from me, and had a long conference with the King and Queen, as they stopped to speak to her on our coming out of chapel. When we returned to breakfast, I taxed her with her having robbed me of an opportunity of hearing what their Majesties said to her, by standing at such a distance, She told me, it was a secret; but she had now their permission to tell me what it was, and then informed me of the whole affair. I was commanded in the evening to attend them at the Lodge, where I spent the evening; the happiness of being with them not a little increased by seeing the fulness of joy that appeared in every countenance. MR. SMELT, 1786. The royal family once a fortnight take Kew in their way to London; they leave Windsor on Tuesday, and return on Saturday. Their Majesties were so gracious as to hint a wish of my spending some days at Kew when they were there, and to make it completely agreeable and commodious, engaged Mr. and Mrs. Smelt, who live there, to invite me to their house, a pleasure of itself, that would have given me wings for the undertaking; and accordingly I availed myself of the command of one, and the invitation of the other, and spent part of two weeks there. I think you can hardly be a stranger to the character of Mr. Smelt, a man that has the honour of being friend to the King, and testified to the world by his disinterested and steady behaviour, how worthy he is of such a distinction. His character is that of the most noble and delicate kind, and deserves the pen of a Clarendon to do justice to it. Mrs. Smelt is a very sensible, friendly, agreeable woman. Their house is convenient and elegant, situated upon the banks of the Thames, open to all its beauties, and guarded from all its inconveniences, and within a short walk from thence to the royal lodge, and they are visited more than once a day by their Majesties or some of the royal family; which pleasure I had the honour of partaking. We were appointed to dine every day at Miss Burney's table, at the lodge, which we did almost every day. It is very magnificent and the society very agreeable: about eight or ten persons, belonging to their Majesties. Coffee was ready about six o'clock, which was immediately after dinner; about seven the King generally walked into the room, addressing every body with the most delightful conde [The extracts will justify our notice of a work, which from its bulk might have been passed over amidst the multitude of books. It must be admitted, that many passages are common-place in sentiment and tame in style, but the volume possesses beauties and exhibits opinions, which merit transferring to our pages. The Author, at least he who wrote the Essay on the Constitution, is no novice in literature, and we do not hesitate to ascribe that Essay to a distinguished member of the House of Commons. Perhaps several hands have been engaged in the production of the work, for it is not likely that the jejune trash about Field Sports and Order of Knighthood, could have been written by the writer of most of the other Essays.] HUMOROUS PREFACE. About a year ago a gentleman, without a servant, took an apartment on the first floor of my house. He was, apparently, a young man; but his look was not diffident and unpractised, like that of most young men, but bold and decided, like the countenance of a lieutenant of hussars, who has served a campaign or two, and as piercing as that of an Old Bailey lawyer. He wore long black hair over his forehead, and used some words in his language, which I never saw any where but in the Bible and Common Prayer, and which, I suppose, are now out of use. He took two servants, and began to frequent the world. I observed he went to Almack's and the French play; was admitted into the Travellers' club, wore stays, and used much starch in his neckcloth. Notwithstanding this, his life was not so regular as that of most young men of fashion. He did not always go out to dinner at a quarter before eight, nor always come home at five in the morning, nor always get up at half-past two in the afternoon. I thought this extraordinary, because I had had observed, that those who pretend to any fashion, and claim merit from their want of punctuality, are generally the most exact people possible, to be always twenty minutes too late wherever they go. My lodger, on the contrary, very often went out riding upon his return from a ball, and then came and dined by himself, or with my family, at four or five o'clock: nor was he of the usual placid, indifferent humour, that men of the world generally are. Sometimes a darkness would come over his face, and he would sit frowning at the chimneypiece in his own room for a fortnight together. Every now and then he would go away for a few days to Dublin or to Edinburgh, without any apparent reason. But, on the 5th of February last, he set out from my house, about twelve at night, saying he should return in a few days. Since that time I have heard nothing of him; and being in great want of money to pay my taxes, I went to search, to see if there were any thing I could sell for rent, of which I had not received one farthing. I found a few old clothes, a dozen pair of boots, and a large number of manuscripts: these were written in all kinds of languages, ancient and modern, more than I ever heard of: some few were in English; and one called, "On the State of the Constitution," in a totally different hand. I suspect it was written by the gentleman, for there was only one, who used sometimes to pay my lodger a visit. With these papers in my hand, I went off directly to Mr. Longman; and he has given me some hopes that I may recover a part of my rent by their means. Who the author may be, I do not pretend to say; or whether the last paper relates at all to himself: I leave that to the courteous reader; and I beg him to recollect, that I am not answerable for the opinions of a gentleman who has left his lodgings. Sackville Street, JOSEPH SKILLETT. ENGLISH SOCIETY. Society on the Continent is one of the greatest luxuries; it is, in fact, an interchange of polite vanity, and as it is itself so great an enjoyment, it constitutes a principal object. But the English, who are proud and reserved, take no pleasure in society, and accordingly they only meet when one of the number can gratify his pride and hospitality by giving a dinner or supper. Conversation is then an involuntary obligation, and except over a bottle of wine, which at once heightens the spirits and opens the heart, is seldom enjoyed by the real John Bull. It is in closing to his own fire-side, in excluding all but his own family, in settling himself in a large: arm-chair, with the consciousness that he is not obliged to entertain any body, that consists the comfort, which is the boast of his language and his life. Comfort generally means a great consideration for self, and a total forgetfulness of other people. It is the same attention to comfort, or the same solitary pride, which prevents a restaurateur from flourishing in London: a better dinner might then be obtained for half the sum; but Mr. Bull likes to have a mutton chop in his own parlour. For the same reason, a town on the Continent is full of reading-rooms, but an Englishman has his newspaper at home; and whilst a fine day in France brings every living soul out of doors, the haughty tailors and punctilious green-grocers of England spend the evening in their close room of six feet square, almost poisoned by the smell of the cheese and apples in the cupboard. MEN OF LETTERS. There is no class of persons, it may be observed, whose failings are more open to remark than men of letters. In the first place, they are raised on an eminence, where every thing they do is carefully observed by those who have not been able to get so high; in the next place, their occupation, especially if they are poets, being either the expression of superabundant feeling, or the pursuit of praise, they are naturally more sensitive and quick in their emotions than any other class of men ; hence a thousand little quarrels, and passing irritabilities. In the next place, they have the power of wounding deeply those of whom they are envious. A man who shoots envies another who shoots better: a shoemaker even envies another who makes more popular shoes; but the sportsman and the shoemaker can only say they do not like their rival: the author cuts his brother author to the bone, with the sharp edge of an epigram or bon mot. Again, it oftens happens, that a man of letters is ignorant of the world ; · hence he offends against a number of the laws of company, reveals a hundred little feelings which he ought to conceal,› and often shows the resentment of injured pride, in return for what was' meant as kindness. The The quality which is most offensive in poets is their very ready servility. It is not easy to read with patience the verses which make Augustus a god, and exalt Nero into a prodigy of virtue. Too many of the worst men have got the tribute of praise from the best poets. Polycrates, Augustus, Nero, Justinian, Louis XIV. Charles II., Bubb Doddington, the Duke of Ferrara, have all had their wreath of luxuriant laurel from the hands of poets: how fortunate it would have been, had we been able to say the reverse; that bad princes had all been blamed, and only good ones praised! The praise of poetry would then have been what it ought to be, an object of difficult attainment, adding another to the few worldly motives which kings have, to be better than their fellow-men: verse would then, indeed, have been sacred, and a few lines, expressing in noble terms the great qualities which had been actually possessed by the object of them, would have been remembered and quoted to the latest posterity, giving a dignity to poetry, an incentive to virtue, and a spectacle fitted to unite the approbation with the wonder of mankind. SUPERFICIAL VIEWS. Travellers from the Continent seldom stay long enough in England to understand the nature of her institutions, and sound the deep seas of her prosperity. The French think they have shown great discernment, as well as liberality, in establishing Trial by Jury. They do not seem to perceive that the goodness of the stuff depends on the material of which it is made, and that a jury must not only consist of twelve men, but of twelve honest men; otherwise it is only a shirt very well made with rotten thread. As long as the members of juries in France are liable to be gained, or awed by Government, the institution is good for nothing, and indeed rather pernicious. The Spaniards, in the same humour, borrowed from England. the liberty of the press; but they forgot to provide for the liberty of the individual who was to print; and the consequence was, that any author who published against the reigning power, was immediately seized and imprisoned. England, like a work of genius, deserves and requires a slow and frequent perusal to understand its beauties. NATIONAL CHARACTER. I was sitting one day in company with a Frenchman, a Spaniard, an Italian, an Englishman, and a German, when a conversation began upon the merits of their respective nations. As I found the argument growing warm, especially on the part of the Frenchman, who was pouring a shower of small talk upon the Englishman, and of the Italian who was near touching the ceiling with his hands in order to invoke the vengeance of Heaven upon the German, I bethought me of a method to temper the discussion; I proposed that each should set forth his reasons for preferring his own nation in a continued speech, and that I, as an impartial hearer, should be the judge amongst them. I addrest myself first to the Spaniard, was by no means a Liberal, and said, "Tell me why you consider your own nation as the wisest, the happiest, and the best?"-he answered, "I consider the two former epithets as entirely superfluous; for if we are the best, we must be the happiest; and if we are the happiest and best, we must be the wisest. 66 Now, I believe, there is no man who performs, so well as the Spaniard, his duty to God, and to his neighbour. He worships in the most exact, and even in the most splendid manner, the Divine Creator, the Redeemer, the Holy Ghost, and the Blessed Virgin, and he does not forget to pray for the intercession of the least of the Saints whom the church has admitted; he is loyal to his king, to the utmost stretch of Christian patience and submission; he is kind and charitable to his fellow-creatures, helping the needy, and feeding the hungry; he reaps the reward of his good actions in a perpetual cheerfulness. Cheerfulness is the habit of the good; gaiety is but the delirium of the wicked. Nor let it be supposed, as many declamatory writers have asserted, that the Inquisition has diminished the happiness of Spain. It is only through the acts of the Inquisition, that the Spanish people have been preserved in an unanimous faith. Now, even granting, for argument's sake, that other religions may be equally good for a future life, there is nothing which tends so much to union and harmony in the present, as worship at the same altar, reliance upon the same means of salvation, obligation to the same duties, and hope of the same final reward. Much has been said of the victims of the Inquisition. The care which that holy tribunal employed not to hurt the reputation of families, by publishing publishing their proceedings, has served to spread a clamour against them; for that which is secret is always magnified by report. It is thus that fame revenges herself on those who wish to keep her out. But, in reality, are the victims of the Inquisition to be compared with those of the day of St. Barthelemi, and the revocation of the edict of Nantz ?— such are the effects of admitting the infection, and then endeavouring to stop it: or are they to be compared with the thousands who suffered in England under Henry VIII., Edward VI., and Elizabeth ?-such are the consequences of admitting, without controul, the preachers of heresy and schism. "If we do not want the religious to leration of England, still less do we stand in need of her political liberty. The sun which favours our country with its propitious influence, gives us enjoyment sufficient without seeking to busy ourselves in the affairs of government. Liberty is, in fact, a poor substitute for a fine climate, The people of the South only require the presence of that power which raises the corn-which ripens the grape, in order to be satisfied with their position. To ask if they are happy you need only ask if they exist. But with the people of the North it is necessary to dig mines, to hew down forests, to build houses, to obtain in a small space of a few feet, that warm, comfortable sensation, which a southern peasant feels in the large mansion of nature; he is obliged to look for some artificial source of pleasure, to intoxicate himself with the poison of distilled spirits, or the tumult of political contention. We court no such advantages. To those who love care we leave the trouble of governing; and we should think it as absurd to insist upon electing deputies, and making laws because we have the right to do it, as to carry burdens because we have backs capable of supporting them. Having said what is sufficient to convince all men of sense, I will not dilate upon the beauty of our country; the majesty of Granada, the splendour of Seville, the fertility of Valencia. You know our land, and can do justice to it."-Having thus spoken, the Spaniard folded his arms in his cloak, which he always wore, even in France; and I observed he never listened to a word that was spoken afterwards. Having put the same question to the Italian that I had addrest to the Spa But niard, he answered to the following purport: That what had been just said concerning the pleasure derived from climate, applied with equal force to Italy, and set their two countries above all the rest of Europe. "Indeed," he said, "the native of London, or Hamburgh, cannot conceive, unless he travels to our land, the pleasure to be derived from the touch of a Cisalpine atmosphere. Our nerves seem to swell and extend themselves to receive the delightful sensation; our eyes dwell without fatigue or pain upon the beauties of a rich and warm landscape: even the voice maintains its clearness only in the air which the sun has blessed. if we had merely this advantage, we should rival and not precede Spain in happiness. It is to another circumstance that Italy owes her glory, her occupation, her delight: - to taste. With justice it has been said, that this is the only pursuit of which the pleasures far out-balance the pains. A man may meet with an unfaithful mistress, or be rejected by an ungrateful sovereign, but nothing obliges him to gaze at a bad picture, or dwell upon a disproportioned building. A great work of art may be said to be the most successful result of human effort: a fine statue requires as much genius in the conception as the most difficult problem of Newton; it demands as much skill in the execution as the formation of a time-piece; and when finished, it attracts the admiration, and gratifies the senses of thousands of spectators for thousands of years. It is, I hope, needless for them to prove that Italy excels all other nations in this respect. The sublimity of Michael Angelo, the grace and expression of Raphael, in fine, the innumerable merits of our great architects, sculptors, and painters, are not to be insulted by a comparison with the smoaky buildings of London, the monuments in the Musée Francois, or the lusty goddesses of the Belgian painters. "Give me, above all, the music which our admirable Paesiello, Cimarosa, and Rossini have produced,—and I will not yield the palm of happiness to any part of Europe. For the prize of wisdom, too, I think we may lay a fair claim. The greatest natural philosophers, the most skilful negociators, the most gifted poets, own Italy as their birth-place. The discovery of the laws of motion, of the resistance of the air, of the barometer, of the telescope, and lately of Galva nism; the knowledge of a fourth quarter of the globe: the history of Italy, of Florence, of the Council of Trent, and of the Civil Wars of France, the Inferno, the Goffredo, and the Orlando Furioso, form a portion of the share which Italy has contributed to the civilization of Europe. It is for you, Sir," he concluded, turning to the German, "to prove that the universities of Heidelberg and Halle have done more." The German, though he seemed to be smoking his pipe with great apathy, was not insensible to the reproach; and, like a skilful general, immediately changed the field of action.—“ I can find but one fault with your discourse, Signor," he replied; "it is, that you have entirely omitted to answer the principal question, namely, why you consider your nation as the best? To this interrogatory, I can reply, with a safe conscience, that the Germans are the best people, because they do not assassinate secretly or murder openly; because they are honest in their dealings and pay their debts, whether to government or individuals, withconscience.calming punctuality. From Hamburgh to Clagenfurt, there is scarcely a village which has not its schoolmaster, whilst the capital of a province is almost ignorant of the name of executioner. Our fruit hangs on the trees by the road-side without being touched by any one; and the streets of our largest towns become still as sleep early in the night. Other nations, indeed, may boast of great discoveries in science, and of a rapid progress in political philosophy; but we furnished them with the means. They have sown a great part and reaped the whole; but we gave the field and invented the plough. It is to us that they are indebted for the art of printing, without which, knowledge could not have moved; and for the Reformation, without which it would have been arrested in its march. In modern times, too, our literature has taken a far-extended springing leap, which leaving behind it the long-past glories of Italy and France, place it by the side of England in the race towards the spectator girt, laurel-surrounded goal, which is always in the horizon of those bright geniuses, who have a heartconvulsing desire of present immortality, and a thousand-man power of intellectual sensation." These last words caused a pause: even the Frenchman took a pinch of snuff, and sneezed twice before he would MONTHLY MAG. No. 342. begin. At last he started with such volubility in praise of France, and of Paris, that I am quite incapable of representing his harangue. He gave the first ten minutes to those who had spoken before him, and tried to prove that France excelled them in the very particulars on which they had insisted. He said there was no climate in Europe equal to that of the south of France, and that even at Paris the winter was over in February. As for the fine arts, he quoted Lalande, who had spent several years in and written several volumes upon Italy, and who maintains there is nothing to be seen there equal to what is to be found in France. In modern times he thought it beyond a question, that the French painters were the first in the world, which, however, was not to be wondered at, as the English had not at all turned their attention to the fine arts. The works of David, he conceived, express a sublimity to which Raphael, born in a barbarous age, never could attain; in music the French now far excelled the Italians. As for virtue, which his German friend had introduced somewhat mal a propos into the discussion, he, like the Delphine of Madame de Stael, defined it to consist in a succession of generous impulses. And these impulses acted no where with such vigour, as in the country where an officer sacrificed his life, in order to give the alarm to his regiment, and a father went cheerfully to execution to save the life of his son. Having thrown out these remarks with an air degage, he put on a more Socratic look, as he addressed himself to the Englishman. "It is with your nation that ours is most fit to be compared. In England, and in France, les lumieres are generally spread like the rays of the sun; in other countries they are scattered like flashes of lightning. But it is more especially in French that elementary books in every art and science are written; it is in French that the reading of the world, profound or trivial, is carried on. If a mathematician wishes to read the deepest book of science, he studies the Mecanique Celeste; if a Russian nobleman desires to lean what is meant by the words feeling or wit, he takes up the tragedies of Racine, or the tales of Voltaire, and learns to smile and to cry like a civilized being. Even the discoveries of your great Newton have been brought to perfection by D'Alembert, and Laplace; and in pure mathematics you have not for a long time produced |