Barnesconsists 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 anddogs,—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 theCountandCountess 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, toconfer 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 inthe 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 Countand 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 thedust 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 oneday 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, havingsold 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 andcorn 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 periodthe 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 fromthe 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 adornboth 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, andout 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 inquiredeagerly 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 ofPartridge! He was one of the last of the learned votaries of Astrology, the mother of thesciences, 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 inferredthat 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 inits 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, remoteand 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 thecertainty, 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 beenlucky; though, if it prove unfortunate, the same train of causes are then calledunlucky. 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 nonecessaryconnexion 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 toFATALITY, 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. Thephysicalare determined by fixed, and often by known laws, and hence we are enabled toforetelthe places of the planets and the moment when eclipses of the Sun and Moon will happen for a thousand years to come. Thementalare 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 timemay 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.”5I sat on the tomb of Partridge, andthought it a fit place in which to ruminate on these involved points. Do theastrologers (said I) consider the stars as mere indices of pretended fates, or as the causes of the events which they are enabledto anticipate by the anticipated motions of the stars? In nativities, they seem to consider them asindices; but, in horary questions, ascauses. 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 aresaid 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 individualsin 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 tocaprices 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, byaveraging 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 ofanyprognosticating 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 ageto age countenanced and confirmed the delusion.All that a prophet or fortune-teller requires, therefore, is some set ofindices, 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 toforetelby 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 theDevil governed his indices; or, with many grave writers, that there is a soul of the world which harmonizes all things, producing an accordance between theFORTUNESof theHUMAN RACEand 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 ofthe 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 lostmost 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 ofJohn 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 onthe 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 ofBarber, 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 WARhave disgracedSEVENTY-FIVE YEARSof our annals, though thirty years of foreign war served in the preceding three hundred years to vindicate every British interest!—Venerated name ofBarber! 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 examplesof 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 generation62nd183rd544th1625th4866th14587th43748th131229th3936610th generation11809811th35427412th106281213th318843614th9565308That is to say,NINE MILLIONS AND A HALFof 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 livingin 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 individual11785,His father and mother21755,Their fathers and mothers41725,ditto81695,ditto161665,ditto321635,ditto641605,ditto1281575,ditto2561545,ditto5121515,ditto10241485,ditto20481455,ditto40961425,Their fathers & mothers81921395,ditto163841365,ditto327681335,ditto655361305,ditto1310721275,ditto2621441245,ditto5242881215,ditto10485761185,ditto20971521155,ditto41943041125,ditto8388608That 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 interwovenlike the lines of lattice-work. A single inter-mixture, however remote, would unite all the subsequent branches in common ancestry, rendering the cotemporaries ofevery 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 linesfrom 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 ofkin; 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 theplace 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 preceptscarried 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 ofa second sight, and discovering adoublesense 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 inthe 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 theNATIONAL CHURCHbe 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 visionarytopics 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 thosearticles of faithwhich 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 thatProtestant 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 toTHE 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 inMortlake 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 intoinfant 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 aWordsworthhas recently proved to be unnecessary, in a poem that rivals the efforts of the Rosicrucian school. Ought not the ghosts of Shakespeare to besupposedmerely 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 allknow 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 lessonfor 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 everlastingNOW, and the universalHERE! Yet how can the creature of mere relations, who exists by generating time, space, and other sensations, conceive of the immutableCAUSE OF CAUSES, to whom his past and future, and his above and below, are as aSINGLE 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 ofubiquityby the contrast ofourlocality—ofinfinityby ourdimensions—ofeternityby ourduration—and ofomniscienceby ourreason! 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 thefinitecannot reason on theinfinite—thetransienton theeternal—or thelocalon theuniversal; 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 toENJOY, toWONDER, and toWORSHIP.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 inquality, 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 wallsrecord departed worth in many persons of distinction. I could find no memorials of the impostorDee, 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 withSPIRITS. 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, thoughthey 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, resolvedinto 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 theGuelphs. 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, thatI 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.
Barnesconsists 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 anddogs,—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 theCountandCountess 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, toconfer 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 inthe 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 Countand 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 thedust 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 oneday 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, havingsold 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 andcorn 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 periodthe 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 fromthe 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 adornboth 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, andout 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 inquiredeagerly 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.
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 ofPartridge! He was one of the last of the learned votaries of Astrology, the mother of thesciences, 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 inferredthat 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 inits 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, remoteand 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 thecertainty, 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 beenlucky; though, if it prove unfortunate, the same train of causes are then calledunlucky. 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 nonecessaryconnexion 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 toFATALITY, 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. Thephysicalare determined by fixed, and often by known laws, and hence we are enabled toforetelthe places of the planets and the moment when eclipses of the Sun and Moon will happen for a thousand years to come. Thementalare 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 timemay 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, andthought it a fit place in which to ruminate on these involved points. Do theastrologers (said I) consider the stars as mere indices of pretended fates, or as the causes of the events which they are enabledto anticipate by the anticipated motions of the stars? In nativities, they seem to consider them asindices; but, in horary questions, ascauses. 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 aresaid 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 individualsin 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 tocaprices 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, byaveraging 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 ofanyprognosticating 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 ageto age countenanced and confirmed the delusion.
All that a prophet or fortune-teller requires, therefore, is some set ofindices, 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 toforetelby 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 theDevil governed his indices; or, with many grave writers, that there is a soul of the world which harmonizes all things, producing an accordance between theFORTUNESof theHUMAN RACEand 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 ofthe 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 lostmost 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 ofJohn 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.”
“Under this stone were laid the remains ofJohn 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 onthe 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 ofBarber, 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 WARhave disgracedSEVENTY-FIVE YEARSof our annals, though thirty years of foreign war served in the preceding three hundred years to vindicate every British interest!—Venerated name ofBarber! 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 examplesof 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:
That is to say,NINE MILLIONS AND A HALFof 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 livingin 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.
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 interwovenlike the lines of lattice-work. A single inter-mixture, however remote, would unite all the subsequent branches in common ancestry, rendering the cotemporaries ofevery 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 linesfrom 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 ofkin; 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 theplace 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 preceptscarried 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 ofa second sight, and discovering adoublesense 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 inthe 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 theNATIONAL CHURCHbe 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 visionarytopics 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 thosearticles of faithwhich 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 thatProtestant 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 toTHE 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 inMortlake 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 intoinfant 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 aWordsworthhas recently proved to be unnecessary, in a poem that rivals the efforts of the Rosicrucian school. Ought not the ghosts of Shakespeare to besupposedmerely 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 allknow 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 lessonfor 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 everlastingNOW, and the universalHERE! Yet how can the creature of mere relations, who exists by generating time, space, and other sensations, conceive of the immutableCAUSE OF CAUSES, to whom his past and future, and his above and below, are as aSINGLE 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 ofubiquityby the contrast ofourlocality—ofinfinityby ourdimensions—ofeternityby ourduration—and ofomniscienceby ourreason! 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 thefinitecannot reason on theinfinite—thetransienton theeternal—or thelocalon theuniversal; 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 toENJOY, toWONDER, and toWORSHIP.
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 inquality, 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 wallsrecord departed worth in many persons of distinction. I could find no memorials of the impostorDee, 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 withSPIRITS. 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, thoughthey 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, resolvedinto 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 theGuelphs. 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, thatI 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.