they are very careful not to produce another. Confessedly, the depreciation which did exist was most baneful, and the cause of much positive spoliation. But there is no use in magnifying injustice. The smallest portion of it is hateful enough; and it certainly shews no hatred of it, to exaggerate the past as the ground of fresh perpetrations. 2. The second money column records the current price of wheat during a longer period. From 1801, part of the high price is confessedly due to the low value of the paper; but how little connexion do these figures establish between that low value and the fluctuations of price! There existed, therefore, some far more powerful deranging cause. 3. The third and last money column, shows all these prices reduced to gold prices; so that it points out the fluctuations which took place independently of the depreciation, viz., the natural fluctuations. These were owing wholly to the seasons and obstructed importation. The elevation, it will be observed, down to 1814, is sufficiently great to have given rise to much speculation, and the subsequent fall quite adequate to account for the ensuing loss. The depreciation did indeed aggravate all, but it was not the principal cause. The disappointed speculators in cotton or silk might have cried out for adjustment with as good face as the agriculturists; and so perhaps they would, but they were ruined outright and set adrift, whereas the wailings of many finger-burnt estate-purchasers have not ceased until the present hour. The difference arose from the possibility of obtaining permanent loans upon estates. Attention to the facts contained in the foregoing table will enable us to reduce much of this ridiculous and unfounded clamour to its true dimensions. II. On the effect of the Resumption Act. It appears from the foregoing table that, in 1819, when Mr. Peel's Bill passed, the depreciation of paper was only £4, 9s. per cent.; that, in the year 1829, it fell to £2, 12s. per cent., and the next year sank to 0,—or that then paper rose to par. Now it would seem manifest, that the only effect which the passing of that act, or, in other words, that substitution of gold for paper, could have had upon general prices, is measurable by the small amount of depreciation appearing in our table; and, certainly, if it had any other effect, that effect has not, up to this moment, been demonstrated or explained. It is Mr. Cayley, we think, who asserts that although the subsequent fall of prices has never been proved to be connected with Peel's Bill as with its CAUSE, it must, nevertheless, be referred to it on account of concomitance: an odd principle, and not hitherto accepted in logic. Concomitance is nothing, but a reason for our inquir ing, whether or not the concomitant circumstance is a cause. Attempts have often been made to get over the apparent difficulty, by imagining a rise in the value of gold of 20 or 25 per cent. on account of our new demand for it as circulating medium; but they are marked by the exaggeration usual to the dogmatists we combat. Taking into account the whole mass of precious metals in Europe, it is not possible that the ten or twelve millions exported in consequence of our Restriction Act could have lowered their value in the general market more than 1 per cent., even had other circumstances remained the same; and, supposing another 1 per cent. of rise to have taken place on our resumption of metallic currency, the sum of 2 per cent. was the very utmost requiring to be added to the foregoing amount in order to adjust it into a correct measure of the depreciation. But other circumstances did not remain the same. Instead of having its value on the continent lowered by the supply from Great Britain, gold was very scarce there, and hence very high during the whole period of the war. Nor is the reason a mystery. A vast quantity of it was absorbed in the military chests of the leading powers; and a still greater quantity disappeared, in consequence of that practice of private hoarding necessarily connected with a state of war. These disturbing causes ceased on the restoration of tranquillity: the precious metals re-appeared, and their value returned to par. If gentlemen who are so apt to theorize with vast confidence on this intricate subject, would but take the trouble to look into its details with something of the spirit in which they would inquire into a dark point connected with their own affairs, we should, doubtless, much sooner attain the knowledge we are in quest of. It would be painful to think that the passion for a little transient notoriety, or the offering up of a whiff of incense to personal obstinacy or conceit, could occupy, in any good reformer's mind, the place of that only noble, that only laudable ambition-the desire to dissever truth from union with falsehood and half-knowledge, and thereby to advance the permanent interests of our own minds, as well as those of all mankind. Referring again to the effects of Peel's Bill, be it noticed, that if mystery is still thought to rest over them, the cloud will never be blown away by thoughtless or random assertion. THE PROSPECTS OF BRITAIN. BY THE AUTHOR OF "POLAND." ongs, Flitted like moving shadows o'er her face; Men looked, and thought, and wisted not, but looked Forward with doubt, as did the ancient seer For Salem's ruin. In the shifting scroll Of their own hearts they tried to read their doom, Upon their neighbour's face, as if to see The index of all hearts; but there was writ No words, but doubt and dread inscrutable! Look on them now: that doubt has passed away; Sits lightly on their breasts; yet not with shouts, They hail the image of all freedom, Truth. After some day of victory and death, When still upon the outskirts of the plain The foe lies hovering. Let us watch and pray, Silent but not asleep: the hurricane Gives to the idle gazer small presage Or warning of its advent; he who reads, Morning and night, in Heaven's mysterious book, Wherein the birth of coming wrath is told, Knoweth its hour, and fleeth unto the plain. Truth may be learned from semblance-life from that Which lives not save in fancy; the thin shades, Wrought by a master-hand, have attributes One was a landscape, in a northern clime : Mingled their mimic foliage; within The shade was dense; yet through the watery gloom One might discern a huge and shapeless shrine, A heavy altar, on whose base was writ "CORRUPTION !"-Some there were who knelt to pray Not as a good man prays unto his God, But as some wretch, who by unholy league Hath bargained with a fiend, prefers his wish, Half-shuddering, to the master whom he serves ! Of leafless pines, a hundred winters old, Bore on their heads the bold and simple arch; To its patrician mother!-there the sire Beside his dying babes-and there the son Spurned by the menials in that lordly hall Were here a blessing. Yet the gates were closed! Of God may be as closed to him and his ! A morn in spring time, when the balmy winds The sun was breaking from a melting veil, And pouring chastened splendour on the scene; The light-green buds were bursting on the trees Its germ above the ground; the early flowers, Were carpeting the mead; and through the glade In gamesome gambol. Joy beamed everywhere; Ships, whitely winged, were passing to and fro, One word was writ beneath-one word—no more- Which was their only mistress and their queen! But where was that high palace? Where the gate Shut to the poor and opened to the rich, As if a different blood had swelled their veins, And mankind were not brothers? They were gone- Of happy homes; the clematis and vine A mirthful face was seen. No pomp was there; No door was shut against the wanderer's prayer, Such the scenes Such Britain was, and such shall Britain be! Which is the better? Tell me, ye faint hearts, ON PERIODICAL LITERATURE. VOLTAIRE was just, in commenting upon the singular degree to which societies of men become the bond-slaves of mere words. They persist in fashioning their opinions and conduct according to the precept of a dogma, or the definition of an adage, either of which has long since lost all fitness to the objects of its application. Such catch-words and noms de guerre resemble the camp-fires cunningly left burning by a retreating army; which make a shew of a great host, whereas the men-at-arms, horses, and baggage have betaken themselves elsewhere. They peculiarly flourish in literature; in which, as it deals with men through their imagination and reflections thus indirectly influencing their conduct, heresies and mistakes are not necessarily detected, as in more practical matters, by the test of immediate experiment. Thus, one entire generation continued, in defiance of much weariness, to read the folio romances of Calprenéde and his compeers, because such had been reputed delectable and courtly by the previous age. For a hundred years, from a similar cause, have the French, in spite of their natural feelings and necessities, been adoring the models of their classicisme; and have only in the present day discovered, that what they swallowed for bread was, after all, but a stone. The pretension of a religious title, in many amusing instances, has won for a work long and unquestioned currency amongst the devout, until some orthodox inquirer discovered, to the consternation of the faithful, that it was bristling with damnable heresies. And in England, at the present day, our works of imagination, in spite of the achievements of Scott and Edgeworth, with many respectable persons yet labour under a censure, adhering to the awful term "Novel," which was uttered with less injustice during the period when Monk Lewis and the Minerva press were in full blow and activity. Most peculiarly, however, is the error, produced by attaching inflexible meanings to such changeable matters, to be remarked in the contradictory position of our Periodical Literature. It is still customary to speak of Journals and Magazines as of things trivial, unimportant and ephemeral. This is the more curious, inasmuch as the immense circulation of these literary teachers proves, either that in practice they are otherwise regarded, or that (which Heaven forefend!) two-thirds of English readers have grown utterly frivolous and distracted. But the advance of Periodicals upon the territory of other schools has been comparatively recent; their predecessors were abundantly insignificant; accordingly, while natural feeling eagerly devours their words, old habit stands by and sneers, even while the bonne bouche is between the lips. The effect of this inconsistency, both upon those who write and those who read, is, like every false thing, purely mischievous; and, since the authority and diffusion of Periodical works are destined, unless we mistake the signs of the times, to wax yet stronger and wider, and to exercise a most significant influence over the intellectual prospects of the next century, we shall not deem the time misapplied in conveying to our readers some long-digested thoughts upon the subject. The origin of our literary democracy is, as we have remarked, recent. It is not half a century since the public had nothing more fresh or substantial in this line than the doting "Gentleman's," or still more vapid |