ation extends itself, but not the suffrage-retrenchment of ribs or of patience giving way. In fact, you are is a word actually lost out of the mouths of reformers. The aristocratic phalanx of placemen sit in all the bloom of unshorn patronage, pensions, salaries, and power, and the people pay nine-tenths of the taxation and starve. Look, fellow countrymen, across the channel, and let that national pride which has often led you into bloody contests with your Gallic neighbours at least in spire you with shame at the glory which they have won from you in the contest for political liberty.

FACTS FROM THE FIELDS.-THE DEPOPULATING possession, and some of them some hundreds of thousands.

and Glasgow, and Paisley, Nottingham and Leeds, and all the manufacturing districts tell; and let all the merchants who have failed, or have stood with a good shaking, let the shopkeeper and everybody tell. We want everybody's custom, as we were formerly, like the Irishman, anybody's customers, and nobody wants our goods.

this that England, the wealthy and the fruitful, the incomparable and the envied of all nations is come! Is this the end and the only gain of all our toilings and moilings, our tradings and inventions, our parliaments and colleges, our hosts of learned and illustrious men, our victories and our vauntings? That the poor for whom God builds worlds, and for whom Christ died, should be ejected to make room for great lonely halls that rarely see their owners, for game, keepers, squires and grasshoppers.

every day and in every corner of it. Mr. Chadwick went burn is acted over again on the affluent plains of England down into the country to trace the effect of the last law of settlement-and he found that labourers were in numbers of places obliged to walk from seven to ten miles and more daily to their work, and back again. They had been ordered out of the agricultural parishes where they worked, and their cottages had been destroyed. They, therefore, had to take up their abode in the towns, and occupy houses in unhealthy, close situations, at double and treble the rental of their former rural ones, where they often had had a garden and could raise a pig. He found that the constitutions of many of them were gradually sinking under this exThere are plenty of places to be named, where one cessive exertion, and this injurious change of abode. parish consisting of small proprietors pays twenty shillings per acre to the poor rates, while the next, the property of some great man, does not pay ONE shilling, for he has carefully shoved out all the labourers, to settle amongst, and become chargeable to his poorer neigh

That is rather an awkward situation to be in! What shall we do with the thousands and the millions that are starving for want of something to do, or for want of profit in what they do do? "Ship them off! says the Mr. Prior in his life of Goldsmith doubts the very cir clever Norman. "Clear the country of them-they are too many." Well, but there is another class that the cumstance of the razing of Auburn. Men do not lay Normans find too many. They have driven the trading he says. Mr. Chadwick could tell him a different tale; we waste pretty hamlets, and destroy substantial villages, millions out of nearly all their foreign resorts of trade, could tell him a different tale; thousands and tens of thouand they are just as busy driving the stupid, sleepy clod-sands could tell him a different tale. The story of Aupoles off their lands. The manufacturers say, our trade is ruined—we cannot maintain our swarming population in the towns; pass an act by which a man may get a settlement anywhere.' It is passed any man who has resided any where for five years, there is his parish. But the clever Norman is too wide awake to be thus checkmated by the stupid, sleepy, easy, and lumpish Saxon. He cries, "Up and off with you every clodpole of you. Up with cledpole wife and clodpole children, and find a dwelling where you can, for on my land you shall find no abiding place, shall gain no settlement!" And so the war of extermination began, and so it is going on daily over all that was once merry, but is now miserable, England. Down go the cottages of the labourers, even of those who are necessary to till the land, and away they must march to any parish or any town that has so many small proprietors that they can not agree to exclude the poor from their borders. Down goes the old thatched cottage, and the little fence that hemmed in its rustic garden for ages. It would break the heart of a lover of the poetic and picturesque to see the venerable old porch and its clustering roses come to the ground in blinding dust; and the row of bee-hives borne off and sold, and the bench on which they stood, and the honeysuckle bower under which they stood rent away and turned out of pieces of rural poetry in a twinkling of an eye into lumber and rubbish. But there are other hearts, tender poetic ones it were enough to craze to see the old roof ripped off-that ancient load of thatch on which the houseleek has grown and in which the sparrow and the wren have built for scores and scores of years. To see the little windows in which many a sweet face has been seen tending some sweet flower, rose, or lily, or geranium, and from which aged countenances have looked forth, and in the glory of the scenes around, in hours ofodorous summer, have seen an image of that heaven after which their weary and bereft hearts have yearned.

Little abodes of humanity however lowly; little cabins of life and love, and a thousand bitter and sweet experiences; little homes of men and women however simple, who stood their day of trial, and wept their portion of tears, and sent forth their sons to the field of toil or of blood, and their daughters to farm and town in servitude-all doing their share to carry on what loftier if not wiser men deem the duties of existence, and the maintenance of the health, wealth, and honour of this country, simple and beautiful cottages of England, well might it melt the sternest heart to see you fall-and ere ye fall, the desolate family tear itself away from you-from the accustomed sod-seat in the open air, from the sweetbriar hedge, the wallflower border, the rosemary bush, and the little stream that runs murmuring by clear as crystal, and taking the dusty road plunge into the fœtid alley of the distant town.

Merciful heaven! what a country is that which smiles like a paradise, and is fertile as the very garden of God, and which yet casts out all its inhabitants, but the solitary lordling and his liveried crew of menials. Is it to

bours.

There is no similar example of intense selfishness on the broad face of the earth. The lordly aristocrat who does it, has in nine cases out of ten gathered his wealth together by the worst of treasons to his country-by peculation under the guise of government, by fomenting bloodshed, and by pandering to royal licentiousness. He and his family have fattened on the salaries of all species of sinecure offices. His sons and his brothers are in command in army, in navy, in colony, and church. He reaps all the rental of miles of England's richest lands. He suns himself on its warmest slopes in proudest architectural state, he walks beneath the shade of woods which were meant by God for the haunt of the thousand hearts that need the refreshment of nature after the wear of social life, but which are shut against all but prowling keepers and four-footed things. Yet from this scene of beauty and abundance, he drives the few wretched tillers of the soil, and walks and works them to death. May God grant him a better treatment on the poor man's estate in Paradise!

Some time ago I came, on the Scottish borders, upon an old herdsman asleep on the sunny ground. He awoke up as I stopped, and I entered into conversation with him. I praised the fine and cultivated country. "Yes,” said he, it is a fine country, but it wants no inhabitants. When these green and huge fields were open, when it was called a waste, it had its villages, and the poor man kept his cow, and the shepherd and the herdsman, or herdswoman, had each their own charge. But now the villages are gone; the poor men's cows are gone. The poor men are gone-fifty families went last week to America, and were I not so old I would have gone too. As it is, I must range while I can over four huge farms to herd cattle and count the sheep; and every day the land wants fewer hands, for the duke neither plants a tree nor makes a road, which might em

ploy a poor man. In faith, the country is a fine country, but it wants no inhabitants."

up to them, and be deposited in the Pantheon, the cathedral of philosophy. The assembly adopted this idea with transport.

the ashes of this great innovator. The body of Voltaire, who died at Paris in 1778, had been transported secretly The other day I rode across a fine tract of coun- during the night by his nephew to the church of the try, which was familiar to me years ago. How abbey of Sellieres in Champagne. When the nation beautiful did those old remembered scenes appear! How sold this abbey, the towns of Troyes and Romilly dissweetly did that little river wind along! How delightful |puted the glory of possessing and honouring the remains were those airy hills and dark hanging woods! How of the man of the age. The city of Paris, where he rich and flowery were those fields and odorous hedges! had rendered up his last sigh, claimed its right as a But how strangely solitary! How those old villages capital, and addressed a petition to the National Assemwere thinned out! Those cottages in their little way-bly, to demand that the body of Voltaire should be given side gardens, under high old bushes and overhanging trees-where were they?-Gone! all gone! Instead of the little garden crammed thick with cabbages, beans, peas, and potatoes, there were blank white places where the grass had refused, as it were, in righteous scorn, to grow over the lime and the rubble of the demolished tenements. As I went on I beheld an enormous rural palace building. It was for the rector, the near relative of the lord! The living was rich, the tithes were enormous! But to whom could this fat parson preach? He preached to nobody; he delegated that task to a journeyman soul-saver, at a pound a week. From so magnificent a mansion, how could he descend to the humble church and bid a few pursy farmers and leather-leggin keepers, and sleek silk-stocking valets-repent? How could he bid the rustic labourers repent, return, and live?" No, that was contrary to the depopulating policy-they must march off and half living, die by inches.

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I passed the parish church. Beautiful old fabric of old Norman days! What a porch was that! Why there were roses running and flowering to its very pinnacle! What a little Eden was that churchyard! surrounded by its lofty trees, and its old ivied wall; and with rose bushes and graceful laurels flourishing amid its superb turf, and antique tombs. But the gates of this Eden were closed-like that of old. The stranger that would read its epitaphs and enjoy its cool solitude,

Must fetch the sexton and his keys,
Endure his talk and pay his fees.

The poor man that would visit his wife's grave must do it on Sunday at service time.

On 11th June, the department and the municipal body went in procession to the barrier of Charenton to receive the body of Voltaire. It was deposited on the site of the Bastille, like a conqueror reposing on his trophies. The bier of the exile was raised within sight of the crowd. A pedestal was formed for him of stones, torn out of the foundation of this fortress of ancient tyranny. Thus Voltaire dead, triumphed over the stones which had imprisoned him when in life. On one of these stones was read these words:" Receive in this place, where despotism enchained thee, the honours which thy country ordains thee."

The following day, in a splendid sunshine which had dissipated the clouds of a rainy night, an innumerable crowd arrived to accompany the car which was to carry the body to the Pantheon. This car was drawn by twelve white horses four abreast; the reins of these horses, their manes decorated with gold and flowers, were held by men dressed in an antique costume, such as are seen on triumphal medals. This car bore a funeral couch on which was seen extended and crowned an image of the philosopher. The National Assembly, the deputies, the magistrates, the constitutional bodies, and the army surrounded, preceded or followed the sarcophagus. The Boulevards, the streets, the public squares, the windows, the roofs of houses, the very branches of the trees swarmed with people. The dull murmurs of vanquished intolerance could not comprehend this enthusiasm. All eyes followed the car. new belief felt that this was her victory, and that philosophy remained mistress of the field of battle.

The

The order of this pageant was majestic, and spite of all its profane and theatrical pomp, an inward joy of intellectual triumph might be read on many counte

I went on; and everywhere were beauty and silence. Here and there might be seen a farm-house; but rarely a cottage. The old stone-breaker on the road, in answer to my enquiries, replied with a shake of the head-nances. "Queer times, Sir. His lordship pulls down all the cottages and never builds any. If you want to know where the labourers live, it is at R- there,' pointing towards the manufacturing town, a few miles farther.

Numerous detachments of cavalry opened the procession, as though henceforth arms even were to enter the service of intelligence. Then came drummers wearing crape, and beating a funeral march, accompanied by the firing of cannon, which rolled behind. Next the students of the Paris colleges, the patriotic societies, Such are the grand processes of our modern, phi-the battalions of the National Guard, printers and losophy, Christianity, and wisdom. Let us trace effects in THE HISTORY OF THE MELDRUM FAMILY.

their

workmen employed in the destruction of the Bastille, the former carrying with them a travelling printingpress which printed on its way hymns in honour of Voltaire; the latter bearing chains, iron-collars, bolts, and cannon balls found in the dungeons and arsenals of the

SCENES AND CHARACTERS FROM THE FRENCH state-prisons. Then busts of Voltaire, Mirabeau, and

REVOLUTION.

Translated for "Howitt's Journal,”

FROM LAMARTINE'S "HISTOIRE DES GIRONDINS."

(Continued from p. 151.)

THE REMOVAL OF VOLTAIRE'S REMAINS TO THE
PANTHEON.

Ir was at the same epoch (the Bordeaux election) that the National Assembly ordered the removal of Voltaire's remains to the Pantheon. It was philosophy avenging herself on the anathemas which had pursued

Rousseau appeared. Upon a platform was exhibited the verbal-process of the electors of '89, that Hegira of the insurrection; upon another the citizens of the Faubourg St. Antoine exhibited also a model of the Bastille, the flag from the donjon, and a young girl, dressed en amazone, who had fought at the siege of that terrible prison. Pikes, surmounted with the Phrygian cap of liberty, rose here and there above the heads of the multitude which followed. A paper on one of these pikes bore the following inscription, Liberty was born of this steel."

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All the actors, and actresses of the Paris theatres followed the statue of him, who, during sixty years had inspired them. The titles of his principal works were, engraved on a pyramid which represented his immortal

Voltaire, this sceptical genius of modern France, united in himself the double passion of the people of that epoch; the passion of destruction and the thirst for in-tection of this sceptre. He affected, or perhaps really novation; the hatred of prejudice and the love of enlightenment. This genius, not the most exalted, but the most vast in France, has, as yet, alone been judged by his idolaters or his enemies. Impiety has deified his vices; superstition anathematized his very virtues; and despotism, when it again seized upon France, felt that Voltaire must be dethroned before tyranny could be reinstalled. Napoleon during fifteen years kept writers and journals in his pay to degrade, defile, and deny the genius of Voltaire. He hated the name of Voltaire with the hatred of physical force for the force of mind. The church, once re-established, could no longer permit his name to shine forth with resplendent glory: the church had a right to hate the genius of Voltaire, but not to deny it.

cantile world, he, together with thousands of others, found himself on the brink of ruin.

A time of dreadful anxiety succeeded: sleepless nights and days of uncertainty and apprehension. In a few weeks the worst, as they believed, was known, immense loss must be sustained, but still there was a chance of something being saved. Mrs. Mowatt who was extremely attached to their residence, where the brightest and happiest portion of her life had been spent, was willing to make any present sacrifice for the hope of returning in better days to this favourite place.

Misfortunes, however, never come alone; and now, as if to prove the truth of the adage, scarcely had they summoned a cheerful courage to look the future in the face, when a new sorrow, and one more appalling than all the rest, befel them. The affection of the eyes, which had first made its appearance in Germany, again severely attacked Mr. Mowatt. It was impossible for him now to re-commence his professional duties; his sufferings were of the most excruciating character, and for a long period from this time, he was unable to fix his eyes upon a book for above five minutes together.

Here, indeed, was deep cause of anxiety and distress. It was a dark and a melancholy season; yet still out of darkness comes light, and now the young wife, not yet twenty, determined to use some of those splendid gifts which God had given her to retrieve their shipwrecked fortunes, and to lighten, if possible, the load of misfortune which pressed so heavily on her husband. Hitherto her talents had been employed only to embellish life; now they must be used to produce the very means of life; hitherto she had unconsciously been exercising and perfecting her powers amid the joy of youth and the ease of affluence, now their nobler uses must be tried amid the trials of adversity. God truly gives us no powers in vain!

body, inclined wholly to embrace disbelief, as relieving them from moral restraint. Such were the elements of this revolution in religion. Voltaire, with the glance of passion which is even still more far-seeing than the glance of genius, comprehended the full spirit of his age. He would not have succeeded in making his age an age of reflection, but he could make it smile. He never attacked in the front, never undisguised, fearing to draw upon himself the rigour of the laws. The modern Esop, he attacked under feigned names the tyranny he wished to destroy. He concealed his hate in the drama, light poetry, romance, history, and in his very witticisms. His genius shewed itself in perpetual allusions comprehended by his age, but giving no warrant for attack to his enemies. This combat of one man against the priesthood, of an individual against an institution, of one life against eighteen centuries, was not, however, without a certain courage. Voltaire did not suffer martyrdom in his person but he did in his name. He sacrificed it both during his life and after his death; he condemned his own ashes to be scattered to the winds, and to not even find the asylum of a tomb. He endured long exile, in order to procure the liberty of combatting. At eighty years of age, infirm, and feeling himself about to die, he made hasty preparations for one more struggle and then expired far from the abode of his old age. The inexhaustible vigour of his mind never failed him for a moment. His gaiety rose almost into genius, and beneath this pleasantry of his whole life you yet feel a serious power of perseverance and deep conviction. The brightness and vivacity of his wit, however, frequently concealed the profundity of his design. This devotion of his, is his virtue in the eyes of posterity. Yet he was not truth, only the precursor of truth. One thing was wanting in him: the love of God. He perceived God through his intellects and he abhorred the phantoms which eyes of darknes, Some time before these domestic events occurred, Mr. had mistaken for Him and adored in His stead. He Vandenhoff had been giving dramatic readings in varirent in anger the clouds which hindered the Divine Idea ous cities of the Union, which had been extremely sucfrom shining in its full glory upon men, but his worship cessful; Mrs. Mowatt had herself attended those which consisted rather in the hatred of error than in faith in he had given in New York. We know already that she the Divinity. The religious sentiment, that sublimest of excelled in reading aloud, and in private she had been all thoughts, that sentiment which enkindled by enthu-accustomed to read and recite for the amusement of her siasm ascends to God, as a flame uniting itself with Him friends, and sometimes in large assemblies. Her first in the unity of the Creator with His creations, this idea therefore was to give publicly a course of readings sentiment was not cherished in Voltaire's soul. And of this class, the taste for them being very great in from this want sprang the evil results of his philosophy. America. It neither created morality, worship, nor charity; it only decomposed and destroyed. Cold negation, mocking and corrosive it acted as a poison, it froze, it killed; it did not vivify. It created sceptics instead of believers. The religious reaction was speedy and universal. This was to be expected. Impiety may cleanse the soul of superstitious errors, but it does not fill the heart of man. Irreligion is never destined to destroy a religion upon the earth. A new faith is needed to supersede an old faith. It is only a more enlightened religion which can triumph over a deposed and corrupt one. The earth can never remain without an altar.

(To be continued.)

MEMOIR OF ANNA CORA MOWATT.
BY MARY HOWITT.
(Continued from p. 149.)

She had, however, one difficulty to overcome in the very outset, and this was to induce her husband to enter into her plans, for without his full consent she could do nothing. At length this being obtained, she opened her views to a young sister, Mary, who had resided with her since her marriage, but so entirely did this sister, who was of a gentle and shrinking nature, disapprove, so violent was her grief and so earnest her efforts to dissuade, that Mrs. Mowatt determined thenceforth to take counsel of no one, lest thereby her own resolution might be shaken. Silently and sedulously she set about preparing herself for the undertaking, and with the She careblessing of Heaven she hoped for success. fully, therefore, made her selections of poetry from Scott, Byron, Milton, etc, to all of which she wrote appropriate introductions, making at the same time such other preparation as she considered needful. Her resolution and courage never failed her as long as she worked in secret; but so much had she been affected by her much loved sister's grief, that even when all her preparations were finished, and she ready to commence, she thought it best not to consult with her family-her father's disapprobation especially she could not brave. For reasons which every reader will perfectly appre

PARTLY in consequence of Mr. Mowatt's residence in Europe, and partly from an affection of the eyes, he gave up his profession of barrister, and was sub-ciate, she felt that she could not commence this new and sequently induced to embark to a large extent in commercial speculations, when unfortunately one of those terrible crises occurring which convulse the whole mer

public life in New York, where she had been known under circumstances so totally different: she, therefore, selected Boston, the most intellectual city of the Union,