important lesson, in a season of change, that' to destroy is easy-but to rebuild is a work of science; it demands a comprehensive survey and philosophical analysis of means and ends.' And who shall stay to make it, when the very next day may see the chance of abating a nuisance destroyed, and those who uphold that nuisance again lords of the ascendant? We must snatch the moments of reformation as they pass. You are reported to have once said, my Lord Duke, 'The people will be quiet if they are let alone; and if not, there is a way to make them be quiet.' You spoke truth, though you meant falsehood and bloodshed. They will be quiet now; they will proceed in a peaceful, rational, and deliberate course of improvement, if you and your faction will let them alone; and if not, the way to make them and you quiet is to seize the first opportunity for realizing such an extent of organic reform as shall effectually preclude any future attempt to force upon the country a government which is alike despised and hated. It might be a good thing in military conflict not to know when you were beaten; it will not do in political conflict. Make the move you threaten, and from one end of the empire to the other will resound the cry of Down with the Tories!'

W. J. F.

A WORD IN THE EAR OF ISAAC TOMKINS, GENT.

SINCE the days of Bruin in the fable, no bear has ever so unconsciously fly-flapped Tomkins's face with most disastrous claws, as-no matter who, he will scarcely prove again so awkward an ally. Since that publication we have ourselves been hooted as an aristocrat while on a visit of Radical importance to a neighbourhood, in which we were better known before our first appearance in that new Stulz and those Nugee inexpressibles; rosewood tables and grass-green note paper are universally denounced; and we know more than one case of new furniture countermanded by one of the Jenkinses, lest his villa at Clapham should be taken for a branch Carlton Club. All we know is, that this has been felt the mechanics will know the author of their disasters, and black-ball him at the Institute.

:

So it is. Well! what next? Ask yon gentleman entering that gin palace. Why, Tomkins will begin re-action to elbow the son of the Cotton Spinner,' and when they go arm and arm into the Carlton Club, of course the Aristocracy will have been demolished, and no more thoughts of it.

But after all, it was ill-judged to go to a lady's drawing room for the bugbear Aristocracy; he should have fetched it from Venice, with its lion's mouth fatal even to nobility; from the Sublime Porte's exclusives the Janissaries, with the prospect of the bowstring; from the ancien régime of the privileges of France in all its

lustihood, with (the shadow thrown before) the bloody revolution. He should have brought back the dark ages, that long tumult of the freemen of the counties sinking beneath feudal lords; and then the tug of war for ages between king and baron; then petitions of right, charters, impeachments, scaffolds, and Pitt, the strangest institution of all, its cost 800 millions sterling, its duration thirty years, a period of postponement, of ignorance, and oratory, and large fortunes, and high rents, one flare and then a flicker, then a stink and all out. The natural extinction of the wick has been postponed by these means; are we to vent our rage on the poor gilt clay movable, erst used for candlestick, and now a gaud shelved in great state among other antiquities?

And do we treat the Aristocracy so? What do you mean, my dear Mr. Simpkins? You are, I know, not always in your apron; and on the Hampstead stage your neck is far less supple than behind the counter; but I do not know the quality of the luxuries of your At home.' Do you break gold wax seals of grass-green envelopes over rose-wood tables? Well, it is not with your or any other happy housekeeper's comforts I would interfere, though you rifle the Indies and task our upholsterers to please my lady. No, Simpkins, Good morning. In ages of ignorance, idols dead or living are set up and decked in the best of the loom and brightest of gold, and in times of ignorance the idol is kicked down in any case of public failure and disgrace; but the Goths were not the only people who set up religion and the state. There have been people who have borne their own sins and provided for their own occasions; for instance, the Spartans with their Senate and Ephori, the Athenians with their council and ostracism, the Roman Senate at its birth, the Italian republics for ages; and yet all had their noble families and heirs of larger census or fortune. What does it matter whether Peel be in the first or the hundredth descent from the novus homo,' the builder of a fortune, if he have a patrimony sufficient to bribe and attract all the Tomkinses-and be a member of that Carlton Club?

You never heard Cobbett taking these silly distinctions. Attack the mischief that shows itself, in whatever shape, and give it a name which signifies mischief, and not some class word which has lost its meaning. What signifies the descent of a lord, (I must not do a libel,) except that, like that of a stone, it falls heavier when it does reach its end the higher the point from which it fell? Why, mortgages in noble estates, like the scrofula in the blood, work rottenness, if not in one, in a few generations. Let them go. They have done for themselves in this wealth-loving country, only let it be known they are insolvent. The laws of debtor and creditor, as altered, will have this effect: the failure of sinecures will be conclusive. Now, Tomkins, prepare for your turn; forget the shop, cut the extra glass and the Times,' get up early and study Locke: you'll do for a legislator yet, but you have not metal. I doubt

whether we shall go on a generation with you, but with him it was impossible, it was a sell,' the soul of the peers was lost in the pension list. Now for knowledge and the middle orders. I wish I had known you younger, Tomkins; you are now so fixed in the ways of trade, I fear you will sell your vote, or edit a newspaper. Apropos ;-have we not an Aristocracy of the press? We talk of the republic of letters, but the stamps and other duties (especially expensive puffs) have made that a monopoly. I wish, Tomkins, you liked Milton, (except his Heaven and Hell,) and Cowley, (except all his poetry,) and Byron, except his notes and innuendoes, and Scripture read backwards, and Shakspeare altogether, and But you only read the Times,' and the Sunday paper, the clever' Age. You are not worth canvassing; you are not fit to vote; you are a tyrant at home, and a cat's-paw in Merchant Tailors' Hall; you are on the Clapham stage a cloud or a bore; in the coffee-room a twaddler; "in the market a monopolist; in the counting-house a trickster; in the hiring of labour an extortioner; in the sale of commodities- I would sooner thresh acorns than have you to cater for me; I would sooner live in the woods than have you for a neighbour. Am I abusing the middle orders?-no; only the generation that have the patrimony catered to them by Pitt, and that would apply to Peel for a renewal of the Treasury custom, and another loan to be funded. Refor Reform! Dare you echo me? Know thyself, Tomkins, and become a good citizen; in the mean time your only safety is in ultraliberal institutions; your journeymen will be the honester voters; it is of that class come soldiers who fight while you snore, and sailors who reef while you adjust the nightcap; thou art a younger brother of the Pharisee; truth is with the humble fishermen; go, read and consider, or England may rue it.

THE FACE.

I.

THE 'joy for ever' of a beauteous thing
Is effluent from its beauty's memory:
Itself and all its loveliness take wing,
And only fixed in the thoughts they lie,
A worshipped, but unseen, Divinity,
Like GoD himself! I never shall forget
That lucent face, but for a moment met:
Itself and all its loveliness must die

In death, or deathward life's maturity;

But, ever young and beauteous, in my dreaming

It shall contend for immortality,

Till o'er my dust the grass and flowers are teeming :

Nor perish then, if aught in this true page

May feed a dream thereof from age to age.

II.

It was a face that on the eyesight struck
Like the clear blue and starry arch of night,
When suddenly we quit a narrow chamber,

From the world's dust to teach our thoughts to clamber
To that invisible ether of delight

Which atmospheres the planets in their flight!
With lips, and brow, and eyelids that did pluck
The gaze from all the circling flash of faces,
And fix it on its beauties' combination;
So interflexed, that, star by star, its graces
Were noted not; but still, in constellation,
A harmony of grace, such as embraces
The innermost spirit with its concord fine,
But which sense cannot note by note define!

* W

OPINIONS OF A MODERN CATHOLIC UPON TITHES.

To the Editor.

SIR, Knowing the general and intense interest that is felt, at the present juncture, upon the important subject of tithe; and feeling the necessity there is, that every one possessing an opinion should express it, at a time when meditated change challenges public discussion and universal advice; and considering, moreover, how imperative it is upon every class of religionists thoroughly to know the estimate of every fellow class, upon a political question of such immense magnitude-a question, not of religion and the kingdom which is not of this world, but of property and of this grosser and present world which we inhabit, and which the philosophic say is too much with us;' feeling all these things, and with them that tithe is really an affair of discipline, and not of faith,-a bond of love for brotherly uses, and not a chain of bondage-that its legality, its justice, its expediency, are all either confirmed or abrogated by changing circumstances and their conjunct, changing opinions; I have imagined that the views of a modern Catholic upon a prescriptive usage of his forefathers would be neither useless nor uninteresting to his differing brethren.

From one who professes himself a Tory and a Catholic, some of my sentiments may, perhaps, surprise you; but as Toryism, except with tithe-owners, is a political, and not a religious distinction, it has not in itself any hostile bearing upon a free discussion of the present question. With respect to Catholicity, although I cannot help perceiving that tithe and Catholic Christianity are contemporaneously prescriptive; yet I am equally convinced that the soundness of Catholic principles is in no wise infracted by maintaining the injustice of enforcing tithe (in its

origin a free gift) from those who disclaim its validity, deny its justice, appeal from the authority, and contemn the society,* of the body that claims it as its property.

Mr. Cobbett, in examining the right of the parsons to this objectionable source of revenue, (in the last vigorous effort of his manly pen,) has very truly said, that as far as they are concerned, it is of no manner of consequence to inquire into the truth or falsehood of the opinions upon which its early foundations rest; it is sufficient to trace its Protestant beginnings, to prove that as far as regards them, tithe is an imprescriptive, unjust, unconstitutional, and impudent exaction, usurpation, and tyranny. But as it is my intention to say a few words explaining why tithe in its Catholic origin was just, and why, from growing and altering circumstances, even in Catholic countries it has ceased to be so, it is necessary that I should briefly allude to its origin, which I thus do:

Every one acknowledges the duty of obedience that the members of a club or associated body owe to the rules which protect and constitute that society. Such an exclusive body was the whole Jewish people; and all owning the divine origin of their laws in every iota, and, which is a natural consequence, feeling, therefore, the necessity of obeying them, no one was injured even by a compulsory gathering of the tenths then established, had this been necessary; but on the contrary, any disobedience in this respect would justly have incurred upon the perverse member excommunication, or a cutting off from the society and its privileges. Thus much must be acknowledged; but now let me ask a question-When the Jews established themselves as a people, and that by divine command, with even a divine right of conquest, did the Jews demand this tribute of the disbelieving nations around them? The answer must be-No! it was required of those only who were born of their family, or who voluntarily sought its society, and took upon themselves its laws; and from those no longer than they chose to conform to them, they might drive off their substance, and leave the land and the society they abjured. Similar was the origin, and similar the practice, of the early Christians; and whether we consider their tenth as a continuation of the earlier prescriptive practice of their Israelitish progenitors, or, more correctly, as a foundation and institution of their own, as a new and separate body, it was exercised after a like manner; they never dreamed of demanding it of their pagan brethren, or of claiming it as a usage of which they had robbed their forefathers of Palestine, and now wielded over them. Few in numbersweak in power-at first they could not had they willed it for many centuries when they could they did not; and when they did, (although it invalidated not the truths or sanctity of their religion) yet I will not hesitate to say, that it degraded the purity * As to communicating with them, in a religious sense.