had been somewhat too polite and complimentary, and even raved a great deal about post-horses and Gretna Green. I was now asked by a fat old lady, who turned out to be my Dulcinea's aunt, whether I was serious in my proposals, and if so, (which she could not permit herself to doubt,) what I was disposed to settle on her amiable, injured, too susceptible, but unportioned niece. I professed a total ignorance of the whole transaction, hinted that I was liable to fits of madness, in corroboration of which, I gnashed my teeth, and looked as horrible as I could, and next day removed into the delights and freedom of an inn. It is a melancholy circumstance, that in a Christian land there should be places in which it is impossible to walk up stairs without a candle after a quiet dinner with a friend, without a manifest risk of stumbling into a marriage. Luckily, in a hotel there is no such danger as this. Boots and the head waiter, who convey any incapacitated gentleman to his room, rarely translate his compliments and praises into a declaration of attachment; so that, after an agreeable night of çigars and conversation, I can comfortably lay myself down to sleep, in the assurance of waking next morning to the enjoyment of celibacy and soda-water. On first arriving in a town, I know nothing so detestable as letters of introduction; but luckily, though it is impossible to refuse them from your friends, there is not the least necessity for presenting them. I have at this moment, I suppose, some scores of unknown acquaintances at the bottom of my trunk, whose fate I often pity in having no opportunity of securing the friendship of an individual so wonderfully recommended. A man ought always to form his own friends, and assuredly there is no such field for a crop of them as the coffee-room of an inn. There you may speak for half an hour to your neighbour on any subject you please: if you find him a violent whig, a liberal, a profane swearer, or a hypocrite, or any thing of that sort, treat him in future with the silent contempt he deserves. But if you discover him to be one of the right kind, how easy it is to convert the distance of unintroduced acquaintance into the cordiality of old and well-cemented friendship. 66 If you once dine together in the same box, before you have demolished the last limb of the turkey, and sipt the last glass of the Madeira, his face is as familiar to you as your glove,and at the end of the evening, amidst the wreck of devilled bones, and the remnants of what once was fruit and flower," opposite to you in a dim, mystic indistinctness, awful, and yet wonderfully beloved, you see sitting the chosen friend of your soul, whose name (which you never heard) you wonder you have forgot, ten, whose friends, home, parentage, and education, are to you mere ob jects of conjecture, but who, in the absence of all collateral ties, as you swallow the last bumper to his health, is "dear as the ruddy drops which warm your heart." Such friendships as these are ge nerally lasting. You take a personal pride in finding you have not been deceived in your choice, and he is endeared to you by being a friend entirely of your own acquisition Far different this from the feelings you entertain towards the friend of your friend. In this case his kindness appears to you to be scarcely voluntary, and you fancy it is less bestowed on you, quasi yourself, than as the representative of the person who introduced you. You are assured that any one with the same recommendation, would be received with the same attention; and even the smiles of the ladies, though in the first instance falling on yourself, you fear may have been intended to "cannon" on your friend. You enact the miserable part of the hat stuck on a pole, to which as much deference is paid as to the distant individual who hung it there; but, in spite of all the kindness and hospitality of those around you, you can't help feeling all the time that if Gesler is deposed, the hat will sink from its high estate, and become a very ordinary, and by no means a favourite, beaver. To a man, who, like myself, trusts to his own taste in the selection of his friends, Bath is an inexhaustible store shop, where he may find them of all sorts and sizes, almost ready made. An universal philanthropy seems spread over all its inhabitants, and every county in England, Scotland, and the Emerald Isle, seems to send a deputation of the most warm-hearted and access ible of its sons and daughters to the city of King Bladud. The ladies are winning beyond any ill-favoured Benedict's belief. The high cheekbones of Aberdeenawa, the delicate brogue of Munster, and the pure red and white of Lancashire or Surrey, are all there-equally profuse of their smiles and kindness, and equally ready to form a friendship to be ended only with their lives. Alas! that it is impossible to retain for any length of time the vantage ground of non-acquaintance! Few faces can stand the test of intimacy. Some tooth absent without leave is discovered to the watchful observer in the negligence of the laugh, or some trait of temper contracts the marble brow, where to the unacquainted beholder good-humour" or solemn contemplation love to dwell." And besides this advantage, unless you converse with the object of your admiration, you run no risk of having that admiration diminished by an exhibition of her colloquial defects. At night, in the pauses of conversation among the beaux esprits of the Divan, you can whiff your çigar, and raise a lovely dream of the pure and delicate maiden you admired in the morning in the circus. No rude reality comes in the semblance of a silly question to destroy the magic of those rosy lips, no vacant stare dims the celestial loveliness of those deep blue eyes; but there she smiles upon you through the thin baze issuing from your gently breathing Havannah, clothed in all earthly beauty, like a goddess of the days of old, revealing herself to some favoured worshipper through the shadowing drapery of her ambrosial cloud. But short-lived and transitory is this blissful state of ignorance and admiration. By a variety of meetings, you cannot tell where, by seeing her smile so often that at last you fancy she smiles on you,-by sitting in the same box at the play, and bowing to her cousin, with whom she is generally to be found, you are surprised to discover, in spite of your efforts to remain" alike unknowing and unknown," that you have met, and smiled, and cousined yourself into an acquaintance. Farewell after that, to the long protracted and unheeded gaze,-farewell to the turn of admiration after you are nast, farewell to dream, and reverie and romance! Sad reality steps in, [July, and the being that you painted as and overturns your "noble theories," the inhabitant of some fairy bower, of your far-off wonder and venerathe creature who had been the object tion,-" Too fair to worship, too confess resides on the second floor of divine to love," you are forced to is solicitous about the colour of a a boarding-house in Pulteney Street, ribbon, and above all things else in the world is anxious to get married. But, alas! even in a town, Time's progress scarcely deserves the name of flight. No contrivances can protract breakfast beyond twelve o'clock. Anewspaper-puffs, advertisements, and all-is but a brief enjoyment to those whom the schoolmaster and the march of intellect have taught to read without stopping very often to spell. For my own part, I was grateful to the Russian Campaign; the very names of the heroes on either side were a tower of strength, and prolonged the perusal by at least twenty minutes. But after a while I felt tempted to skip over those prodigious combinations of consonants, and was contented to believe in the capture and demolition of unnameable towns by gallant and unpronounceable generals. The He rald, talented and well-edited paper as it is, comes by degrees to a conclusion; street and square, bustling and beautiful though they be, grow silent and deserted; the pump-room, where every fiddlestick seems less im bued with rosin than Rossini, closes its charmed doors, or exchanges the group of beauty, and the swell of music, for the tottering steps of superannuated invalids. Day after day you miss some glass of fashion, or some mould of form, from her accustomed walk. "Star after star decays,"-gaiety comes imperceptibly to a close,-concerts are less frequent, and the silver voice of Manners only at intervals, few and far between, wraps your senses in Elysium; and in fact, (for there is no denying it,) Bath itself becomes as dull and vapid as a pseudo-religious poem. Amidst the most fearful forebodings of the amount of your '' bill, you determine on migration you mourn over the changeableness of pleasure, as you extricate your name from the ill-omened side of the ledger of the classic Tully, in ཝཱ ferior, perhaps, to his Roman prototype in eloquence, but immeasurably above even that vain-glorious orator in his puffs; and finally (how can the most obdurate heart remain unmelted?)-amid the tears of inconsolable waiters-amid the groans of overburdened Boots, you mount once more the vehicle which conveyed you from your rural home, and return to muse till the succeeding winter on all that you saw and heard; on the walk by the side of the canal, -on the whisper in the octagon a the rooms,-on the bracelet retained in memory of your visit to the Sydney Gardens,-on the time when that bracelet is faithfully to be returned. "Hush, hush, my dark spirit." I shall certainly get every room in my cottage painted, and have three or four apartments built during the autumn,-a drawing-room, two bedrooms, a nursery. "There's a braw time comin'." ΑΝ ΟΧΟΝΙΑΝ. BALANCE OF THE FOOD AND NUMBERS OF ANIMATED NATURE.* quirements; and of it Mr Sadler was as the last resource of the dull and shallow, that he was declamatory and rhetorical-and even poetical; and verily he is so-on fit occasions; but they who have tried to grapple with him, in the House or out of it, have found that in argument he can take good hold, and knows a chip or two in wrestlingas, for example, that amiable and intelligent member, Mr Wilmot Horton, who, on the Emigration Question, suddenly challenged Mr Sadler to try a bout, and though the member for Newark was taken by surprise, and without preparation, such another fair back-fall as he gave his challenger never resounded through St Stephen's. It is all well for those to accuse a speaker of declamation, who themselves cannot utter six con * Dissertation' appended to the Treatise on the Law of Population, by M. T. Sadler, M.P. London. Murray. 1830. secutive sentences without the most alarming and portentous stuttering; prosers shew their piety in lauding the gods for that they have not been made poetical, and are naturally as afraid of a figure of speech as of a ghost; a summer-up of the tottle of the whole, finding no rhetoric in Cocker, despises it even in a Canning; and none are so incapable of judging of the argumentative as the disputatious :-But the men of true power or genius, and who can themselves, as occasion requires, deal in declamation, rhetoric, poetry, reasoning, like Plunkett or Brougham, have admitted that Mr Sadler is-as the world goes-a master in all those arts, and that on great subjects which he has studied, and on which he rises prepared, AN ORATOR. But our business is not now with this distinguished man as a member of Parliament-he comes before the public as the author of one of the most ingenious, able, and learned works, on perhaps the most difficult and important part of Political Economy, that has been given to the world since Political Economy deserved the name of a mixed Science. In an early number we shall give an ample statement of his refutation of the Malthusian doctrine; and also an account of that doctrine which he would substitute in its place. The work was a good deal abused before it was published, by some ingenious persons, who, since its publication, have been mum; nor, as far as we have seen, have any of the Malthu sians yet made upon it any formidable attack. An answer to it, consist ing of a couple of columns, appeared in that most excellent weekly paper, the Spectator; but though evidently written by an able man and conversant with the science, it was truly a lame and most manc affair. The writer was much puzzled and perplexed with Mr Sadler's long tables of figures and well he might-for they contain calculations that seem to furnish the most appalling refutations of many of the statements on which Mr Malthus sought to base his doctrine. If Mr Sadler is to be answered at all, it will not be in a couple of columns, but it must be in a book. The Spectator is strong in its Political Economy, as indeed it is in almost every thing else; and we read, if not with out entire conviction, certainly with pleasure and profit, that very inge nious plan of Emigration which formed an appendix to one of its numbers a few months ago. Let the writer of that appendix give us another in refutation of Mr Sadler, and we pledge ourselves that it shall not go without an adverse, but, at the same time, a friendly notice, as long perhaps as itself. The Spectator is a fair and honourable opponent, though he would lose no character by ceasing to sneer at such a man as Mr Sadler; but other papers there are, some without power, some without principle, and some without either who keep dogging Mr Sadler's heels after the uncertain fashion of curs, who some times on the street push their snoking noses against the calves of the lieges' legs, whether in blind search of a master, or in blinder hydrophobia, who can say?-though none can deny that they deserve their kicking. How sardonically laughs the public-pensive no more-at the mongrels who imagine themselves Cynics, simply because they can bark! They have entered into a league, offensive and defensive, to sneer down a certain public character-say Mr Sadlerand, on the third Saturday, they are stifled in their own slaver. Derision must be made of sterner stuff than an article even in the Times to "sneer down"-that we believe is the usual slang word of all slanderous scribblers-any man of the most ordinary intellectual stature; for it is astonishing to see the successful stand made even by a weak honest man against the strongest knave. But when the Sneered-at is great in intellectual and moral power, and the Sneerer wholly worthless, the growl of the peevish starveling becomes a croak, and the croak a hiss, and the hiss a gasp that speaks of suicide by strangulation. So it often is-and in no other case more conspicuously than in Mr Sadler's-with some of the guides, forsooth, of Public Opinion! But the admirable old Public, God bless her!-nay,say not old—the admirable young, bold, bright, and buxom Public-just like Miss in her teens running off to Gretna-Green with her own chosen suitor, out of a score of sailors, and soldiers, and civilians selects such a man, for example, as the member of Newark, places her colours in his cap, and on his return from routing all his foes, flings her arms round his neck, and absolutely smothers him with kisses. The rejected slanderers sneak into corners and bite their thumbs-the nails whereof have already been nibbled to the quick in a habit unconsciously acquired by thirst and hunger. Of Mr Sadler's great work hereaf ter-at present we shall confine our attention to this most beautiful Dissertation, written in disproof of that superfecundity, by Malthus equally asserted of all the inferior orders of animated existences as of the human race. Its argument is, indeed, as Mr Sadler says, a corollary of the great argument urged against the Malthusian theory, if not an essential part of it. For that theory comprehends all the living orders of creation, from man down to his brother worm. We are necessarily so familiar every hour of the day with the proportion observable between the numbers and necessities of living beings, and the means of subsistence prepared for them, that our minds are apt either to lose those feelings of admiration with which it must otherwise be regarded, or to be overwhelmed and lost in a vague astonishment. To bring and keep before our minds the contemplation of the minute and complicated means by which that supply is accomplished by Providence, is the aim of this admirable Dissertation; and we do not hesitate to say that it is a noble addition to those rich stores of learning and wisdom which in our country have been so poured and heaped up into Natural Theology, that scepticism sinks and dies beneath the weight of the accumulated proofs and evidences of the perfect goodness of God. The more knowledge has accumulated, the more sacredly plain, says Mr Sadler, has this branch of the diyine economy become, and all doubts vanished of the sufficiency of the means of subsistence which nature furnishes for all her offspring. But the dogma broached by Mr Malthus, and which Mr Sadler does not hesitate to call an "indelible disgrace to the age," does indeed darken dismally the decrees of Providence. According to him, there is a constant tendency in all animated life to increase beyond the nourishment prepared for it; according to him, nature has scattered the seeds of life abroad with the most profuse and liberal hand, but has been comparatively sparing in the room and nourishment necessary to rear them! And the deficiency thus represented by him as established by all the analogies of nature, is pro nounced by him to have been the source of the severest and most de grading evils which the human race has suffered. Has the Author of nature indeed made this grievous mis calculation, Mr Sadler asks, in reference to the food and numbers of his offspring-or, in other words, a calculation that takes universal insufficiency as its basis? No; and forthwith he sets himself to rebut that strange hy, pothesis, by means of the very analogies by which it professes to be supported, and by an appeal not only to animated, but to inanimate creation. Each of these, he undertakes to shew, has the strictest mutual relations-in all their complicated adaptations, involving calculations the most minute as well as stupendous, nothing superfluous, nothing deficient,-but open to our eyes when freed from their film by the light of philosophy and religion, without one single flaw. The Dissertation is composed throughout in an animated and eloquent style, and breathes a fine and chastened enthusiasm. Perhaps there may be some occasional repetitions and redundancies, chiefly, we suspect, arising from the circumstance of its being two discourses blended into one; and to the same cause probably may be attributed, here and there, some little confusion in the arrangement. But the main current of the argument, though sometimes rather broken, is always strong and clear; its course, though circuitous, is always seen tending towards one direction; and it has no resemblance to a canal, but always to a river having its source among the sacred mountains. Heaven preserve us! how arid are the writings of the economists! Reading their works is like toiling across a flat desert ankledeep in sand, no well,-no oasis,→ all dry dust, and not a single tree. No wonder so many travellers sink and are seen no more; and that they are now shy of joining even the ch |