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feeling sufficiently dreary, consider that they are quite delighted-and who, at four in the morning, having found a cheesecake under the table, consider that they have supped. There is hope that the grave, solid English character will yet catch wings from imagination and colour from

romance.

The same credulity is everywhere manifested in matters of greater, indeed of the greatest importance. For an example of pre-eminent interest, take education. The parent considers that his children are highly educated, for the half-yearly bills have been high. The Rev. Mr. Q., or the Misses X., undertake to instil every species of knowledge, and every principle of moral discipline and righteousness (in unlimited quantities) into the tender mind; and the children, consequently, are presumed to have fed on blessings as well as cold veal. He always will and must consider that his boy has a higher cultivated mind, and his girl incorruptible principles as well as brilliant accomplishments; for he looks to his account, and sees that he has paid the charges for these things in full.

To show that a grand stretch of the imagination is no very uncommon thing, a glance at a very common custom is sufficient. Consider yourself honoured! is as efficacious as Consider yourself horsewhipped! The recipient of the supposed honour, like the receiver of the supposed thrashing, believes; and the bystanders in thousands evince the same credulity, having an entire faith in that which has no existence.

Case in point. When a decent illiterate man, who, having amassed money by vending nails or ribbons, can fortify his position by civic friendships, and surround himself with evidences of "respectability"soup-tureens and a saddle-horse-is elected alderman, and constituted a magistrate, he "considers himself” an administrator of the laws of his country-which he has never read, and knows not where to find: and in like manner, when some rustic Wronghead, by virtue of his possession of sundry preserves and county patronage, finds that he can write the two letters, J. P., he considers himself a dispenser of justice, and an infallible guardian of the peace ;--and some people are so far below the common level of independence and intelligence, as to look at the justice of the peace in the same considerate light in which, by the conceit of imagination, he views himself.

Another custom, not less common and undeviating in town and country, supplies as forcible a proof of the ease with which imagination may be brought to play upon fact, like water worked from a distant river through concealed channels, and poured upon a fire.

A fine young gentleman, with nothing particular to recommend him, but the incident of his being twenty-one years of age on Tuesday, presents himself on Wednesday to his father's tenantry, and at first sight proves so irresistible as to be elected a Member of Parliament then and there. No sooner is this ceremony performed, and it is as short as the absence of question and answer can make it, than he comes up to town, or travels here and there, everywhere considering himself as a Representative of the People :-which is quite a different thing, and which he cannot, without a prodigious pressure upon the suppositious principle, be accounted. He takes his seat in the House of Commons, and thenceforward regards himself, and is regarded, as a law-giver, which, if Lycurgus was one, he, strictly speaking, is not! But the thing is not the less supposed: some inaudible voices, potent with the suffrage, have said,

"Consider yourself a legislator," and all parties at once concur in the delusion. Few tricks of imagination can be carried much further than this.

The examples cited speak for a hundred. It is of daily note, that honour is dispensed just as the horsewhip is flourished :-there is a little dallying, but no legitimate descent so as to leave an impression. The dignity, like the disgrace, is assumed.

It is not always safe to assume, excellent as the principle of assumption is, exactly what is passing in the mind of an acquaintance; but it would seem that some people of whom we know a little, must have been told to consider themselves buried, by their never being alive to any thing, or doing the least good in life, where so much is every moment to be done.

The supposition system is undisguisedly introduced into some of our courts of justice. Look, for instance, at the invariable ceremony with which a court-martial terminates when a verdict of guilty is returned, and a reprimand is the award. The president addressing the defendant, and announcing that the court has ordered him to be severely reprimanded, uniformly adds, “And you are severely reprimanded," which

concludes the affair.

This is saying, "The court orders you to be punished, and you must consider yourself punished-we have nothing more to say to you!" No reprimand is delivered; the president uses no lash in the language he employs; he talks no strip of skin off the prisoner's back; he utters no stern rebuke an hour long, stinging him all over; he chokes him with no hard, bitter words; he burns no ineffaceable stigma into his flesh; but, on the contrary, politely informs him that he is reprimanded, and leaves him to suppose the terms of the unspoken rebuke as may be most agreeable to himself. How a sentence can be more imaginary, it is difficult to conceive, the punishment being limited to the bare announcement of it. It is well that the culprit is officially informed that the reprimand he does not hear is a severe one, or he might never be able to consider himself severely reprimanded.

If strict military honour can thus be satisfied, and sacred justice be fulfilled, while every body's feelings are humanely spared by the reprimand being left to the imagination, why should not the same excellent principle be tried in the case of corporal punishments, and the cat-o'nine-tails be as the cat in the fairy tale, entirely a creature of the fancy! Nay, if a man is to consider himself reprimanded when not a word has been spoken, why may not another be indulged with permission to consider himself hanged, omitting the ceremony of the rope. The fiction would not be less grave or effective for issuing from the lips of a judge. "The sentence is, that you be hanged by the neck, and you are hanged;" the offender thenceforth supposing himself to be always in a state of suspension.

Nor is this doctrine to be battered down by the ridicule to which in too many respects it palpably lies open. Very true, the facetious might invite one to assumed banquets, saying, "I have given you an invitation, and you may consider that you have dined with me," sitting one down to much imaginary game, and to vinous draughts, purely suppositious. Nor is it to be urged in objection that the patron might say to his petitioner, suing for a place, "Consider yourself engaged," though place there was

none; because this would be but the continuance of a practice existing time out of memory.

Nor is it to be said that a grasping low-minded attorney (a creature that crawls everywhere about this metropolis), under a system which took so much for granted, and drew so largely on credulity, would fasten more wolfishly than ever on his client, by canting in the popular language, "Consider me as your friend!" and thereby preying upon the honest with greater security and despatch. This objection fails at once, because under no conceivable state of things can the supposition be entertained, that a client not crazed would consider any thing so utterly irreconcileable with reason and experience. These are things that cannot be supposed-they are too monstrous. Belief must have its limits, if it were once to pass that point, it must be boundless for ever, and incredulity have no place in the mind.

Nor is there greater apprehension that in the coming day, when things which are in any respect disagreeable shall be imagined instead of performed, a cautious host would dream of sparing his cellar by suggesting to his guests that they should consider themselves drunk at the emptying of the first bottle, instead of opening the other dozen. And even if such a frisk of the fancy were once resorted to, it would not be without its parallel, as is well known to the visiters of that Bacchanalian enthusiast and inveterate drinker, who, when friends met at his board, placed a bottle of wine on the table, locked the room-door, put the key in his pocket, and looking round exultingly at the assembled seven, extravagantly cried, "None of ye are going, till all that's gone!" The desperate Anti-Mathewite and truly jolly dog! Who would not wish to have been of the party!

The worst that could happen if the principle contended for were everywhere in practice, would be matched in the past; the imagination being already as much strained for bad, as it would then be for good purposes. What can be more difficult than for a couple of boys to look upon themselves in the light of one-a single boy! The Siamese could not have done it. And yet an advertisement has appeared in the journals in these words" Wanted two apprentices, who may consider themselves as one of the family." At dinner-time, too! It shall go hard when the "considering" plan comes into fair play, but we will have the tables turned, and one apprentice considering himself as hungry as two of the family, every morning at breakfast.

Above all, it is desirable to remember, that before the new doctrine can be universally acted upon, a simple rule must be laid down-it is this: that the principle of supposing occurrences, and giving effect to them as if they had really happened, applies solely and entirely to painful, toilsome, troublesome, and unprofitable affairs: and is never to be allowed scope, or to be admitted as a law, when the matter on hand is of a gay, easy, and exhilarating kind. All business of an agreeable nature, every ceremony calculated to delight, is to be performed as usual; but when the duty is a decided bore, and the discharge of it painful to the feelings, the performance is to be presumed by popular consent, as in the wellknown civil whip-case, and the military ceremony of the reprimand: "Consider yourself horsewhipped!" "And you are reprimanded!"

LITERATURE.

ARTHUR ARUNDEL.*

THE author of "Brambletye House," can offer nothing to the reading world that it will not receive with favour. But nothing that his accomplished and versatile pen could achieve was so sure of commanding that favour in its fullest extent as an historical novel, in the strict yet comprehensive sense of that phrase the sense, in fact, which was first attached to it by the great master and inventor of that noblest class of prose composition. When "Brambletye House" first made its appearance-which it did not only at the very height of the popularity of the Scotch novels, but avowedly from the pen of a writer second only in popularity to the (then) "Great Unknown" himself, and who thus dared to compete with the mighty wizard in his own circle, and with his own weapons-it was hailed as at once the herald and the first example of a series of works which promised to do for English history and English Prose Fiction what the Waverley novels had done for those of Scotland. And if Mr. Horace Smith had persevered in the happy course he then adopted with such perfect success, he would now have enjoyed a reputation superior to that of any other English writer of similar works (for those of Sir Bulwer Lytton belong to an altogether different and distinct class). But the singular versatility of his pen, and the strong bias of his genius towards that reality which is the very essence of the merit of a certain class of prose fiction, impelled him into another though a parallel track-that of domestic and social, as distinguished from historical fiction-the truth as it is in every-day and individual life, rather than in that higher life which moulds and modifies the other, whether for good or evil. Mr. Horace Smith's passion, we say, for social truth in preference to that from which it springs-for the truth that settles down into manners, rather than that which rises and expands into moral and political institutions-tempted him from the course which his early success so strongly pointed out, and his temporary abandonment of which we have ever felt cause to regret. Whether the general reading public have participated in this regret, may be reasonably doubted; for the success of his "Jane Lomax," his "Adam Brown," his "Monied Man," &c., has been little inferior, we believe, to that which attended the first, and we cannot help thinking incomparably the best of his works in prose fiction.

But be all this as it may, we are delighted to welcome the return of the author of "Brambletye House" to his old course. "Arthur Arundel" is an historical novel in the strictest sense of the phrase; and though our early admiration of his first work forbids us to place the present on a level with that, it may be doubted whether the general reader will not like it as well as that admirable production. What is certain is, that it displays in its details an equal amount of talent and historical research, applied to the subject matter with no less care and in.

* Arthur Arundel: a Tale of the English Revolution. By the author of “Brambletye House," &c. 3 vols.

dustry; and if the result must be pronounced less effective as well as less attractive, as a whole, the deficiency may be attributed to the less attractive character of the period in which the scenes are laid.

"Arthur Arundel" is "a Tale of the English Revolution," and the author has taken the bold step of making his hero a hunchback-a step doubly bold in the present case, for the mind and character of Arthur Arundel are depicted as no less beautiful than his body is deformed. To delineate a Quilp, or a Quasimodo-a being whose bodily deformities have moulded his mind to an equally repulsive shape and bearing-is a comparatively easy task, and accordingly we have of late years had scores of such delineations, all more or less false, because, as we verily believe, founded on a false view of our common nature. It is not the tendency of bodily defects to warp the mind from its natural bias, any more than it is the tendency of personal beauty to do the like. The dwarfs and hunchbacks who have been imps of mischief and demons of malignity, would have been little better-though their ill qualities might have taken a different shape and colour-had their personal qualities been the reverse of what they were. At all events, in making the beautiful Rupert Arundel a type of all that is base, and his mis-shapen brother Arthur, a model of all that is noble and beautiful in human character, Mr. Horace Smith is at least as near the truth as those writers who have taken an opposite course.

The fortunes of "Arthur Arundel" are depicted from the very commencement of his career as a schoolboy, and perhaps the most striking and effective portion of the whole work is, that with which the narrative opens-a long and elaborate description of Arthur's escape from school, induced by the injudicious harshness of his master, and the habitual jeers and scoffs of his schoolfellows. This description has the minuteness of Defoe, and almost his truth and reality of effect; but in consequence of its great length, and the elaborate care with which it is conducted, we are led to expect from it results upon the character of the hero, and the subsequent events of his career, which never arrive. This remarkable portion of the narrative has therefore the singular quality of being at once the most effective, and even the most attractive feature of the book, and yet that which the judicious reader would the most readily part with.

The historical features of this novel arise out of the hero's connexions with the noble conspirators-noble in both senses of the phrase, though conspirators nevertheless-who brought about the revolution of 1688; and some of the most stirring and effective scenes are those describing the meetings of the conspirators themselves. Others, and they are among the most spirited and attractive in the work-introduce us to the courts of the Grand Monarque and the "Merry Monarch." It is in separate scenes of this nature that Mr. Horace Smith is most successful, because they afford him most scope for that perpetual vivacity of mind, and that care and industry in historical research, which so eminently qualify him for the details of this species of composition. The minutest particulars of these delineations are accurate and in keeping with the time and manners treated of, while the general effect is that of an actual scene which may have just passed before the eye of the relator. If we could indulge in extracts, it would be from this department of the work that we should

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