Addison observes that, in his time, the great professions law, physic, and divinity were overstocked with practitioners. Hence there arose a class of literary adventurers. As early as in Elizabeth's days, a few unlucky individuals had lived by their wits, without any other profession or means of subsistence; but men of letters were not known in England as a distinct class in society till the beginning of the last century, and during the present reign they have increased in number at least fifty fold.

When literature was confined to colleges and convents, it may safely be affirmed, that men of letters were at the same time the happiest and the most useful of their generation. They had no cares for the morrow; they wrote from the fullness of the mind, or from the impulse of strong desire: some to collect the scattered memorials of past times, or record the events of their own; others to exert the whole force of their intellect on the subtlest or the highest problems which could be proposed to human understanding. If they obtained celebrity, it was well; and if they failed, the labour had been its own reward. The schoolmen will not now be spoken of with derision, as they have often been by writers too ignorant to be humble;' enough is known of their real merits to ensure the acknowledgment that their powers of mind were commensurate with their Herculean industry; and that characters more truly venerable, or on whom it is more consolatory and delightful for the imagination to dwell, than Bede, William of Malmsbury, and many of the monkish historians, are not to be found in the annals of mankind. Great as have been the advantages of printing, it was a lamentable change, when literary composition and that exercise of reason which should be, as till then it had been, the noblest of human occupations and the highest of human enjoyments, became a trade—a mere trade, to be pursued not from aptitude or choice, but from necessity and for daily bread. It is a difficult, as well as a delicate task, to advise a youth of ardent mind and aspiring thoughts in the choice of a profession; but a wise man will have no hesitation in exhorting him to chuse any thing rather than literature. Better that he should seek his fortune before the mast, or with a musket on his shoulder and a knapsack at his back,—better that he should follow the plough, or work at the loom or the lathe, or sweat over the anvil, than trust to literature as the only means of his support. Let the body provide for the body; the intellectual part was given us for other purposes. A single hour of composition won from the business of the day, is worth more than the whole day's toil of him who works at the trade of literature: in the one case, the spirit comes joyfully to refresh itself, like a hart to the water brooks; in the other, it pursues its miserable way panting and jaded, with the dogs of hunger and necessity behind. Nor

are

are respectability, worldly welfare, happiness, health, and even existence, all that are endangered by this course of life; there are worse evils than neglect, poverty, imprisonment, and death. It is not of his earthly fortunes alone that a man may make shipwreck upon this perilous course; his moral nature may be sacrificed, and his eternal hopes desperately hazarded. Boyse in his blanket, Savage in a prison, and Smart scrawling his most impassioned verses with charcoal upon the walls of a madhouse, are not the most mournful examples which might be held up as a warning to kindred spirits. There are even more pitiable objects than Chatterton himself with the poison at his lips. His mighty mind brought with it into the world a taint of hereditary insanity, which explains the act of suicide and divests it of its fearful guilt. But it is when literary adventurers commit the act of moral suicide that they render themselves objects of as much compassion as is compatible with abhorrence, when they become base in the basest way, and acting as panders to the lowest vices or the worst passions of man's corrupted nature, deal in scandal, sedition, obscenity, or blasphemy, whichever article may be most in demand, according to the disease of the age. The reader need not be reminded of the wretched libeller in France, who when he was brought before the minister and interrogated concerning the motives of his conduct, replied that it was necessary for him to live. If the real motives of our present race of libellers could be traced, very many of them would be found to proceed from the same cause, cupidity or poverty acting upon minds which have long since emancipated themselves from all moral restraint. This has been placed beyond all doubt in the case of one incendiary, the most notorious of his tribe, He was involved in unprofitable speculations and consequent debts; he thought it possible by taking advantage of the general distress, to bring about a revolution; he spared no efforts for effecting this, in the hope of enriching himself in the scramble; and being disappointed by the enactment of those timely laws which the safety of the country required, the villain fled from his creditors and from the pursuit of justice. Another of these firebrands, perceiving some two or three years back that his journal flagged in its sale, observed that it was not seasoned enough, and he must put more capsicum in it ;-a significant expression, implying more personality, more falsehood, more abuse of the Prince Regent, a stronger infusion of slander, and a little more of the essential spirit of treason. Had this man taken to any useful profession, or even any honest trade, he might have bequeathed an honourable name to posterity, and gone to his grave without the miserable reflection, that from error, and vanity at first, and afterwards from irritation, pride, wilfulness and malignity, he had made the talents with

which he was entrusted, instruments of evil to others, and of perdition to himself.

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A Frenchman who at the age of nineteen, and in the first years of the Revolution, eutered Paris for the first time, meaning to live by his literary talents, describes his own feelings and his conduct on his arrival in a very memorable manner. After wondering awhile at the Louvre, till a sense of weariness and hunger made him think it necessary to look out for food and lodging, Je fus distrait,' he says, ' de ma stupidité contemplative par un appétit dévorant, qui me rappela en un clin d'œil mon isolement, le peu de moyens pécuniaires que j'avais, la disgrace et l'exhérédation dont j'allais être puni?' Te voilà donc à Paris sans état, sans fortune, sans parens, sans connoissances!"-D'après ce soliloque, je perche mon chapeau au bout de ma canne; je le fais tourner, attachant ma destinée à la direction de la corne droite, qui se fixe à l'E.S.E. Me voilà dans la Rue Saint Jacques. Many are the literary adventurers who chuse their part in political warfare with no truer compass to direct their course,-and without the honest inten tions of the Irishman who seeing two parties of his countrymen warmly engaged in bludgeon work, and being utterly unable to refrain from joining in the sport, exclaimed, as he rushed in among them, God grant I may take the right side!' But the general tendency of men who thus throw themselves upon the world to live by their wits is soon determined by the disappointment which they almost universally experience at their outset; for disappointment brings with it discontent, which is the parent of disaffection; and envy, which the unsuccessful are too prone to entertain towards all who are more fortunate than themselves, is inseparable from hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness. Thus it is that of

This poor Frenchman, M. Pitou, who as long as his Memoirs shall be remembered will be liked the better for having worn a cocked hat, deserved a happier fortune than he met with. He seems to have kept clear of the crimes of the Revolution, but being reduced at last to sing ballads of his own composing about the streets, some unlucky Couplets offended the Directory, and he was condemned to death for them by the friends of humanity and liberal opinions who were then at the head of affairs. The sentence was commuted for transportation to Cayenne. He survived the sufferings and dangers of that inhuman banishment, and it is in his Memoirs that the account of the death of Collot d'Herbois is given,--a death worthy of his crimes: he was lying upon the ground, his face exposed to a burning sun, in a raging fever, the negroes who were appointed to bear him from Kouron to Cayenne, a distance of six leagues, having thrown him down to perish; a surgeon who found him in this situation, asked him what ailed him, he replied, J'ai la fièvre, et une sueur brulante.-Je le crois bien, vous suez le crime,— was the bitter rejoinder. He expired vomiting froth and blood, calling upon the Virgin Mary and upon that God whom he had so often renounced, crying out for a priest, and despairing of mercy while he implored it. M. Pitou describes him as not naturally wicked, but made so by the Revolution ;-il avait d'excellentes qualités du côté du cœur, beaucoup de clinquant du côté de l'esprit; un caractère foible et irascible à l'excès, généreux sans bornés, peu attaché à la fortune, bon ami, et ennemi implacable. La récolution a fait sa perte.

mere

mere men of letters, wherever they exist as a separate class, a large proportion are always enlisted in hostility, open or secret, against the established order of things. From the first their bias is on the wrong side; vanity, presumption, and half-knowledge, make them believe that they are wiser than their elders, and capable of reforming the world; add to these errors by which youth is so easily beset, false philosophy to which they lead, and irreligion in which that philosophy ends, and you have a revolutionist complete. 'Loose principles,' says Stillingfleet, bad practices, and extravagant desires, naturally dispose men to endeavour changes and alterations, in hopes of bettering themselves by them; and the prevalency of vice doth unhinge government and weaken the strength and sinews of it.'

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The progress of society also, which tends naturally to overstock every profession, and to crowd all the middle walks of life with unsuccessful adventurers, is continually increasing the number of persons who are discontented because their fortune has not corresponded to their desires. The acute observer who asked of Maecenas why no man was contented with his destination was in this instance less accurate than usual in his remarks. It is not with their way of life that men are dissatisfied, but with their success in it; and in whatever way they may be placed they usually contrive to keep upon excellent terms with themselves. The dis satisfaction which would have its seat at home if they had courage or virtue to look into their hearts, and set about the rigorous duty of self-examination, is projected by an easy effort of self-love; they impute their failure in life to any cause rather than to the want of talents, or of discretion, or of character; the game has gone against them, and they wish to shuffle the cards and cut for the winning seats. As early as the days of the Prophet Samuel we know who were the men who have always been found ready to embark in desperate designs,- every one that is in distress, and every one that was in debt, and every one that was discontented.' Talleyrand has said that hope is the counterpoise of discontent; with more truth may it be said to be the heaviest weight that discontent casts into the scale.

'States are secure in proportion as the great body of the people are contented with their situation, and attached to the institutions of their country :'-no axiom in geometry can be more incontestable than this. Wherever this attachment is loosened and a spirit of discontent has gone abroad, convulsions must be expected, and revolutions will ultimately follow, unless the evil be averted by wise preventive means. While the endemic moral maladies of the last half-century have been tainting the middle classes,-while a false philosophy, sapping the very foundation of religion, has made a

breach

breach through which unbelief and atheism have come in;-and while crude and erroneous notions of policy have substituted a cosmopolitan liberality as it is called, and a spurious patriotism in place of those old English virtues which our fathers called loyalty and love of our country, changes more alarming only because they act upon a wider population, have been taking place in the condition of the populace. The direct tendency of the manufacturing system has been to raise up among us a class of men who are exposed to every imaginable circumstance that can render them dissatisfied and dangerous, and who are removed from all those local and personal ties, all those soothing and genial influences, which bind the peasant to his superiors and his country. They have been trained up in a manner of which it is not speaking too strongly to affirm that it is alike pernicious to the body and to the soul. All means of instructing them in their moral and religious duties have been neglected, while the wickedest writers that ever converted the press into an engine of mischief have used every means for engrafting sedition and impiety upon vice and ignorance. So long as manufactures flourished, and the wages of the week sufficed for the expenses of the week and for the week's debauchery, all seemed well to the superficial observer, and there appeared no further evil upon the surface than the increase of crimes in manufacturing districts, and the continual increase of the poorrates. The revenue however prospered, and it was even boasted in parliament, as a cause for national exultation, that the labour of children during the present reign had been made productive to the state. Alas! they who mistake the wealth of nations for their prosperity, and, in pursuit of it, lose sight of their virtue and their happiness, are woefully ignorant of all upon which the strength of nations and the security of governments must be founded. Governments that found it upon manufactures sleep upon gunpowder.

But the system bore in itself the seeds of its own destruction. It was not possible that improvements in machinery should always be confined to ourselves. Men equally ingenious were at work upon the same object on the continent, (where indeed they were stimulated and encouraged in every way by the government,) and no laws, however severe, could prevent the emigration of artificers. The journeyman who, in defiance of laws, carries his labour where he can obtain the highest reward for it, is no object of moral indignation; but the fact that many of the most flourishing fabrics which were established under Buonaparte's patronage have been erected or conducted by subjects of Great Britain, is one melancholy proof how entirely the British are capable of expatriating themselves. While the continental nations have thus been taught to manufacture for themselves, a cause upon which it is more humi

liating