which he had unconsciously reckoned upon, and which, unknown to himself, he had been reckoning upon as his reward. Gradual changes take place, until at last the genius-no, the devil-of Toryism clutches him, into its box he goes, and comes out finally a crawling, creeping creature, who will do anything for place. He is shackled and made their hack; he is laughed at by his old companions, he sinks into dulness; or plays the buffoon, as the only chance of securing something of that notoriety, the love of which was, in his character, the root of all the evil.

Next comes the clerical box, which is the more melancholy, as the one qualification for any service connected with the mission of Jesus of Nazareth-the chief characteristic of which was its simplicity, so remote from the forms and excrescences of the English Church-should be an entire devotion of the will, founded on a becoming fitness for that vocation rather than any other. 'His service' should be perfect freedom.' How many are forced into the box' whose character, whose pursuits, whose tastes, would lead them in a totally different direction! With some (the better and fewer) it is a fancied notion of duty, accompanied with a desire not to disappoint their friends; with others, it is the wish to attain a certain station in society-for, as the wife of a clergyman once remarked, the clergy rank next to the nobility!' The greater part, so far from being moved by the spirit of God,' are moved simply by the argumentum ad pocketum. How many, who would have made first-rate actors, or artists, or musicians, who would have assisted in refining the human soul, or cheering the human heart, have failed to do aught, in their forced vocation, save the administering soporifics to their congregation on a Sunday, marrying couples, christening children, or endeavouring to administer cold comfort to some poor sick creature during the week. They do their duty tolerably, but it is done merely as a duty, not, as it ought to be, as a pleasure. Their true genius is in shackles; they have not the kind of talent, or of feeling, required of them, and they stoop to the dishonesty of appropriating that of others without any acknowledgment, as the thousand bought manuscript sermons will testify. There must be a want of pure frankness in a nature that can do this. But, say they, we cannot starve.' True-but better wear a fustian jacket in honesty, than a black gown in meanness.

Next comes the more innocent victim of the legal box. He suffers himself to be caught by the trap of the law, he feels himself hemmed in on all sides; if he consider himself safe one way, there is a chancery suit threatening him in another, or there is some uncivil civil process that is sure to be lost-or won, it matters little which, for the gains are swallowed up by the leviathan of the law, far more readily than was Jonah of old by the briny monster, as we will venture to affirm its swallow to be infinitely more capacious. He is in a miserable condition, and he kicks

against the enclosure, which holds him, again and again. All in vain! He must submit; and he finds too late his error in not heeding the advice of Christ, If any man will sue thee at the law and take away thy coat, give him thy cloak also.' He too is turned out of the box at last, to be made sport of by those who have fleeced him, and who will never let him go, as long as they can keep the shackle on him and still retain him in their power. The box of social law is far more mischievous and miserable in its consequences than any of the others; because its inflictions are more generally diffused. There are so many classes of people who are subjected to its torture-a moral torture, worse to bear, and more crippling to the energies of the mind and heart, than were the iniquitous inquisitorial torments that deformed and maimed the body. Society,' the world,' people,' with the mysterious'on dit' as a witness, have established an inquisition after the most rigid and unsparing Spanish policy. It is a selfelected judgment; it employs masked witnesses; it endeavours, like its prototype, to torture into falsehood; and would doom its victims to cells of perpetual moral darkness, away from the sun and air, and all the precious influences of social life. Thus it does, or would try to do, with those who dare to question its established laws.

6

And now how, and upon whom, does this last torture box act? We will take, for instance, a girl brought up without any regard to the mere forms of society; free to think, free to look, free to speak her thoughts, with this one object always before her-the desire after truth, to which she would look as the eagle looks upon the sun, whether soaring upward or taking a downward flight, always keeping that one light of life in view. The first part of her life is easy; the child may do what in the woman may be conspicuous; and conspicuous for why? Because it is without that worldly varnish which society' wears as a livery, to the injury, and sometimes destruction, of originality of character; just as painting over a beautiful delicately-chiselled statue would destroy its sharpness. Women become, like soldiers, so many slaves in uniform, to go through their various exercises (though without ever standing at ease') just as society may bid. The single-hearted, the frank, the unsuspicious followers of their own generous impulses, these are the selected victims. They are taught, that to exclaim wherever they find beauty, to yield genuine admiration to whatever attracts their eye, to leap to do a service whenever they can, without respect to persons, is 'extraordinary,' 'eccentric,' 'wild,' incautious. As the girl grows up she finds a thousand checks to the naturally open-hearted expression of her pure unquestionable feelings. Even the most rigid can detect no fault in the feeling itself, but they shake their heads and bid her be careful how she looks, for fear of the world' what she says, for fear of the world.' In time she

acquires a habit of nervous consciousness which takes the name of modesty, but really is vanity; an excessive desire of approbation, a thing she never used to care or think about except from those she loved, and which she runs the risk of losing by her excessive wish to gain. She is constantly afraid of committing herself, of saying too much, of showing her feelings too much, of doing those things she ought not to do,' and leaving the worldly customs undone which she has been taught that society expects from her, in fact, she is in the box:' she went in a pure, warmhearted, unconventual, genuine girl-she comes out an affected, meretricious, morally-distorted woman; her intellect enfeebled; her virtue a negative; without individuality-a mere machine. It may chance that she has intellect sufficient to assert her right to be something more than a puppet; and then, owing to the unnatural restraint, it shows itself in all sorts of eccentricities, tinctured with an admixture of bravado. And thus are women subjected to be, by turns, laughed at, despised, or condemned, by 'the world;' that very world which has tempted them into the

error.

And now comes the worst box of all, the box of marriage; and for this reason, that it is the evil of all others which inflicts the deepest injury on posterity. It is the only box which is entered in couples; and society says that the two shall remain bound to each other for life, however dissimilarity of feeling may make a dissolution of the contract desirable: thus yielding a superior privilege to Messrs. Hubbins and Gubbins in the formation of their business partnership. It is said that people enter into it voluntarily, knowing the consequences. They do not know the consequences. They marry young, each in a state of undeveloped intellect and feeling; and the change in themselves which time produces, and the different action of circumstances upon them, may be divorcing them from each other, in spite of all their wishes to remain in sympathy. Love never came by effort. It is said, and with truth, of a popular Calvinistic preacher, that, on being repeatedly urged by his father to marry a lady who possessed sundry golden temptations, he replied, Father, I have tried to like her; I have prayed that I might like her; but I cannot like her.'* His terms of adjuration must have been a curiosity; they should have been preserved in some un-common prayer-book, for the benefit of others similarly circumstanced! But, at all events, it is one proof amongst the 999,999, that love cannot be created out of the wish to have it, but is a feeling dependent upon a positive existing sympathy. People do not know the consequences. They marry without any intention to deceive-they are themselves deceived. They have a liking for persons more than qualities. The error too often consists in the excess of a virtue; in goodness that thinks another like itself, or, where there is anything like,

*He afterwards married her, nevertheless,

doubt, generously turning the scale on the favourable side. A glowing imagination deifies its object, and thereby is committed that grievous mistake, which we so frequently see, of falling in love,' instead of, as it should ever be, rising into love. But, says another, even should a marriage prove unsuitable, a life of struggle helps to the attainment of moral strength. It is not true. It is a mistake to suppose that continued resistance to the action of unfavourable circumstances is a good and tolerance to inferiority is worse. Better be comparatively miserable with a consciousness of inferior unfitness, than comparatively what is called happy in lowering yourself to it. I am supposing that the hope of elevating it has been proved a fallacy. No; continued painful struggle no more strengthens the mind, than continual painful effort strengthens the muscles: it exhausts the energy of both. There must be hope beyond-there must be something to struggle for, as well as to struggle against.

It

And what says society to help them out of their sufferings? says that the error shall be permanent-that it will visit with its direst vengeance those who dare to dispute the wisdom of the law it hath set up. It is to be adhered to with a tenacity that would go to prove that the people are made for the good of the law, rather than the law made for the good of the people. It con demns one, pure and well-intentioned, to the companionship of a man unfitted for her. She has not intellect sufficient to see the immorality of her position, nor courage enough to free herself from it. It condemns another to the degradation of seeking communion with, and being dependent upon, one who would avoid her. It encourages and legalizes the horrible transformation of man into a mere animal. Where the moral and intellectual qualities find no sympathy to warm them into progression, people too often, like the poor whose pleasures are circumscribed and only the inferior ones within reach, leave the finer part of their nature totally uncultivated, and deteriorate towards the brute. Here, too, is the secret of that 'original sin' that has caused so many a theological dispute. Here is the real crime against society! This incompleteness of sympathy, this prevalence of selfish gratification, is the cause of the unaccountable waywardnesses, caprices, and petulancies of children, that have so often puzzled physicians, metaphysicians, mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, and a whole tribe of uncles and aunts to boot. It is this which appears to us to settle the question, when the honest and mistaken social moralist would leave things as they are to the gradual action of an improvement in education. Were the sole mischievous results the unhappiness of the contracting parties themselves, there might be room for a doubt, but the real evil lies in the injury done to society by the results of ill-assorted marriages, and to continue the necessity of such a state of things is to keep up a constant supply of mischief for education

to try to remedy. But how many make it a matter of principle? One out of a thousand is a liberally allowed proportion. No-it is what will the world say? what will the world think?' what will the world do? This world,' this delicate monster who likes nothing so well as to prey on precious human hearts, how he stands by, and grins in triumph, when he sees the constantly filling box' periodically emptied of its contents! How he loves the sound of the clanking of the fetter, be it of gold or iron! How he makes sport of the immoral distortion occasioned by the hopeless shackle! How he enjoys, by turns, each strange vagary, angry passion, odious sensuality, or morbid stupidity, the result of the unnatural bond!

It is this world' who is the chief proprietor of the set of torture boxes we have been enumerating. It is the world' who tempts the young aspirant through his ambition, the poor student through his poverty, the weak litigant by his desire for mastery, or shortsightedness in the knowledge of results. It is the world' who is the grand sitter in judgment upon the incautious and unsuspicious, who often, by pretended adulation, tempts them into its power, that it may make them its victims; and it is 'the world,' who, by perpetuating the error of a mistaken marriage, changes it into a crime against society of the worst possible consequences. Let

the world' look to it-or rather let them look to it no longer. I would say to all, never trust your morality out of your own keeping; regulate it according to your own judgment; but, above all, never yield it into the hands of the world,' or you will find, when it is too late, that you are in the wrong box,' beyond the power of extrication. S. Y.

1

MR. BUCKINGHAM'S COMPENSATION.

SOME of the merchants and manufacturers of Sheffield are bestirring themselves to obtain from the legislature, by petitioning for the adoption of a bill similar to that which was lost last session upon a mere technicality, the means of enforcing such compensation as is justly due from the East India Company to their representative for the grievous oppression practised upon him in India. They have called on others to aid them in this righteous work, and we heartily comply with a request for the insertion of their sketch of a petition, which contains an outline of the merits of the case, in order to facilitate the imitation of their example. We cannot better introduce it than by the following note from a correspondent, whose name we are always glad and proud to inscribe on our

pages.

'MR. EDITOR,-To redress the wronged is with us a sacred duty. In J. S. Buckingham, we have a man whose wrongs enabled him to give us a free trade to India. By speaking (as none but he can speak) mouth to mouth with his fellow-countrymen, he made tens of thousands