CONTENTS. (continued 3)

Prudence forbids me to extend these queries on subjects which will ever interest the speculative part of mankind, but on which it will be difficult, if not impossible, to arrive at certain and indubitable conclusions: as, however, I have been led into this digression by existing errors relative to Electricity, I may remark, in conclusion, that the phenomena produced by this power arise from the action of opposing surfaces through intervening media; that the excitement impels the surfaces towards each other; and that all the phenomena grow out of the motive quality of intervening bodies, whose surfaces are alternately attracted by the comprehending excited surfaces, or out of the want of perfect smoothness in the opposing or excited surfaces. Electricity is in fact the phenomena of surfaces, growing out of the sole property of their mutual mechanical attractions, which attractions are governed by some necessary relations of the surfaces of the intervening media to the surfaces of the opposing conductors.

At any rate, it is irrational to suppose that the CAUSE of CAUSES operates in the production of natural phenomena by the aid of such complicated machinery, and such involved powers, as men have forced into nature, for the purpose of accounting for affections on their senses, or effects of matter on matter; in the measure of which they have no standard but their sensitive powers and the undiscovered relations of the agent and patient. Would it not, on the contrary, be more consistent with the proper views of philosophy to dismiss all occult powers, which are so many signs of our ignorance or superstition, and to search for the SECONDARY CAUSES of all phenomena, as well between the smallest as the largest masses, in the undeviating laws of ARITHMETIC, GEOMETRY, and MECHANICS; whose simplicity, sublimity, perfection, and immutability, accord with our deductions in regard to the attributes of an OMNISCIENT ARCHITECT and OMNIPOTENT DIRECTOR of the universe?

This, however, is certain, that such catastrophes as those described could never occur, if the imperfect conductors of which our buildings are generally composed, were encompassed by more perfect conductors. The ridge of the roof of every house should be of metal; and, if that metallic ridge were connected with the leaden water-pipes, and by them continued into the ground, all buildings would be protected. A descending or an ascending ball would then find a conduit, by which to pass, or freely propagate its powers, without the violent effects that accompany its transition through air and other non-conductors. The rods of Franklin are toys, which were ingeniously contrived in the infancy of this branch of science, but they ought now to be forgotten.

Before I dismiss this interesting topic, I would ask whether the transmission of the power called electric, to a particular spot, does not always afford evidence, that at that spot there exists, beneath the surface of the earth, either a vein of metallic ore, a spring, or some other competent conductor, which the power called electric is seeking to reach, when the antagonist non-conductors exhibit their destructive phenomena? Does not the power or vacuum created by the change of volume in the aqueous vapour of the cloud, regard only the perfect conductors prepared to receive it, however deeply they may be concealed beneath the surface of the non-conducting or imperfectly-conducting soil and vegetable surface? If it were not so, would not the stroke always affect the higher objects, or prefer palpable conductors in moderately elevated sites? In this instance 200 degrees of the horizon were more elevated than the place attacked, while the destruction proves that the superficies invited no accumulation here. Must not then the predisposing and operative cause have existed beneath the surface; and, hence, may not the selection of lightning, in most cases where it prefers lower sites, afford evidence of the existence of metallic strata, of springs, or other conducting surfaces, the discovery of which, by such natural test, may sometimes be important to the owner of the soil?

The bottom of Roehampton-lane joins the road which leads from Putney and Wandsworth to Richmond. Here I came again upon the same alluvial Flat which I left when I ascended from Wandsworth to Putney-heath, having since passed a corner of the undulating high land on which stand Wimbledon, its common, Roehampton, Richmond-park, and its lovely hill. A more interesting site of the same extent, is not perhaps to be found in the world. Its picturesque beauty, and its general advantages as a place of residence, are attested by the preference given to it by ministers and public men, who select it as a retreat from the cares of ambition. On this ridge Pitt, Tooke, Addington, Burdett, Goldsmid, and Dundas, were recent contemporary residents. Here, amid the orgies of the latter, were probably concerted many of those political projects which have unfortunately desolated the finest portions of Europe, for the wicked, yet vain, purpose of destroying Truth by the sword! In an adjoining domain, Tooke beguiled, in philological pastime, the evening of a life whose meridian had been employed in disputing, inch by inch, the overwhelming march of corrupt influence; while, as though it were for effect of light and shade, the spacious plain of Wimbledon served to display the ostentatious manœuvres of those servile agents of equivocal justice, whose permanent organization by an anti-human policy has been engrafted on modern society, but whose aid would seldom or never be necessary, if the purposes of their employers accorded with the omnipotent influence of truth, reason, and justice.

I was now on the border of Barnes Common, consisting of 500 acres of waste; and at a few paces eastward stands Barnes poor-house! Yes!—in this enlightened country—in the vicinage of the residence of many boasted statesmen—stands a PARISH POOR-HOUSE ON A WASTE! The unappropriated means of plenty and independence surrounding a mansion of hopeless poverty, maintained by collections of nearly 4000l. per annum from the industrious parishioners! Lest readers in future ages should doubt the fact, the antiquary of the year 2500 is hereby assured,—that it stood at the angle of the Wandsworth and Fulham roads, at the perpendicular distance of a mile from the Thames, and by the side of the fashionable ride from London to Richmond!—Did so monstrous an incongruity never penetrate the heads or hearts of any of the high personages who daily pass it? Did it never occur to any of them that it would be more rational to convert the materials of this building into cottages, surrounded by two or three acres of the waste, by which the happiness of the poor and the interests of the public would be blended? Can any antiquated feudal right to this useless tract properly supersede the paramount claims of the poor and the public?—From respect to any such right, ought so great a libel on our political economy to be suffered to exist, as a receptacle for the poor in the middle of an uncultivated and unappropriated waste? To dwell further on so mortifying a proof of the fallibility of human wisdom may, however, pique the pride of those who enjoy the power to organize a better system:—I therefore forbear!

These and other considerations prompted me to visit the interior. I found it clean and airy, but the best rooms were not appropriated to the poor. The master and matron were plain honest people, who, I have no doubt, do all the justice that is possible with a wretched pittance of 5s. 6d. per head per week. Should 4s. 6d. remain to provide each with twenty-one meals, this is but two-pence half-penny per meal! Think of this, ye pampered minions of wealth, who gorge turtle at a guinea a pound, who beastialize yourselves with wine at a shilling a glass, and who wantonly devour a guinea’s worth of fruit after finishing a sumptuous dinner!—The guardians have judiciously annexed to the house an acre or two of ground for a garden, which is cultivated by the paupers, and supplies them with sufficient vegetables. This, though a faint approach to my plan, is yet sufficient to prove what the whole common would effect, if properly applied to the wants and natural claims of the poor. It is too often pretended that these wastes are incapable of cultivation—but the fertile appearance of enclosed patches constantly falsifies such selfish and malignant assertions.

I visited the community of these paupers, consisting in this small parish of only thirty men, women, and children, in one large room. Among them were some disgusting-looking idiots, a class of objects who seem to be the constant nuisance of every poor-house.4 How painful it must be to honest poverty to be brought into contact with such wretched creatures, who are often vicious, and, in their tricks and habits, always offensive and dirty. Surely, for the sake of these degraded specimens of our kind, as well as out of respect to the parish-poor, who have no choice but to live with them, every county ought to be provided with a special Asylum for idiots; whose purpose should be to smoothen their passage through life, and to render it as little noisome to others, and to one another, as possible.

On leaving this poor-house, I crossed Barnes Common in a north-eastern direction, with a view to visit at Barnes-Elms the former residence of Jacob Tonson, the bookseller, and once the place of meeting of the famous Kit-Cat Club.

On this Common, nature still appeared to be in a primeval and unfinished state. The entire Flat from the high ground to the Thames, is evidently a mere freshwater formation, of comparatively modern date, created out of the rocky ruins which the rains, in a series of ages, have washed from the high grounds, and further augmented by the decay of local vegetation. The adjacent high lands, being elevated above the action of the fresh water, were no doubt marine formations, created by the flowing of the sea during the four thousand years when the earth was last in its perihelion during our summer months; which was between twelve and seven thousand years since. The Flat or fresh-water formation, on which I was walking, still only approaches its completion; and the desiccated soil has not yet fully defined the boundaries of the river. At spring-tides, particularly when the line of the moon’s apsides coincides with the syzygies, or when the ascending node is in the vernal equinox, or after heavy rains, the river still overflows its banks, and indicates its originally extended scite under ordinary circumstances.

The state of transition also appears in marshes, bogs, and ponds, which, but for the interference of man, would many ages ago have been filled up with decayed forests and the remains of undisturbed vegetation. Rivers thus become agents of the NEVER-CEASING CREATION, and a means of giving greater equality to the face of the land. The sea, as it retired, either abruptly from some situations, or gradually from others, left dry land, consisting of downs and swelling hills, disposed in all the variety which would be consequential on a succession of floods and ebbs during several thousand years. These downs, acted upon by rain, were mechanically, or in solution, carried off by the water to the lowest levels, the elevations being thereby depressed, and the valleys proportionally raised. The low lands became of course the channels through which the rains returned to the sea, and the successive deposits on their sides, hardened by the wind and sun, have in five or six thousand years created such tracts of alluvial soil, as those which now present themselves in contiguity with most rivers. The soil, thus assembled and compounded, is similar in its nature to the rocks and hills whence it was washed; but, having been so pulverized and so divided by solution, it forms the finest medium for the secretion of all vegetable principles, and hence the banks of rivers are the favourite residences of man. Should the channel constantly narrow itself more and more, till it becomes choaked in its course, or at its outlet, then, for a time, lakes would be formed, which in like manner would narrow themselves and disappear. New channels would then be formed, or the rain would so diffuse itself over the surface, that the fall and the evaporation would balance each other.

Such are the unceasing works of CREATION, constantly taking place on this exterior surface of the earth; where, though less evident to the senses and experience of man, matter apparently inert is in as progressive a state of change from the operation of unceasing and immutable causes, as in the visible generations of the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Thus water, wind, and heat, the energies of which NEVER CEASE to be exerted, are constantly producing new combinations, changes, and creations; which, if they accord with the harmony of the whole, are fit and “good;” but, if discordant, are speedily re-organized or extinguished by contrary and opposing powers. In a word, WHATEVER IS, IS FIT; AND WHATEVER IS NOT FIT, IS NOT, OR SOON CEASES TO BE!—Such seems to be the governing principle of Nature—the key of all her mysteries—the primary law of creation! All things are the proximate effects of a balance of immutable powers—those powers are results of a PRIMORDIAL CAUSE,—while that CAUSE is inscrutable and incomprehensible to creatures possessing but a relative being, who live only in TIME and SPACE, and who feel and act merely by the IMPULSE of limited senses and powers.

A lane, in the north-west corner of the Common, brought me to Barnes’ Elms, where now resides a Mr. Hoare, a banker of London. The family were not at home; but, on asking the servants if that was the house of Mr. Tonson, they assured me, with great simplicity, that no such gentleman lived there. I named the Kit-Cat Club, as accustomed to assemble here; but the oddity of the name excited their ridicule; and I was told that no such Club was held there; but, perhaps, said one to the other, the gentleman means the Club that assembles at the public-house on the Common. Knowing, however, that I was at the right place, I could not avoid expressing my vexation, that the periodical assemblage of the first men of their age, should be so entirely forgotten by those who now reside on the spot—when one of them exclaimed, “I should not wonder if the gentleman means the philosopher’s room.”—“Aye,” rejoined his comrade, “I remember somebody coming once before to see something of this sort, and my master sent him there.” I requested then to be shewn to this room; when I was conducted across a detached garden, and brought to a handsome structure in the architectural style of the early part of the last century—evidently the establishment of the Kit-Cat Club!

A walk covered with docks, thistles, nettles, and high grass, led from the remains of a gate-way in the garden-wall, to the door which opened into the building. Ah! thought I, along this desolate avenue the finest geniuses in England gaily proceeded to meet their friends;—yet within a century, how changed—how deserted—how revolting! A cold chill seized me, as the man unfastened the decayed door of the building, and as I beheld the once-elegant hall, filled with cobwebs, a fallen ceiling, and accumulating rubbish. On the right, the present proprietor had erected a copper, and converted one of the parlours into a wash-house! The door on the left led to a spacious and once superb staircase, now in ruins, filled with dense cobwebs, which hung from the lofty ceiling, and seemed to be deserted even by the spiders! The entire building, for want of ventilation, having become food for the fungus, called dry-rot, the timber had lost its cohesive powers. I ascended the staircase, therefore, with a feeling of danger, to which the man would not expose himself;—but I was well requited for my pains. Here I found the Kit-Cat Club-room, nearly as it existed in the days of its glory. It is eighteen feet high, and forty feet long, by twenty wide. The mouldings and ornaments were in the most superb fashion of its age; but the whole was falling to pieces, from the effects of the dry-rot.

My attention was chiefly attracted by the faded cloth-hanging of the room, whose red colour once set off the famous portraits of the Club, that hung around it. Their marks and sizes were still visible, and the numbers and names remained as written in chalk for the guidance of the hanger! Thus was I, as it were, by these still legible names, brought into personal contact with Addison, and Steele, and Congreve, and Garth, and Dryden, and with many hereditary nobles, remembered, only because they were patrons of those natural nobles!—I read their names aloud!—I invoked their departed spirits!—I was appalled by the echo of my own voice!—The holes in the floor, the forests of cobwebs in the windows, and a swallow’s nest in the corner of the ceiling, proclaimed that I was viewing a vision of the dreamers of a past age,—that I saw realized before me the speaking vanities of the anxious career of man! The blood of the reader of sensibility will thrill as mine thrilled! It was feeling without volition, and therefore incapable of analysis!

I could not help lingering in a place so consecrated by the religion of Nature; and, sitting down for a few minutes on some broken boards, I involuntarily shed a tear of sympathy for the departed great—for times gone by,—here brought before my eyes in so tangible a shape! I yielded to the unsophisticated sentiments which I could not avoid reading in this VOLUME of ruins; and felt, by irresistible association, that every object of our affections—that our affections themselves—and that all things that delight us, must soon pass away like this place and its former inhabitants! Beginning yesterday—flourishing to-day—ceasing to-morrow!—such is the sum of the history of all organized being! Certain combinations excite, and the creative powers proceed with success, till balanced by the inertia of the materials—a contest of maturity arises, measured in length by the activity of the antagonist powers;—but the unceasing inertia finally prevails over the original excitement and its accessary stimuli, and ultimately produces disorganization and dissolution! Such is the abstract view of the physical laws which, in the peculiar career of intellectual man, successively give rise to HOPE in youth—PRIDE in manhood—REFLECTION in decay—and HUMILITY in old age. He knows his fate to be inevitable—but every day’s care is an epitome of his course, and every night’s sleep affords an anticipation of its end!—He is thus taught to die—and, if in spite of his vices or follies he should live till his world has passed away before him, he will then contentedly await the termination of that vital action which, creating no passion, affords no enjoyment. Such, said I, is the scheme of Benevolence, which, by depriving the prospect of death of its terrors, makes room, without suffering, for a succession of new generations, to whose perceptions the world is ever young. The only wise use therefore which men can make of scenes like that before me, is to deduce from them a lesson of moderation and humility;—for, such as are these dumb, though visible cares of that generation—such will our own soon be!

On rejoining Mr. Hoare’s man in the hall below, and expressing my grief that so interesting a building should be suffered to go to decay for want of attention, he told me that his master intended to pull it down and unite it to an adjoining barn, so as to form of the two a riding-house; and I learn that this design has since been executed! The Kit-Cat pictures were painted early in the eighteenth century, and, about the year 1710, were brought to this spot; but the room I have been describing was not built till ten or fifteen years afterwards. They were forty-two in number, and were presented by the members to the elder Tonson, who died in 1736. He left them to his great nephew, also an eminent bookseller, who died in 1767. They were then removed from this building to the house of his brother, at Water-Oakley, near Windsor; and, on his death, to the house of Mr. Baker, of Hertingfordbury, where they now remain, and where I lately saw them splendidly lodged and in fine preservation. It may be proper to observe, that the house of Mr. Hoare was not the house of Mr. Tonson, and that Mr. Tonson’s house stood nearer to the Kit-Cat Club-rooms, having a few years since been taken down. The situation is certainly not a happy one, being on a level with the Thames, and the adjacent grounds being deeply flooded at high tides. It is, however, completely sequestered from vulgar approach, and on that account was, perhaps, preferred as the retreat of a man of business.

At Barnes’ Elms lived the virtuous minister of Elizabeth, Sir Francis Walsingham, and here he once entertained that chivalrous queen. Cowley, the poet, afterwards resided here; and, in a later age Heydegger, the buffoon, who gave an eccentric entertainment to the second Guelph, and contrived to gratify his listless mind by an ingenious surprize, in at first making him believe that he was not prepared to receive him, and then contriving a sudden burst of lights, music, and gaiety.

In returning through the lane which led from the Kit-Cat Club-room to Barnes Common, the keenest emotions of the human mind were excited by an unforeseen cause. I was admiring the luxuriance and grandeur of the vegetation, in trees which from the very ground expanded in immense double trunks, and in the profusion of weeds and shrubs which covered every part of the untrodden surface—when, on a sudden, I caught the distant sound of a ring of VILLAGE BELLS. Nothing could be more in accordance with the predispositions of my mind. All the melancholy which is created by the recurrence of the same succession of tones, instantly controlled and oppressed my feelings. I became the mere patient of these sounds; and I sank, as it were, under the force of gloomy impressions, which so completely lulled and seduced me, that I suffered without being able to exert an effort to escape from their magic spell. Seldom had the power of sound acquired a similar ascendency over me. I seemed to be carried back by it to days and events long passed away. My soul, so to speak, was absorbed; and I leaned upon a gate, partly to indulge the reverie, partly as an effect of lassitude, and partly to listen more attentively to the sounds which caused so peculiar a train of feeling.

There were six bells; and they rang what might be designed for a merry peal, to celebrate some village festival; or, perhaps, thought I, they may be profaning a sanctuary of the religion of peace, and outraging a land of freedom, to announce some bloody victory, gained by legions of trained slaves, over patriots who have been asserting the liberties and defending the independence of their country. Whichever might be the purpose, (for, alas! the latter, among my degenerated countrymen, is as likely as the former,) the recurring tones produced corresponding vibrations on my nerves, and I felt myself played upon like a concordant musical instrument. Presently, however, it occurred to me, that I was not an entire stranger to the tones of those bells, and that part of their fascination arose from an association between them and some of the earliest and dearest objects in my remembrance. “Surely,” I exclaimed, “they are Chiswick bells!—the very bells under the sound of which I received part of my early education, and, as a school-boy, passed the happiest days of my life!—Well may their tones vibrate to my inmost soul—and kindle uncommon sympathies!” I now recollected that the winding of the river must have brought me nearer to that simple and primitive village than the profusion of wood had permitted me to perceive, and my nerves had been unconsciously acted upon by tones which served as keys to all the associations connected with these bells, their church, and the village of Chiswick! I listened again, and now discriminated the identical sounds which I had not heard during a period of more than thirty years. I distinguished the very words, in the successive tones, which the school-boys and puerile imaginations at Chiswick used to combine with them. In fancy, I became again a school-boy—“Yes,” said I, “the six bells repeat the village-legend, and tell me that “my dun cow has just calv’d,” exactly as they did above thirty years since!”—Did the reader ever encounter a similar key-note, leading to a multitude of early and vivid impressions; for in like manner these sympathetic tones brought before my imagination numberless incidents and personages, no longer important, or no longer in existence. My scattered and once-loved school-mates, their characters, and their various fortunes, passed in rapid review before me;—my school-master, his wife, and all the gentry, and heads of families, whose orderly attendance at Divine service on Sundays, while those well-remembered bells were “chiming for church,” (but now departed and mouldering in the adjoining graves!) were rapidly presented to my recollection. With what pomp and form they used to enter and depart from their house of God!—I saw with the mind’s eye the widow Hogarth and her maiden relative, Richardson, walking up the aisle, dressed in their silken sacks, their raised headdresses, their black calashes, their lace ruffles, and their high crook’d canes, preceded by their aged servant, Samuel; who, after he had wheeled his mistress to church in her Bath-chair, carried the prayer-books up the aisle, and opened and shut the pew! There too was the portly Dr. Griffiths, of the Monthly Review, with his literary wife in her neat and elevated wire-winged cap! And oft-times the vivacious and angelic Duchess of Devonshire, whose bloom had not then suffered from the canker-worm of pecuniary distress, created by the luxury of charity! Nor could I forget the humble distinction of the aged sexton Mortefee, whose skill in psalmody enabled him to lead that wretched groupe of singers, whom Hogarth so happily pourtrayed; whose performance with the tuning-fork excited so much wonder in little boys; and whose gesticulations and contortions of head, hand, and body, in beating time, were not outdone, even by Joah Bates in the commemorations of Handel! Yes, simple and happy villagers! I remember scores of you;—how fortunately ye had escaped the contagion of the metropolitan vices, though distant but five miles; and how many of you have I conversed with, who, at an adult age, had never beheld the degrading assemblage of its knaveries and miseries!

I revelled in the melancholy pleasure of these recollections, yielding my whole soul to that witchery of sensibility, which magnifies the perception of being, till one of the bells was overset; when, the peal stopping, I had leisure to reflect on the rapid advance of the day, and on the consequent necessity of quickening my speed.

At the end of this lane I crossed a road, which I found led to Chiswick Ferry. The opening gave increased effect to the renewed peal, and I regretted that I could not then indulge in a nearer approach to that beloved spot. I passed a farm-house and some neat villas, and presently came to the unostentatious, but interestingly-ancient structure of Barnes Church, situated on the Common, at the distance of a quarter of a mile from the village. I essayed to enter the church-yard to read some of the chronicles of mortality, particularly as it invited attention by the unusual object of a display of elegant Roses, which I afterwards learnt had been cultivated on the same spot about 150 years, to indulge the conceit of a person of the name of Rose, who was buried there, and left an acre of ground to the parish to defray the expence; but I found the gate locked, and was told it was never opened, except during service. I confess I was not pleased with this regulation, because it appeared to sever the affections of the living from their proper sympathy with the dead. I have felt in the same manner in regard to the inclosed cemeteries of the metropolis: they separate the dead too abruptly from surviving friends and relatives. Grief seeks to indulge itself unobserved; it desires to be unrestrained by forms and hours, and to vent itself in perfect solitude. The afflicted wife longs to weep over the grave of her husband; the husband to visit the grave of a beloved wife; and the tender mother seeks the spot endeared by the remains of her child: but they cannot submit to the formality of asking permission, or allow their griefs to be intruded upon by strange attendants. Such tributes to our unsophisticated feelings are, however, denied by the locks, bolts, and walls, of the metropolitan cemeteries. The practised grave-digger wonders at the indulgence of unavailing woe—the unconscious tenants of his domain possess no peculiar claims on his sympathy—he cannot conceive how any can be felt by others—and, if he grant permission to enter, it must be for some cause more urgent, and more apparent, than that of bewailing over a grave! Did it never occur, however, to the clergymen who superintend these depositories of mortality, that more respect is due to the feelings of survivors? Is it necessary for any evident purpose, that the gates should be locked at any time, or for more than a few hours in the night? And, if even this privation be suffered merely from the fear of resurrection-men, is it not due to the best feelings of our nature that the severest punishment should attach to the crime of stealing dead bodies? What can now be learnt of anatomy which cannot be found in books and models, or be taught in the dissection of murderers? I would therefore rather bury a detected resurrection-man alive with the body he might be stealing, than shut out the living from all communion with the dead, and from all the sympathies and lessons addressed to the heart and understanding by their unrestricted intercourse.

Barnes consists of a few straggling houses opposite the Common, of a mean street leading to the water-side, and of a row of elegant houses facing the Thames, on a broad terrace nearly half a mile long. On the opposite side of the river is a tract of new-made swampy ground, shaped circularly by the winding of the river. The chord of this circle extends from Chiswick to Strand-on-the-Green; and upon it is seen the exquisitely beautiful villa of the Duke of Devonshire, where Charles James Fox lately terminated his patriotic career; and on the left are the house and extensive grounds long occupied by the amiable Valentine Morris, esq. who, on his death-bed in Italy, in 1786, bequeathed these premises and a competent annuity as a provision for about thirty aged horses and dogs,—and here some of them survived till within these seven years, dying, from the gradual decay of their vital powers, at the ages of forty and fifty.

The beauty and seclusion of this terrace have long invited the residence of persons of wealth and distinction. Many of those Frenchmen who, from interested connexions, or the prejudices of education, preferred exile and comparative poverty in foreign lands, to the reign of liberty and reason at home, came to reside on this spot. Here was acted the terrible tragedy of the Count and Countess D’Antraigues. These famous intriguants, after traversing Europe to enlist the vain prejudices of kings, and the sycophant spirit of courtiers, against the unalterable principles of the rights of man, settled themselves in a small house near the upper end of this terrace. Here their establishment consisted only of a single Italian footman, and two maid-servants. One day in every week they went to London, in a hired coach, to confer with their partizans; and it was on the morning of one of these excursions that these unhappy persons were suddenly butchered by their Italian footman. The coach stood at the door, and the Count and Countess had descended the stairs, when the servant, rushing from the parlour, fired a pistol at the Count; the ball of which struck, but did not injure him. It, however, so much surprised him as to throw him off his guard, when the wretch struck him with a stiletto between the shoulders. The Count at first reeled on the step of the door, but instantly rushed up stairs, as is supposed, to get arms from his bed-chamber, which he reached, but only to fall dead on the floor. In the mean time, the Countess, who was two or three paces in advance, and had reached the carriage-door, not aware of the cause of the report of the pistol, and of the Count’s precipitate retreat, asked the man, peevishly, why he did not open the door? He advanced as if to do it; but instantly stabbed her in the breast to the hilt of his weapon: she shrieked, reeled a few yards, and fell dead beside the post which adjoins the house to the West, on the pavement near which her blood was lately visible. The villain himself fled up-stairs to the room where his master lay weltering in his blood, and then, with a razor, cut his own throat. I saw the coachman, who told me that scarcely five minutes elapsed between the time when he heard them approach the carriage and beheld them corpses! The several acts were begun and over in an instant. At first he could not conceive what was passing; and, though he leaped from the box to the aid of the dying lady, he had then no suspicion of the fate of the Count. I took pains to ascertain the assassin’s motive for committing such horrid deeds; but none can be traced beyond a feeling of revenge, excited by a supposed intention of his master to discard him, and send him out of the kingdom; a design which, it is said, he discovered by listening on the stairs to the conversation of the Count and Countess, while they were enjoying the water-scene by moon-light, on the preceding evening, from their projecting windows. It was impossible to view the spot where such a tragedy had been acted, without horror, and without deep sympathy for the victims; yet it gratified me to find the house already inhabited by a respectable family, because it thus appeared that there are now dispersed through society many whose minds are raised above the artifices of superstition,—which, in no distant age, would have filled these premises with ghosts and hobgoblins, till they had become a bye-word and a heap of ruins!

Nearly adjoining and behind the residence of Count d’Antraigues, stand the premises and grounds long occupied by another distinguished emigrant, the Marquis de Chabanes, a relation of the notorious and versatile Talleyrand. This marquis here pursued two speculations, by which, at the time, he attracted attention and applause. In the first he undertook to give useful body and consistency to the dust of coals, of which thousands of tons, before their application to gas-lights, were annually wasted in the shipping and coal-wharfs; and for this purpose he erected a manufactory; but, after much loss of labour and property, found it necessary to abandon the project. In the second speculation, he proposed to introduce various French improvements into English horticulture, and undertook to supply the fruiterers of the metropolis with tender and unseasonable fruits and vegetables, in greater perfection, and at a lower rate, than they had heretofore been supplied by the English gardeners. For this purpose he built large and high walls, and very extensive hot-houses and conservatories; but, being unable to contend against the fickleness of our climate, he found it necessary to abandon this scheme also; when the glasses, the frames, &c. were sold by auction; and no vestiges now remain of his labours, but his vines and the ruins of his flues and foundation-walls.

During my inquiries of the working gardener who has succeeded him on the ground, I learnt some particulars in regard to the economy by which the metropolis receives its vast supplies of fruits and fresh vegetables. Mr. Middleton, in his philosophical Survey of Middlesex, estimates the quantity of garden-ground, within ten miles of the metropolis, at 15,000 acres, giving employment in the fruit-season to 60,000 labourers. The mode of conveying this vast produce to market creates habits among this numerous class of people which are little suspected by the rest of the community. A gardener’s life appears to be one of the most primitive and natural; but, passed near London, it is as artificial and unnatural as any known to our forced state of society. Covent-garden market is held three days in the week, and other markets on the same or other days; and, as vegetables ought to be eaten as soon as possible after they are gathered, it is the business of the gardener to gather one day and sell the next; hence the intervening night is the period of conveyance from the places of growth to those of consumption. All the roads round London, therefore, are covered with market-carts, and waggons during the night, so that they may reach the markets by three, four, or five o’clock, when the dealers attend; and these markets are over by six or seven. The shops of retailers are then supplied by the aid of ill-paid Irish women, who carry loads of a hundredweight to all parts of London on their heads, to meet the demands of good house-wives, who, at ten or eleven, buy their garden-stuff for the day. This rapid routine creates a prodigious quantity of labour for men, women, and horses. Every gardener has his market-cart or carts, which he loads at sun-set; and, they depart at ten, eleven, twelve, or one o’clock, according to the distance from London. Each cart is accompanied by a driver, and also by a person to sell, generally the gardener’s wife; who, having sold the load, returns with the team by nine or ten o’clock in the morning; and has thus finished the business of the day, before half the inhabitants of London have risen from their beds. Such is the economy of every gardener’s family within ten miles of London,—of some every night, and of others every other night, during at least six months in the year. The high vegetable season in summer, as well as peculiar crops at other times, call for exertions of labour, or rather of slavery, scarcely paralleled by any other class of people. Thus, in the strawberry season, hundreds of women are employed to carry that delicate fruit to market on their heads; and their industry in performing this task is as wonderful, as their remuneration is unworthy of the opulent classes who derive enjoyment from their labour. They consist, for the most part, of Shropshire and Welsh girls, who walk to London at this season in droves, to perform this drudgery, just as the Irish peasantry come to assist in the hay and corn harvests. I learnt that these women carry upon their heads baskets of strawberries, or raspberries, weighing from forty to fifty pounds, and make two turns in the day, from Isleworth to market, a distance of thirteen miles each way; three turns from Brentford, a distance of nine miles; and four turns from Hammersmith; a distance of six miles. For the most part, they find some conveyance back; but even then these industrious creatures carry loads from twenty-four to thirty miles a-day, besides walking back unladen some part of each turn! Their remuneration for this unparalleled slavery is from 8s. to 9s. per day; each turn from the distance of Isleworth being 4s. or 4s. 6d.; and from that of Hammersmith 2s. or 2s. 3d. Their diet is coarse and simple, their drink, tea and small-beer; costing not above 1s. or 1s. 6d. and their back-conveyance about 2s. or 2s. 6d.; so that their net gains are about 5s. per day, which, in the strawberry season, of forty days, amounts to 10l. After this period the same women find employment in gathering and marketing vegetables, at lower wages, for other sixty days, netting about 5l. more. With this poor pittance they return to their native county, and it adds either to their humble comforts, or creates a small dowry towards a rustic establishment for life. Can a more interesting picture be drawn of virtuous exertion? Why have our poets failed to colour and finish it? More virtue never existed in their favourite Shepherdesses than in these Welsh and Shropshire girls! For beauty, symmetry, and complexion, they are not inferior to the nymphs of Arcadia, and they far outvie the pallid specimens of Circassia! Their morals too are exemplary; and they often perform this labour to support aged parents, or to keep their own children from the workhouse! In keen suffering, they endure all that the imagination of a poet could desire; they live hard, they sleep on straw in hovels and barns, and they often burst an artery, or drop down dead from the effect of heat and over-exertion! Yet, such is the state of one portion of our female population, at a time when we are calling ourselves the most polished nation on earth, and pretending to be so wealthy that we give away millions a-year to foreigners unsolicited, and for no intelligible purpose! And such too is their dire necessity, that it would be most cruel to suggest or recommend any invention that might serve as a substitute for their slavery, and thereby deprive them of its wretched annual produce!

The transit from Barnes to Mortlake is but a few paces; a small elbow in the road forming their point of separation. Both of them contain some handsome villas, and they are pleasantly situated on the banks of the Thames; yet they are less beautiful than they might be rendered, by very slender attentions. There is no public taste, no love of natal soil, no pride of emulation apparent, though the scite is one of the finest in England. A few mansions of the opulent adorn both villages, and the country fascinates in spite of the inhabitants; but the third and fourth rate houses have a slovenly, and often a kind of pig-sty character, disgusting to those who, in the beautiful towns and villages of Essex, have seen what may be done, to improve the habitations even of humble life. Lovely Witham, and Kelvedon, and Coggeshall! what examples you set to all other towns in your neatly painted and whitened houses—unostentatious, though cheerful—and inviting, though chaste and modest! What a contrast do you present to the towns and villages in Middlesex and Surrey, and even in Kent! If poverty forbids a stuccoed or plastered wall, the cleanly and oft-repeated whitewash proves the generous public spirit of the occupant, while the outside seldom has occasion to blush for the inside. A spirit of harmony runs through the whole, and a pure habitation is indicative of pure inhabitants; thus, cleanliness in the house leads to neatness of apparel—both require order, and out of order grow moral habits, domestic happiness, and the social virtues. Nor is this theory fanciful; Witham, Kelvedon, and Coggeshall, form a district which is at once the most beautiful, the least vicious, and the happiest, in the kingdom. One virtue is doubtless consequent on another, and one good habit generates another; the result is the harmonious triumph of virtue! If it be doubted whether the white-washed exterior is more than “an outward and visible sign” of the purity within, I reply—that virtue is so much the effect of habit, that whatever improves the habits improves the character; and that, if a house were frequently white-washed within and without, it could scarcely fail to banish personal filth from the inmates; while habits of cleanliness, which call for habits of industry, would produce the rest. I have, indeed, often thought that it would be an efficacious means of bettering the morals, as well as the health, of the London poor, if St. Giles’s, Hockly-in-the-hole, Fleet-lane, Saffron-hill, and other dens of vice and misery, were by law lime-washed inside and outside twice in every year. But, in whatever degree this doctrine may be just, let me hope these observations will meet the eye of some active philanthropists, who, being thus taught to consider cleanliness as an auxiliary of morals and happiness, will be induced so to paint and whiten our dusky-coloured villages and dirty towns, as to render them worthy of virtuous residents, in the hope that, by reciprocation, they may render themselves worthy of their purified habitations.

I do not charge on Barnes and Mortlake exclusively the characteristics of filth—they are not inferior to other villages within ten miles; but the whole require improvement, and I recommend Witham, Kelvedon, and other places in that district of Essex, to their imitation.

Mortlake church-yard and its ancient church stand pleasantly on the north side of a large field, across which is a picturesque foot-path to East Sheen. I inquired eagerly for the tomb of Partridge, the almanack-maker and astrologer, and found it in the south-east corner, in a tottering condition. Relics so famous would, it might have been supposed, have extorted from the Parish Vestry a single hod of mortar, and an hour’s labour of a mason, to sustain it: yet thus it is, not only at Mortlake, but every where. Nothing is conceded to public feeling, and the most venerable monuments are suffered to fall to decay for want of the most trifling repairs. The following inscription is still legible on the slab of the tomb:—

Johannes Partridge, Astrologus et Medicinæ Doctor, natus est apud East-Sheen, in comitatu Surrey, 8º die Januarii, anno 1644, et mortuus est Londini 24º die Junii, anno 1715. Medicinam fecit duobus Regibus unique Reginæ; Carolo scilicet Secundo, Willielmo Tertio, Reginæque Mariæ. Creatus Medicinæ Doctor Lugduni Batavorum.

How many are the associations which grow out of this name of Partridge! He was one of the last of the learned votaries of Astrology, the mother of the sciences, though herself the daughter of superstition. His works on genitures, and on the errors of his favourite science, are specimens of acute reasoning, not exceeded by the ablest disquisitions on more worthy subjects. Yet he was held up by Swift as an impostor, though Swift himself lived by a show of faith in other mysteries, for which his reverence is very doubtful. Not so Partridge; he evidently believed sincerely that the stars were indices of fate, and he wrote and acted in that belief, however much he may have been deceived by appearances. He found, as all students in astrology find, that every horoscope enabled him to foretel with precision a certain number of events; and, if his prognostics failed in some cases, he ascribed the failure to no defect of his celestial intelligencers, but to the errors or short-sightedness of his art. Good, and even wise men have, in all ages, been deceived by the same appearances. They found that the planets foretold some events; they thence inferred that the planets ruled those and all events; and, if the science often disappointed them, they found an apology for it in their own mistaken judgments, or in the errors introduced into it by different authors. Astrologers were therefore not impostors, as they are often described by the over-righteous, the hasty, or the ignorant. They found a science reared on the observations and experience of the remotest antiquity, and their prognostications were deduced from its established laws. Its practices were directed by the unerring motions of the earth, moon, and planets; and it possessed characteristics of grandeur and sublimity, arising from the magnitude and solemnity of its sources, and from the eternal laws which regulated them.

The errors on which this science was reared, were not, however, peculiar to astrologers. They were engendered by ignorance, and nurtured by superstition and priestcraft. Every event happens in its own way, and cannot happen in any other way than that in which it has actually happened; or, in other words, an event cannot happen and not happen, or a thing cannot be and not be. This necessary determination of every event in a single manner, the consequence of commensurate proximate causes, which it is often difficult to analyse, served as a fruitful source of superstitious feeling, and as a handle for the priests among the early nations of antiquity. In whatever way an event happened, that was said to be its Fate, notwithstanding a slight exercise of reason would have shewn that what has happened in one way could not, at the same time, happen in another way. But, as it did happen in one way rather than another, the way in which it did happen was said to be predetermined; the kind of cause was not examined which determined it to happen as it did happen; the effect was even said to rule the causes; and all the causes, remote and proximate, were said to be operative merely for the sake of producing the ultimate effect!

As every event must happen in the way an which it has happened, a description of it, is but an expression of the certainty, that it has happened in such or such a particular manner. If this result be fortunate, then all the circumstances which led to it, however remote, are deemed to have been lucky; though, if it prove unfortunate, the same train of causes are then called unlucky. There was, however, neither luck nor ill-luck in these trains, because the remote or necessary physical causes did not determine the proximate and fluctuating mental ones. There existed no necessary connexion between these trains, besides the necessity or certainty that some result must be consequent on every train of events growing out of human life and action. These trains must, in all cases, produce some result, that is to say, a result of some kind, and not necessarily any particular result.

In considering the curious enigma in regard to FATALITY, men err in conceiving that all the remote causes which lead to an event, operate and combine for the sake of some particular result, instead of considering every personal or social event as the necessary single effect of the proximate causes; and they also confound the species of causes which produce events. There are two distinct sets of causes, the one physical and the other mental. The physical are determined by fixed, and often by known laws, and hence we are enabled to foretel the places of the planets and the moment when eclipses of the Sun and Moon will happen for a thousand years to come. The mental are governed by the varying experience, caprice, and self-love, generated within animal minds; and, being therefore measured by no fixed laws, produce results which cannot be anticipated, except in their proximate operation. These mental causes, so to speak, cross each other in every direction, and at one time may accelerate, though at another time they may retard, or give novel directions to physical causes; and, as they are generated in every successive moment by the errors and passions of fallible beings, and often have an extensive influence on the affairs of mankind, so they constitute an infinite variety of original causes, which, as no law creates them, no law leads to their effects; of course, therefore, their effects are not necessary, and no knowledge can exist, enabling men to anticipate that which is generated by no fixed laws, and which therefore is not necessary.

I lately met a friend, who justly passes for a philosopher. He mentioned the distress of a family which he had just been relieving; “and, would you believe it,” said he—“if I had not passed along a street where I seldom go, and met a child of the family, I should have known nothing of their situation? Was it not evidently pre-ordained, therefore, that I should walk along that street, at that time, for the purpose of relieving that family?” “So, then,” said I, “you make the consequence determine the cause, rather than take the trouble to examine whether the causes were not equal to the effect, without being themselves necessary or irresistible.” “But then,” he replied, “there was such an aptness, such a coincidence, such a final purpose!”—“Ah!” I rejoined, “you cheat yourself by not extending your vocabulary—why not say there was sufficient affluence, guided by a benevolent heart—and such distress, that they were called into prompt exertion? Is it to be regarded as a miracle, that a benevolent heart proved the sufficient cause of a good action, and that distress was an excitement equivalent to the effect which you describe? The street was a medium or stage of action, as capable of leading to evil as to good. You could not be in two places at the same time; nor could the result be and not be. Had you been in another place, some other family might have been relieved from the collision of the same causes; and each event would, in like manner, have appeared to have determined the causes, instead of being a single consequence of the causes. Nor were these causes more necessary than the result. Your feelings were spontaneous, but you may in future change the result by hardening your heart, like other rich men.” “I will do neither,” said he, quickly.—“No,” said I, “I know you won’t—you will not violate your habitual inclinations. In future, however, do them justice; and, when you perform a kind action, do not make the consequence the cause.”5

I sat on the tomb of Partridge, and thought it a fit place in which to ruminate on these involved points. Do the astrologers (said I) consider the stars as mere indices of pretended fates, or as the causes of the events which they are enabled to anticipate by the anticipated motions of the stars? In nativities, they seem to consider them as indices; but, in horary questions, as causes. They are treated as indices in all cases wherein arbitrary numbers or measures, or imaginary points are introduced; but deemed material causes when particular events are said to be coincident with actual positions. Both hypotheses cannot, however, be well founded; and his reason will call on the astrologer to give up the doctrine of indices of fate, and prefer that of secondary causes. Here then a still greater difficulty presents itself; the causes are general, and they must operate on the whole earth and all its inhabitants alike. A □ of ♂ and ☿, or a △ of ♄ and ♃, (that is, a square aspect of Mars and Mercury, or a trine of Saturn and Jupiter,) whenever they happen, are alike applicable to all the inhabitants and regions of the earth. It was plausible to talk of a planetary aspect as productive of rain or wind, when the geography of the astrologer did not extend beyond the plains of Chaldea, or the immediate banks of the Nile; but our better knowledge of cosmography now teaches us, that, at the time of every aspect, every variety of season and of weather is prevalent in different parts of the world; and every contrariety of fortune is happening to individuals in all countries. The doctrine that the planets are secondary causes, is, therefore, not supported by the circumstances of the phenomena.

But the astrologers are not content with natural positions, but, like the eastern priests with their gods, they assign different parts of the heavens, and different countries, to each planet; and then found prognostics on these local positions of the planets. It is evident, however, that the apparent position of a planet depends on the varying position of the earth, and that an inferior planet may be in exactly the same point of space, and yet be seen from the earth in every sign of the zodiac; though, according to the astrologers, it would in that same place have very different powers! This doctrine was admissible when the earth was considered as the centre of the universe; when the geocentric phenomena were considered as absolute; and when the apparently quick and slow motions, the retrogradations, and the stationary positions, were ascribed to caprices of the planets themselves, or to motives of their prime mover, and therefore were received as signs of corresponding events and fates!

But the radical error of the art of prediction is more deeply seated than we are commonly aware of. There is a chance, however difficult it may be in all cases to reduce it to arithmetical precision, that any possible event may happen to a particular person. No possible event can indeed be conceived, that, with regard to a particular person, is not within the range of arithmetical probability; while all the probable events, such as predictors announce, are within very narrow limits. As an example, I assume, that, of any hundred ordinary events of human life, it may be an even chance that sixty of them will happen, or not happen; and, of the other forty, it may be as 20 to 1 that 10 of them will happen; as 10 to 1 that other 10 will happen; as 1 to 10 that other 10 will happen; and as 1 to 20 that the other 10 will happen. Then, by averaging all these chances, it will be found that it is an even chance that the whole will happen, or will not happen; or, in other words, that half will happen, and that half will not happen. If, therefore, a dextrous person foretel one hundred events, by means of any prognosticating key, or any index whose powers are previously settled,—whether stars, cards, sediments of tea, lines of the hand or forehead, entrails of animals, or dreams, signs or omens,—by the doctrine of chances it is an even, or some other fixed chance, that half, or some other portion, of such events will come to pass. Superstition will triumph if only 1 in 5, or 1 in 10, happen as foretold; but, if 1 in 2 or 3 should happen by neutralizing or generalizing the predictions, then the prophet is accounted a favourite of Heaven, or a familiar of Satan! For this purpose it signifies not what it is that constitutes the key of fate; it will sufficiently deceive the practitioner, if it relieve him from the responsibility of his announcements; and, if he prudently announce none but events highly probable, he will himself be astonished at the apparent verity of his art! In truth, he is all the while but the dupe of arithmetic; and a cool examination would shew him that, for the most part, it is an even chance that any predicted event will happen, which has been foretold by any key, or sign, or token. The planets, the signs of the zodiac, &c. serve as one set of these keys, or indices—dreams serve as another—the entrails of animals have been used as another—signs, noises, omens, tokens, sympathies, &c. are a fruitful source—lines of the hand, forehead, wrist, &c. are others—moles, marks, &c. furnish others—cards afford a rich variety—and the sediments of teacups, and I know not what besides, serve as means of announcing events by pre-arranged laws of association. The half, or more than half, of such events, must however necessarily happen by the averages of chances; and this unascertained and unsuspected coincidence has from age to age countenanced and confirmed the delusion.

All that a prophet or fortune-teller requires, therefore, is some set of indices, to each of which he can assign particular powers and significations, and then be able so to vary their order as to give them new and endless combinations, representing the fortunes of all mankind. When varied for a particular individual, he has merely to apply to that person the probable events indicated by the new combinations; and, according to the law of chances, he must necessarily succeed in a certain proportion of his prognostics, because it is within a certain numerical chance that any possible event will happen to any individual. The prognosticator in these cases is deceived, because he is solely directed by the order of his indices. As he finds that he has been enabled to foretel by their means a certain number of events, he conceives either that these indices must govern the fates; that the finger of Providence or the agency of the Devil governed his indices; or, with many grave writers, that there is a soul of the world which harmonizes all things, producing an accordance between the FORTUNES of the HUMAN RACE and the sediments of tea-cups, the arrangements of cards, the aspects and positions of the planets, the lines in the hand or forehead, the indications of dreams, and the entrails of animals! On the other hand, the dupes of these prognostics, when fortunate, often direct their best exertions to fulfil them; or, when unfortunate, they sink into a feeling of despondency, which leads to their fulfilment. And, should one in ten of the predicted events take place, they become firm believers in the doctrines of fatality, necessity, and other superstitions; “for,” say they, “how could an event be foretold, if it had not been irrevocably decreed that it must happen?” What a powerful handle for priest-craft, state-craft, and all the crafts by which mankind have been abused in every age of the world!

That this exposition of the true cause of the popular errors, in regard to any supposed connexion between certain accidents of matter, and unconnected future events, will not be without its uses, must be evident from the known influence which some of the means of prognostication possess over every rank of society. Such scenes as that described in the Spectator, where so much unhappiness was created by spilling the salt, are still realized every day in nearly every family in Great Britain. All phenomena which cannot easily be accounted for, and hundreds of trivial incidents, are considered by the gravest as portentous signs of events to come. The coincidence of any event and its prognostic, though it might have been ten to one that it would happen, is received as evidence of their connexion, which it would be impiety to laugh at! But need I quote a more striking instance than the still prodigious annual sale of 300,000 of Partridge’s and Moore’s Almanacks, whose recommendations are their prognostications, and which a few years since lost most of their patrons, because the Stationers’ Company, in the edition of the year, left out the predictions as an experiment on the public wisdom!

In returning from the tomb of Partridge, I beheld another, dear to patriotism and civic glory, that of Alderman Barber, Lord-mayor of London in 1733. His memory is still cherished among aged citizens, and the cause is recorded in the following inscription:—

“Under this stone were laid the remains of John Barber, esq. alderman of London, a constant benefactor to the poor, true to his principles in church and state. He preserved his integrity, and discharged the duty of an upright magistrate. Zealous for the rights of his fellow citizens, he opposed all attempts against them; and, being lord mayor in the year 1733, he defeated a scheme of a general Excise, which, had it succeeded, would have put an end to the liberties of his country.”

Virtuous citizen! Happy was it that thou didst not live to suffer the mortification of seeing thy degraded country devoured by swarms of excisemen, and the third of its population fattening on the taxes collected from the other two-thirds. Too justly didst thou anticipate that the terrors and corruptions growing out of such an inquisition as the excise, would destroy that sturdy spirit of independence, which in thy day constituted the chief glory of the English country-gentleman and London merchant. Till it was broken or undermined by the evil genius of Taxation, that spirit served as the basis of Britain’s prosperity; but now, alas! it seems to be extinguished for ever.—Patriotic Lord-mayor of London! In thy day to watch with jealousy the never-ceasing encroachments of the regal prerogatives, and to render the ministers of the crown accountable at the bar of public opinion, were paths of honour leading to the highest civic distinctions! Many of the race that conducted to a wise end the glorious revolution of 1688 then survived—the genius of liberty continued to inspire the sons of Britain—the holy flame that punished two kings for trespassing on the rights of their people, was not entirely extinguished—the deadly paralysis of the Septennial Act had not then produced its blighting effects on the whole body politic. But London ceased to be influenced by the lost voice of Barber, and the Excise system triumphed—the barriers of freedom were passed—trial by jury was, in certain cases, either dispensed with, or nullified by well-trained special juries—the public judgment was misled by venal conductors of the public press—patriotism was deemed faction—liberty was held up as another name for rebellion—and, in consequence, FORTY-FIVE YEARS OF FOREIGN WAR have disgraced SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS of our annals, though thirty years of foreign war served in the preceding three hundred years to vindicate every British interest!—Venerated name of Barber! Where is the monument to be found in the public buildings of London, to record thy virtues for the example of others? Would it not be a worthy companion to the statues of Beckford and Chatham? And would it not keep in countenance the honest exertions of the Waithmans—Woods—and Goodbeheres—who in our days have trod in thy steps, and who, it may be hoped, will have a long line of successors in the same honourable career?

Being anxious to view the inside of Mortlake church, a boy undertook to fetch the key from the house of the sexton. In the mean time I examined around me the humble monuments raised by affection to the memory of the dead. Here were the pyramid, the obelisk, and the tumulus, in their most diminutive forms. Here lay decomposed the mineral parts of those ancestors from whom the contemporary generation have sprung. Yes, said I, we truly are all of one nature, and one family; and we suffer a common fate! We burst as germs into organization, we swell by a common progress into maturity, and we learn to measure by motion what we call Time, till, our motions and our time ceasing, we are thus laid side by side, generation after generation, serving as examples of a similar futurity to those who spring from us, and succeed us.

I reflected that, as it is now more than four hundred years since this ground became the depository of the dead, some of its earliest occupants might, without an hyperbole, have been ancestors of the whole cotemporary English nation. If we suppose that a man was buried in this church-yard 420 years ago, who left six children, each of whom had three children, who again had, on an average, the same number in every generation of thirty years; then, in 420 years, or fourteen generations, his descendants might be multiplied as under:

1st generation 6

2nd 18

3rd 54

4th 162

5th 486

6th 1458

7th 4374

8th 13122

9th 39366

10th generation 118098

11th 354274

12th 1062812

13th 3188436

14th 9565308

That is to say, NINE MILLIONS AND A HALF of persons; or, as nearly as possible, the exact population of South Britain, might at this day be descended in a direct line from any individual buried in this or any other church-yard in the year 1395, who left six children, each of whose descendants have had on the average three children! And, by the same law, every individual who has six children may be the root of as many descendants within 420 years, provided they increase on the low average of only three in every branch. His descendants would represent an inverted triangle, of which he would constitute the lower angle.

To place the same position in another point of view, I calculated also that every individual now living must have had for his ancestor every parent in Britain living in the year 1125, the age of Henry the First, taking the population of that period at 8,000,000. Thus, as every individual must have had a father and a mother, or two progenitors, each of whom had a father and a mother, or four progenitors, each generation would double its progenitors every thirty years. Every person living may, therefore, be considered as the apex of a triangle, of which the base would represent the whole population of a remote age.

1815, Living individual 1

1785, His father and mother 2

1755, Their fathers and mothers 4

1725, ditto 8

1695, ditto 16

1665, ditto 32

1635, ditto 64

1605, ditto 128

1575, ditto 256

1545, ditto 512

1515, ditto 1024

1485, ditto 2048

1455, ditto 4096

1425, Their fathers & mothers 8192

1395, ditto 16384

1365, ditto 32768

1335, ditto 65536

1305, ditto 131072

1275, ditto 262144

1245, ditto 524288

1215, ditto 1048576

1185, ditto 2097152

1155, ditto 4194304

1125, ditto 8388608

That is to say, if there have been a regular co-mixture of marriages, every individual of the living race must of necessity be descended from parents who lived in Britain in 1125. Some districts or clans may require a longer period for the co-mixture, and different circumstances may cut off some families, and expand others; but, in general, the lines of families would cross each other, and become interwoven like the lines of lattice-work. A single inter-mixture, however remote, would unite all the subsequent branches in common ancestry, rendering the cotemporaries of every nation members of one expanded family, after the lapse of an ascertainable number of generations!

This principle is curious; and, though in one view it has been applied to calculations of increasing population, yet I am not aware that it has previously received the moral application which I draw from it, in regard to the commixture of the human race. My ideas may be better conceived, if any person draw two parallel lines to represent the respective contemporary populations of two distinct epochs; and then set up on the lower line an indefinite number of triangles. In this scheme we shall have a just picture of the progressive generations of every nation, and we may observe how necessarily, in spite of artifice and pride, they must, by intermarriages, be blended as one family and one flesh, owing to the individuals of each pair springing from a different apex, and to every side being necessarily crossed by the sides of other triangles. By a converse reasoning, or by tracing the lines from the apex to the base, we may trace the descent as well as the ascent; and, by a glance of the eye, ascertain not only that every individual of a living generation must be descended from the whole of the parents of some generation sufficiently remote, but that every parent in such remote generation must necessarily have been the ancestor of every individual of a contemporary generation.

If, during the Crusades, any of the English intermarried with Greeks, or Syrians, or Italians, all of whom must, by intermingling, have been descendants of the great men of antiquity, so all the English of this age must be connected in blood with those intermarriages, and be descended from the heroes of the classic ages. But let not pride triumph in this consideration; for every malefactor in every age, who left children, was equally an ancestor of the living race! The ancient union of France and England, and of Belgium and Germany with England, must have rendered those people near of kin; while each adjoining nation, mixing with its neighbours, must have blended the whole human race in one great family of remote common origin. This reasoning explains the cause of national physiognomy and character, the co-mixture of foreign nations being inconsiderable, and not sufficient to effect general characteristic changes; while each nation becomes, in the course of ages, one common and blended family, in physiognomy, character, and genius. May so plain a demonstration of this great truth be the means of promoting their concord, their love, the interchange of mutual good offices, and their common happiness!

The messenger having brought the key, I was admitted into Mortlake church, the first glance of whose venerable structure, carried my imagination back through many distant ages, and generated a multitude of interesting associations. Every part of the building bore an air of antique simplicity; and it seemed truly worthy of being the place where the inhabitants of a village ought to meet periodically to receive lessons of moral instruction, and pour forth their thanksgivings to the First Cause of the effects which daily operate on them as so many blessings. Happy system!—so well adapted to the actual condition of society, and so capable, when well directed, of producing the most salutary effects on the temper and habits of the people. Thrice happy man, that parish-priest, who feels the extent and importance of his duties, and performs them for their own reward, not as acts of drudgery, or to gratify selfish feelings! Enviable seat, that pulpit, where power is conferred by law and by custom, of teaching useful truths, and of conveying happiness, through the force of principles, to the fire-sides of so many families! Delightful picture!—what more, or what better, could wisdom contrive?—A day of rest—a place sanctified for instruction—habits of attendance—a teacher of worth and zeal—his precepts carried from the church to the fire-side—and there regulating and governing all the actions and relations of life!

Such, however, is the composition of the picture, only as seen on a sunny day! Alas! the passions and weaknesses of men deny its frequent realization! Authorised instructors cannot enjoy the reputation of superior wisdom without being excited by vanity, and led to play the fool—they cannot understand two or three dialects without becoming coxcombs—they cannot wear a robe of office without being uplifted by pride—and they cannot be appointed expounders of the simple elements of morals, without fancying themselves in possession of a second sight, and discovering a double sense in every text of Scripture! From this weakness of human nature arise most of the mysteries which discredit religion,—hence the incomprehensible jargon of sects—hence the substitution of the shadow of faith for the substance of good works—hence the distraction of the people on theological subjects—and hence, in fine, its too common inefficacy and insufficiency in preserving public morals, evinced, among other bad effects, in its tolerance of vindictive Christian wars.

I appeal, therefore, to conscientious teachers of the people, whether it is not their duty to avoid discussions in the pulpit on mysteries which never edify, because never understood; and to confine their discourses to such topics as those indicated in the Sermon of Jesus on the Mount. Such, at least, appears to be the proper duty of a national establishment! Empirics may raise the fury of fanaticism about mysteries with impunity—every absurdity may, for its season, be embodied in particular congregations—and infidelity, of all kinds, may be proclaimed at the corners of the streets without danger, provided the NATIONAL CHURCH be founded on the broad principles of virtue, and on the practice of those morals which are so beautifully expounded in the New Testament; and provided the parochial clergy do not mix themselves with those visionary topics which depend for success more on zeal and credulity, than on argument or reason. Such a church must flourish, as long as common sense, and a respect for virtue, govern the majority. In this view, I lament, however, that a revision has not taken place of those articles of faith which were promulgated in the sixteenth century, by men newly converted, and perhaps but half converted, from the Romish faith, and taught to a people then unprepared to receive all the changes which reason demanded. As a friend, therefore, to that religion which preserves the public morals, I hope to live to see many of those articles qualified which treat of mysteries conceived in the dark ages of monkish superstition, and countenanced by scholastic logic; considering that such qualification would probably lead to greater concord in matters of the highest importance to society, and serve to establish the Anglican Church on the immoveable bases of reason and truth. It seems, indeed, to be high time that Protestant churches, of all denominations, should come to some agreement in regard to the full extent of the errors which, during twelve centuries, were introduced into the Christian religion by the craft or ignorance of the Church of Rome. Did the early reformers detect the whole of them? And, if in the opinion of discreet persons they did not, or, as is reasonable to suppose, they could not, is it not important to examine conscientious doubts, and to restore the religion of Christ, which we profess, to its original purity, and to THE ONLY STANDARD OF TRUTH, which God has given to man, THE LIGHT OF HIS EXPERIENCE AND REASON.

Such were the considerations that forced themselves upon me, as I paced the aisles of this sanctuary of religion. Nor could I avoid reflecting on the false associations which early prejudices attach to such enclosures of four walls. By day, they are an object of veneration; by night, an object of terror. Perhaps no person in Mortlake would singly pass a long night in this solemn structure, for the fee-simple of half the town! The objects of their fears none could, or would, justify; yet the anticipated horrors of passing a night in a church seems universal! Perhaps some expect, that the common elementary principles which once composed the bodies of the decomposed dead, would, for the occasion, be collected again from the general storehouse of the atmosphere and earth, and would exhibit themselves, on their re-organization, more hurtful than at first. Perhaps others expect that some of those unembodied spirits, with which mythology and priestcraft have in all ages deluded the vulgar,—though no credible evidence or natural probability was ever adduced of the existence or appearance of any such spirits,—would without bodies appear to their visual organs, and torment or injure them!—Yes—monstrous and absurd though it be—such are the prevalent weaknesses created by superstition, and wickedly instilled into infant minds in the nursery, so as to govern the feelings and conduct of ninety-nine of every hundred persons in our comparatively enlightened society.

It should now be well understood, that what is contrary to uniform experience ought to be no object of faith—consequently what no man ever saw, none need expect to see—and what never did harm, none need fear! In this view our poets might aid the work of public education, by dispensing with their machinery of ideal personages, as tending to keep alive that superstition, which a Wordsworth has recently proved to be unnecessary, in a poem that rivals the efforts of the Rosicrucian school. Ought not the ghosts of Shakespeare to be supposed merely as the effects of diseased vision, or a guilty imagination? Ought an enlightened audience to tolerate the mischievous impressions produced on the minds of ignorance or youth by the gross exhibitions which now disgrace our stage in Hamlet, Richard, and Macbeth? We all know that fever of the brain produces successions of spectres or images, the result of diseased organs; but no one ever conceived that such melancholy effects of disease could be seen by healthy by-standers, till our stage-managers availed themselves of vulgar credulity, and dared to give substance to diseased ideas as a means of gratifying their avarice? If Shakespeare intended to give visible substance to his numerous ghosts, he merely conformed himself to the state of knowledge in his day, when Demonology was sanctioned by royal authority, and when the calendars at the assizes were filled with victims of superstition, under charges of witchcraft! It is, however, time that we banish such credulity from the minds even of the lowest vulgar, as disgraceful to religion, education, morals, and reason!

Humanly speaking, I exclaimed—Am I not in the House of God? Is not this puny structure a tribute of man to the Architect of the Universe? What a lesson for man’s pride!—look at this building, and behold the Universe! Man is but a point of infinite space, with intellectual powers, bound in their sphere of action to his body, and subject with it to the laws of motion and gravitation! For such a being this may properly be the house of God; but it ought never to be forgotten, that the only house of God is a universe as boundless as his powers, and as eternal as his existence! In relation to man and man’s pride, what a sublime and overwhelming contrast is presented by the everlasting NOW, and the universal HERE! Yet how can the creature of mere relations, who exists by generating time, space, and other sensations, conceive of the immutable CAUSE OF CAUSES, to whom his past and future, and his above and below, are as a SINGLE TOTALITY! Wisest of men is he who knows the most of such a Being; but, chained to a point, and governed in all our reasonings by mere relative powers, we can only conceive of ubiquity by the contrast of our locality—of infinity by our dimensions—of eternity by our duration—and of omniscience by our reason! Creatures of yesterday, surrounded by blessings, it is natural we should inquire in regard to the origin and cause of the novel state in which we find ourselves; but the finite cannot reason on the infinite—the transient on the eternal—or the local on the universal; and on such subjects all we can ascertain, is the utter inadequacy of our powers to perceive them clearly. It seems, therefore, to be our duty to ENJOY, to WONDER, and to WORSHIP.

On every side of me I beheld records of the wrecks of man, deposited here merely to increase the sympathy of the living for the place. Perhaps I was even breathing some of the gaseous effluvia which once composed their living bodies: but, the gas of a human body differing in no respect from the gas generated in the great laboratory of the earth’s surface, which I breathe hourly; and being in itself innoxious in quantity, if not in quality, I felt no qualms from my consciousness of its source. The putrefactive process decomposes the bodies of all animals, and returns their generic principles to the common reservoirs of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen: through life, the same process, varied in its proportions, is going forward; and the body is constantly resolving itself into the generic principles of nature, which generic principles again serve the purposes of respiration in other animals, and renew other existences as suitably as though they had never before been employed for the same purposes. Hence it is probable that the identical atoms composing any of the elements of nature, may have existed in hundreds of different animals in different ages of the world; and hence we arrive at a principle of metempsychosis, without entangling ourselves in the absurdities with which priestcraft among the Eastern nations has clothed and disguised it.

Various tablets placed around the walls record departed worth in many persons of distinction. I could find no memorials of the impostor Dee, whose aged remains were deposited here. He was one of the last of the race of those men of science who made use of his knowledge to induce the vulgar to believe him a conjuror, or one possessed of the power of conversing with SPIRITS. His journals of this pretended intercourse were published after his death, by one of the Casaubons, in two folio volumes. Lilly’s Memoirs record many of his impostures, and there is no doubt but in his time the public mind was much agitated by his extravagancies. The mob more than once destroyed his house, for being familiar with their devil; and, what is more extraordinary, he was often consulted, and even employed in negociations, by Queen Elizabeth. He pretended to see spirits in a small stone, lately preserved with his papers in the British Museum. His spirits appear to have had bodies and garments thick enough to reflect rays of light, though they passed freely in and out of his stone, and through the walls of his room; and organs for articulation, which they exercised within the glass! How slight an advance in knowledge exposes all such impostures! In his spiritual visions, Dee had a confederate of the name of Kelly, who, of course, confirmed all the oracles of his master. Both, however, in spite of their spiritual friends, died miserably—the man by leaping out of a window, and the master in great poverty. Dee is the less excusable, because he was a man of family and considerable learning, a fellow of Trinity-college, Cambridge, and a good mathematician. But, in an age in which one Queen imprisoned him for practising by enchantment against her life, and her successor required him to name a lucky day for her coronation, is it to be wondered that a mere man, like tens of thousands of our modern religious fanatics, persuaded himself that he was possessed of supernatural powers?

Beneath the same pavement, resolved into kindred elements, though when in chemical union so different a totality, lie the remains of that illustrious patriot, Sir John Barnard, who passed a long life in opposing the encroachments on liberty of the ministers of the first and second of the Guelphs. His statue in the Royal Exchange, London, would attest his worth, if the same area was not disgraced by another, of the infamous Charles the Second, thereby confounding virtue and vice. Sir John, like Alderman Barber, acquired fame by his opposition to the Excise Laws, and by other exertions in defence of public liberty, I have been told by one who still remembers him, that he was an active little man, adored by the Common Hall, and much respected by various political parties for his long-tried worth.

On the south side of the Communion-table, I was so well pleased with some verses lately placed on a marble tablet, to record the virtues of the Viscountess Sidmouth, who died June 23, 1811, that I could not refrain from copying them. The Viscount and his family have a pew in the church, and, I am told, are constant attendants at the morning-service on Sundays.

Whenever the remains of the lord of this amiable woman are deposited on the same spot, I venture humbly and respectfully to suggest, that the tablet to his memory should include a copy of the most eventful document of his life and times. He was prime-minister when, in March 1803, the ever-to-be-lamented message charging the French with making extensive military preparations in the ports of France and Holland, was advised by the ministry to be sent to both Houses of Parliament. During the past year he had obtained the glory of concluding a treaty which restored tranquillity to a suffering world; and yet the virulence of a contemptible Opposition, and the empirical pretensions of an Ex-minister, led him and his colleagues tardily to execute the article which was to restore Malta to its Knights. A demand that this article should be executed, led to discussions since made public, but which, in my opinion, have not justified the character given of them in the message. Nor does it appear that the English ambassador at Paris had inquired or remonstrated with the French Government on the subject of the pretended military preparations. The flame, however, was thus kindled, which spread in due time from kingdom to kingdom; covering the whole earth with blood and desolation, wasting millions of lives in battle, siege, imprisonment, or massacre; and transferring all the rentals and industry of the people of England to the public creditors, to pay the interest of loans and other consequent obligations of the state!

Unhappily the GENIUS of TRUTH was hoodwinked at the time, by the general corruption of the press; and the SPIRIT of PATRIOTISM was overawed by the passionate clamours of a whole people to be avenged for various alledged affronts! But at this distance of time these are merely topics for the lamentation of history! It is now, I fear, too late to institute legislative inquiries; but the case will remain as a beacon to all people, who should be taught by it to consider ministers of the Crown, though as amiable in private life as an Addington, as fallible men, liable to be misled by intrigue or passion, and therefore, in a public sense, not to be credited without other evidence than their own assertions. Let an exemplary INSCRIPTION on the tomb of the minister of that day serve therefore to teach all ministers, never wilfully to depart in the most indifferent act of public policy from THE TRUTH; and warn them to pause before they commit the extensive interests of nations, while they or the people are under the influence of passion. Alas! what frightful mischiefs might have been averted if these considerations had governed the English people, or the English ministry, during the fatal discussions of Lord Whitworth at Paris!

In charity, I hope the Ministry believed that this dispute might have ended with a mere demonstration; and I admit that no man can foresee all the consequences of an action: yet, as the feelings which excited that message and directed those deliberations, continued to influence the Ministry during twelve years warfare, and led to the rejection of seven overtures for peace, made at different times by Napoleon; the character of the age and the future security of the world against wars of aggression, seem to require that the origin of the late war should even yet become an object of solemn parliamentary inquiry. The Crown may have the constitutional power of declaring war, but the ministers of the Crown are responsible for the abuse of that power; and let it be remembered, that the origin of every war is easily tried by tests to be found in Grotius, Puffendorf, Vattel, or other authorities on the laws of nations; and that, without the combination of justice and necessity in its origin, no true glory can be acquired in its progress or in its results.6

I learnt with regret that the improved Psalmody of Gardiner had not yet been introduced into the service of this church, and that the drawling-monkish tunes are preferred to those sublime passages of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, which that gentleman has so ingeniously adapted to the Psalms of David. It might have been expected that every church in the enlightened vicinage of the metropolis would, ere this, have adopted a means of exalting the spirit of devotion, which has received the high sanction of the Regent and the Archbishop of Canterbury, and which exhibits among its patrons nearly the whole bench of bishops. I suspect, indeed, that the shops of the mere trading Methodists attract as many auditors by their singing as by their preaching; consequently, enlarged churches and improved psalmody would serve to protect many of the people from becoming the dupes of that CANT and CRAFT of FANATICISM, which is so disgraceful to the age, so dangerous to religion, and so inimical to the progress of truth and knowledge.

Viewing this church in a statistical point of view, I counted 85 pews, capable of holding about 550 persons, and I learnt that about 100 charity-school and other children sit in the aisles. Hence, perhaps, 600 attend each service; and, if 300 attend in the afternoon who do not in the morning, then we may calculate the attendants on the church-service, in this parish, at about 900. The population is, however, about 2100; from which, deducting 300 children, it will appear that half the inhabitants are dissenters, methodists, or indifferents. Of these, about 200 belong to a chapel for the Independents, and perhaps others attend favourite preachers in the vicinity. Such are the religious divisions of this parish; yet, as there are no manufactories, and the clergyman is well respected, the attendants on the Church may be considered as above even the general average of the Establishment in other parishes.

I was induced to ascend into the belfry, where I found ropes for eight bells—those musical tones, which extend the sphere of the Church’s influence, by associations of pleasure, devotion, or melancholy, through the surrounding country. What an effective means of increasing the sympathies of religion, and exciting them by the fire-sides, and on the very pillows of the people! Who that, as bride or bridegroom, has heard them, in conjunction with the first joys of wedded love, does not feel the pleasurable associations of their lively peal on other similar events? Who, that through a series of years has obeyed their calling chime on the Sabbath morning, as the signal of placid feelings towards his God, and his assembled neighbours, does not hear their weekly monotony with devotion? And who is there that has performed the last rites of friendship, or the melancholy duties of son, daughter, husband, wife, father, mother, brother, or sister, under the recurring tones of the awful Tenor, or more awful Dumb-peal, and does not feel, at every recurrence of the same ceremony, a revival of his keen, but unavailing, regrets for the mouldering dead? Thus does art play with our ingenuous feelings; and thus is an importance given to the established Church in the concords of man’s nervous system, which renders it unnecessary for its priesthood to be jealous or invidious towards those who dissent from its doctrines for conscience sake. In truth, such is the imposing attitude of the national Church, that, if the members leave the Church to sit under strange pulpits, the incumbent should suspect his doctrines, his zeal, his talents, or his charity in the collection of his dues and tithes. What but gross misconduct in the priest—what but doctrines incompatible with the intelligence of an enlightened age—or what but the odious impost of tithes-in-kind, can separate the people from the building where they first heard the name of God, and which contains the bones of their ancestors?

In conceding to the influence of bells so many services to the establishment which monopolizes them, I must, however, not forget that the power they possess over the nerves, however agreeable or interesting in health, is pernicious, and often fatal, when the excitability is increased by disease? What medicine can allay the fever which is often exasperated by their clangor? What consoling hope can he feel who, while gasping for breath, or fainting from debility, hears a knell, in which he cannot but anticipate his own?—Hundreds are thus murdered in great cities every year by noisy peals or unseasonable knells. Sleep, the antidote of diseased action, is destroyed by the one; and Hope, the first of cordials, is extinguished by the other. The interesting sympathies and services of bells appear to be, therefore, too dearly purchased. In all countries, death-knells and funeral-tollings ought to be entirely abolished; and even the ringing of peals should be liable to be interdicted, at the request of any medical practitioner. Nor ought the sanctuaries of the professed religion of peace and charity to be disgraced at any time, by celebrations of those murderous conflicts between man and man, which too often take place, to gratify the malice and pride of WEAK PRINCES, or sustain the avarice and false calculations of their WICKED MINISTERS. Even in justifiable wars of self-defence, such as the resistance to the unprincipled invasion of William the Norman, or of the English people against the tyrannical Charles, the church of Christ ought only to mourn at the unhappy price of the most decisive victory.