manners. savage?' Cowper. Why is it contemptuous? especially, why is it Johnson -Such is his malignity, that hell grows darker at his frown.' Cowper. And at THINE!' Johnson. From this time it is observed, that he became an enemy to the Presbyterians, whom he had favoured before. He that changes his party by his humour, is not more virtuous than he that changes it by his interest. He loves himself rather than truth.' Cowper. You should have proved that he was influenced by his humour.' Johnson. It were injurious to omit, that Milton afterwards received her father and her brothers in his own house when they were distressed, with other Royalists.' Cowper. Strong proof of a temper both forgiving and liberal.' Johnson. If nothing can be published but what civil authority shall have previously approved, power must always be the standard of truth. If every dreamer of innovations may propagate his projects, there can be no settlement.' Cowper. The fact is against this; because in this country those things have been always permitted.' Johnson. It seems not more reasonable to have the right of printing unrestrained, because writers may be afterwards confuted, than it would be to sleep with doors unbolted, because by our laws we can hang a thief.' Cowper. Would you therefore cut off a man's fingers lest he should steal?' Johnson. But as faction seldom leaves a man honest, however it may find him, Milton is suspected of having interpolated the book called ' Ikon Basilike,' &c. Cowper. A strange proof of your proposition! 6 Johnson. Even in the year of the Restoration he bated no jot of heart or hope, but was fantastical enough to think that the nation, agitated as it was, might be settled by a pamphlet.' Cowper. 'Petulant!' Johnson.- Milton, kicking when he could strike no longer, was foolish enough to publish, a few weeks before the Restoration, notes upon a sermon preached by one Griffiths, intituled the Fear of God and the King.' Cowper. O foolishly said!' Johnson.-'I cannot but remark a kind of respect, perhaps unconsciously paid to this great man by his biographers. Every house in which he resided is historically mentioned, as if it were an injury to neglect naming any place that he honoured by his presence. Cowper. They have all paid him more than you.' Johnson. If he considered the Latin Secretary as exercising any of the powers of Government, he that had showed authority either with the Parliament or with Cromwell, might have forborne to talk very loudly of his honesty.' Cowper. 'He might, if he acted on principle, talk as loudly as he pleased.' Johnson. However inferior to the heroes who were born in better ages, he might still be great among his contemporaries, with the hope of growing every day greater in the dwindle of posterity: he might still be a giant among the pygmies, the one-eyed monarch of the blind.' Cowper. Here are three insolent pages, considering who is the subject.' Johnson. Yet something of this inequality happens to every man in every mode of exertion, manual or mental. The mechanic cannot handle his hammer and his file at all times with equal dexterity; there are hours, we know not why, when his hand is out.' Cowper. 'Let us by all means make an ordinary man of him if we can.' Johnson. Versification free like his from the distresses of rhyme, must, by a work so long, be made prompt and habitual; and when his thoughts were once adjusted, the words would come at his command.' Cowper. Did you ever write blank-verse?' Johnson. This darkness, had his eyes been better employed, had undoubtedly deserved compassion.' Cowper. Brute! Johnson. But of evil tongues for Milton to complain, required impudence at least equal to his other powers.' Cowper. Impudence is the vice of fools, and therefore could not be one of his.' Johnson His last poetical offspring was his favourite. He could not, as Elwood relates, endure to hear Paradise Lost preferred to Paradise Regained * * Milton had this prejudice, and had it to himself.' Cowper. They were not proper objects of comparison. In their respective kinds perhaps they are equal.' Johnson. He added some academical exercises, which perhaps he perused with pleasure, as they recalled to his memory the days of his youth, but for which nothing but veneration for his name could now procure a reader.' Cowper. Yet they deserve many.' Johnson. His eyes are said never to have been bright, but if he was a dexterous fencer they must have been once quick.' Cowper. That'sno t necessary, the eye is in the wrist.' Johnson.-Visitors, of whom Milton is represented to have had great numbers, will come and stay unseasonably; business, of which every man has some, must be done when others will do it.' Cowper. Yet might it not be his general practice?" Johnson. Milton's republicanism was, I am afraid, founded in an erroneous hatred of greatness and a sullen desire of independence.' Cowper. 'Good Doctor, 'tis a delicate and tender fear!' Johnson. That his own daughters might not break the ranks, he suffered them to be depressed by a mean and penurious education. He thought women made only for obedience, and man only for rebellion.' Cowper. And could you write this without blushing? Os hominis!: Johnson. It is not likely that Milton required any passage to be so much repeated as that his daughter could learn it; nor likely that he de sired the initial lines to be read at all; nor that the daughter, weary of the drudgery of pronouncing unideal sounds, would voluntarily commit them to memory. Cowper. Yet, after all this fine reasoning, the story perhaps was true. And whether true or false what does it signify? Johnson. She knew little of her grandfather, and that little was not good.' Cowper. You are glad of that.' We have nothing more at present to say on the subject of Cowper; but when Mr. Grimshawe's fifth volume appears, if we find it necessary, we shall make our remarks upon it. OPERATION OF THE OLD AND NEW POOR LAWS; SURPLUS POPULATION; ALLOTMENTS OF LAND; COLONIZATION. I. An Address to the Paupers of Bledlow, in the county of Bucks, explanatory of the Situation of United Parishes under the Act for the Amendment of the Poor Laws, 4th and 5th William IV. cap. 76. By Mr. George Stephen. 12mo, pp. 41. II. The Malthusian Boon unmasked. With Remarks upon "the Poor Law Amendment Bill," as connected with it, and in which the real cause of the oppressive Burden of our Poor Rates is fully developed. By a Friend to the Poor. 8vo. pp. 16. GENT. MAG. VOL. IV. 2 Y III. Prospects of Industry; being a brief Exposition of the past and present Conditions of the Labouring Classes. With Remarks on the Operation of the Poor Law Bill, Workhouses, &c. Containing the Influence of Machinery upon Labour, Hand-loom Weavers, Factory System, Change in the industrial Character of England from Agriculture to Manufactures, Effects of the Change, Poor Law Bill, Extinction of Out-door Relief, Allowance System, Workhouses, Home Colonization, Emigration, Waste Lands, Cottage Plots, &c. By P. Gaskell, Esq. 8vo, pp. 44. IV. The Labourers' Friend; a Selection from the Publications of the Labourers' Friend Society, showing the Utility and National Advantage of allotting Land for Cottage Husbandry. 8vo. pp. 300. V. Useful Hints for the Labourer. 8vo. Nos. 1 to 38. VI. The Labourers' Friend Society, for bettering the Condition of the Labonring Classes, particularly in allotting to them small Portions of Land. Established at Wallington, in Surrey, in the month of July, 1835. By Nicholas Carlisle, Esq. K.H. F.R.S. 4to, pp. 25. 1. An Address to the Paupers of Bledlow, &c. MR. George Stephen was the person selected by the Bledlow paupers, as their agent to represent their case to the Poor Law Commissioners, and he obtained for them immediate and satisfactory attention to their representations. His very sensible address comprehends not only his report of the result of his application on their behalf, but some wholesome counsel which be offers them, and which, as it may be found useful to other persons similarly circumstanced, has been printed in a cheap edition, in order that it may be gratuitously distributed by the friends of the poor in the several parts of the country. "I am enabled," Mr. Stephen observes on pp. 8 and 9 of his address, "to inform you in a general way, what will be your situation; and feeling as I do, that, as regards the sober and industrious among you, it will eventually be an improvement of your present one, I have great pleasure in giving you the information." He then proceeds to point out the advantage of some of the provisions of the new law; even of some of those which have been most loudly objected to by the poor, as well as by a few of their professed partizans; such as the union of parishes; the distribution among real paupers of wholesome provisions in proportion to the numbers and ages of the persons in their several families, instead of money; the classification, according to character, age, and sex in the receptacles for the poor, or workhouses, and the provision ordered to be made for the education of the young, together with the absolute prohibition of intemperance, and the privation of all means of indulging it. There will not, we apprehend, be found, among those who denominate themselves the friends of the poor, many individuals who would object to these enactments of the new Poor Law. local regulations, the greater part of them existed in some of the best managed districts in the neighbourhood of the metropolis, before the passing of the present law; but the obligation to grant relief in money rendered their enforcement nearly impracticable, and the industrious housekeeper was, in several districts, compelled to see beer shops, and even gin palaces, arise and flourish around him, and deriving no inconsiderable share of their prosperity from a fund designed originally for the relief of virtuous poverty. Mr. Stephen, while he acknowledges that he does not concur in opinion with the framers of the bastardy clauses in the new Poor Bill, very properly points the attention of his constituents to those clauses, as imposing upon them additional obligation to prudence and forecast in all their intercourses, and especially in those of the more delicate and intimate description. In reasoning the several important points on which the labouring classes have been at a sort of issue with landholders and farmers, Mr. Stephen particularly calls the attention of the working poor to the actual condition of their immediate employers, the farmers, whose case he represents as worse than their own; inasmuch as they, the farmers, are, in a great many cases, exhausting their capital on farms held on lease at immoderate rents, and while they allow themselves and their families only a bare subsistence, are actually losing their all, and verging by sure steps to pauperism and beg He has subjoined, in a note, authenticated statements of the outgoings and produce of four farms, of different magnitudes, in Essex and Surrey; the cultivation of which is attended with an annual loss to the farmer of a sum nearly equal to one-fourth of the rent, and a consequent diminution of his capital to that amount. There are, no doubt, great numbers of similar cases in the agricultural districts: some have fallen within our own knowledge; and while we admit the force of the argument which Mr. Stephen draws from these cases, in favour of that submission and feeling of contentment which he recommends his constituents to cultivate among themselves, we cannot admit that the evil has not an appropriate remedy, to which the attention of those who have it in their power to apply it, ought to be immediately called. That remedy is such a reduction of the rents of farms still held under old and impracticable leases, as shall enable the farmer to cultivate his farm and adequately to remunerate the labourers employed on it, without precipitating the ruin of himself and family. In the cases quoted by Mr. Stephen, the reduction of one-third in the rent would have been a great relief, both to the farmers and the labourers on the farms. We quote the following as an instance in point: On a farm which costs the farmer, £1722 1612 per annum --and returns him only lower, it must in a few years be brought, whether the proprietor like it or not. Well, therefore, would it become those who have the disposal of this question to consider it in time, and determine it rightly on sound principles of political economy, viz. of justice as between man and man, and in accordance with the dictates of the sacred Scriptures. By continuing their present course, and adhering to impracticable rents, landlords not only oppress the poor, and inflict ruin on a worthy race of farmers, whose places may hereafter be filled by much worse men, but also deceive themselves by an appearance of wealth which is unreal; and, in addition to all this, they are in perpetual danger of such a crisis as would be pregnant with calamity to all parties. We all know on what authority the declaration rests, that "the labourer is worthy of his hire;" which hire, we presume, should never be less than a subsistence; and who it was that said "the poor ye have always with ye;" and we have little reason to doubt that those who oppress the poor and virtuous labourer, are in the sure road to the Divine displeasure. Mr. Stephen has referred to colonization as providing one most efficient. remedy for an excess of population in the agricultural districts. In this suggestion, upon which we shall hereafter remark more fully, we concur with him; but it is evident that colonization does not furnish a complete and fitting remedy, under all its circumstances, for the case of the Bledlow paupers. Their case involves the claim of him who tilleth the soil, to live, together with his family, by the fruits of the soil which he tills; and we presume that the owner of that soil has no more moral right to starve those who labour upon it, than the Jews of old had to muzzle the mouth of the ox that trod out the corn. 11. The Malthusian Boon unmasked. "The system of Mr. Malthus," this writer observes, " in its naked detail, as presented to us in his original or first edition, ascribes and traces the most part of human misery to laws of nature. As a novel and hypothetical fancy, it struck; but soon finding that upon examination it had subjected him to universal execration, in need of an apology, of a retreat from the merciless abyss into which he had plunged both himself and his fellow-mortals, he adopted the no less irrelevant than ineffectual remedy of moral restraint.' "The system," it is added in a subsequent page, "amounts exactly to this, that marriage and having a family are luxuries, and therefore, like all other luxuries, should be confined to, and indulged in, by those persons only who are able to pay for them.' We do not defend the doctrines of Mr. Malthus, but think that his work justly merited that severity of criticism which it experienced; and we fully admit that to "increase and multiply, and replenish the earth," is a divine command, and that it cannot suffer violation, without entailing on those by whom it is violated, many and serious evils; whereas its conscientious fulfilment is connected with all the charities of human life, and even in the worst imaginable states of society, will ensure some cheering emotions to countervail the severest inflictions to which human nature is exposed. But having made these concessions, we cannot accompany the author of the Malthusian Boon Unmasked" any further. We cannot concur with him in imputing to the new Poor Law any accordance with the doctrines of Malthus, in violation of the Divine command: on the contrary, we think this author, in his observations, has himself scarcely touched the question of the Poor Laws; an examination of which must have involved facts too numerous, and details too minute, for anything like a satisfactory discussion of them in so small a space as he had allotted to himself. He merely glances at one or two anomalies which seem to arise out of the new system; forgetting that anomalies did also arise out of that which preceded it. It is well known to have been one of the faults of the old system, that provision, designed originally for the meritorious poor and really necessitous, was often converted into a more than necessary provision for the criminal spungers on society, and sometimes into an encouragement to crime. There were other evils in the existing system which called loudly for correction and we presume it will not : be denied, that the concurrent voice of the country had long been in favour of some attempt to remedy these evils, and that the new Poor Law was designed as a remedy for them. The crying evil of the old system was the compulsory relief of the most immoral vagrants, in large towns, under the orders of magistrates, which orders those magistrates had not the power to withhold. This law, and the fact is within our knowledge, did often compel the overseers of large parishes in the vicinity of London, daily, at the close of each day, to distribute from 50 to 100 sixpences, out of the hard earnings of laborious and painstaking shopkeepers, to 50 or 100 of the most worthless of the vagrant tribe, who had been infesting the streets through the day, and at its close resorted to this fund for their support through the night in lewdness and vice, that they might on the following morning again travel in the beaten track of shameless vagrancy; out of which, so long as they could go forward in it with impunity, they felt no disposition to deviate into that of honest exertion of any kind. This, it will surely be admitted, was an abuse of the legal provision for paupers, which called loudly for correction. Not much less to be deprecated was the abuse in agricultural districts, although arising out of quite different causes, of paying part of the labourers' wages out of the poor rates. The new Poor Law aimed at correcting both these great abuses, by drawing a stronger line of demarcation than had previously existed between the rate payer and rate consumer; and so far its object was unquestionably laudable. Its efficiency for the accomplishment of its object, needed, of course, to be brought to the test of experiment; and we have heard or read nothing to induce us to believe that its operation has been so disastrous as some writers anticipated. It could not, on its first promulgation, fail to give a severe shock to many previously existing habits, customs, and interests; still, if we are rightly informed, it is even now scarcely a problem, whether all those public benefits which its framers expected to see arise out of it, (some of which have already been derived from its opera |