None of your travellers have reached Utopia, and brought from thence a fuller account of its institutions?

Montesinos.—There was one, methinks, who must have had it in view when he walked over the world to discover the source of moral motion. He was afflicted with a tympany of mind produced by metaphysics, which was at that time a common complaint, though attended in him with unusual symptoms, but his heart was healthy and strong, and might in former ages have enabled him to acquire a distinguished place among the saints of the Thebais or the philosophers of Greece.

But although we have now no travellers employed in seeking undiscoverable countries, and although Eldorado, the city of the Cesares, and the Sabbatical River, are expunged even from the maps of credulity and imagination, Welshmen have gone in search of Madoc's descendants, and scarcely a year passes without adding to the melancholy list of those who have perished in exploring the interior of Africa.

Sir Thomas More.—Whenever there shall exist a civilised and Christian negro state Providence will open that country to civilisation and Christianity, meantime to risk strength and enterprise and science against climate is contending against the course of nature. Have these travellers yet obtained for you the secret of the Psylli?

Montesinos.—We have learnt from savages the mode of preparing their deadliest poisons. The more useful knowledge by which they render the human body proof against the most venomous serpents has not been sought with equal diligence; there are, however, scattered notices which may perhaps afford some clue to the discovery. The writings of travellers are not more rich in materials for the poet and the historian than they are in useful notices, deposited there like seeds which lie deep in the earth till some chance brings them within reach of air, and then they germinate. These are fields in which something may always be found by the gleaner, and therefore those general collections in which the works are curtailed would be to be reprobated, even if epitomisers did not seem to possess a certain instinct of generic doltishness which leads them curiously to omit whatever ought especially to be preserved.

Sir Thomas More.—If ever there come a time, Montesinos, when beneficence shall be as intelligent, and wisdom as active, as the spirit of trade, you will then draw from foreign countries other things beside those which now pay duties at the custom-house, or are cultivated in nurseries for the conservatories of the wealthy. Not that I regard with dissatisfaction these latter importations of luxury, however far they may be brought, or at whatever cost; for of all mere pleasures those of a garden are the most salutary, and approach nearest to a moral enjoyment. But you will then (should that time come) seek and find in the laws, usages and experience of other nations palliatives for some of those evils and diseases which have hitherto been inseparable from society and human nature, and remedies, perhaps, for others.

Montesinos.—Happy the travellers who shall be found instrumental to such good! One advantage belongs to authors of this description; because they contribute to the instruction of the learned, their reputation suffers no diminution by the course of time: age rather enhances their value. In this respect they resemble historians, to whom, indeed, their labours are in a great degree subsidiary.

Sir Thomas More.—They have an advantage over them, my friend, in this, that rarely can they leave evil works behind them, which either from a mischievous persuasion, or a malignant purpose, may heap condemnation upon their own souls as long as such works survive them. Even if they should manifest pernicious opinions and a wicked will, the venom is in a great degree sheathed by the vehicle in which it is administered. And this is something; for let me tell thee, thou consumer of goose quills, that of all the Devil's laboratories there is none in which more poison is concocted for mankind than in the inkstand!

Montesinos.—"My withers are unwrung!"

Sir Thomas More.—Be thankful, therefore, in life, as thou wilt in death.

A principle of compensation may be observed in literary pursuits as in other things. Reputations that never flame continue to glimmer for centuries after those which blaze highest have gone out. And what is of more moment, the humblest occupations are morally the safest. Rhadamanthus never puts on his black cap to pronounce sentence upon a dictionary-maker or the compiler of a county history.

Montesinos. I am to understand, then, that in the archangel's balance a little book may sink the scale toward the pit; while all the tomes of Thomas Hearne and good old John Nichols will be weighed among their good works!

Sir Thomas More.—Sport as thou wilt in allusions to allegory and fable; but bear always in thy most serious mind this truth, that men hold under an awful responsibility the talents with which they are entrusted. Kings have not so serious an account to render as they who exercise an intellectual influence over the minds of men!

Montesinos.—If evil works, so long as they continue to produce evil, heap up condemnation upon the authors, it is well for some of the wickedest writers that their works do not survive them.

Sir Thomas More.—Such men, my friend, even by the most perishable of their wicked works, lay up sufficient condemnation for themselves. The maxim that malitia supplet aetatem is rightfully admitted in human laws: should there not then, by parity of justice, be cases where, when the secrets of the heart are seen, the intention shall be regarded rather than the act?

The greatest portion of your literature, at any given time, is ephemeral; indeed, it has ever been so since the discovery of printing; and this portion it is which is most influential, consequently that by which most good or mischief is done.

Montesinos.—Ephemeral it truly may be called; it is now looked for by the public as regularly as their food; and, like food, it affects the recipient surely and permanently, even when its effect is slow, according as it is wholesome or noxious. But how great is the difference between the current literature of this and of any former time!

Sir Thomas More.—From that complacent tone it may be presumed that you see in it proof both of moral and intellectual improvement. Montesinos, I must disturb that comfortable opinion, and call upon you to examine how much of this refinement which passes for improvement is superficial. True it is that controversy is carried on with more decency than it was by Martin Lutherand a certain Lord Chancellor, to whom you just now alluded; but if more courtesy is to be found in polemical writers, who are less sincere than either the one or the other, there is as much acerbity of feeling and as much bitterness of heart. You have a class of miscreants which had no existence in those days—the panders of the press, who live by administering to the vilest passions of the people, and encouraging their most dangerous errors, practising upon their ignorance, and inculcating whatever is most pernicious in principle and most dangerous to society. This is their golden age; for though such men would in any age have taken to some villainy or other, never could they have found a course at once so gainful and so safe. Long impunity has taught them to despise the laws which they defy, and the institutions which they are labouring to subvert; any further responsibility enters not into their creed, if that may be called a creed, in which all the articles are negative. I? we turn from politics to what should be humaner literature, and look at the self-constituted censors of whatever has passed the press, there also we shall find that they who are the most incompetent assume the most authority, and that the public favour such pretensions; for in quackery of every kind, whether medical, political, critical, or hypocritical, quo quis impudentior eo doctior habetur.

Montesinos.—The pleasure which men take in acting maliciously is properly called by Barrow a rascally delight. But this is no new form of malice. "Avant nous," says the sagacious but iron-hearted Montluc—"avant nous ces envies ont regne, et regneront encore apres nous, si Dieu ne nous voulait tous refondre." Its worst effect is that which Ben Jonson remarked: "The gentle reader," says he, "rests happy to hear the worthiest works misrepresented, the clearest actions obscured, the innocentest life traduced; and in such a licence of lying, a field so fruitful of slanders, how can there be matter wanting to his laughter? Hence comes the epidemical infection: for how can they escape the contagion of the writings whom the virulency of the calumnies hath not staved off from reading?"

There is another mischief, arising out of ephemeral literature, which was noticed by the same great author. "Wheresoever manners and fashions are corrupted," says he, "language is. It imitates the public riot. The excess of feasts and apparel are the notes of a sick state; and the wantonness of language of a sick mind." This was the observation of a man well versed in the history of the ancients and in their literature. The evil prevailed in his time to a considerable degree; but it was not permanent, because it proceeded rather from the affectation of a few individuals than from any general cause: the great poets were free from it; and our prose writers then, and till the end of that century, were preserved, by their sound studies and logical habits of mind, from any of those faults into which men fall who write loosely because they think loosely. The pedantry of one class and the colloquial vulgarity of another had their day; the faults of each were strongly contrasted, and better writers kept the mean between them. More lasting effect was produced by translators, who in later times have corrupted our idiom as much as, in early ones, they enriched our vocabulary; and to this injury the Scotch have greatly contributed; for composing in a language which is not their mother tongue, they necessarily acquired an artificial and formal style, which, not so much through the merit of a few as owing to the perseverance of others, who for half a century seated themselves on the bench of criticism, has almost superseded the vernacular English of Addison and Swift. Our journals, indeed, have been the great corrupters of our style, and continue to be so, and not for this reason only. Men who write in newspapers, and magazines, and reviews, write for present effect; in most cases this is as much their natural and proper aim as it would be in public speaking; but when it is so they consider, like public speakers, not so much what is accurate or just, either in matter or manner, as what will be acceptable to those whom they address. Writing also under the excitement of emulation and rivalry, they seek, by all the artifices and efforts of an ambitious style, to dazzle their readers; and they are wise in their generation, experience having shown that common minds are taken by glittering faults, both in prose and verse, as larks are with looking-glasses.

In this school it is that most writers are now trained; and after such training anything like an easy and natural movement is as little to be looked for in their compositions as in the step of a dancing master. To the vices of style which are thus generated there must be added the inaccuracies inevitably arising from haste, when a certain quantity of matter is to be supplied for a daily or weekly publication which allows of no delay—the slovenliness that confidence, as well as fatigue and inattention, will produce—and the barbarisms, which are the effect of ignorance, or that smattering of knowledge which serves only to render ignorance presumptuous. These are the causes of corruption in our current style; and when these are considered there would be ground for apprehending that the best writings of the last century might become as obsolete as yours in the like process of time, if we had not in our Liturgy and our Bible a standard from which it will not be possible wholly to depart.

Sir Thomas More.—Will the Liturgy and the Bible keep the language at that standard in the colonies, where little or no use is made of the one, and not much, it may be feared, of the other?

Montesinos.—A sort of hybrid speech, a Lingua Anglica, more debased, perhaps, than the Lingua Franca of the Levant, or the Portuguese of Malabar, is likely enough to grow up among the South Sea Islands; like the mixture of Spanish with some of the native languages in South America, or the mingle-mangle which the negroes have made with French and English, and probably with other European tongues in the colonies of their respective states. The spirit of mercantile adventure may produce in this part of the new world a process analogous to what took place throughout Europe on the breaking up of the Western Empire; and in the next millennium these derivatives may become so many cultivated tongues, having each its literature. These will be like varieties in a flower- garden, which the florist raises from seed; but in the colonies, as in our orchards, the graft takes with it, and will preserve, the true characteristics of the stock.

Sir Thomas More.—But the same causes of deterioration will be at work there also.

Montesinos.—Not nearly in the same degree, nor to an equal extent. Now and then a word with the American impress comes over to us which has not been struck in the mint of analogy. But the Americans are more likely to be infected by the corruption of our written language than we are to have it debased by any importations of this kind from them.

Sir Thomas More.—There is a more important consideration belonging to this subject. The cause which you have noticed as the principal one of this corruption must have a farther and more mischievous effect. For it is not in the vices of an ambitious style that these ephemeral writers, who live upon the breath of popular applause, will rest. Great and lasting reputations, both in ancient and modern times, have been raised notwithstanding that defect, when the ambition from which it proceeded was of a worthy kind, and was sustained by great powers and adequate acquirements. But this ambition, which looks beyond the morrow, has no place in the writers of a day. Present effect is their end and aim; and too many of them, especially the ablest, who have wanted only moral worth to make them capable of better things, are persons who can "desire no other mercy from after ages than silence and oblivion." Even with the better part of the public that author will always obtain the most favourable reception, who keeps most upon a level with them in intellectuals, and puts them to the least trouble of thinking. He who addresses himself with the whole endeavours of a powerful mind to the understanding faculty may find fit readers; but they will be few. He who labours for posterity in the fields of research, must look to posterity for his reward. Nay, even they whose business is with the feelings and the fancy, catch most fish when they angle in shallow waters. Is it not so, Piscator?

Montesinos.—In such honest anglers, Sir Thomas, I should look for as many virtues, as good old happy Izaak Walton found in his brethren of the rod and line. Nor will you, I think, disparage them; for you were of the Rhymers' Company, and at a time when things appear to us in their true colours and proportion (if ever while we are yet in the body), you remembered your verses with more satisfaction than your controversial writings, even though you had no misgivings concerning the part which you had chosen.

Sir Thomas More.—My verses, friend, had none of the athanasia in their composition. Though they have not yet perished, they cannot be said to have a living existence; even you, I suspect, have sought for them rather because of our personal acquaintance than for any other motive. Had I been only a poet, those poems, such as they were, would have preserved my name; but being remembered for other grounds, better and worse, the name which I have left has been one cause why they have passed into oblivion, sooner than their perishable nature would have carried them thither. If in the latter part of my mortal existence I had misgivings concerning any of my writings, they were of the single one, which is still a living work, and which will continue so to be. I feared that speculative opinions, which had been intended for the possible but remote benefit of mankind, might, by unhappy circumstances, be rendered instrumental to great and immediate evil; an apprehension, however, which was altogether free from self-reproach.

But my verses will continue to exist in their mummy state, long after the worms shall have consumed many of those poetical reputations which are at this time in the cherry-cheeked bloom of health and youth. Old poets will always retain their value for antiquaries and philologists, modern ones are far too numerous ever to acquire an accidental usefulness of this kind, even if the language were to undergo greater changes than any circumstances are likely to produce. There will now be more poets in every generation than in that which preceded it; they will increase faster than your population; and as their number increases, so must the proportion of those who will be remembered necessarily diminish. Tell the Fitz-Muses this! It is a consideration, Sir Poet, which may serve as a refrigerant for their ardour. Those of the tribe who may flourish hereafter (as the flourishing phrase is) in any particular age, will be little more remembered in the next than the Lord Mayors and Sheriffs who were their contemporaries.

Montesinos.—Father in verse, if you had not put off flesh and blood so long, you would not imagine that this consideration will diminish their number. I am sure it would not have affected me forty years ago, had I seen this truth then as clearly as I perceive and feel it now. Though it were manifest to all men that not one poet in an age, in a century, a millennium, could establish his claim to be for ever known, every aspirant would persuade himself that he is the happy person for whom the inheritance of fame is reserved. And when the dream of immortality is dispersed, motives enough remain for reasonable ambition.

It is related of some good man (I forget who), that upon his death-bed he recommended his son to employ himself in cultivating a garden, and in composing verses, thinking these to be at once the happiest and the most harmless of all pursuits. Poetry may be, and too often has been, wickedly perverted to evil purposes; what indeed is there that may not, when religion itself is not safe from such abuses! but the good which it does inestimably exceeds the evil. It is no trifling good to provide means of innocent and intellectual enjoyment for so many thousands in a state like ours; an enjoyment, heightened, as in every instance it is within some little circle, by personal considerations, raising it to a degree which may deserve to be called happiness. It is no trifling good to win the ear of children with verses which foster in them the seeds of humanity and tenderness and piety, awaken their fancy, and exercise pleasurably and wholesomely their imaginative and meditative powers. It is no trifling benefit to provide a ready mirror for the young, in which they may see their own best feelings reflected, and wherein "whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely," are presented to them in the most attractive form. It is no trifling benefit to send abroad strains which may assist in preparing the heart for its trials, and in supporting it under them. But there is a greater good than this, a farther benefit. Although it is in verse that the most consummate skill in composition is to be looked for, and all the artifice of language displayed, yet it is in verse only that we throw off the yoke of the world, and are as it were privileged to utter our deepest and holiest feelings. Poetry in this respect may be called the salt of the earth; we express in it, and receive in it, sentiments for which, were it not for this permitted medium, the usages of the world would neither allow utterance nor acceptance. And who can tell in our heart-chilling and heart-hardening society, how much more selfish, how much more debased, how much worse we should have been, in all moral and intellectual respects, had it not been for the unnoticed and unsuspected influence of this preservative? Even much of that poetry, which is in its composition worthless, or absolutely bad, contributes to this good.

Sir Thomas More.—Such poetry, then, according to your view, is to be regarded with indulgence.

Montesinos.—Thank Heaven, Sir Thomas, I am no farther critical than every author must necessarily be who makes a careful study of his own art. To understand the principles of criticism is one thing; to be what is called critical, is another; the first is like being versed in jurisprudence, the other like being litigious. Even those poets who contribute to the mere amusement of their readers, while that amusement is harmless, are to be regarded with complacency, if not respect. They are the butterflies of literature, who during the short season of their summer, enliven the garden and the field. It were pity to touch them even with a tender hand, lest we should brush the down from their wings.

Sir Thomas More.—These are they of whom I spake as angling in shallow waters. You will not regard with the same complacency those who trouble the stream; still less those who poison it.

Montesinos.—

"Vesanum tetigisse timent, fugiuntque poetam Qui sapiunt; agitant pueri, incautique sequuntur."

Sir Thomas More.—This brings us again to the point at which you bolted. The desire of producing present effect, the craving for immediate reputation, have led to another vice, analogous to and connected with that of the vicious style, which the same causes are producing, but of worse consequences. The corruption extends from the manner to the matter; and they who brew for the press, like some of those who brew for the publicans, care not, if the potion has but its desired strength, how deleterious may be the ingredients which they use. Horrors at which the innocent heart quails, and the healthy stomachs heaves in loathing, are among the least hurtful of their stimulants.

Montesinos.—This too, Sir Thomas, is no new evil. An appetite for horrors is one of the diseased cravings of the human mind; and in old times the tragedies which most abounded in them, were for that reason the most popular. The dramatists of our best age, great Ben and greater Shakespeare excepted, were guilty of a farther sin, with which the writers whom you censure are also to be reproached; they excited their auditors by the representation of monstrous crimes—crimes out of the course of nature. Such fables might lawfully be brought upon the Grecian stage, because the belief of the people divested them of their odious and dangerous character; there they were well known stories, regarded with a religious persuasion of their truth; and the personages, being represented as under the overruling influence of dreadful destiny, were regarded therefore with solemn commiseration, not as voluntary and guilty agents. There is nothing of this to palliate or excuse the production of such stories in later times; the choice, and, in a still greater degree, the invention of any such, implies in the author, not merely a want of judgment, but a defect in moral feeling. Here, however, the dramatists of that age stopped. They desired to excite in their audience the pleasure of horror, and this was an abuse of the poet's art: but they never aimed at disturbing their moral perceptions, at presenting wickedness in an attractive form, exciting sympathy with guilt, and admiration for villainy, thereby confounding the distinctions between right and wrong. This has been done in our days; and it has accorded so well with the tendency of other things, that the moral drift of a book is no longer regarded, and the severest censure which can be passed upon it is to say that it is in bad taste; such is the phrase—and the phrase is not confined to books alone. Anything may be written, said, or done, in bad feeling and with a wicked intent; and the public are so tolerant of these, that he who should express a displeasure on that score would be censured for bad taste himself!

Sir Thomas More.—And yet you talked of the improvement of the age, and of the current literature as exceeding in worth that of any former time

Montesinos.—The portion of it which shall reach to future times will justify me; for we have living minds who have done their duty to their own age and to posterity.

Sir Thomas More.—Has the age in return done its duty to them?

Montesinos.—They complain not of the age, but they complain of an anomalous injustice in the laws. They complain that authors are deprived of a perpetual property in the produce of their own labours, when all other persons enjoy it as an indefeasible and acknowledged right. And they ask upon what principle, with what equity, or under what pretence of public good they are subjected to this injurious enactment? Is it because their labour is so light, the endowments which are required for it so common, the attainments so cheaply and easily acquired, and the present remuneration in all cases so adequate, so ample, and so certain?

The act whereby authors are deprived of that property in their own works which, upon every principle of reason, natural justice, and common law, they ought to enjoy, is so curiously injurious in its operation, that it bears with most hardship upon the best works. For books of great immediate popularity have their run and come to a dead stop: the hardship is upon those which win their way slowly and difficultly, but keep the field at last. And it will not appear surprising that this should generally have been the case with books of the highest merit, if we consider what obstacles to the success of a work may be opposed by the circumstances and obscurity of the author, when he presents himself as a candidate for fame, by the humour or the fashion of the times; the taste of the public, more likely to be erroneous than right at any time; and the incompetence, or personal malevolence of some unprincipled critic, who may take upon himself to guide the public opinion, and who if he feels in his own heart that the fame of the man whom he hates is invulnerable, lays in wait for that reason the more vigilantly to wound him in his fortunes. In such cases, when the copyright as by the existing law departs from the author's family at his death, or at the end of twenty-eight years from the first publication of every work, (if he dies before the expiration of that term,) his representatives are deprived of their property just as it would begin to prove a valuable inheritance.

The last descendants of Milton died in poverty. The descendants of Shakespeare are living in poverty, and in the lowest condition of life. Is this just to these individuals? Is it grateful to the memory of those who are the pride and boast of their country? Is it honourable, or becoming to us as a nation, holding—the better part of us assuredly, and the majority affecting to hold—the names of Shakespeare and Milton in veneration?

To have placed the descendants of Shakespeare and Milton in respectability and comfort—in that sphere of life where, with a full provision for our natural wants and social enjoyments, free scope is given to the growth of our intellectual and immortal part, simple justice was all that was required, only that they should have possessed the perpetual copyright of their ancestors' works, only that they should not have been deprived of their proper inheritance.

The decision which time pronounces upon the reputation of authors, and upon the permanent rank which they are to hold in the estimation of posterity, is unerring and final. Restore to them that perpetuity in the property of their works, of which the law has deprived them, and the reward of literary labour will ultimately be in just proportion to its deserts.

However slight may be the hope of obtaining any speedy redress, there is some satisfaction in earnestly protesting against this injustice. And believing as I do, that if society continues to improve, no injustice will long be permitted to continue after it has been fairly exposed, and is clearly apprehended, I cannot but believe that a time must come when the rights of literature will be acknowledged and its wrongs redressed; and that those authors hereafter who shall deserve well of posterity, will have no cause to reproach themselves for having sacrificed the interests of their children when they disregarded the pursuit of fortune for themselves.



COLLOQUY XV.—THE CONCLUSION.

Montesinos.—Here Sir Thomas is the opinion which I have attempted to maintain concerning the progress and tendency of society, placed in a proper position, and inexpugnably entrenched here according to the rules of art, by the ablest of all moral engineers.

Sir Thomas More.—Who may this political Achilles be whom you have called in to your assistance?

Montesinos.—Whom Fortune rather has sent to my aid, for my reading has never been in such authors. I have endeavoured always to drink from the spring-head, but never ventured out to fish in deep waters. Thor, himself, when he had hooked the Great Serpent, was unable to draw him up from the abyss.

Sir Thomas More.—The waters in which you have now been angling have been shallow enough, if the pamphlet in your hand is, as it appears to be, a magazine.

Montesinos.—"Ego sum is," said Scaliger, "qui ab omnibus discere volo; neque tam malum librum esse puto, ex quo non aliquem fructum colligere possum." I think myself repaid, in a monkish legend, for examining a mass of inane fiction, if I discover a single passage which elucidates the real history or manners of its age. In old poets of the third and fourth order we are contented with a little ore, and a great deal of dross. And so in publications of this kind, prejudicial as they are to taste and public feeling, and the public before deeply injurious to the real interests of literature, something may sometimes be found to compensate for the trash and tinsel and insolent flippancy, which are now become the staple commodities of such journals. This number contains Kant's idea of a Universal History on a Cosmo-Political plan; and that Kant is as profound a philosopher as his disciples have proclaimed him to be, this little treatise would fully convince me, if I had not already believed it, in reliance upon one of the very few men who are capable of forming a judgment upon such a writer.

The sum of his argument is this: that as deaths, births, and marriages, and the oscillations of the weather, irregular as they seem to be in themselves, are nevertheless reduceable upon the great scale to certain rules; so there may be discovered in the course of human history a steady and continuous, though slow development of certain great predispositions in human nature, and that although men neither act under the law of instinct, like brute animals, nor under the law of a preconcerted plan, like rational cosmopolites, the great current of human actions flows in a regular stream of tendency toward this development; individuals and nations, while pursuing their own peculiar and often contradictory purposes, following the guidance of a great natural purpose, and thus promoting a process which, even if they perceived it, they would little regard. What that process is he states in the following series of propositions:—

1st. All tendencies of any creature, to which it is predisposed by nature, are destined in the end to develop themselves perfectly and agreeably to their final purpose.

2nd. In man, as the sole rational creature upon earth, those tendencies which have the use of his reason for their object are destined to obtain their perfect development in the species only, and not in the individual.

3rd. It is the will of nature that man should owe to himself alone everything which transcends the mere mechanic constitution of his animal existence, and that he should be susceptible of no other happiness or perfection than what he has created for himself, instinct apart, through his own reason.

4th. The means which nature employs to bring about the development of all the tendencies she has laid in man, is the antagonism of those tendencies in the social state, no farther, however, than to that point at which this antagonism becomes the cause of social arrangements founded in law.

5th. The highest problem for the human species, to the solution of which it is irresistibly urged by natural impulses, is the establishment of a universal civil society, founded on the empire of political justice.

6th. This problem is, at the same time, the most difficult of all, and the one which is latest solved by man.

7th. The problem of the establishment of a perfect constitution of society depends upon the problem of a system of international relations, adjusted to law, and apart from this latter problem cannot be solved.

8th. The history of the human race, as a whole, may be regarded as the unravelling of a hidden plan of nature for accomplishing a perfect state of civil constitution for society in its internal relations (and as the condition of that, by the last proposition, in its external relations also), as the sole state of society in which the tendencies of human nature can be all and fully developed.

Sir Thomas More.—This is indeed a master of the sentences, upon whose text it may be profitable to dwell. Let us look to his propositions. From the first this conclusion must follow, that as nature has given men all his faculties for use, any system of society in which the moral and intellectual powers of any portion of the people are left undeveloped for want of cultivation, or receive a perverse direction, is plainly opposed to the system of nature, in other words, to the will of God. Is there any government upon earth that will bear this test?

Montesinos.—I should rather ask of you, will there ever be one?

Sir Thomas More.—Not till there be a system of government conducted in strict conformity to the precepts of the Gospel.

Montesinos.

"Offer these truths to Power, will she obey? It prunes her pomp, perchance ploughs up the root."

LORD BROOKE.

Yet, in conformity to those principles alone, it is that subjects can find their perfect welfare, and States their full security. Christianity may be long in obtaining the victory over the powers of this world, but when that consummation shall have taken place the converse of his second proposition will hold good, for the species having obtained its perfect development, the condition of society must then be such that individuals will obtain it also as a necessary consequence.

Sir Thomas More.—Here you and your philosopher part company. For he asserts that man is left to deduce from his own unassisted reason everything which relates not to his mere material nature.

Montesinos.—There, indeed, I must diverge from him, and what in his language is called the hidden plan of nature, in mine will be the revealed will of God.

Sir Thomas More.—The will is revealed; but the plan is hidden. Let man dutifully obey that will, and the perfection of society and of human nature will be the result of such obedience; but upon obedience they depend. Blessings and curses are set before you—for nations as for individuals—yea, for the human race.

Flatter not yourself with delusive expectations! The end may be according to your hope—whether it will be so (which God grant!) is as inscrutable for angels as for men. But to descry that great struggles are yet to come is within reach of human foresight—that great tribulations must needs accompany them—and that these may be—you know not how near at hand!

Throughout what is called the Christian world there will be a contest between Impiety and Religion; the former everywhere is gathering strength, and wherever it breaks loose the foundations of human society will be shaken. Do not suppose that you are safe from this danger because you are blest with a pure creed, a reformed ritual, and a tolerant Church! Even here the standard of impiety has been set up; and the drummers who beat the march of intellect through your streets, lanes, and market-places, are enlisted under it.

The struggle between Popery and Protestanism is renewed. And let no man deceive himself by a vain reliance upon the increased knowledge, or improved humanity of the times! Wickedness is ever the same; and you never were in so much danger from moral weakness.

Co-existent with these struggles is that between the feudal system of society as variously modified throughout Europe, and the levelling principle of democracy. That principle is actively and indefatigably at work in these kingdoms, allying itself as occasion may serve with Popery or with Dissent, with atheism or with fanaticism, with profligacy or with hypocrisy, ready confederates, each having its own sinister views, but all acting to one straightforward end. Your rulers meantime seem to be trying that experiment with the British Constitution which Mithridates is said to have tried upon his own; they suffer poison to be administered in daily doses, as if they expected that by such a course the public mind would at length be rendered poison-proof!

The first of these struggles will affect all Christendom; the third may once again shake the monarchies of Europe. The second will be felt widely; but nowhere with more violence than in Ireland, that unhappy country, wherein your government, after the most impolitic measures into which weakness was ever deluded, or pusillanimity intimidated, seems to have abdicated its functions, contenting itself with the semblance of an authority which it has wanted either wisdom or courage to exert.

There is a fourth danger, the growth of your manufacturing system; and this is peculiarly your own. You have a great and increasing population, exposed at all times by the fluctuations of trade to suffer the severest privations in the midst of a rich and luxurious society, under little or no restraint from religious principle, and if not absolutely disaffected to the institutions of the country, certainly not attached to them: a class of men aware of their numbers and of their strength; experienced in all the details of combination; improvident when they are in the receipt of good wages, yet feeling themselves injured when those wages, during some failure of demand, are so lowered as no longer to afford the means of comfortable subsistence; and directing against the government and the laws of the country their resentment and indignation for the evils which have been brought upon them by competition and the spirit of rivalry in trade. They have among them intelligent heads and daring minds; and you have already seen how perilously they may be wrought upon by seditious journalists and seditious orators in a time of distress.

On what do you rely for security against these dangers? On public opinion? You might as well calculate upon the constancy of wind and weather in this uncertain climate. On the progress of knowledge? it is such knowledge as serves only to facilitate the course of delusion. On the laws? the law which should be like a sword in a strong hand, is weak as a bulrush if it be feebly administered in time of danger. On the people? they are divided. On the Parliament? every faction will be fully and formidably represented there. On the government? it suffers itself to be insulted and defied at home, and abroad it has shown itself incapable of maintaining the relations of peace and amity with its allies, so far has it been divested of power by the usurpation of the press. It is at peace with Spain, and it is at peace with Turkey; and although no government was ever more desirous of acting with good faith, its subjects are openly assisting the Greeks with men and money against the one, and the Spanish Americans against the other. Athens, in the most turbulent times of its democracy, was not more effectually domineered over by its demagogues than you are by the press—a press which is not only without restraint, but without responsibility; and in the management of which those men will always have most power who have least probity, and have most completely divested themselves of all sense of honour and all regard for truth.

The root of all your evils is in the sinfulness of the nation. The principle of duty is weakened among you; that of moral obligation is loosened; that of religious obedience is destroyed. Look at the worldliness of all classes—the greediness of the rich, the misery of the poor, and the appalling depravity which is spreading among the lower classes through town and country; a depravity which proceeds unchecked because of the total want of discipline, and for which there is no other corrective than what may be supplied by fanaticism, which is itself an evil.

If there be nothing exaggerated in this representation, you must acknowledge that though the human race, considered upon the great scale, should be proceeding toward the perfectibility for which it may be designed, the present aspects in these kingdoms are nevertheless rather for evil than for good. Sum you up now upon the hopeful side.

Montesinos.—First, then. I rest in a humble but firm reliance upon that Providence which sometimes in its mercy educes from the errors of men a happier issue than could ever have been attained by their wisdom;—that Providence which has delivered this nation from so many and such imminent dangers heretofore.

Looking, then, to human causes, there is hope to be derived from the humanising effects of Literature, which has now first begun to act upon all ranks. Good principles are indeed used as the stalking-horse under cover of which pernicious designs may be advanced; but the better seeds are thus disseminated and fructify after the ill design has failed.

The cruelties of the old criminal law have been abrogated. Debtors are no longer indiscriminately punished by indefinite imprisonment. The iniquity of the slave trade has been acknowledged, and put an end to, so far as the power of this country extends; and although slavery is still tolerated, and must be so for awhile, measures have been taken for alleviating it while it continues, and preparing the way for its gradual and safe removal. These are good works of the government. And when I look upon the conduct of that government in all its foreign relations, though there may be some things to disapprove, and some sins of omission to regret, it has been, on the whole, so disinterested, so magnanimous, so just, that this reflection gives me a reasonable and a religious ground of hope. And the reliance is strengthened when I call to mind that missionaries from Great Britain are at this hour employed in spreading the glad tidings of the Gospel far and wide among heathen nations.

Descending from these wider views to the details of society, there, too, I perceive ground, if not for confidence, at least for hope. There is a general desire throughout the higher ranks for bettering the condition of the poor, a subject to which the government also has directed its patient attention: minute inquiries have been made into their existing state, and the increase of pauperism and of crimes. In no other country have the wounds of the commonwealth been so carefully probed. By means of colonisation, of an improved parochial order and of a more efficient police, the further increase of these evils may be prevented; while, by education, by providing means of religious instruction for all by savings banks, and perhaps by the establishment of Owenite communities among themselves, the labouring classes will have their comforts enlarged, and their well-being secured, if they are not wanting to themselves in prudence and good conduct. A beginning has been made—an impulse given: it may be hoped—almost, I will say, it may be expected—that in a few generations this whole class will be placed within the reach of moral and intellectual gratifications, whereby they may be rendered healthier, happier, better in all respects, an improvement which will be not more beneficial to them as individuals, than to the whole body of the commonweal.

The diffusion of literature, though it has rendered the acquirement of general knowledge impossible, and tends inevitably to diminish the number of sound scholars, while it increases the multitude of sciolists, carries with it a beneficial influence to the lower classes. Our booksellers already perceive that it is their interest to provide cheap publications for a wide public, instead of looking to the rich alone as their customers. There is reason to expect that, in proportion as this is done—in proportion as the common people are supplied with wholesome entertainment (and wholesome it is, if it be only harmless) they will be less liable to be acted upon by fanaticism and sedition.

You have not exaggerated the influence of the newspaper press, nor the profligacy of some of those persons, by whom this unrestrained and irresponsible power is exercised. Nevertheless it has done, and is doing, great and essential good. The greatest evils in society proceed from the abuse of power; and this, though abundantly manifested in the newspapers themselves, they prevent in other quarters. No man engaged in public life could venture now upon such transactions as no one, in their station half a century ago, would have been ashamed of. There is an end of that scandalous jobbing which at that time existed in every department of the State, and in every branch of the public service; and a check is imposed upon any scandalous and unfit promotion, civil or ecclesiastical. By whatever persons the government may be administered, they are now well aware that they must do nothing which will not bear daylight and strict investigation. The magistrates also are closely observed by this self- constituted censorship; and the inferior officers cannot escape exposure for any perversion of justice, or undue exercise of authority. Public nuisances are abated by the same means, and public grievances which the Legislature might else overlook, are forced upon its attention. Thus, in ordinary times, the utility of this branch of the press is so great that one of the worst evils to be apprehended from the abuse of its power at all times, and the wicked purposes to which it is directed in dangerous ones, is the ultimate loss of a liberty, which is essential to the public good, but which when it passes into licentiousness, and effects the overthrow of a State, perishes in the ruin it has brought on.

In the fine arts, as well as in literature, a levelling principle is going on, fatal, perhaps, to excellence, but favourable to mediocrity. Such facilities are afforded to imitative talent, that whatever is imitable will be imitated. Genius will often be suppressed by this, and when it exerts itself, will find it far more difficult to obtain notice than in former times. There is the evil here that ingenious persons are seduced into a profession which is already crowded with unfortunate adventurers; but, on the other hand, there is a great increase of individual and domestic enjoyment. Accomplishments which were almost exclusively professional in the last age, are now to be found in every family within a certain rank of life. Wherever there is a disposition for the art of design, it is cultivated, and in consequence of the general proficiency in this most useful of the fine arts, travellers represent to our view the manners and scenery of the countries which they visit, as well by the pencil as the pen. By means of two fortunate discoveries in the art of engraving, these graphic representations are brought within the reach of whole classes who were formerly precluded by the expense of such things from these sources of gratification and instruction. Artists and engravers of great name are now, like authors and booksellers, induced to employ themselves for this lower and wider sphere of purchasers. In all this I see the cause as well as the effect of a progressive refinement, which must be beneficial in many ways. This very diffusion of cheap books and cheap prints may, in its natural consequences, operate rather to diminish than to increase the number of adventurers in literature and in the arts. For though at first it will create employment for greater numbers, yet in another generation imitative talent will become so common, that neither parents nor possessors will mistake it for an indication of extraordinary genius, and many will thus be saved from a ruinous delusion. More pictures will be painted but fewer exhibited, more poetry written but less published, and in both arts talents which might else have been carried to an overstocked and unprofitable market, will be cultivated for their own sakes, and for the gratification of private circles, becoming thus a source of sure enjoyment and indirectly of moral good. Scientific pursuits will, in like manner, be extended, and pursuits which partake of science, and afford pleasures within the reach of humble life.

Here, then, is good in progress which will hold on its course, and the growth of which will only be suspended, not destroyed, during any of those political convulsions which may too probably be apprehended—too probably, I say, because when you call upon me to consider the sinfulness of this nation, my heart fails. There can be no health, no soundness in the state, till government shall regard the moral improvement of the people as its first great duty. The same remedy is required for the rich and for the poor. Religion ought to be so blended with the whole course of instruction, that its doctrines and precepts should indeed "drop as the rain, and distil as the dew, as the small rain upon the tender herb, and as the showers upon the grass"—the young plants would then imbibe it, and the heart and intellect assimilate it with their growth. We are, in a great degree, what our institutions make us. Gracious God were those institutions adapted to Thy will and word—were we but broken in from childhood to Thy easy yoke—were we but carefully instructed to believe and obey—in that obedience and belief we should surely find our temporal welfare and our eternal happiness!

Here, indeed, I tremble at the prospect! Could I look beyond the clouds and the darkness which close upon it, I should then think that there may come a time when that scheme for a perpetual peace among the states of Christendom which Henri IV. formed, and which has been so ably digested by the Abbe St. Pierre, will no longer be regarded as the speculation of a visionary. The Holy Alliance, imperfect and unstable as it is, is in itself a recognition of the principle. At this day it would be practicable, if one part of Europe were as well prepared for it as the other; but this cannot be, till good shall have triumphed over evil in the struggles which are brooding, or shall have obtained such a predominance as to allay the conflict of opinions before it breaks into open war.

God in his mercy grant that it be so! If I looked to secondary causes alone, my fears would preponderate. But I conclude as I began, in firm reliance upon Him who is the beginning and the end. Our sins are manifold, our danger is great, but His mercy is infinite.

Sir Thomas More.—Rest there in full faith. I leave you to your dreams; draw from them what comfort you can. And now, my friend, farewell!

The look which he fixed on me, as he disappeared, was compassionate and thoughtful; it impressed me with a sad feeling, as if I were not to see him again till we should meet in the world of spirits.