admiration, sitting in his easy chair, plotting paragraphs, and meditating how he may undermine her heart with culled phrases at a distance. In periods of separation, the lover who has won in person this sweet privilege; the betrothed, whose hope is secure, may gracefully write what circumstances prevent him from speaking; but to choose such a cold, halting thing as a letter for the chief support of a love-suit, is a folly and an offence which ought to be specially restrained, were not the accidents, discoveries, ridicule, and mal-entendres which ensue, sufficient punishment for those who trust in such an interpreter. The numerous instances of this mode of wooing, from the Heroides down to St. Preux, do not countervail our objection,-there was never a real passion to which epistles have been more than auxiliaries; and, we are persuaded that no true woman's heart (we speak not of persuasions of the judgment) was ever won by such addresses alone. They are only fit for poetasters and pedants, and elderly gentlemen desiring an establishment; to the humiliation of whose vows we trust that none of our beautiful readers will ever be exposed. It is good to eschew confidences in love. They are assuredly impolitic; and we cannot but think them indelicate, and savouring of the green affections which spring up amongst young persons in their teens. The man who talks of his tenderness to any save its chosen object, appears to us as only one degree less criminal than he who boasts of accorded favours. To girls, who are naturally more talkative and confiding, some relaxation of this censure must be allowed; but only in favour of a sister or a companion equally dear and familiar; nor even to such, in the early dawn of her affection. To a girl of true virgin feeling, the first discovery that she loves is not admitted, even in secret, without bashfulness and a certain alarm; and she who is ready to impart it to others, may be very elegant and attractive, but she is not one to touch whose hand we would undertake a pilgrimage. In a man, such openness is unpardonable, no less than foolish; it robs his treasure of half its worth, to expose it to common eyes. He is a poor scholar in the rudiments who does not know "How sweet is Love to them that can dissemble In thoughts and looks, till they have reaped the gains." If he choose a female as his confidante, he most probably offends her, and thereby ensures her enmity, which can disturb the course of his love in a thousand ways; to say nothing of its immediate publication. If a man, besides the indelicacy of the procedure, he runs the risk of provoking rivalry, or ridicule, or counsel, or, what is worse than these, the clumsy attempts at assistance, which good-natured people, who understand nothing of the fastidious nicety of the passion, inflict upon the love-stricken. In some circumstances, such confidences become necessary; but these are only cases of thwarted, or unequal attachment, of which they are not the smallest miseries. They who unprovokedly discharge their amorous emotions upon intimates, are nuisances to society, traitors to the secrecy of love, and architects of their own frequent discomfiture. But the moon is up, and tells us how long we have been dwelling upon this inexhaustible subject. It is time to conclude; and we shall do so, by presenting to our fair readers a quaint and pleasant morsel of lovelore from the pages of an old Spanish master, wherein, under the "device of the four S's," the sum of this gentle science is learnedly expounded. And thus it runs : "Sage must love be,-as worshipping the fame Of its high prize, with fair and worthy pride; In sweet command the willing heart must guide; Or acts designed, in silence to retain. THE SLEEPING CHILD. A BROOK went dancing on its way, And by its sunny margin lay, A lovely infant sleeping. The murmur of the purring stream It is a lovely sight to view, Within this world of sorrow, That earth from heaven may borrow Mayhap, afar on unseen wings, Now hears the burst from golden strings And, with the pure heliacal throng, Around their Maker praising, Thy joyous heart may join the song Ten thousand tongues are raising! Sleep, lovely babe!-for time's cold touch Shall make these visions wither; Youth and the dreams which charm so much, Shall fade and fly together. Then, sleep! while sleep is pure and mild, Ere earthly ties grow stronger, When thou shalt be no more a child, And dream of Heaven no longer. V. T. D. T. HONESTY THE BEST POLICY; OR, DEPRECIATION AT A DISCOUNT. THE depreciation "crotchet" is at length fairly, and, we hope, finally dished. Unless by 'some untoward chance we be soon cast amid the tumults and crimes of a reckless and vengeful revolution, we may depend upon it, we shall never hear of Mr. Attwood's remedies more. And, indeed the party has persevered well! The advocation of the extraordi nary panacea originated with unfortunate land-speculators during the war, who encountered estates under a load of borrowed money, on the infatuated supposition that land could not be bought too dear; and as that accidental high value was not likely, by any chance, to be restored, they have never ceased, until now, to clamour for the permission of Par liament to pay, in some way, their debts by composition. That a scheme so well calculated to relieve their distresses should have been hit upon by the said speculators is indeed nothing wonderful; the only strange part of the comedy is, that they should have succeeded in persuading any portion of the unconcerned public, that the national safety was involved in the success of their proposal. In every proposition, and in every limb of every proposition, brought forward by the depreciators, there is manifest that disregard of inconve nient facts, and that exaggeration of real occurrences, which usually originate in minds agitated by hopeless distress; and however often their assertions have been proved false, and their deductions upset, they accordingly, again and again, return to them in a spirit of obstinate and unflinching iteration. If you ask a depreciator, for instance, what was the amount by which the value of paper remained below the value of gold during the whole existence of the Restriction Act, he will, to a certainty, announce as the permanent or at least general amount, the very utmost difference which obtained between the said values for any-even the briefest period; and if he is not all the more modest, he will step a good way beyond. If the man but thought dispassionately of the nature of the question he is agitating-a question, viz., about the taking money, on pretence of retribution, from his neighbour's pocket, and putting it into his own-his principles of honesty would cause him shun exaggeration as he would shun theft, and, by all means to keep within, rather than go outwards of the mark: but the fact is, he does not, nor ever did think; he is driven on by the consciousness of his own distressed, and perhaps hopeless state, and also, it may be, by a lurking, and not pleasant suspicion, that he is not aiming at a very justifiable method of relieving it. If he had in reality entered upon his task in the spirit of equitable" Adjuster, his principal concern would have manifestly been for the preservation of the landmarks of equity; but his speculations are, on the contrary, strongly odorous of the feelings of sundry Adjusters with rather unpolite names, who, so that they can obtain the desired adjustment, are seldom troubled with many scruples about the equity. But the absurd and unprincipled exaggerations are not confined within these comparatively modest bounds. Few depreciators will consent to stand by the recorded price of gold in paper, as the measure of the under-value of the bank notes; but-if there is the smallest sense or significance in their clamorous misstatements-are bold enough to insist upon our computing it by the high price of certain articles during certain short periods,-ignorant, apparently, or wilfully forgetful of the fact, that an 66 VOL. III.-NO. VI. 2 N the time they allude to, was one of deranged markets, on account of changes as little connected with the Restriction Act as with the phases of the moon; ignorant, that at one period we were driven nearly out of all markets for silk -at another, out of all markets for cotton,-that at a third, the Baltic was as useless to us as a frozen sea,-that the outlets for our Colonial stock were almost periodically deranged,-that, down to the harvest of 1813, we had had, for twenty years, a series of deficient seasons, alternating with seasons of but ordinary fertility with a fatal and most unusual regularity, that during the worst of these seasons the expenses of importation had, in consequence of our state of war, amounted to the enormous sum of 50s. per quarter; and, lastly, altogether forgetful of the effect of speculation during a rising, or prospectively rising market, in enhancing the price under any currency, and thereby preparing for a disastrous recoil. How many, we beg to ask, of the talkers who have of late been so much given to indulge upon the connexion of high prices and paper depreciation, have even looked into Mr. Tooke's elaborate history of the vacillations of that eventful period? How many are acquainted with a tithe of the circumstances then operating upon our fluctuating markets, and have thus qualified themselves for entering upon the inquiry in the sedate and watchful spirit of men aware that it involves the mighty question of their country's honesty? If more had done so, an answer still less equivocal had been given to the clamorous remnant of disappointed speculators, this particular year of our Lord had assuredly furnished fewer followers for Mr. Attwood; and, just by the amount of that abridgment of the Member for Whitehaven's suite, had we counted more eyes open to our true grievances, and more minds intent upon achieving their redress. (See Note end of Article.) There is one other misrepresentation generally hazarded by the depreciators, which has often filled us with amaze. To hear them dilate concerning bygone times, it would seem almost that the period of high prices was a sort of commercial millennium. It would appear to exist in their imagination as a period in which the nation accumulated inconceivable masses of happiness, as well as wasted vast amounts of its resources, a period in which, the faster we spent, the richer and lustier we grew; and it is seemingly because of his belief in its marvellous power of flourishing by means of evacuation, or of the signal support it afforded to the Sangrado system of therapeutics, that Mr. Attwood somewhere conjures us to return to it, if we would avoid the death of the political system under which we live! Now, for all things pertaining to the psychological genus of dreams, and more especially if the dream be a sort of Lay-of-the-Last-Minstrel one, we have the hugest respect; and it is not without pain that we observe the necessity of disturbing this Whitehaven vision. It is really fit, however, that our countrymen call to mind what the period alluded to was; for they are not now political babes, and must therefore no longer talk as such. So far from the period of the Bank Restriction act being one of commercial prosperity, it is hazarding little to allege that, try it by what test you may, there would be a difficulty of discovering another equally brief period, so full of commercial disaster. Something may be indicated by the following short list of bankruptcies : Average Annual number of Bankrupts. For seven years, ending 1809, For seven years, ending 1816, For seven years, ending 1823, 1272 2231 1351 For 1823 itself, the number was only 1070; while for 1810, it was 2314; for 1811, 2500; for 1812, 2228; for 1815, 2284; for 1816, 2731. More emphatically still-in 1810, commissions were issued against 26 bankers; in 1812, against 17; in 1814, against 29; in 1815, against 26; and in 1816, against 37. Facts like these do somewhat to awaken us from the dream; and if we farther clear up our reminiscences of that period, still more expressive evidence will be obtained. Down to the harvest of 1813, or rather, perhaps, to the harvest of 1818, when a final blow was struck at the extravagant elevation of corn, by the revolution of a new epocha in the mysterious cycle of the weather, it is allowed that, with only a few slight and temporary depressions, a great and general excitement prevailed amongst agriculturists. It is easy to conceive how strongly an unwonted and almost prevalent high price would affect the classes engaged in the work of cultivation; and the memory of most of us will suffice to bring up the lively picture of farmers changing altogether their habits and style of living; sedate tradesmen seduced to become clodhoppers, in hope of fortunes; the rapid circulation of land as an article of merchandize; the determination of every one who could beg or borrow, to make money by buying estates; the extraordinary number of paper purchases; and, finally, the immediate or drawn-out ruin alike of tenants and debtor landlords, who leased and purchased in the vain hope that high prices could endure for ever. The revulsion here, we say, came late; why it did so will be inexplicable so long as the changes of weather are mysterious; but, because of the lateness of its arrival, all who were engaged in these land transactions have at once a long period of factitious prosperity to look back to with lingering eye, and as much shew of reason, as a partial correspondence of time can give them, for reposing the burden of their misfortunes upon the back of Peel's Bill. Agriculture, however, was not then, more than now, the only, or even the staple employment of the capital of Great Britain; and although our depreciators naturally enough pass by or misrepresent the commercial history of the period, we shall not affect similar forgetfulness. And how, under existing circumstances, could commerce be prosperous? Is the exorbitant price of the necessaries of life an element of a flourishing commercial state? Answer for us, ye reminiscences of meal-mobs! The truth is, that this evil alone-for except to rent-drawers, (including farmers drawing rent in virtue of their old and unexhausted leases,) such high price is an evil of the most serious kind to all-this evil alone, we say, had produced a period of unalleviated and permanent commercial depression. But its influence was vastly aggravated by another circumstance, which, strangely enough, tended to mislead the unthinking into a belief of commercial prosperity. Let the reader dwell for a moment upon the state of our external relations in those days, and tell us first, whether in such a state we could have commercial prosperity? It might be alleged without hazarding exaggeration, that no merchant at the beginning of a year could calculate whence he would draw his supplies, or where find his markets, at the year's end. On one shifting in the political sky, Italy became shut against him; then it was Spain-then all Europe, excepting Sweden; then America blackened her aspect, and Brazil invited exports;-then, again, the tables turned,-Brazil was discovered to be a cheat, but Spain was cleared, and Russia opened by the sacrifice of Moscow. What merchant could expect prosperity here? What depreciator would choose risk his capital amid changes so unparalleled, so confounding? And yet these were the very alternations, which disguised the physiognomy of what was truly a period of |