variety of the experimental apparatus in the use of which the searchers into thy mysteries must be familiar; we are compelled to reverence the courage of him who seeks preeminence through thee, and to yield to those mortals who have attained thy favours, our wonder, admiration, and gratitude![8]

[8] The system of Physics which I have for many years inculcated, in the hope of removing from Philosophy the equivocal word attraction, supposes that space is filled with an elastic medium,—that this medium permeates bodies in proportion to their quantities of matter,—that resistance or re-action takes place between the universal medium of space and the novel arrangements of matter in bodies,—that this action and re-action diverge in the medium of space from the surfaces of bodies,—and that, like all diverging forces, they act inversely as the squares of the distances. That, if there were but one body in the universe, it would remain stationary by the uniform action of the surrounding medium,—that the creation of another body would produce phenomena between them, owing to each intercepting the action of the medium of space on the other, in proportion to the angles mutually presented by their bulks,—that two such bodies so acted upon by an universal medium must necessarily fall together, owing to the difference between the finite pressure on their near sides, and the infinite pressure on their outsides,—that a stone falls to the earth, because, with regard to it, the earth intercepts an angle of 180 deg. of the medium of space on its near or under side; while, with regard to the earth, the stone intercepts but a small proportion of a second,—that these actual centripetal forces are very slight, between such distant bodies as the planets,—and, that the law of the forces is necessarily as their bulks directly, and as the squares of their distances inversely. That the centrifugal forces result from the same pressure or impulse,—that the varied densities of the opposite sides of the masses, as land and water, occasion a uniform external pressure to produce rotation on an axis,—that the action or oscillation of the fluid surfaces, a consequence of the rotation, constantly changes the mechanical centre of the mass, so as thereby to drive forward the mathematical centre in an orbit,—and that this is the purpose and effect of the tides, increased by the action and re-action of the fluid and solid parts. That centripetal and centrifugal forces so created, are necessarily varied by the diverse arrangements of the solid and fluid parts of planetary bodies, as we see in the northern and southern hemispheres of the earth,—and that hence arise the varied motions, the elliptical orbits, and all the peculiar phenomena. Attached as the moderns are to the terms attraction and repulsion, I produce this theory with due deference to their prejudices; and I venture to presume, that, on examination, it will be found to be a fair induction from the phenomena, and also in perfect accordance with all the laws of motion. It accounts for the uniform direction and moderate exertion of the centripetal force towards the largest body of a system; for the mutual actions of a system of bodies, or of many systems, on each other; and for the constantly varying direction of the centrifugal force, by shewing that it is generated within the mass. The term repulsion is even more disgraceful to Philosophy than that of attraction; all repulsion being in truth but a relative phenomenon between at least three bodies; and its most palpable appearance in electricity being but a stronger mechanical action towards opposite surfaces. The local impulses of magnets, and of bodies going into chemical union, are not better explained by Kepler's gravitating sympathy, than by this doctrine of mechanical interception; but, I have no doubt that the former of these will, in due time, be traced to the difference between the rotary motion of the Equatorial and Polar regions; and the latter to some laws of the atomic theory, arising out of the shape and arrangement of the component particles, with reference to those of surrounding bodies.

Overtaking three or four indigent children, whose darned stockings and carefully-patched clothes bespoke some strong motive for attention in their parents, I was induced to ask them some questions. They said they had been to Mortlake School; and I collected from them, that they were part of two or three hundred who attend one of Dr. Bell's schools, which had lately been established for the instruction of poor children in this vicinity. I found that, until this establishment had been formed, these children attended no school regularly—and, in reply to a question, one of them said, "Our father could not afford to pay Mr. —— sixpence a week for us, so we could not go at all; but now we go to this school, and it costs father nothing." This was as it should be; the social state ought to supply a preparatory education of its members—or, how can a government expect to find moral agents in an ignorant population—how can it presume to inflict punishments on those who have not been enabled to read the laws which they are bound to respect—and how can the professors of religion consider themselves as performing their duty, if they have not enabled all children to peruse the volume of Christian Revelation? We are assured by Mr. Lancaster, that George the Third expressed the benevolent wish that every one of his subjects should be enabled to read the Bible; and his successors will, it is to be hoped, not lose sight of so admirable a principle. But a few ages ago, to be able to read conferred the privileges of the clerical character, and exempted men from capital punishments—how improved, therefore, is the present state of society, and how different may it yet become, as prejudices are dispelled, and as liberal feelings acquire their just ascendancy among the rulers of nations! These boys spoke of their school with evident satisfaction; and one of them, who proved to be a monitor, seemed not a little proud of the distinction. Whether the system of Mr. Lancaster or of Dr. Bell enjoy the local ascendancy; or whether these public seminaries be "schools for all," or schools in which the dogmas of some particular faith are taught, I am indifferent, provided there are some such schools, and that all children are enabled to read the Bible, and "the Catechism of their Social Rights and Duties."

Seeing several respectable houses facing the meadow which led to the Thames, I inquired of a passing female the names of their owners, and learnt that they were chiefly occupied by widow ladies, to whom she gave the emphatic title of Madam—though she called one of them Mistress. It appeared that those who were denominated Madams were widows of gentlemen who, in their lives, bore the title of Esquires; but that the Mistress was an old maid, whom her neighbours were ashamed longer to call by the juvenile appellation of Miss. Madam ——, whose name I ought not to have forgotten, has devoted a paddock of four or five acres to the comfortable provision of two super-annuated coach-horses. One of them, I was assured, was thirty-five years old, and the other nearly thirty; and their venerable appearance and pleasant pasture excited a strong interest in favour of their kind-hearted mistress. Such is the influence of good example, that I found her paddock was opposite the residence of the equally amiable Valentine Morris, who so liberally provided for all his live-stock about thirty years ago, and whose oldest horse died lately, after enjoying his master's legacy above twenty-four years.

I now descended towards a rude space near the Thames, which appeared to be in the state in which the occasional overflowings and gradual retrocession of the river had left it. It was one of those wastes which the lord of the manor had not yet enabled some industrious cultivator to disguise; and in large tracts of which Great Britain still exhibits the surface of the earth in the pristine state in which it was left by the secondary causes that have given it form. The Thames, doubtless, in a remote age, covered the entire site; but it is the tendency of rivers to narrow themselves, by promoting prolific vegetable creations on their consequently increasing and encroaching banks, though the various degrees of fall produce every variety of currents, and consequently every variety of banks, in their devious course. In due time, the course of the river becomes choaked where a flat succeeds a rapid, and the detained waters then form lakes in the interior. These lakes likewise generate encroaching banks, which finally fill up their basins, when new rivers are formed on higher levels. These, in their turn, become interrupted, and repetitions of the former circle of causes produce one class of those elevations of land above the level of the sea, which have so much puzzled geologists. The only condition which a surface of dry land requires to increase and raise itself, is the absence of salt water, consequent on which is an accumulation of vegetable and animal remains. The Thames has not latterly been allowed to produce its natural effects, because for two thousand years the banks have been inhabited by man, who, unable to appreciate the general laws by which the phenomena of the earth are produced, has sedulously kept open the course of the river, and prevented the formation of interior lakes. The Caspian Sea, and all similar inland seas and lakes, were, for the most part, formed from the choaking up of rivers, which once constituted their outlets. If the course of nature be not interrupted by the misdirected industry of man, the gradual desiccation of all such collections of water will, in due time, produce land of higher levels on their sites. In like manner, the great lakes of North America, if the St. Lawrence be not sedulously kept open, will, in the course of ages, be filled up by the gradual encroachment of their banks, and the raising of their bottoms with strata of vegetable and animal remains. New rivers would then flow over these increased elevations, and the ultimate effect would be to raise that part of the continent of North America several hundred feet above its present level. Even the very place on which I stand was, according to Webster, once a vast basin, extending from the Nore to near Reading, but now filled up with vegetable and animal remains; and the illustrious Cuvier has discovered a similar basin round the site of Paris. These once were Caspians, created by the choaking and final disappearance of some mighty rivers—they have been filled up by gradual encroachments, and now the Thames and the Seine flow over them;—but these, if left to themselves, will, in their turn, generate new lakes or basins—and the successive recurrence of a similar series of causes will continue to produce similar effects, till interrupted by superior causes.

This situation was so sequestered, and therefore so favourable to contemplation, that I could not avoid indulging myself. What then are those superior causes, I exclaimed, which will interrupt this series of natural operations to which man is indebted for the enchanting visions of hill and dale, and for the elysium of beauty and plenty in which he finds himself? Alas! facts prove, however, that all things are transitory, and that change of condition is the constant and necessary result of that motion which is the chief instrument of eternal causation, but which, in causing all phenomena, wears out existing organizations while it is generating new ones. In the motions of the earth as a planet, doubtless are to be discovered the superior causes which convert seas into continents, and continents into seas. These sublime changes are occasioned by the progress of the perihelion point of the earth's orbit through the ecliptic, which passes from extreme northern to extreme southern declination, and vice versa, every 10,450 years; and the maxima of the central forces in the perihelion occasion the waters to accumulate alternatively upon either hemisphere. During 10,450 years, the sea is therefore gradually retiring and encroaching in both hemispheres:—hence all the varieties of marine appearances and accumulations of marine remains in particular situations; and hence the succession of layers or strata, one upon another, of marine and earthy remains. It is evident, from observation of those strata, that the periodical changes have occurred at least three times; or, in other words, it appears that the site on which I now stand has been three times covered by the ocean, and three times has afforded an asylum for vegetables and animals! How sublime—how interesting—how affecting is such a contemplation! How transitory, therefore, must be the local arrangements of man, and how puerile the study of the science miscalled Antiquities! How foolish the pride which vaunts itself on splendid buildings and costly mausoleums! How vain the ostentation of large estates, of extensive boundaries, and of great empires!—All—all—will, in due time, be swept away and effaced by the unsparing ocean; and, if recorded in the frail memorials of human science, will be spoken of like the lost Atalantis, and remembered only as a philosophical dream!

Yet, how different, thought I, is the rich scene of organized existence within my view, from that which presented itself on this spot when our planet first took its station in the solar system. The surface, judging from its present materials, was then probably of the same inorganic form and structure as the primitive rocks which still compose the Alps and Andes; or like those indurated coral islands, which are daily raising their sterile heads above the level of the great ocean, and teaching by analogy the process of fertilization. At that period, so remote and so obscure, all must have been silent, barren, and relatively motionless! But, the atmosphere and the rains having, by decomposition and solution, pulverized the rocks, and reduced them into the various earths which now fertilize the surface, from the inorganic soon sprung the vegetable, and from the vegetable, in due time, sprung the animal; till the whole was resolved into the interesting assemblage of organized existences, which now present themselves to our endless wonder and gratification.

I looked around me on this book of nature, which so eloquently speaks all languages, and which, for every useful purpose, may be read without translation or commentary, by the learned and unlearned in every age and clime. But my imagination was humbled on considering my relative and limited powers, when I desired to proceed from phenomena to causes, and to penetrate the secrets of nature below the surfaces of things. I desire, said I, to know more than my intellectual vision enables me to see in this volume of unerring truth. I can discover but the mere surfaces of things by the accidents of light. I can feel but the same surfaces in the contact of my body, and my conclusions are governed by their reciprocal relations. In like manner, I can hear, taste, and smell, only through the accidents of other media, all distinct from the nature of the substances which produce those accidents. In truth, I am the mere patient of certain illusions of my senses, and I can know nothing beyond what I derive from my capacity of receiving impressions from those illusions! Alas! thought I, I am sensible how little I know; yet how much is there which I do not, and can never, know? How much more am I incapable of knowing, with my limited organs of sense, than I might know if their capacity or their number were enlarged? How can a being, then, of such limited powers presume to examine nature beyond the mere surface? How can he measure unseen powers, of which he has no perception, but in the phenomena visible to his senses? How can he reason on the causes of effects by means of implements which reach no deeper than the accidents produced by the surfaces of things on the media which affect his senses, and which come not into contact with the powers that produce the phenomena? Ultimate causation is, therefore, hidden for ever from man; and his knowledge can reach no deeper or higher than to register mechanical phenomena, and determine their mutual relations. But there is yet enough for man to learn, and to gratify the researches of his curiosity; for, bounded as are his powers, he has always found that art is too long and life too short. He may nevertheless feel that his mind, in a certain sense, is within a species of intellectual prison; but, like the terrestrial prison which confines his body to one planet, no man ever lived long enough to exhaust the variety of subjects presented to his contemplation and curiosity by the intellectual and natural world.

We seem, however, said I, to be better qualified to investigate the external laws which govern INORGANIC MATTER, than the subtle and local powers which govern organized bodies. We appear (so to speak) to be capable of looking down upon mere matter as matter; but incapable, like the eye in viewing itself, of retiring to such a focal distance as to be able accurately to examine ourselves. It is not difficult to conceive that planetary bodies, and other masses of inorganic matter, may appear to act on each other by mutually intercepting the pressure of the elastic medium which fills space; and the pressure intercepted by each on the inner surface of the other, may, by the un-intercepted external pressure on each, produce the phenomena of mutual gravitation: nor is it improbable that the curvilinear and rotatory motions of such masses may be governed by the arrangement and mutual action of their fixed and their fluid parts; nor impracticable for the geometrician, when the phenomena are determined, to measure the mechanical relations of the powers that produce those phenomena; nor wonderful that a system of bodies so governed by general laws, should move and act in a dependent, consequent, and necessary harmony.