In the train of these gentry will be found another set who, anxious to preserve our ancient literature, will object to the total annihilation of all those odes and poems relative to liberty which have been sung and spouted at public dinners and pot-house meetings ever since the people dared say their souls were their own. It certainly is vexatious (as the lady said when her husband was about to be hanged) that all for which Hampden bled on the field and Sydney died on the scaffold, should be found to be of no avail; but still, as we have two hundred years' proof of its inefficiency, it is of no avail denying the truth. be With respect to these literary and oratorical persons, who might be apprehensive that they would suffer a professional loss by the formal enslavement of the lower orders, a consolatory view may taken. We have the noblest examples of rhetorical flourish on the side of liberty in writers and orators of the very nations where the most iron-hearted slavery existed. Leonidas was a Spartan, and in Sparta they slew Helots to make fun. Rome, and all the states of Greece, afford a beautiful example that the speechifying and poetising about liberty have nothing to do with the reality. Brutus had his door opened to him when he went out to slay Cæsar, and make his speech in the forum, by a slave who was chained to the lintel. These, it may be said, are heathen examples; but it is delightful to find in modern states, punctilious of their Christianity, parallel examples. Behold Am rica, whose every second word is liberty, with her black population. Read her bravadoes, and behold her slaves! What country has distinguished itself more than France? yet consider, that where the Marseillaise is the popular hymn, it is frequently sung by conscripts. In our own happy land, "the birthplace of freedom, the land of the free," we have ample precedents and authorities. Impressment and enlistment have a slight antithesis to "Britons never will be slaves;" not to allude to factory operations and workhouse regulations. Enough, however, has been said to show that the literature of the country cannot suffer from the measure proposed. Indeed, it will probably increase in value, on the old principle of the greater the fiction the greater the poem. These then are groundless fears, and we shall have our odes and orations, when the great object shall have been compassed, as full of glowing images and eulogies of liberty as in the times of Pitt's volunteers, and be able then fully to equal America and France in the loudness of our eulogy of the imaginary, and in the complete absence of the real. The literary men will therefore, of course, immediately adopt and advocate the noble purpose proposed. To those who will still remain incredulous, we ask what liberty has done for the great mass of the people? Answer, ye enormous poor-houses-ye mighty jails-ye banished convicts-ye starving and over-worked populace. Liberty without property is but a phantasma. Independence indeed is a different thing, but then the property of the civilised world is already appropriated, and henceforward political morality can only acknowledge two things-the proprietor and the property. He who is not one must be of the other, to be of any value in the social scale. He either must be the preserver or the preserved -the possessor or the possessed. This is a great moral truth, that at once, like all such principles, puts everything in its right place. The proprietor will of course take care of his property; and the property thus will be sure to be taken care of by the proprietor. The enunciator of a great truth is not compelled to show in what way his discovery is to be brought into operation. It was enough for the Marquis of Worcester, and for Windsor, to show how steam and gas could be applied; they were not called upon to lay down all the rails and pipes necessary to the practical fulfilment of their theories; so I am not bound to say how my great discovery of enslaving the whole pauper population of England is to be accomplished. Inferior geniuses may find great help in the proceedings of the Poor Law Commissioners, and many other parts of the conduct of great ministers and patriots, from Charles Stuart to Daniel O'Connell-and from Sir Robert Walpole to Sir Robert Peel. With the execution of this great national movement I can have nothing to do, though I shall be ever ready to defend my discovery. As I feel, however, that my principles are perfectly in accordance with a new and noble race of young men with hot heads and cold hearts, who have lately flamed above the political horizon, I shall look to them for the practical fulfilment of this noble object, convinced that they will throw a grace over the enslavery of the people, and a glow of rhetoric on the annihilation of English liberty, that will add a charm to the benefit thus conferred. Deeply impressed with their inclination and their powers to effect this desirable object, I confide the revival and confirmation of English slavery to The Young Englanders. 124 PAUL BELL IN ACCOUNT CURRENT WITH WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, ESQ., LAUREATE. My name is Bell; and I am a person of scanty consequence: occupied the whole day in a warehousing business, which gives me little leisure for putting myself on paper; otherwise the world might have heard of my present particular trouble earlier. I have no connection with the party to whom I perceive so many weekly inquiries are addressed:-"whether"—for instance-"A.B. ought to play knave or queen in such and such a predicament?"many years have elapsed since Mrs. 6 of the "How The atre began to put on white; and since Mr. sang the Little farthing rushlight' in the presence of Royalty?" Nor dare I claim cousinship with the educating Dr. Bell, who seems— if one may judge from Dr. Southey's Life-to have been rather fond of money for a philanthropist, and a leetle quarrelsome for a teacher. Though I be thought less of for the avowal, I must own myself a descendant of the Peter Bell the Potter whose case was publicly mentioned some years ago by Mr. Wordsworth, in one of that gentleman's beautiful pieces. And as this establishes in some sort a business connection between us, I conceive I have a right, in my turn, to make public a grievance of which he is the cause; private remonstrance having been tried, and found ineffectual. It is with regard to the part taken by the Laureate on the Railway Question, expressed in letters to the Morning Post, published about Christmas time :-a benefaction to the hard-working classes, which deserves acknowledgment! The matter in debate is a railway from Kendal to Low Wood, near the head of Windermere-and the terror is of the cheap pleasure-trains, calculated, the poet pleads, to inundate the district in which he resides, with mere riotous and unworthy persons; or, to quote his own designation, "Manchester tradesmen." I do not quarrel with Mr. Wordsworth's desire of keeping the seclusion of his residence inviolate, any more than with the horror of Sir Timothy Dod, in "Gilbert Gurney," on seeing surveyors performing their evolutions on the lawn in front of his villa. Every Englishman's house, and his garden also, I presume we may add, is his castle; but when a poet, who has been all his life doing his best to expose every rock, stone, and scrap of foliage, round about his residence to the gaze of his countrymen (" Manchester tradesmen" inclusive), takes in his elderly days to setting up the toll-bars of false and oppressive reasons, why such or such persons should be kept at a distance-let him look to it; and think of Rebecca and her Daughters! I, at least, as one of the class aimed at, must say my say; and, following his example, print it, too. pro First, let me ask, is it quite fair in Mr. Wordsworth to fling at railway makers, as persons only interested in "gains and gambling speculations ?" What are gains, pray? Premiums and fits on railway shares, only; or guineas remitted from Dover-street to Rydal, when a new poem is completed? What is "a speculation,"—if a book published on a Laureate's own account to kindle "a blaze of triumph,' or to paper trunks, as Taste and Fashion will-is not one? And give me leave to assert, that with some small knowledge of "the business world" (as it is often disparagingly called), I have not found authors, actors, and artists the most disinclined to a high rate of interest for their money. On the con : trary I only wish they were generally less disposed to dabble in matters they cannot overlook for themselves, and to risk their modest fortunes in moonshine schemes! Hence, to raise a cry against projectors in general, as Mr. Wordsworth disinterestedly does, is a little foolish, as well as a little unjust. Why, in our countinghouse (the head of the firm and his family being all admirers of poetry), we are indebted to him for these lines, framed above the chimney-piece of the private room : So much for the "gambling speculation" part of Mr. Wordsworth's objection. Then comes his first great reason. The Manchester tradesman is not worthy of the Lake country, because he cannot understand it. He may stay at home; and if he wants a feast of Nature, devour "a rich meadow, with fat cattle grazing upon it." He may also luxuriate in "a heavy crop of corn; or a scaur. but let him beware how he casts sheep's-eyes on a rock, or a ghyll, He won't like them half so well. He shan't come near them. Why, is not this very like telling the schoolboy to stick to his suet dumplings, because he won't understand currant tart? I do not know how it may be in other families, but were I to preach such a doctrine at my table in holiday-time, I am afraid the young Bells, from great Tom downwards to little Ann, would ring a peal of laughter my ears would not soon hear the last of. But, only think!-in the self-same letter, Mr. Wordsworth tells us, that not every one even who is born among the finest scenes of Nature is able to enjoy them. The poets, before he came, says he, were but stupid when a mountain was in question. Gray was speechlessly reverent in Borrowdale (an example our Laureate has not followed). Burns never crossed the border to mount Skiddaw-argal, Burns had no love for Nature. How, let me digress to ask, should a farmer, with a family-a busy exciseman-have more time to ramble than a "Manchester tradesman?”—and in days when intercourse was limited and conveyance slow; my relative having, as all the world knows, supplied Yorkshire with crockery conveyed on an ass whereas now he would assuredly have travelled the country on the Highflyer, or by aid of the Spitfire locomotive. To what, in fact, do these limitations of the Laureate amount, beyond the exclamation of Dr. Caius, "Dere shall no honest man dat shall come in my closet?" Let me next call attention to the nature and tendency of Mr. Wordsworth's life and literary services. Have they not been directed to implant, in the readers of England, pure tastes and wholesome affections; a minute love of Nature, as preferable to coarse and turbulent pleasures? Was he not laughed at, in his day, for professing that a "Poor Susan in Wood-Street" was capable of enjoying the fancied pleasures of "A mountain ascending, a vision of trees?" Did not saucy critics ridicule him, for daring to inform the genteel public, how my mother's brother was brought into regular courses, by impressions of pity and kindness, made more impressive by scenery in which they came upon him; where the "The rocks that tower on either side Build up a wild fantastic scene: |