great property. In neither case had our good people looked at the foreigner; they had looked the first time at the small portmanteau, and the second time at the three carriages and four! But if the commercial spirit makes us attach undue importance to wealth, it keeps alive also a spirit of honesty as the best means to acquire it. Thus the same causes that produce our defects, conspire to produce many of our merits. The effect of commerce is to make men trustworthy in their ordinary dealings and their social relations. It does this, not by the sense of virtue, but that of self-interest. A trader soon discovers that honesty is the best policy. If you travel through Italy, and your carriage break down, there is perhaps but one smith in the place; he repairs your carriage at ten times the value of the labour; he takes advantage of your condition and his own monopoly of the trade. Whoever has had the misfortune to make the tour of the Netherlands in a crazy calèche, can speak from ample experience of the similar extortion practised also in that country, where the standard of morality is much higher than in Italy. This would rarely, if ever, be the case in England. There might be no other smith in the village for you to apply to, but there would be a public spirit, a common conscience in the village, which would insensibly deter the monopolist | from acting towards you dishonestly. To this we must, to be sure, add the consideration, that population being more dense in this Country, the monopoly is more rare, and the temptation less frequent. It is the property of an enlightened aristocracy-I mean one that is comparatively enlightened-to foster the sentiments of honour. Honour is their creed; they sacrifice even virtues to a single one of its prejudices. Thus, in our relations with foreign states, we have been less wise than honourable and we have sustained our national character by paying with rigid punctuality the national loans. : Rogues among traders, and swindlers among gentlemen, there are in this, as in all countries; but they do not suffice to stamp the character of the People. There is no systematic mockery of principle with us― nor that sort of maison de jeu morality, which you find among the philosophical, élégans of Paris and of Vienna. A fine gentleman in London is a formidable person to young heirs; but of these fine gentlemen, thank Heaven, there are not above a dozen or two. In private character, as in the national, an English patrician is rather the dupe than the deceiver:-at least, he keeps his deceits for his parliamentary career. The English are also an eminently generous people. I do not mean generous in the vulgar signification of the epithet, though that they would deserve, if but from the ostentatious and artificial spirit I have already described-but the loftier and more moral one. Their sympa thies are generous; they feel for the persecuted, and their love is for the fallen. But it is mainly the People (properly so speaking), the mass-the majority-that generosity characterizes; nor do I trace this virtue to the aristocratic influences: among the aristocracy it is not commonly found. As little, perhaps, is it to be traced to the influences of trade; it is rather connected with our history and our writers—and may be considered a remnant of the chivalric spirit which departed from the nobles ere it decreased among the people. It is the multitude who preserve longest the spirit of antiquity-the aristocracy preserve only the forms. Let us recall for a moment the trial of Queen Caroline in my own mind, and in the minds of the majority of the public, she was guilty of the crime imputed to her. Be it so; but the people sympathized, not with the crime, but the persecution. They saw a man pampered in every species of indulgence, and repudiating his wife in the first instance without assignable cause; allowing her full licence for conduct if she consented to remain abroad, and forbore to cross the line of his imperial Sybaritism of existence; but arming against her all the humiliations, and all the terrors of law, the instant she appeared in England, and interfered with the jealous monopoly of royal solemnities. They saw at once that this was the course of conduct natural rather to a man of passion than to one of honour: to a man of honour, disgrace to his name would have seemed equally punishable whether perpetrated in Italy or in England. The queen ceased to be the defendant in a court of law, and seemed to the public the victim of a system of oppression. The zeal with which the lower orders supported her, was the zeal of Chivalry; the spirit which Burke invoked in vain from a debased nobility, leaped at once into life among a generous people. Compare the subservient and smothered disgust of the aristocracy with the loud indignation of the people;-which was the more indicative of the nobler emotions, or which preserved in the higher shape our national characteristic of generosity? Who are they that feel the most deeply for the negro slave-the people, or the nobles? The people. Who attend the meetings in behalf of Poland? the aristocracy?-some two or three of them, indeed, for the vanity of uttering orations; but it is the people who fill the assembly. The people may be right, or they may be wrong, in their zeal for either cause, but it is at least the zeal of generosity. Poverty, crime itself,-does not blunt this noble characteristic. In some of the workhouses the overseers devised a method to punish the refractory paupers by taking away from them the comforts permitted to the rest; the rest, out of their own slender pittance,' supplied their companions! In his work upon prisons, Mr. Buxton informs us, that in the gaol of Bristol the allowance of bread to criminals was below the ordinary modicum necessary for subsistence; to the debtors no allowance, however, was made,—their friends, or the charity of strangers, supported them: there have been times when these resources have failed, and some of the debtors would have literally perished for want, but that they were delivered-how? by the generosity of the criminals themselves, who voluntarily shared with them at once the food and the distress! In the last election I remember to have heard a tory orator, opposed to the emancipation of the West Indian slaves, take advantage of the popular cry for economy, and the general impatience under taxation, and assure his audience, all composed of the labouring part of the population, thatto attempt to release the slaves would be to increase the army, and consequently, the national burdens: the orator on the other side of the question, instead of refuting this assertion, was contented to grant it. "Be it so," he said; suppose that your burdens are augmentedsuppose that another shilling is monthly, or even weekly, wrung from your hard earnings-suppose all this, and I yet put it to you, whether, crippled and bowed down as you are by taxation, you would not cheerfully contribute your mite to the overthrow of slavery, though in so distant a clime-though borne by men of a different colour from yourselves, rather than even escape your burdens, grievous though they be, and know that that human suffering still exists, which you, by a selfsacrifice of your own, had the power to prevent?" The meeting rang with applause; the appeal was to generous emotions: had the generosity not been there, the appeal would have been unavailing. It is, indeed, in popular elections, that a foreigner can alone fully learn the generous character of the English people-what threats they brave, what custom they lose, what profits they surrender, in order to act up to a motive of conscience, or a principle of honour. Could you be made aware of the frequent moral exaltation of the Constituent, your Excellency would be astonished to see the Representative so often an apostate. Thus, then, generosity is the character of the nation; but the character rather of the people than of the nobles; and while a certain school of theorists maintain that the chief good of an aristocracy is to foster that noble quality, they advance an argument which is so easily refuted as to endanger the cause it would support. Your Excellency, if I mistake not, is tolerably well acquainted with the weaker side of Madame de Staël, and have, doubtless, in your experience of the courtly circles of England, seen whether their "moral air" be entitled to all the panegyrics it received from that ingenious Architect on Hypotheses. A regard for character is a quality on which we value ourselves justly; yet it scarcely, perhaps, produces those excellent effects on morality which ought to be its offspring. The reason is possibly this: we defer, it is true, to what we consider to be a good character; but it very often happens that our notions of the elements of a good character are any thing but just. We sometimes venerate a Saint where your Excellency would recognise a Mawworm. In the first place, as regards public character, that character has usually been considered the best, which adopts the principles most à la mode. Now the aristocracy influence the mode, and the best character, therefore, has been usually given to the strongest supporter of the aristocrats the people not being educated, at least politically, and judging not for themselves, have formed their opinion from the very classes interested against them, maligned their friends, and wept tears of gratitude for the consistency of their foes. Mr. Thelwall advocated reform; and Mr. Canning informs us, that he was pelted as he went:-* Another fault in our judgment of public men has been, that we have confounded too often a private sobriety of life with political respectability. If a gentleman walked betimes in the park, with his seven children and a very ugly wife, the regularity of such conduct stamped him as an unexceptionable politician. Your Excellency remembers Lord Mediocre So-so-he was a cabinet minister. He ordained a vast number of taxes, and never passed one popular law; but then he was very domestic, and the same coldness of constitution that denied him genius, preserved him from vice. He was a most pernicious statesman; but he bore the highest of characters. His very frigidity made him considered "a safe politician;" for we often seem to imagine that the property of the mind resembles the property of sea water, and loses all its deleterious particles when once it is fairly frozen. Sometimes in those visions of public virtue, which your Excellency knows all men now and then conceive-in their closet; I have fancied that public character should be proportioned only to public benefits; that the statesman should be weighed in a balance, where the laws he has assisted to frame should be thrown into the opposite scale; and that the light of his private amiabilities should, instead of casting into shade his public character, be lost to the general eye in the wide blaze of universal utility. "Thelwall and ye, that lecture as ye go, And for your pains get pelted," &c. It is curious enough to observe, that while, when Tory principles were the mode -your Liberal was considered the immoral man-and the Tory was the high model of public excellence; so now, when the Liberal Party are in fashion, the same Tory is considered the basest of beings-a creature that has fattened upon the agonies of the Public-his very loyalty, once his virtue, now his vice-and his attachment to Church and State, formerly the proof of his religion, now merely the evidence that he has some corrupt object to further by the alliance. At present, or at least until very lately, Whene'er of statesmen we complain, They cry, Why raise this vulgar strife so? "Tis true, that tax too hard may strain; But then his Lordship loves his wife so ! That law, indeed, may gall ye rather; his Lordship's such a father!' I have observed, in a former chapter, that the undue regard for wealth produces a false moral standard; that respectability is the favourite word of eulogium with us, as virtue was with the ancients; and that a man may be respectable, without being entitled from his virtues to respect. Hence it follows, that a regard for character may often be nothing but the regard of popular prejudices; and that, though a virtue in itself, it may neither be directed to, nor productive of, virtues in others. Still this characteristic is a great and noble superstructure to build upon:-it is those nations who are indifferent to moral distinctions of whom Improvement may despair. A People who respect what they consider good, sooner or later discover in what good really consists. Indifference to moral character is a vice; a misunderstanding of its true,components is but an error. Fortunately, the attention of our countrymen is now turned towards themselves; the spirit of self-examination; is aroused; they laugh at the hyperbolical egotisms in which they formerly indulged; they do not take their opinions of their own excellence from ballad-singers, any more than their sentiments on the goodness of their Constitution from the common-places of Tories. "Impostors," said the acute Shaftesbury, "naturally speak the best of human nature, that they may the more easily abuse it. The Imperial Tyrant of the Roman Senate always lalked of the virtues of the Senators. ་ But men now think for themselves. That blind submission to teachers, which belongs to the youth of Opinion, is substituted for bold examination in its maturity; and the task of the latter period is too often to unlearn the prejudices acquired in the first. When men begin to think for themselves, they will soon purify in the process of thought the errors they imbibed from others. To the boldness of the once abused and persecuted Paulicians, in judging themselves of the Gospel, we owe that spirit which, though it suffered with Huss and Wickliffe, triumphed with Zuinglius, and Luther. The scanty congregations of Armenia and Cappadocia were characterized by the desire to think freely they have been the unacknowledged authors of this tery era, when men begin to think rightly. The agitation of Thought is the beginning of Truth. If the effect of our regard for character has been a little overrated, so I apprehend that the diplomatist of a thousand cabinets must some |