This national feeling is rendered doubly valuable, now the Holy Alliance is accustoming the people of the Continent to look at the occupation and government of their respective countries by foreigners with indifference. I need go no farther in detailing the blessings, next to the hope of immortality, of the noblest of the gifts of Heaven to

man.

In respect to the publication of examinations of criminals before magistrates, or of coroners' inquests, great good is often induced; and witnesses come forward, and facts are disclosed, that would else remain unknown. The reporters for the public press might, on the score of courtesy, on the expression of a wish for a temporary suppression only of the appearance of any particular fact by an authority, comply with such delay. The public could not suffer, and the compliance would not be deemed a sacrifice of any moment. I should deprecate the question of right as to this matter coming before a court of lawyers, for many reasons; especially when I believe the majority of the profession to be friends neither to a free press nor free discussion. The question will be a new one, still there are musty precedents enough which an ingenious tortuousness may call in to assist in deciding the point; and it is not difficult to conjecture what the decision would be. Though every court is an open court, and all England is present, and hears the case, and rumour distorts facts and perverts evidence, and spreads falsehoods respecting it, this may continue to be the case; but the truth must not be written, lest all England may read it, and the assassin be prejudiced in his defence by the testimony against him being published the midnight robber be unable to find an honest jury, and men become more in the dark as to a just state of facts the more they know of them! The statement being true (this must be understood as to sense and meaning at least,) the more the public are informed of the merits of a case, the better for all parties. A jury deciding on evidence drawn from the testimony of present witnesses, and from that alone, will decide on what it hears according to its oath. The prejudice of few men against those from whom they never individually received injury, will not overpower ocular and auricular testimony in presence of a court of justice. It is at best, therefore, exceedingly ill-judged to censure the press for every trivial aberration from what in strictness may be considered its correctest course. But how much more ill-judged is it to carp at those uses of it, which, so far from deserving censure, are entitled to be ranked among its greatest blessings! Neither the bench nor the profession of the law generally, can be benefited by an open contest with it. The combat would be that of a giant and a pigmy, of a Hercules and a common mortal; and the results would be decidedly injurious to law, because the latter is so open to attack in many quarters, so full of absurdities, and stands so much in need of purification by the legislature: it is better, therefore, that it should refrain from forcing an exposition of its weakness before the world, and thereby diminishing that respect in which it is held at present, and with which it should ever be surrounded.

Y. I.

HOW TO OBTAIN THE CAP OF FORTUNATUS.

"He that within his bounds will keep

May baffle all disasters,

To Fortune and fate commands he may give,

Which worldlings call their masters;

He may dance, he may laugh, he may sing, he may quaff,
May be mad, may be sad, may be jolly;

He may walk without fear, he may sleep without care,
And a fig for the world and its folly."

WIT RESTORED.

In the deep serenity of an autumnal evening, I placed myself upon the terrace of the chateau at Versailles to enjoy the setting sun, the rays of which enamelled the glassy surface of the waters before me with a golden bloom, burnished the bronze figures of the marble fountains by which I was surrounded, glistened like fire upon the windows of the great gallery, illuminated by reflections from the wall of mirrors within, and after flickering along the casements of the eastern wing threw a rosy tinge over the Bois de Satory where it is embosomed, the leaves of which were as motionless as if the whole wood already reposed in the first flush of sleep. Having recently visited the stupendous aqueducts of Buc and Marly, works worthy of the ancient Romans, and observed how the whole of the circumjacent country was perforated with tunnels and reservoirs for the supply of the palace, I doubted whether that pile with its six thousand rooms had cost so much human labour as the various subterraneous works radiating from it in all directions; and I appreciated the difficulties to be overcome when the vainglorious Louis Quatorze resolved to conquer nature, and to make this spot, situated upon a sandy height, the most celebrated place in all Europe for those elaborate playthings, its waterworks. All around me were the evidences of his apotheosis and deification. In the baths of Apollo I had seen him sculptured as that deity, while the matchless chisel of Girardon had been prostituted to the representation of his six mistresses, as attendant nymphs, performing the most menial offices about his person. On the ceiling of the great gallery I had gazed upon the paintings of Le Brun, in which he appears wielding the thunder of Jupiter, while Venus, Diana, and Juno were on all sides compelled to wear the faces of his shameless courtesans. When I reflected that a greater part of Europe was convulsed with war by his mad attempts at foreign supremacy, at the very moment that the whole resources of the country were lavished for the gratification of his magnificence and his vices at home, I endeavoured to calculate how much actual enjoyment had probably been attained by that individual for whom so many millions of men had sacrificed theirs.

When the decrepit monarch was obliged to be wheeled about his stately terraces in an arm-chair, he could hardly fail to draw humiliating comparisons between the palsied reality of his fleshly limbs and the divine symmetry of his marble portraits; nor could he well avoid sharing the feeling of Vespasian, who, being flattered upon his deathbed, exclaimed in bitter spirit, "O yes, I feel that I am becoming a god." But we will take him in the vigour of his health and youth, without availing ourselves of Bacon's observation, that it is a sad thing to have nothing farther to desire and a thousand things to fear; or of

his equally apposite position, that monarchs are like the heavenly bodies, which have a great deal of glory and very little repose. Legitimate as he was, and misgoverning by unquestionable right divine, it will still be admitted that he had but five senses, or inlets of bodily pleasure; and Nature herself in the beneficent equality of her dispensations, has prevented us from usurping any undue share of pleasurable sensation, by limiting our capacities to that portion of enjoyment which is pretty much within the reach of all classes. She has not only placed a sentinel at each gate to warn us against over-indulgence, but has provided an express and complicated economy by which she compels us to reject every excess with disgust and loathing. A king cannot devour more than one dinner in a day, a peasant eats no less; and as to the different qualities of the ingredients, custom, which makes the soldier's "flinty and steel couch of war his thrice driven bed of down," produces the same effects in an opposite direction, and renders the banquet of the palace not more stimulant or palatable than the frugal meal of the cottage. Probably it is less so, if there be any truth in the old adage, that health is the most exquisite cook, and hunger the best sauce. It is the same with the other senses as with the appetite. You cannot discount life and spend it before it is due. You cannot live upon the capital of your body, instead of contenting yourself with its legal interest, without inevitable exhaustion and poverty. Your portion being limited, the more you condense your gratifications the more you curtail their duration, and the more inevitably do you condemn yourself to the horrors of debility, satiety, tædium, and ennui. This is the lot of those kings who, having blunted and worn out their sensations by abuse, sit down in a blank and torpid desolation, and would willingly, like the Roman emperor, offer an immense reward for the discovery of a new pleasure. Henry the Eighth and Francis of France, in their meeting on the field of gold cloth, had completely exhausted in fourteen days all the means of gratification which the wealth and genius of their respective countries could supply or devise; and when we recollect the enormous riches of King Solomon, and his multifarious luxuries, among which we should, perhaps, be hardly warranted in including his seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines, we need not wonder at his declaring that all was vanity and vexation of spirit.

These, it may be urged, are the mere pleasures of sense, which are for all classes equally grovelling and evanescent; but the high in station may still preserve a wider range over the pure world of intellect, and all those enduring delights that emanate from the head and heart. Alas! the spirit and matter whereof we are compounded are fellowtravellers, one of whom cannot be goaded beyond his strength without fatiguing the other. We cannot exhaust the body by intemperance without debauching and emasculating the mind; and even where a rare course of personal temperance has preserved the faculties unimpaired, it is almost impossible to drink largely of power without superinducing that mental intoxication which has precipitated so many rulers into the mischievous pranks of ambition. Where it assumes not this active tendency, it is apt to bemuddle its victim into that morbid and pitiable state of fretful lethargy termed Ennui. As nothing is so deplorable as the want of a want, there is not one of us who would not be a miserable loser by being "as happy as a king." They are the spoilt children of

Fortune, and like the juvenile members of the class are too often wayward, peevish, and ill at ease. As to the pleasures of intellect, Lord Walpole's Researches have not been able to redeem many royal authors from the dust; for it is much easier to win and wear a dozen crowns than to achieve a single wreath of bays. Too busy or to indolent for literary pursuits, they read despatches instead of books, and pension laureats instead of perusing them. Reasons of state equally debar them from the solace of those delights that emanate from the heart. Cupid is a Carbonaro who owns no allegiance to thrones; there is no sweet courtship in courts; a king goes a wooing in the person of his privy counsellors; marries one whom he never saw, to please the nation, of which he is the master only to be its slave; views his bride with indifference or dislike, and is generally cut off from those domestic enjoyments which constitute the highest charm of existence. Friendship cannot offer itself as a substitute, for equality is the basis of that delicious sentiment, and he who wears a crown is at once prevented by station, and prohibited by etiquette, from indulging in any communion of hearts. Verily he ought to be exempted from all other taxes, since he pays quite enough already for his painful pre-eminence. If it be bad to have nothing to hope, it is not much better to have every thing to fear. It is humiliating enough for such exalted personages to be perpetually giddy with the height they have attained; to envy the meanest mortal who can exclaim that

"Treason has done his worst; nor steel, nor poison,

Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing

Can touch him farther;"

to be incapacitated from looking out upon the face of nature or art without encountering some impertinent memento. If they gaze upon an eclipse, they are forthwith perplexed with fear of change; the full moon snubs them with the reflection that they, like her, have accomplished their sphere; that they cannot become greater, and have nothing left but to decline and wane: the high tide twits them with the consciousness that they have been raised by the flood of fortune, and may subside again with its ebb; a natural storm catechises them about the chances of a political one; a volcano thunders them a lesson upon conspiracies of the Carbonari; and they cannot open a book without being schooled by croaking ravens as to the instability of human grandeur. All the dethroned monarchs, from Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar down to Napoleon, are flung in their face; they are pleasantly reminded that the lightning strikes the tallest towers first; that those who are the most elevated have the farthest to fall; that when the sportsman Death goes out a shooting, it is a matter of perfect indifference to him whether he launches his arrow through the cottage casement, or the window of the palace; and that in many a royal cemetery

"Here's an acre sown indeed
With the richest royal seed
That the earth did e'er suck in
Since the first man died for sin.

Here are sands, ignoble things,

Dropt from the royal sides of kings."

Well might Napoleon, in the plentitude of his power, revert with a sad complacency to the days of his childhood, declaring that he even recollected with delight the smell of the earth in Corsica; and that the

happiest period of his existence was when he was roaming the streets of Paris as an engineer subaltern, to discover a cheap place for dining: and there can be as little doubt that his successor would gladly exchange the heart-corroding splendour of the Tuileries for the tranquil obscurity of Hartwell.

As the ocean is subject to unreposing tides to prevent it from stagnating, so is the human mind destined to a perpetual ebb and flow of excitement, that it may be stimulated to fresh enterprises, and thus conduce to the general advancement of the species by the developement of individual activity. The mental hunger must be gratified as duly as the corporeal; and, unfortunately, there is this analogy between them, that whatever either of them tastes it destroys: the vulgar adage ❝ that we cannot have our cake and eat it too," is equally applicable to the feast of reason. Air that has remained a certain time in the lungs becomes unfit for the purposes of respiration, and whatever has once passed through the mind loses with its novelty its power of future gratification. Some pleasures, like the horizon, recede as we advance towards them; others, like butterflies, are crushed by being caught. Reader, didst thou ever see a squirrel in a cage galloping round and round without moving a step forwarder? or the same animal at liberty, jumping from bough to bough of a hazel tree, and shaking the ripe nuts into a pond beneath, in his anxiety to catch them? Art thou bustling -enterprising-grasping, and yet disappointed, thou hast seen an exact portrait of thyself. Pleasure unattained is the hare which we hold in chase, cheered on by the ardour of competition, the exhilarating cry of the dogs, the shouts of the hunters, the echo of the horn, the ambition of being in at the death. Pleasure attained is the same hare hanging up in the sportsman's larder, worthless, disregarded, despised, dead.

As an epicure in the enjoyment of life, I thank the gods, that by placing me above want and below riches, they have given me little to fear and much to hope. I rejoice that so large a portion of enjoyment remains unpossessed, that I have spoilt so little by usage, and that seven-eighths of the world remain yet to be conquered, at least in hope. The ancients were quite wise in placing that goddess at the bottom of Pandora's box; it was like making the last-drawn ticket, after a succession of blanks, the capital prize. Oh the matter-of-factness of imagination-the actuality of reveries-the bona fide possession of those blessings which we enjoy in hope-the present luxury of anticipation! These are the only enjoyments which cannot be taken from us, which are beyond the reach of the blind fury with the abhorred shears, or her sightless sister of the ever-revolving wheel. To the winds do I cast the counting-house morality inculcated in the story of the milkmaid with her basket of eggs, Alnaschar with his pannier of crockery, and all such musty apologues of the fabulists. There is a loss in breaking eggs or cracking teapots, but is there no gain in fancying oneself, for however short a period, a princess or a grand vizier, and revelling in all the delicious sensations which those respective dignities confer upon the imaginary, but withheld from the real incumbent ? Surely if the fancied delight be real, and the positive enjoyment of those stations illusory, the non-possessor has the best of the bargain. Credo quod habeo, et habeo. It is incredible what riches and estates I hold by this tenure. I pity the title-deed proprietors of manors, parks, and