easily distinguished by the simplest practitioners in medicine; and we strongly and earnestly-nay, seriously and solemnly-recommend to Mr Stokes a dose of Glaubers.

Let the primæ via be well cleaned out-as well as a blackleg's purse with a bad book after the Derbyand a day or two afterwards, he may, without danger-nay, with great propriety, retire to the Desert not forgetting to put a cold fowl and a quartern loaf in his pouch, for he will wax exceeding yawp when the salts have done their work; and then, instead of giving way to melancholy, why, he will be busy picking a merry thought, and betting right hand against left which is first to be married. What sort of society, pray, has Mr Stokes been moving in since he bade farewell to the apes of Gibraltar, that he is sick with "mankind and their disgusting ways?" Has he a cottage in Cockaigne? A box in Little Britain? To what practices does he allude? Is he hand and glove with Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt? Their ways certainly are disgusting enough -but who supposes that they belong to "mankind?" Let him associate for a short time with the common run of Christians, and he will be delighted to see that the moment a human creature conducts himself "in disgusting ways," he is kicked out of company. The gorge does rise-nay, the soul as well as the stomach does get sick-at the " disgusting ways" of Cockneys; but how illogical to reason from brute to man, and to believe, because the one is disgusting, that the other may not be delightful? Let Mr Stokes but try-and we lay our lives on the success of the experiment. Let him cut all his present cronies-just as he cut the squalling apes of Gibraltar; let him quit Cockaigne as a place of residence, and he may depend upon it, that, on his entrance into England, he will find some spot more suitable, even to a lover of solitude, than Dartmoor Desert. 'Tis an absurd place, notwithstanding Mr Carrington's craze about it; but then Mr Carrington is a man of genius, and can find "sermons in stones, and good in every thing." Not so Mr Stokes-to whom a stone is a stone, a stump a stump; although he has no right to complain, for the great principle of compensa

tion reigns all over the world, and tohim, as to other men, Glauber salts are Glauber salts, a purge a purge, an emetic an emetic, though a moor is not necessarily a desert, nor a lay in his hands by any means a poem. Mr Stokes seems occasionally not a very unamiable young man. "Life's wick" is an expression that shews some humility, and suggests the image of a farthing candle; but he relapses into a bad habit of self-conceit when he speaks of it" gathering into manhood's blaze," for no human eye, no human imagination, ever in this world saw the blaze of a farthing candletwinkle is the proper word-or_rather twinkling in the socket. The concluding line of the stanza is meant to be magnificent, but it comes in awkwardly upon the blazing wick of the farthing candle; whatever Mr Stokes-misunderstanding Miltonmay be disposed to think to the contrary, a knell and a roar are two sounds most different to all ears of a moderate length, and with drums not of ben-leather; and if love, truth, and virtue, have all perished in the world's wild maze, beyond all possibility of resuscitation by the Humane Society, Mr Stokes, instead of retiring to the Moor of Dart, ought to scorn to survive the death of all that makes life of any value, and, like Cato of Utica, read Plato on the Immortality of the Soul, and with the spit seek refuge in suicide on the kitchen dresser. "But half an hour and I was in the world, The din of mortals overwhelm'd the roar With which the surge its mighty masses

hurl'd

Against the bulwarks of the western shore ;

In half an hour it seem'd the world was

o'er ;

I climb'd the steep-the troubler, man, seem'd dead,

The sea's was drown'd in human din no more;

Where dwelt the timid partridge did I

tread,

And in the eagle's realm aerial lift my head."

We shall suppose that Mr Stokesas he was not walking for a wager, did the distance at about the rate of four miles an hour-which, if the day was hot, must have put him into a profuse perspiration-a strong sweat. Two miles, therefore, from

a flourishing seaport town, he considered himself to be far beyond the bounds of the inhabited world out of the reach of mankind and all their disgusting ways. With what a face he must have left the suburbs! Conscious of the high emprize on which he was bound, how must he have turned up his nose at the ragged urchins squalling round his path, till his eyes, in a fine frenzy rolling, met the lines intersecting the sky, and all fluttering with old seamen's jackets and trowsers, exposed to sale in Petticoat-lane! Had it been known in the town that he was about to plunge all alone into the perils of the desert, and to encounter singlehanded all the monsters,

σε Gorgons, and hydras, and chimeras dire,"

with which the imagination of a timid nautical population dreamt it to be infested, his exit would have been attended from the Pig and Whistle with a band of instrumental music, in which the cloth-covered marrowbones and cleavers would to the muffled town-drum have moaned to

the self-devoted hero an everlasting

farewell.

"In half an hour it seem'd the world was o'er !"

About the time consumed by a rea. sonable sermon. Did the world give o'er by degrees, like a pound of melting butter, or smack all in a moment like a burst bladder? For the first mile or so, there must have been,-nay, there were-for we have ourselves been in them, and at divers times, and in sundry manner, slaked our thirst both with blue ruin and heavy wet at their nut-brown oval oak-tables-here and there, as if dropped from heaven, small, comfortable, well-kept changehouses, or publics, into whose everopen doors we were smiled and beguiled, courted and curtsied, by slimwaisted maiden or barrel-bellied matron, wide awake to the wishes of wayfaring men, and "swifter than meditation or the wings of love," away and back again with a plateful of poached eggs, or welsh-rabbits, which in half an hour, nay, in far less time, were o'er," like the vanished world. We have too good an opinion of Mr Stokes, in spite of his misanthropy, to believe his stomach

VOL. XXVIII. NO. CLXIX.

-as well as his soul-dead to all ordinary feelings of humanity; and do not doubt, to use his own poetical language, that "he hurled mighty masses "of toasted cheese down his gullet, according to "mankind's disgusting ways," washing them down with a deluge of brown-stout, before burying himself in the central solitude of the desert, perhaps a mile off that House of Entertainment for Man and Horse. Perhaps a pigeon-pie was in him, when treading among the "timid partridges" in the moor. But that eagles have their “realm aerial" within ten minutes run of a donkey from a town, where Tars overwhelm with their din the ocean's roar, is, we suspect, a traveller's tale, nor could we swallow it, even were Mr Stokes to shew us the stuffed body of an alleged Bird of Jove, which he had shot in that remote desert with a single ball from his shillela right through the heart. The creature he saw must have been a goose.

But what have we got here? Lord Byron? Indeed!

Ay-and 'twas when thy ray most bright and clear,

Illumed, alas! it sank, never to reappear!"

Mr Stokes, squatted on the furze, half an hour's walk from the world, no doubt imagines himself a compeer of Childe Harold; and inwardly-we had almost, by a slip of the pen, written mentally-compares himself with Byron, when he says,

"To sit alone, and gaze o'er flood and fell," &c.

Now, the bird called a Booby, perched with his fat doup on a large stone, about a ton weight, in the slush of a creek, half asleep, digesting a flounder, is just every whit as much a bird, and as scientifically included in the class Aves, as an Eagle, sitting broad awake on a cliff ten thousand feet above the sea, and staring at the sun to clear his eyes before he sets sail on his vans to " prey in distant

isles." But the moment he begins to flap himself up six feet above the level of the shore at low water, he feels painfully that he is a Booby; though, to do him justice, we question if he knows of the existence of the Eagle. Just so—and yet not just so-with Mr Stokes. He must know, figuratively speaking, that he is a Booby, and that too most painfully, the moment he attempts to fly. But, unlike his brother Booby, the bird, he bethinks him of the Eagle-that is, of Byron-and, forgetful of the prodigious weight which he constantly carries behind, and the feebleness of his finlike flappers, nothing less will satisfy him than to mount into what is called the empyrean, as if he belonged to the genus Falco. To the immediate consequences of this shot-star ambition, decency prevents us from making more than a slight allusion as we pass along; but the ultimate consequences are not only shameful as the others are, but fatal; and fatty gets a fall which shews him in the shape of a pancake.

Pray-if we may be permitted to indulge in a little verbal criticism what does Mr Stokes mean by "exception of degenerate days?" And does he really, now, in his heart think these days degenerate? Are they degenerate from the virtue of the olden time? If he says so, alas! was poor Byron the man to restore their raciness? Are they degenerate from the genius of the olden time? If he says so, then we must change him from a biped and a booby into a quadruped and an ass; and even then the sentiment is too much to suffer from the largest animal of the class that "chews the thistle."

"Exception grand of thy degenerate caste."

terloo, base blood and poor, in compa rison with the high and rich blood of those undegenerate heroic families, the Stokeses and the Sewells, the two main branches of the great Trunk,→→ the right and left wings of the illus trious House of Tims? In all this he shews himself—if not a low-born-a low-bred man. In low birth, there is no disgrace-none but fools think so and we should not esteem him the less

but the more-were he to turn out to be a natural son of the tailor who wrote the Age. But low-breeding is shameful, in all who have had the luck to be born at all, and peculiarly so in one who pretends that he cannot endure "mankind's disgusting ways;" indeed we have uniformly remarked, that he who plucks up courage to sneer at Lords, is the creature who would volunteer to lick their spittle, in the most "disgustful way;" and if spit upon accidentally by a nobleman, would pride himself on the expectoration, and thenceforth claim three gobs on his scutcheon. Mr Stokes, like all other poetasters, treats us with the old story of the comet. Byron has been compared to a comet about a billion times at the very lowest computation. Pray, did Mr Stokes ever see a comet? To the eye, it neither travels, nor blazes, nor particularly passes over midnight. It seems a soft lazy light, at which Mr Stokes, genteely tucking up the tails of his coat, might warm his posteriors. The dull common orbs-so he chooses to libel the stars-do_not look quite aghast at a comet. They know their own place and keep it, and do not fear but that he will keep his, however eccentric may be his orbit. With regard to Byron again, did all the dull common orbs, alias all the great living poets of Britain, look quite aghast on his portentous career? All of them either admired, loved, or pitied him; even those whose innocuous brightness, in his unhappy and diseased temper, he vainly strove to stain with ridicule and abuse. Mr Stokes is mistaken, too, in supposing that the life of a comet is short. Comets are as ancient as the fixed stars-the transitory effulgencies are the meteors.

"Thy glorious course for man was, ah! too fast,"

Such is the character this small insignificant sinner Henry Sewell Stokes draws of ROBERT SOUTHEY. Faugh! the offence is rank; and the nostrils are surprised to feel how strong may be the stinking breath of a Lilliputian. To look at a poor poetaster, with his unmeaning face, and silly eyes, you would deem his disposition to be milk and water-but it is small beer turned into vinegar. Imbecility is almost always malignant -the feeble-hearted are generally foul-mouthed-and the weak, in a world where glory waits on power, are in fretting envy, the most worthless of the wicked. The head of that Illustrious Man is grey; for the brain within, working in intellect and imagination, for many laborious and glorious years, has whitened the locks that once were dark as the raven's wing; nor has Providence exempted him from mortal affliction.

But the world, whom his genius and his virtue have blessed, the race whom he has elevated by the divine spirit of his works, and the spirit diviner still of his life, will hold his titude: and though loathsome to the name in everlasting honour and grawill be the slime of the reptiles that mere senses, yet harmless after all may crawl over his grave.

Literary jealousy and envy, the bitterest passions that poison the heartsblood, and political party-spirit, that as often lies coolly as savagely, have for many years been assailing Mr Southey, with little other effect than public scorn spit in the faces of the mean malignants. But why should Master Stokes join the gang ? If he be jealous of Mr Southey, so may green cheese be jealous of the moon. And as for party, why, Whigs and Radicals alike would scoff at a poetaster who dignifies Dartmoor with the pompous designation of a Desert. His abuse of Mr Southey therefore must be the abuse of a heartless blockhead, repeating by rote the gabble of the geese with whom he plowters about in the same pond. Motive he can have none; his fibels are even more ludicrous than loathsome; and we are disposed, as soon as our disgust subsides, to pity the poor fellow as a Fool. He is, after all, perhaps a simpleton rather than a sinner.

Uncle Toby we believe it was who dismissed a large bummer that had been teazing him, out at the window, with some such humane ejaculation as this "Go thy ways-poor devil

there is room enough in the world for both thee and me"-and Uncle Toby was in the right of it, for the blockhead of a blue-bottle had no sting, and was in his native element only in horse-dung. But small Stokes has a sting, which, though short and blunt, is yet venomous-and therefore we put our foot upon him-So.

SIR CHRISTOPHER,

I HAVE talked with you so often upon the grand philosophic question of this age-the value and interpretation of the doctrines advanced by the great Thinker of Koenigsberg, that to you I shall not need any apology for drawing the public attention to any thing connected with that subject. Perhaps the direct philosophy of Kant, meaning by that term the Critical or Transcendental System, is not altogether fitted for a popular miscellany. Though, candidly speaking, I am not quite sure of that; for one excellence of your thrice-famous journal lies in its vast compass. There is no note within the gamut of human enquiries, and the largest scale of human interests, which has not been sounded by you on one occasion or other; and the true caution seems to be-not to reject such themes altogether, but (as in reality you have done) to keep them down within their just proportions. After a certain period of discussion, when books have familiar ized us with their names, even the most abstruse enquirers after truth become objects of a mere popular interest in a limited degree. Fontenelle finds it convenient to expound one mode of philosophy to a female audience, Voltaire and Algarotti another. And such facts, possible for our ancestors of three generations back, are much more possible for ourselves, or ought to be, consistently with our pretensions. Yes, it will be said, mere abstruseness or subtlety, simply considered, is no primâ facie objection to the policy of entertaining a great question even before a popular and mixed audience. It is not for its abstruseness that we shrink from the Transcendental Philosophy, but for that taken in connexion with its visionariness, and its disjunction from all the practical uses of life. In an age which, if ever any did, idolatrizes the tangible and the material -the shadowy (but not therefore unreal or baseless) texture of metaphysics is certainly called into a very disadvantageous comparison. Its objects are not those of any parts of

knowledge to which modern curiosity is directed; neither are its weapons such as modern education has qualified us to wield. We are powerless for the means, and without reverence for the ends. The subsidiary pursuits of Logic, Psychology, &c. languish under the same neglect in this country. And thus every avenue being barred to this great and central philosophy, our ignorance, gross in this point as that of the Esquimaux, becomes reciprocally cause and effect in relation to our want of interest. Yet, after all is said and done, and when vassalage to the eye is most matured, and the empire of sense absolutely systematized by education,-still under every obstacleoppression, thwarting, stifling, such is the imperishable dignity of the human mind, that all the great problems concerning its own nature and destination, which, without one exception, happen to be metaphysical, must and will victoriously return upon us.

"Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will, and Fate,

Fixed Fate, Free Will, Foreknowledge Absolute,"

the ruined angels of Milton (Par. Lost, b. ii.) converse, as of the highest themes which could occupy their thoughts; and these are also the highest for man. Immortality-is that a natural prerogative of the human soul, or a privilege superinduced upon its original nature? God-does he exist by laws capable of a regular demonstration, as Des Cartes (borrowing from the Schoolmen), and, upon different grounds, Samuel Clarke, imagine? Or is He far transcendent to every mode of apodeictic evidence? Is man free, i. e. has that stupendous phenomenon of human nature-the will, or the practical reason-absolute autonomy? Or is that also under laws of mechanism? In fact, all parts of knowledge have their origin in Metaphysics, and, finally, perhaps revolve into it. Mathematics has not a foot to stand upon which is not purely metaphysical. It begins