parts of Europe have their marquis; and instead of count we have retained the old Saxon eorl or earl. The baron, a title by no means a rarity in Germany, is in fact that by which the emperor of that country designated a freeholder of the empire; a liber baro, as he is styled in the imperial patent of creation; a person who held of no subject superior, but immediately of the empire. The term is still retained in Spain, where baron or varon denotes, not a title or rank, but a truly valuable man, one indeed who deserves to be called a man. In Germany, the title duke, which includes that of prince, properly belongs to a sovereign, subordinate to the chief of the empire. Hence it was that a British duke, in travelling through that country, was received with peculiar military honours: The earl or grave, also enjoyed occasionally certain privileges. The Roman dux commanded in chief a certain territory, having under him several assistants, or comites, because they were his equals, under whom were other officers or substitutes, thence called vicecomites, a name now used to denote our sheriffs, or properly shire-reeves. If every head of a noble family in Scotland and Ireland do not actually take his place in the peers' house of parliament, equally with their. equals in England, the distinction proceeds from no intrinsic difference, but from conventional arrangements made at the periods, when those kingdoms were severally united to that of England. The only nobles in our country are, therefore, those persons, who, as the heads of their families, have, or may have, a seat in the house of peers, with the titles of duke, marquis, earl, viscount, and baron, But we have besides two classes of titled persons, viz. baronets and knights, to which corresponding classes are to be found on the continent, and who are not accounted nobles but gentry, but who are eligible as members of the commons. With respect to the title esquire, from the French écuyer, and in modern Latin armiger, because it was his duty to attend the eques, or cavalier, or knight, and bear his ecu, or shield to battle; as the office has long ceased to be in exercise, it is no wonder that the title itself should now have lost all meaning. It is still, however, retained in certain cases. Thus, when a young officer of the army obtains his commission as an ensign and a lieutenant, he is described as a gent. but in that creating him a captain, he is MONTHLY MAG. No. 339. styled esquire. To the wives of all peers, and of baronets and knights, the terms lady and ladyship are applied, with the addition of duchess to the wife of a duke; and as a gracious condescending disposition is, that is to say, ought to be the characteristic feature of persons exaltedto the highest rank in life, your grace is a suitable monitory address to a duke and his duchess. It is now an established courtesy to confer on the eldest sons of dukes, marquisses and earls, their fathers' second title; the younger sons of the first two classes have the title lord prefixed to their christian and family names; and the younger sons of earls, together with all the sons of viscounts and barons, have the epithet honourable similarly prefixed. With respect to the daughters of peers, the custom is a little different, for all the daughters of earls, as well as those of marquisses and dukes, are styled lady; those of viscounts and barons, are honourable. Now the distinctions here pointed out have nothing similar or equivalent on the continent. Thus, in France, the various degrees of nobility, as we would call them, are all addressed in the same style: monsieur le duc, le marquis, le comte, le baron, le chevalier, &c. madame la duchesse, la marquisse, la comtesse, la baronne, &c. In Italy, Il signor duca, marchese, conte, &c. In Spain, El senhor, duque, marques, conde, &c. But in this latter country, a peculiar title is employed, which is strangely, although very generally misapplied by some modern writers in England, and, which is still less excusable, even in France. From the Latin dominus, a lord or master, came domnus, domno, and at last don, a title once naturally of high import, but of late years so commonly applied to persons in all stations, that to refuse it is rudeness, and to bestow it is no compliment. It is to be observed, however, that, like the English title sir to a knight or baronet, the don ought always to precede the christian, and never the surname. Thus lord John Russel, would in Spain be styled Don Juan R., sir Francis Burdett, would become Don Francisco B., and your humble servant Mr. Editor, who has no title of any kind, would, nevertheless, be exalted to the rank of Don Pedro N. But even this confusion is not sufficient to satisfy modern courtesy in Spain. From their long and intimate connection with Italy, the nursing mother of complimentary extravagance, the Spaniards have learned 2 R to to outdo themselves by prefixing senor to the don; as in the title (well merited however) of the very learned gentleman, who, when I was in Madrid, presided over the royal public library, Illustris simo Senor Don Francisco Perez Bayer. The humble mechanic in Madrid would be offended to be addressed in any lower style than senhor maestro. These remarks, Mr. Editor, may appear to be of little importance in them. selves; but in the established relations of society, such trifles come to deserve the attention of men in all situations of life. It may not offend our ears to hear of the notorious Don Godoy, the Prince of the Peace; but a Spaniard would instantly call him Don Manuel Godoy. I remember when even the government paper of France, the Moniteur, used to recount the acts and speeches of our two great orators, Sir Pitt, and Sir Fox. London, March 10, 1820. P. N. For the Monthly Magazine. LETTERS from the HAVANNAH, descriptive of the STATE of SOCIETY, and embracing ORIGINAL relative to the ISLAND of CUBA. III. MY INFORMATION Y friend, I dare say, by this time, thinks I am safely wafted on the Stygian shore; verily, such may be the issue. However, I have a strong presentiment that an early tomb is not marked out for me in the rolls of destiny. And here, methinks, the very idea is an excellent preservative against the vomito negro. That pityless ravager has not yet visited my premises, though there is not a single house that I know of where he has not been to levy his annual tribute. I have already descanted on the character, &c. of the free negroes; the elegance of their costume, and even of their manners, indicates that they are in affluent circumstances. In fact, they are generally rich; and their wealth is derived from an honourable source, for they owe it to their habitual industry. The indolence and pride of the Spaniards have transferred to the free negroes, the monopoly of the mechanical arts, wherein they labour, without ceasing. As they are far more sober than any workmen from Europe, and wages here are very high, their peculium accumulates rapidly, and they soon become masters of a considerable capital, especially in a country where interest at the lowest, is 20 per cent. The whole population of free negroes assemble together in the towns; they seem to have an invincible dislike to the labours of the field, as rural occupations would recall too forcibly the painful recollections of their former bondage. The preference thus given to the towns has long excited jealousies on the part of the government and the intelligent inhabitants; but the evil is now without remedy, and the observation has been made too late. The free negroes are too numerous to be compelled, by authority, to go and live in country places, where, scattered over an immense territory, they could have no means of mutual communication, and would be entirely ignorant of their collective force. At present, they know one another, and can calculate the aggregate of their strength, nor will they much longer endure, as I conceive, the present state of things, which, notwithstanding their emancipation, seems ever liable to some reverse. With their liberty, they have acquired the dignified sentiments of men, and the time, I think, is drawing near, when the whites will no longer enter into explications with the negroes, cane in hand. In Rome, emancipation was attended with no inconvenience; the complexion of the slaves being white, like their masters, on a declaration of manumission, they amalgamated with the people, and every freedman added one more citizen to the republic. The stain of colour not striking the sense, other stains were soon forgotten; but it is not so in our modern colonies. The black still remains a black, and his colour will ever prove an insurmountable obstacle to his admission to public honours; he cannot even rise to the lowest fiscal offices, which in all countries are left to the inferior classes of society. The white cannot think of any political equality between himself and the black; this, it will be said, is a prejudice, and I allow it; but it is rooted in the mind to an inconceivable extent. I wish you, my friend, to make an experiment with that abhorrer of all social distinctions, M. Destrett de Tracey; set over him a black for colonel, and see whether he will obey orders, with resignation and promptftude. Philosophy is beautiful in its theories; but come to make an application of them, and you will start back.The capitalists of France and Germany, in spite of their liberalism, revolt against their own doctrine; when it is to portion out a daughter or to seek an alliance by marriage: marriage: to ennoble their descendants, they look out for the purest and most illustrious blood they can find. As these free negroes are every day getting richer, they bestow on their children a more cultivated education; they also keep a table, they have their parasites, and the petit blanc, who is not above taking a seat there, by way of paying his scot, enters into a declamation against the prejudices that attach difference of consideration to a difference of colour. He fails not to pronounce that black soldiers have an air as martial as white ones, and look as well on the parade; to this, he adds, that Christophe wears the crown with as much ease and dignity, as if born heir to a throne; in short, that a negro may be a count, marquis, and even duke, like · any other man. All this oratory is not lost in the air; the free black begins already to talk of the enjoyment of political rights; he aspires to places and even honours. He is listened to, because he begins to be an object of alarm, and it is to humour him, as well as to raise money, that the court of Spain has lately granted to the Mulattoes permission to purchase the right of wearing epaulettes; a step rather impolitic perhaps, than otherwise, in the present state of things, as the Spanish officer will feel himself degraded, the whites in general will be affronted, and it will let the blacks see the alarm which they inspire. An official public census, in 1811 estimated the number of freemen of colour at 114,000; that of the slaves amounted to 212,000, forming an aggre gate of 326,000 individuals; the white population was 274,000; thus, of a hundred heads, the proportion of whites to blacks is 45 to 55. The proportion of slaves to the emancipated is about 1 to 2; before the revolution, the proportion was 1 to 33, in the French colonies, and 1 to 65, in the English colonies. The latter, of all the colonial systems, is undoubtedly the best. But if the end sanctifies the means, and if it be sound morality to quench the thirst of gold, regardless of the black man's sufferings, the negroes should be all alike -and no frightful odds be seen between one part in irons, and another at full. liberty, getting rich by their industry, and adding to their stock of intelligence, by education. The negroes have one advantage in the Spanish colonies, that a black may become free almost as soon as he wishes it. He has only to reimburse his master, the price of his ransom; and money is got here so rapidly, that if a negro remains long in slavery, one might deem it his own choice. I have seen a slave sell to his master, in a few months, three hogs, at the rate of twenty piastres a head; with a dozen more, and some little profit that he may make out of his garden, a sum would accumulate equivalent to his ransom. These emancipations multiplying ad infinitum, prove a source of uneasiness, in another point of view. The abolition of the Slave Trade will, in time, put a stop to the importation of slaves; the plantations will then decline in their population; the products of the soil will be less and less, and the whole colony will become an immense desart, overrun with brambles, and incapable of furnishing Europe with a single article of exchange. The whites, who are inadequate to the toils of cultivation under so burning a sun, will quit a country where they have been attracted merely by motives of gain; and thus, by means less violent than revolting, the negroes will reign sovereigns in a territory to which they were originally transported as slaves. Slaves were formerly treated by the Spaniards, with more humanity, than any other nation; this character Robertson has conceded to them, as an act of justice. The Abbé Gregoire confirms the testimony of the Scotch historian, remarking, that the most religious people ought ever to be the most humane. The colonists of Cuba were entitled to this eulogium, without reserve, so long as they limited their ambition to the rearing of cattle; then their slaves lived among them like children of one family; but since the island has become an asylum to the planters of St. Domingo, an insatiable cupidity has succeeded to those moderate sentiments that once pervaded the colony. The grounds are now covered with sugar canes and boiling houses; unnatural exertions are extorted from the negro, scourge in hand; and bloody streams irrigate the soil from which more is looked for than it is competent to produce. It is not the land-owners that in general are chargeable with cruelty; it is very seldom that they reside on their plantations, which are besides so extensive, that it would be difficult to get at the knowledge of the ill treatment the negroes are exposed to; it is the the overseers that do all the mischief, and abuse the poor slaves without mercy. These officers are here called majorats. It is a truly afflicting spectacle to see these majorats, armed with long whips, conducting to their labours, a score of negroes, with countenances fallen, and a look that proclaims their sensibility of degradation, lashed on one side or the other, to quicken or retard their speed, and the blood spurting from wounds ever open from daily fustigations. I have seen such spectacles, petrified with horror. Henceforth I shall drop all thoughts of turning planter, and shall try some other way to gain the temple of fortune. The most terrible of these fustigators are your Europeans, whom the successive revolutions of the old continent have driven into the colonies. You cannot well conceive how easily these liberals, who in Europe will have no compromise with principles of any kind, enter into terms of composition here. You may read in their looks their extravagance of joy, in first getting a plantation to govern. Bonaparte was not more intoxicated, when he placed the crown on his head. You know that he began with being a leveller; and fortune pushed him on, in that grade, to a pretty prominent elevation; had he not been thus seconded, I may be allowed to conjecture, from examples before my eyes, that he might have become a planter, or perhaps not higher than a simple majorat. I frequently meet with a Polish colonel who was aid-de-camp to the famous Kosciusko, and who received more than thirty wounds in defending that noble cause. He lives at the Havannah in high repute; and it is incumbent on me to add, that he is not undeserving of consideration, as no one is better skilled in the art of governing. His whip is the sceptre he wields, and I can assure you, that it will not fall from his hands. He is however just; and the firmness of his character does not prevent him from being a favorite with the negroes but woe to the shoulders of that wretch who shall come to implore some concession or mitigation! Our Polish patriot has imbibed a relish for power, and he will not be easily persuaded to renounce it. To the Editor of the Monthly Magazine. SIR, HE following notices, relative to tions of pit coal, at Aubin in the department of the Aveyron, will be interesting to those who have perused the account of similar phenomena, near Wednesbury, in Staffordshire, by Mr. Finch, Miss Hutton, &c. and particularly to those who have visited that terrific district. No province in France, contains such immense beds of pit coal, as that of Upper Guienne; now in the department of Aveyron. These beds extend through a superficies of more than 63 square miles. They are uncommonly productive, and of very superior quality. The mineral is found but a very little below the surface, and in such abundance, that it would require several ages to exhaust even the upper parts, and to remove entire mountains. More than a hundred pits have already been opened, and no doubts are entertained of finding others equally rich. In all the districts where coal pits are excavated, it has been found, that there are or have been conflagrations in the interior. Seldom is any discovered on the exterior surface, especially where the effects produced, (independent of the alum, favas, and heated waters,) are so curious, as the varied productions in the Canton of Aubin. The exterior surface of Fontaynes, presents a spectacle like the Solfatara of Naples. It is an aggregate of ruins of substances of every description; no regular stratum, or layer appears on the surface of either of these, but the whole is a mass of rubbish, ashes, baked clay, and burnt or vitrified stones. At every step, you meet a precipice, fissures, &c. formed by the subterranean fires, and from their orifices issue exhalations of smoke and flames, that in the night may be seen at considerable distances, attended with a stench of sulphur almost insupportable. As on the Solfatara, there are lavas of every different degree of hardness, and clouded with all the colours of nature; so on the burnt mountain of Fontaynes there are argillaceous stones, presenting every known modification and gradation of form and colour, that clay is susceptible of, such as slate, schist, quartz, jasper, iron-dross, &c. Both at Naples and at Aubin, the fissures are covered with incrustations of sulphur, and vitriolic salt, ammoniac and aluminous. You meet with sublimates in the form of needles, red and glittering, with sulphur and tions of all the above salts, and perhaps several other substances, hitherto unknown: these minerals are garnished with the most beautiful colours and diversified forms. The principal difference pervading the two mountains, is, that on Fontaynes, the red colour of clay, converted to the condition of bricks, is predominant, whereas the Solfatara is incrusted with the white tinge of lavas reduced to clay. M. Febber and M. Barnillon have described the manner, wherein basalts and the hardest lavas are turned to clay on the Solfatara. The burnt mountains of Aubin will best explain another great phenomenon, how argillous and schistous substances assume, not only the consistence of basalt and lava, but also that of the hardest vitreous stones, jasper and quartz, How does nature operate by fire phenomena so contrary? Does the fire of a burnt colliery produce a formation which it destroys on the Solfatara? The fire of Fontaynes occupies a sloping tract of about 140 yards on one side, and sixty on the other; the whole surface thrown up and down, and furrowed into crevices, and boggy, or sinking patches. Some eminences are composed of all the substances, that the fire has transformed, destroyed, or altered; here you see them scattered about, separated, and often united again by a cement of baked clay, nearly resembling that produced by brick dust. The conflagration is moving in its progress, but slowly, advancing only on the side of the top of the mountain. It will extend yet some distance further, as we may judge by the smoke, seen to issue from the earth, at the distance of 80 or 100 yards from the burnt part. The writer of this description, M. de Richeprey,) mentions his having traversed the whole area of the burnt space, without danger; every step is on solid ground, till you arrive at the edge of the crevices, from which the fire escapes. By advancing with precaution, you may cast any thing into the crevices; some green wood thrown in, was instantly consumed, and a branch of a tree was found there, remarkable for the manner in which it had become mineralized. Stones thrown into the crevices, glitter and sparkle at the points where they touch in falling. This also takes place at the crater of Vesuvius, which is in tersected with gaps and crevices, like Fontaynes, and the Solfatara of Naples. The fires here have sometimes occasioned explosions, which lasted for some minutes, accompanied with a report like that of thunder; and then, with cinders, and all sorts of relics of minerals, large stones would be hurled into the air, of the weight of a quintal, and would fall again, at the distance of about 1,000 yards: but these explosions are very rare. It would be a misconception to assimilate them with those of the volcanoes, that vomit torrents of fire for a length of time, scattering flames through a vast expanse of air, with burning ashes and ignited stones, and spreading their contents over a surface of 60 or 90 miles, in fact, inundating whole regions with aqueous and boiling lavas; then forming hills and vallies, far more extensive than all the mines of Aubin put together; for here the fires are included within spaces of from 120 to 160 yards, and the discharges never extend beyond five hundred. To the south of the fires, in a newly found quagmire, intersected with a great number of clefts, a subterranean noise has been heard not unlike that of some liquid boiling in a cauldron, or that of a distant cascade. The neighbouring inhabitants have observed that the fire is much greater in the rainy seasons, and is sure to augment during the rain. The same phenomenon has been observed at the Solfatara and in burning volcanoes; and the same effect takes place after rain in the pseudo volcanoes of Staffordshire. R. T. To the Editor of the Monthly Magazine. SIR, a perusal of the remarks of your HAVE been particularly gratified by Correspondent, W. W. St. Ives, p. 29. of your Magazine for February, and I intend, with your permission, to comply with his invitation. I agree with your Correspondent, that a comparison of the state of the air, character of the weather, &c. in various parts of the country will be very interesting, and I am persuaded, if accurately communicated, will ultimately much facilitate our endeavours in the art (at present in its infancy, perhaps) of prognosticating atmospheric variations. For several years no inconsiderable portion of my leisure time has been devoted to this interesting |