Literary men rarely indeed acquire wealth. They persevere nevertheless. The coinage of their brains supplies the country with its currency of thought. It is not convertible into specie, but it accumulates.

The progression of the trading classes is somewhat slower, and that of the hereditary proprietary much slower still. The latter have obvious inducements to content. The only question for them is, whether they can keep others so. They fear change, for they hold the prizes already. There is nothing for them to get, unless it be moral good and benevolent enjoyment. They doubt whether, for these objects, it would be worth risking the quiet possession of their estates and position, which they apprehend would be at stake, especially while they can bolster up their rents and their station. Yet they see that the mighty change around them must induce some corresponding change, to them undefined, in themselves. Hence, with the exception of a few fanatics, the mass of the landed Aristocracy is disposed towards some of the various modifications of Conservative Reform. The commercial classes, yet working their way up the ladder of Aristocracy, which reaches from the dust. to the heavens of English society, see further than this, even to the necessity and desirableness of such Reform as shall not only preserve but improve our institutions. Moreover the perception spreads of the identification of the interests of trade and commerce with the Cause of human progression. The principles of Free Trade are a chapter in the bible of the enlightened philanthropist. Political Reform is thus, throughout the various classes of the community, the object of zealous demand, or of temperate desire, or of calm acquiescence, or of unavoidable concession. Some say, Hurrah, it shall come!' others, Alas! it must come!' and others, It is coming, it should come, and let it come!'

That we have correctly indicated the rapid developement of intelligence, as the main-spring of that movement which takes Political Reform in its road, might be shown by a general survey of the literary productions of our time, including in that term all published thought, with all its latent as well as avowed principle and tendency. We have observed enough to feel no doubt of the results of such an analysis. Intellect is power as truly as steam is power; and like that, when generated in a confined space, will act upon the boundaries that compress it until they give way. Here the parallel stops. The material energy dissipates itself, and is lost; not so the mental. That forms a new and ampler nidus for itself, creates fresh and larger boundaries, and works well within them until a renewed expansion brings disproportion again, and requires a repetition of the process. All demonstrations of progressive intelligence, (and how abundant they are,) show that a re-formation of social institutions is in its commencing course, with that certainty which belongs, not to the schemes of partisans, or the policy of administrations, but to the operation of

the laws which regulate the nature of man and the progress of society; laws which are a portion, and the noblest, of that universal plan, by which is insured to us the succession of the seasons and the revolutions of the planetary system.

It is not to such writings as those of the benevolent but impracticable Owen that we refer, when we speak of the reformatory, or rather the progressive character of the productions of modern intelligence. Mr. Owen has been described, too severely, perhaps, yet not without some reason, as a man who can manufacture the plainest truth into an absurdity. The consequences he deduces have certainly not facilitated the reception of the principles he advocates. We rather had in our minds the great Conservative writers, their poets, orators, and oracles, and the tendency of their writings. It is not too far to go back to Burke, for the Tories are raising new altars to his name, and rendering the homage due to a great political philosopher and prophet, to the man who in his day was degraded by the pay of a pension for his partisanship. What was the one bright idea, enshrined within his soul, which solves and harmonizes the seeming discrepancies of his career, and which he was infuriate with the French Revolution, and what were called Jacobin principles, for beclouding? It was a stately and glorious vision of social order, like the proud keep of Windsor, rising in the majesty of proportion, and girt with the double belt of its kindred and coeval towers.' Now, that same 'majesty of proportion' is equally the object of enthusiastic idolatry to all true Reformers, even down to what are deemed the lowest grades and wildest speculators, to the Republicans,' 'Anarchists,' and 'St. Simonians.' In that conception, Burke showed the real and native tendency of intelligence; and if, misled by the passing events and passions of a stormy time, when the dust of falling thrones made the air too dense and foul a medium for the clear perception of facts, he spoke of what to himself could only have been the comparative as if it had been the absolute, that affects not the truth and grandeur of his conception, nor the certainty that the developement of the human mind must ever be, and is strongly now, an impulsive power towards its realization. There is not, there never can be, the majesty of proportion' in society, while its various classes feel a gross discrepancy in their position; while imbecility holds supremacy over soul, and idleness sits like an incubus on industry; while the weakest bear the heaviest burdens, and protection is distributed in proportion to strength; while gulfs are yawning wider and wider between classes that must rest on each other, if society is to be an edifice and not a ruin; while political existence is a privilege capriciously conferred, most abundant where its perversion can be best enforced, and withheld from multitudes by whom it is claimed and needed; and while ancient and venerable names gather associations of contempt and aversion by ceasing to represent, as they profess,

any proportionate reality of public utility, and by becoming mere pretexts, under which cupidity aggravates every national incongruity. A sense of the majesty of proportion' must, even without much personal participation in the pressure, produce in all pure and generous minds, the passion of renovation. To the Conservative poets, Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, apply the observations we have made on Burke. What is Coleridge's Idea of an Established Church? a beautiful and noble speculation, the very speculation which makes many of those who are called UltraRadicals and Atheists, demand the dissolution of the union between Church and State. No bonds that have been ever used to hold together the living and the dead, can unite, in men's minds, to any considerable extent, that conception and the English hierarchy. In the corruptions of that body, no such soul can be compelled to inhabit. It must cease to be a sectarian corporation, rich in national endowments, and sacrificing even the comparatively better qualities of a sect to political subserviency and aristocratical patronage, before it can possibly become the means of spiritual culture to the entire population. The Sycorax of our hierarchy must be indeed re-formed before the pure Ariel of Coleridge's vision will do her bidding, and receive from her the mission of national religion. It is

'too pure a spirit,

To act her earthly and abhorred commands.'

But Coleridge is witness of the intellectual movement towards this regeneration. Nor need we point out to those who watch, with a mixture of complacency and melancholy, the superficial yet perennial luxuriance of Southey; or to those, before whom the majestic soul of Wordsworth has stood unveiled, to what an extent, in them, the same truth is manifested. Glancing, for an instant, at a very different form of intellect, we might ask what has become of the (originally) Tory speculations of Malthus? what is the actual influence of talent, which was first put forth to shame man's brightest hopes, and bow his spirit to the oppressions and plunderings of his fellow-creatures in authority, as if they were the decrees of eternal Providence? The philosophy which was evoked, o'ermastered the Toryism it was raised to serve, and became another agent of improvement. And so might we show, whenever intelligence has been evinced in the party, from the orations of Canning, or the fictions of Disraeli, to the scribes of Blackwood and Fraser, how every devil of Toryism confesses, however unconsciously, the presence of the Divinity of Reform, in its divinest character, that of the progressiveness of society and of man.

We may assume Lytton Bulwer to be the prince of living writers of fiction; and he is also an illustration of the affinity between that species of imagination which realizes both the external indications and inward feelings of human character, and the aspiration after a nobler developement of humanity itself.

Campbell is still the bard of Patriotism and of Hope. What is all the sadness, which, like the wailings of an Æolian harp, breathes over the blended poetry and philosophy of the criticisms of Carlyle, but the discontent which we have endeavoured to define, the impulsiveness of a nature too noble for its sphere, towards one more in accordance with its capacity. In strange contrast as they are with this, and with each other, yet is the same principle at work in the very different manifestations of the metaphysical moodiness of Tennyson, and the denunciations of Ebenezer Elliot. As for political and moral philosophy, almost all that we have of it is twin-born with Reform. It was cradled in Westminster. The Philosophers are the Reformers. The two great powers of mind, the logical and the imaginative faculties, have both, in their advance, shown themselves identified, often with the faith, and always with the fact, of the movement towards an improved and improving condition of society.

Amid these general, and, as it were, floating tendencies, all through the intellectual world, often unperceived, and often vainly abjured, by individual minds, it could not be but what there should be some, many, in whom their spirit would become more distinctly incorporate, and with whom the amelioration of social institutions and arrangements, as subservient to the progression of human nature, would form itself into their being's end and aim,' and acquire the energy of a determined purpose, a principle, a passion, a religion. And such there are, scattered over the country; their union of purpose and of purity being the pledge of that country's redemption. They have no party to strengthen but that which best advances principles. They advocate no interests but those which best subserve the great common interest. They do not one day worship a political idol, and the next throw him to the moles and the bats with every species of contumely. They measure their zeal by the degree of utility and not by the temporary convenience of factions. If unconnected with permanent good for the people, the triumphs of party do not satisfy them, nor its defeats dismay them. While no momentary advantage can divert them from a principle, they are the furthest of all men from being unpractical. Like one of their greatest precursors, Milton, the heart of each the lowliest burdens on itself will lay.' They know that in doing well the work of the day, they best labour for futurity. In their course there is a perfect. unity of direction. Hence they have a power, a constantly expanding power, seldom perceived, continually felt. They are the central force of Reform. They are its enduring missionaries; they would not hesitate to become its martyrs. There are no such men in the ranks of Whigism, nor in those of Toryism, nor are they prominent amongst the yet unorganized troops of Radicalism.

Some of the public zeal for Reform by which the Whigs were borne into power, and now think to regain power, may, perhaps,

have been artificially excited; some selfish interests in the country there doubtless are, which the security of a monopoly, or the repeal of a tax, may make the friends or the foes of any Government; some action there may have been of demagogues upon the multitude for individual aggrandizement; the immediate effect of those organic reforms in which some classes are interested, may have been inordinately estimated; there may be in some quarters a blind desire of mere change, or an aimless restlessness, or an insane tendency towards violence: but purblind indeed must the politicians be, who dream that these constitute any sensible portion of the real social movement, any calculable fraction of the impulse which drives it on, or that it can be arrested by their repression. They might as well tie up the vane to change the wind; or catch and fix the twigs that are whirling about when the air and the ground are convulsed with the heavings of the earthquake. The new Premier hopes that the people are tired of agitation:' of party squabbles and compromises; of court intrigues, and of the blind obstinacy of the privileged; of empty professions, broken pledges, and disappointed expectations, they are tired; but the spirit of Reform is no more likely to rest in satisfaction, or go to sleep in weariness, than the just liberated eagle to flag on the wing at the very commencement of its upward flight.

Whatever determined stand may be made on behalf of the Church, that institution will probably be the next to yield to the public feeling. It will not be pulled down by the Dissenters. They neither understand the Church nor Dissent, who expect the conflict to be between these parties. The sectarian spirit of the present times is not that of the seventeenth century. The Dissenters will achieve the redress of their own grievances, and be quiet. They will not, as a body, wage war with the Establishment on the abstract principle; nor will any other class. But the present Ecclesiastical Constitution cannot long survive the deep conviction which is becoming general, that it works but little of moral good for the community, and that it presents the most formidable obstacle to almost every measure of real improvement. There is a growing determination that it shall be made of use, or be unmade. Every intelligent Reformer deprecates the latter alternative, so far as it would throw the Ecclesiastical funds into the landlord's grasp, and would preserve this grand national endowment intact for the appropriate purposes of national instruction, of the best and most comprehensive description.

The silly assumption of hereditary wisdom, or the barefaced avowal that, not the wise to govern, but the interested in misgovernment, shall guide a community at their pleasure, cannot long be tolerated. They are condemned in men's minds, and the decent and hollow respect of words, mouth-honour,' is all they have left to live upon. The time was, when the Peerage of this country was better qualified to rule than the Commonalty; rightly then had the Upper House its privileges: the time was

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