haps, fortunate for him that he is not exposed to the temptation. He has in public broken down the barrier of honesty, the defences are overthrown, and the strength of virtue being gone, it is open to all attacks. Truth and honesty are no longer principles with him, but mere conventionalities; and if by any chance he should lose his large property and be reduced to distress, his conventionality might enlarge its bounds, and he might find it as convenient a thing to swindle a tradesman out of his money, as he now does to swindle the public out of their rights. He might then consider it as fitting a thing to level his pistol at a traveller on the highway for the purpose of possessing himself of his purse, as he now does to level his pistol at Joseph Hume to stop him from asserting the rights of the public, which are obstacles to Tory dominion, or as he does to set soldiers to shoot Irishmen because they refuse to pay tithes.

But if rules or principles of morality exist independent of conventionality, then these rules must be independent of time, place, or individual. They must be the unalterable principles which determine the well-being of man, and on which all sound laws must be based. Tried by these principles, that which is morally wrong in private life, must be equally wrong in public life; and, vice versa, that which is good in public life, must be equally good in private life. Thus the habit of lying, or violating truth, is not a vice by any conventional rule laid down by lawgivers or society at large, but because the habitual violation of truth, if universally practised, would utterly destroy social habits, and subject all human beings to individual isolation. The intercourse of families would be broken up; all the sweet ties of confidence which render life desirable would cease to exist. Commerce, business, science, art, all would come to an end; and the world, for want of the united exertions of man, would be again reduced to a 'howling wilderness.' Truth may be called the universal bond between mind and mind, for even those who choose to form societies apart, to profit by the damage of the rest of their species, are yet obliged to be true to one another. Lying is an universal vice, more mischievous in its consequences than even great crimes, for it overspreads society to an enormous extent, from the fluttering capital to the groaning base. The King's Speech is a lie; the speeches of his Ministers are lies; the speeches of their opponents are but rarely truths, they contain for the most part a grain of truth set round with conventional trimming. The Bishops lie, both as churchmen and legislators. The merchant lies in his counting-house, and the small tradesman and dealer lies in his shop. But these people, from the highest to the lowest, use lying principally as a tool of business, and they all profess to hate lies in the abstract. But their principle of virtue has vanished; and so that the temptation be but large enough, or the necessity urgent enough, the lying no-principle will by them be carried through every variety of private life.

We have yet one consolation; a large portion of the community, the producers, have, by the nature of their occupations, been kept from the necessity of considering lying a part of the business of life. They can well appreciate truth, and from their ranks will the apostles of freedom and virtue come forth to wield that power which is at present turned to evil purposes. The apostles of Christ were men of occupation, and many other great and good men have also been so. Philosophy is not in all cases the result of leisure or gentle training.

There are amongst our mechanics men of high powers and noble purposes; men amongst whom are found profound judgment and deep, feeling united with a power and flow of language, constituting oratory in its best sense. Oh! for the time which shall witness the progress of sound sense amongst electors, prompting them to choose as their legislators, men of the highest minds, without regard to adventitious circumstances, which shall prompt them to choose a Samuel Downing, though his hands be hard, and turn away in scorn from the silken slaves of luxury, and the dull-witted

men of large havings, the utmost stretch of whose ideas is, the construction of inefficient laws for the protection of their slave-god property.' Oh! for the time when some such man shall rise in simple dignity from his legislatorial seat, to rebuke the falsehoods which leave the lips of authority; who will say to the tool of a court or faction, Such as the act is, so is the actor; alike in public and in private, he is a degraded slave.' And if the arbitrement of the pistol be proposed, he will reply, My life belongs to my country, and I place it not in the balance with one whose services are hired by a faction; but if the day shall come when the cannon peals, and hireling swords wave, and muskets rattle, and bayonets glance, in the last crusade against freedom, then will we try whether the arm of the slave, or of the freeman be the firmest nerved for the death grapple.'

March 25, 1835.

·

JUNIUS REDIVivus.

'Appropriation.'-This word has acquired, in the House of Commons, a sort of technical signification, viz.: the application of the surplus ecclesiastical revenues of the Irish Church to such moral and religious purposes as will benefit the whole community. In this sense it has become the watchword of the Opposition, and experiment is on the eve of being made to ascertain whether it be the signal of victory over Toryism. Defeated as Ministers have already been on several points, it will, should Lord John Russell's motion be successful, as is expected, be seen whether they will stick to office under discomfiture upon this also. The Whigs were beaten into this principle, by the last Parliament; they are now helping to beat the Tories into it; and not only is their success devoutly to be wished, but moreover the extension of the principle to England, and its application to the funds which support the hierarchy as well as to the surplus which remains after they are provided for. The promotion, throughout the nation, of religion and morality is, we apprehend, the legitimate direction, not merely of the surplus, but of the entire ecclesiastical fund, both Irish and English. It is for such a purpose, professedly at least, that the Church exists. It holds the amount in trust, or receives it as wages, for the accomplishment of that end. If it be not realized, the monies are forfeited. The clergy are in the condition of their Catholic predecessors, the original trustees, who were dismissed by the State as inefficient or unfaithful. They should be reduced to the alternative of reforming or being cashiered. All Church property (not bequeathed absolutely to a sect) is the property of the nation, for the purposes of national religion and morality. Such new arrangements as will render the ample means which exist efficient for this great public object, the noblest that a government, or rather a community, can contemplate, are the only real Church Reform. Nothing less than this will go to the root of the evil. Nothing less than this will rid us of the sinecurism and corruption under which the country groans. Begin with Ireland; but do not let appropriation' (it were better called, restitution) stop with the crumbs that fall from the episcopal table. Give us our heritage again;' our best heritage of the means of universal instruction, of national morality. Nothing less will satisfy the claims of justice.

F.

225

SKETCHES OF DOMESTIC LIFE.-No. II.

THE NOTABLE.

It is not often that the present day exhibits the spectacle of a mere scholar; that is, a being to whom books are almost the only realities in life, and all things else little other than visions.

Joshua Drennan was one of these dry-as-dust' doctors. He had some such conception of the men and women moving in the world, as they have of evil spirits or angels; that is, notions which they can neither understand themselves nor make any one else understand; the second dilemma a necessary consequence of the first.

To Dr. Drennan, as he was called, with what claim to the title I know not,

'Not rude nor barren were the winding ways

Of hoar antiquity, but strewn with flowers.'

And there many a garland had he gathered, beneath the shade of which he sat, a fit emblem of the studies he pursued.

Nevertheless he was a loveable creature, for he was one of the kindest, gentlest, as well as the simplest of nature's children. A bereavement in early youth had, it was said, unsettled his mind; which severe study first restored, and then engrossed.

Yet social sympathy, that inextinguishable power, at times prevailed. If in his lonely wanderings the voice or laughter of children reached his ear, he would pause and drink in the sound, as he did breathings from a bed of flowers; while a smile brightened his deep-seated eyes and played upon his pale quiet lip, as if some of the sunshine of his own mother-time came back upon his heart.

But if, instead of sounds of gladness, he chanced to hear the wail of sorrow from any living thing,-the bleat of a stray lamb, the cry of a distressed dog, let alone the tone of suffering from any human tongue, the instinctive spirit of pity spake within him, and no matter what the obstacles which might lie between him and the appealing creature, to that creature he would make his way.

A

In this manner he had gained one of the most faithful of his household friends, Sancho, a fine Newfoundland dog, who had survived the snow wreath which had buried his first master. stranger had perished near the village church-yard, and after some fruitless attempts to discover who he was, had been buried there. Sancho, whose name was inscribed on a brass collar about his neck, was the only mourner at that chance funeral; when it was over, he remained at the grave to watch and wail over it as if he thought thereby to awaken his buried friend.

Dr. Drennan discovered the dog; drew him home, but came back with him the next day to the grave, and then took him home again; he did this for many days, saying, as he patted the dog's head, I will give him a tear, too, Sancho, since he was so kind to

No. 100.

S

thee; and I will try and win thy love; for it is worth some trouble to win the love of a creature so full of gratitude and attachment as thou art.'

Sancho was not insensible to the kindness of his sympathetic protector, and soon learned to lie at his feet with an expression of devotion in his watery eyes, as if to love some one being exclusively was a necessity of his nature-the first condition of his existence.

About twelve months after this event, two circumstances occurred which made a great change in the feelings and views of Dr. Drennan. A work, which with much labour he had given to the public, was most favourably received, and a somewhat considerable independence was bequeathed to him.

How often do points of character lie unperceived till some peculiar circumstances, calculated to excite, call them forth! Fame and fortune coming together to Dr. Drennan, as they did, mutually heightened and strengthened each other. Vanity, and the desire of social consideration, awakened in the hitherto apparently humble and retiring mind of the doctor. The obscure lodging in which he had dwelt undisturbed and undisturbing so long that the spiders considered themselves not tenants at will, but tenants in common, was speedily vacated for a large house; and instead of the chance attendance of a slatternly girl, the daughter of the little shopkeeper whose garret he had occupied, he engaged two or three servants, resolving to draw round him a circle of admiring friends.

All this, which in speculation and preparation had appeared so pleasant, proved far otherwise in the realization. Old habits are not easily changed, nor new ones readily acquired. Absence of mind, the consequence of abstract studies and social isolation, was as constant a characteristic of the doctor, when a householder, as it had been when he was a garreteer. Many, as soon as he was disposed to lionize, came to see him, and all the more readily, as report made him more of a golden lion than he really was. he soon discovered that servants and visiters disturbed his quiet and his studies more than they ministered to his comfort or his vanity.

But

By a singular effort of social sagacity, or rather observation, the doctor after a time saw what appeared a remedy for all his annoyances; he resolved, as most others of his neighbours had done, to take unto himself a wife; that is, (acting with the views and from the feelings which the doctor did,) an upper servant, who, unlike every other servant, should have no power of obtaining, retaining, or possessing any independent property, nor any power of quitting her service, however unsuited to her it might be, unless for the coffin and the grave.

Dr. Drennan had all the same amability, and some of the genius, of the immortal Goldsmith; but he partook, also, of the same want of perception of the improvements possible and essential to the social state. He looked on women with the kindly eye with which he looked on all creatures; but never dreamed that a capacity

above making puddings and pies, and gooseberry wine, existed in the sex, or that they could be better employed than

To suckle fools and chronicle small beer.'

As long as women are treated as fools, such they will, more or less, suckle; nature perpetuates injuries as well as benefits.

Now it was that Dr. Drennan, who for the last twenty years had felt more interest about fossil bones than about the fairest belles, turned to that terra incognita, the female world, and the notable widow of a farmer soon fixed his attention.

She was well-looking, in what, in a drawing-room, would be called rude health, and, according to the report of a friend who was abetting the doctor in the rash act he was about to commit, she was neither a gossip nor a gad-about, but just such a delegate as a man of letters might desire; one who would attend to her own province, not infringe upon his. Her utter want of intellectual culture the doctor and his friend deemed a matter of no moment, since she might always avail herself of the rich funds of her husband's mind.

These worthies did not reflect that funds exist in vain for those unfitted to use them.

Dr. Drennan expected to find a domestic delegate, who would superintend the economy of the kitchen and the comfort of the parlour, without interfering with the library.

He was unconscious that in all things a general harmony is essential to happiness-that the essence, if not the substance, of the library, contributes most materially to brighten and warm the atmosphere of the parlour.

During the embroidered days of courtship, (for though the widow was a sort of dowlas, and the doctor a sort of foolscap, the common course was pursued,) how fondly did Dr. Drennan anticipate the time when of all the locks in his house he should only turn Locke on the Human Understanding; when, without reference to roast or stew, he might enjoy Bacon and Boyle; recreate with Cook's Voyages, without any care about cook's accounts; when a train of precious thoughts should run no risk of being disturbed by an appeal about preserves; when he might sit knee-deep in litter, cutting up newspapers, pasting and compiling, without hearing anything about pickles; enjoy saying a smart thing, or indulge in uttering an angry one, without interruption about vinegar and spices; when he might crack jokes in happy unconsciousness of the contingencies of cracked crockery; when he might give a connecting thread to a treatise, and not find such wanting to the buttons of his shirt or the strings of his waistcoat; in short, when he might cater for the mind, relieved of all. cares about the body.

Nor were his friends less interested upon the present occasion, since in the event of his marriage they did hope, that when he