somewhat tiresome account of the battle of Vittoria, you may be surprised that I have said nothing of the Marquis. The truth is, that during the whole of it, I did not get above two or three glimpses of him, and these either too distant or too brief to afford matter even interesting enough for a paragraph. At one time I saw him gallop past from right to left of the line, with a sort of meteor-like velocity, which soon excluded him from my gaze. At another, I saw him on a height at some distance, where, amid the lengthening shadows of the setting sun, he seemed to tower, like a gigantic Titan, high up into the Empyrean.

I am not insensible of the glory which, from its commencement, has invested and encircled the career of Lord Wellington; and I know not by what splendour of enterprise he may yet be destined to establish and emblazon the security of his country, and the honour of her arms. But I do know, that were his name hitherto as obscure as it has been splendidly illustrated,-were Vittoria the only basis, the sole pedestal of his fame, it would support a column as high and as proud as that of any warrior of ancient or modern times, whose name has been irradiated by the admiration of past ages, and will be by that of those yet unborn. During the whole of the present campaign, his operations have been distinguished for an union of science, promptitude, and decision, impossible to be surpassed. So skilfully have his combinations been made, that, notwithstanding the troops of three nations were embraced by them, in no one instance have they failed. He has outmanoeuvred the enemy by his calculations in the closet, as completely as he has beaten them by his army in the field. To the French General, Vittoria was but a forlorn hope. It was an endeavour to regain, by fair fighting, the advantages he had lost by the superior talent and strategy of his antagonist. The issue has been, that Spain is at length finally and decisively wrested from his grasp, and the remains of the invading army have been driven to the passes of the Pyrences, to seek for shelter and safety from the pursuit of their victorious foe.

We continued our pursuit of the

enemy for about two leagues beyond Vittoria, where we bivouacked for the night. We had no sooner taken up our position, than, tired, jaded, starved, I cast myself on the ground in a temporary, yet universal paralysis of all powers and energies. Never did bivouac afford fewer appliances for comfort-yet these are not wanted by the tired soldier. In the mere cessation of exertion, he finds, when bathed by the cold dews of heaven, a medicinal balm for the weariness of exhausted nature. And then the sleep, by which, in a brief space, his heavy and motionless eyelids seem to be hermetically sealed! Think you, my good Aunt Dorothy, it at all resembles the light and fragile slumbers which nightly soothe your senses into forgetfulness beneath your tester of pink damask and eider-down quilt? Slumbers which the ticking of a clock, or the softest whisper in your apartment, or the pattering of rain on the window panes, could break and dissipate in a moment? No, no, believe me, it is nothing like this. The sleep of the worn campaigner is very different from that of an amiable and respectable maiden lady, whose fatigues during the day have proceeded from an airing in the carriage, or a walk in the shrubbery; and, perhaps, an extra rubber at whist or back-gammon in the evening. It is a sleep, deep, dreamless, and imperturbable-a still, calm, unbroken sabbath of all his faculties and senses. Fire a pistol at his ear, and he hears it not. Let the glare of a thousand torches be concentrated on his eyelids, and they move not. Let his stoney bed be shaken by the concussion of an earthquake, and, beyond an occasional snore, he will shew no signs of animation. But try him with the sound of drum or trumpet, and, with curses on the earliness of parade, muttered in something like a grunt, he springs at once to his feet, restored, as if by magic, to all the functions, powers, and attributes, of a sentient and living man.

On the day following the battle, we moved onward, and again halted at Salvatierra, where we took up our quarters in a wood. Since then we have approached still nearer to Pampeluna, in the vicinity of which we are now encamped. What service we are next to be employed on I know

not; but I am very sure our life at present is about as unpleasant as may be. There is nothing to be had for love or money in the country; these abominable cormorants, the French, having taken or destroyed everything possessing marketable value they could lay their hands on. Our supply of creature comforts, therefore, is, as you may suppose, rather scanty. I gave orders to my servant, not an hour ago, to boil the but-end of a ham-the last produce of my panniers for dinner to-day; and when I may get another, is known only to God and the army sutlers, which latter gentry, by the by, seem of late to have forsaken us altogether. In the meanwhile, I shall comfort myself, when inclined to fall into the

blue-devils, by chanting a stave of the old song, which assures us that

“A light heart and thin pair of breeches, Will go through the wide world, brave boys."

Now, my dear Aunt, God bless you. I leave the details of this long letter to be read, marked, learned, and inwardly digested by you at your leisure; only assuring you, in conclusion, that if you are not already somewhat muzzy with Champagne, and your whole establishment drunk as Chloe, in honour of the glorious victory of Vittoria, you are unworthy of so excellent and admirable a nephew SPENCER MOGGRIDGE.

as

MR WILMOT HORTON is a very honest and well-meaning man; yet if his late transfer from the Colonial Office shall put an end to his fantasies about emigration, the country and himself may be equally congratulated upon the change. The truth is, that a wellmeaning man, when he gets a wrong idea in his head, is the most consummate of public nuisances. His consciousness of intending all for the best makes him stubborn in the wrong; he cannot conceive his honesty can be absurd, any more than his perseverance through thick and thin can be often but another shape of obstinacy, that no experience can soften, or sullen self-will, that nothing in the shape of reason can guide. The favourite idea which has occupied Mr Horton's studies for some years is Emigration. For the evils of England, Scotland, and Ireland, for the poor-rates, for fevers, and famines, and poaching, and the crowding of Newgate, and the multiplication of pickpockets, he has one theory; that they all proceed from an excess of population. His theory is wrong in its principle, just as his remedy would be trivial in its practice.

There is no excess of population in the British Islands. There may be districts to which the people crowd till they overstock agriculture or ma

nufactures, but the surface of these islands has acres enough to feed, clothe, and employ, five times their present number. Even in England there are immense spaces almost totally unpeopled, and scarcely touched by the hand of man. It is true, that they are not to be found within ten miles of London or Manchester. But what is the population of Derbyshire, of the whole huge district between the parallels of York and Berwick, of the Scotch Highlands, of North Wales, of three-fourths of South Wales? Except ing in the immediate vicinage of mines and manufactories, those immense districts are comparatively deserts.

It is allowed that they are not rich plains, nor probably easily productive of the support of man. They are mountains, often bleak, and comparatively barren, on which no opulent farmer would be justified in speculating, and among whose wild summits no gentleman of travel, taste, and in the habits of London life, would think of living beyond a month of the shoot ing season; but they are, notwithstanding, cultivable ground. There is scarcely a spot among those wastes, in which a labourer could not find the means of subsistence by the soil; the potatoe, and the common vegetable tribes, would amply reward him for his labour.

It is obvious that no landholder will think it worth his while to farm on those wilds, nor needs any man go among them who can live else where, nor will any peasant think of taking those rude acres at a high rent; nor, perhaps, at any rent at all. But let the land be given to them for fifty years to come, to make the most of it as their own, to let them feel, that when they are taming the stubbornness of the ground, they are taming for their own profit-let the peasant feel that he stands upon his own property, and we shall see, in a few years, the barrenest mountain that rears its head in England smile with produce and population. The great point is property-the feeling, that what we do is for ourselves and our children, works wonders everywhere. It is the whole secret of the superiority of our nation in all the branches of human industry-it has covered England, a reluctant soil, in a forbidding climate, with verdure, beauty, and fruitfulness, denied to the brilliant climates and teeming luxuriance of the south. It makes the British labourer-a man, above all others, attached to home-to disregard the feelings of home, cross the ocean, and bury himself in the wildernesses of the United States or Canada, and submit to every desperate privation that can break down the strength and heart of man, in the hope at last to secure a property to himself. The same impulse would act with still more vigorous activity nearer home, and the happiness and the strength of England grow together.

But to come to the case that makes all the pillows of the Emigrationists sleepless thè tremendous over-population of Ireland. Ireland has, of surface nineteen millions and a half statute acres. Of this will it be believed, that seven millions and a half are totally untouched by spade or plough? and those deserts are divided, by the present survey of the Commissioners of waste lands, into

Acres.

Uncultivated lands and bogs capable of improvement, 4,900,000 Incapable surface, 2,416,000

The whole bog of Ireland is computed about 1,250,000 acres. But

there can be no doubt, with any man who knows the loose terms in which the Commission talk of incapable land, that every acre of ground in the most incapable, is capable of making a return to labour; not, of course, to repay hired labour, nor to indemnify a rich proprietor in the outlay of his money, but to indemnify and support the peasant, who brings to it his spade, his sturdy arm, and his determined resolution to work a subsistence for himself out of the ground.

No man who has travelled through any province of Ireland can have seen, without surprise and regret, the mountain-sides and valleys that are given up to the ranges of a few sheep, or left in a state of utter barrenness. The bogs are, with scarcely any exception, capable of being turned into arable land; and when once so turned, they are actually of inexhaustible fertility. Of course, there must be a vast deal of trouble and discomfort in the exertion, and also considerable delay, but the result would be success, and the peasant would soon have solid possession for his pains.

The only true remedy for the pressure of population and pauperism in Ireland, is to distribute these wastes among the peasantry; to give from ten to twenty acres to a family, without the power to alienate the farm for the next twenty-five years; and to give the possession for fifty or a hundred years, free of all rent or incumbrance whatever. For this purpose, the land must be purchased from the present proprietors, to whom it is almost totally useless, and from whom it would be had cheap; or if the spirit of chicanery should prompt them to raise their price, on the chance of government purchase, the price might be left to the decision of a jury, as in the common case of purchasing the ownership of houses in London. A hundred thousand pounds laid out in this way would buy ground for the location of a million of people. Their freedom from rent would soon enable them to make their subsistence; the trifling advance of a few agricultural utensils would be easily repaid; and we should have, in place of the double nuisance of a host of beggars and a desert, a vigorous population, and a cultivated district. The demands of the population, as it increased in means, would amply remunerate this original

expense, in the employment of manufacturers and traders.

But the whole question is a business of necessity. We must adopt this scheme of settling, for we can adopt no other. The emigration scheme is utterly impossible. It has the disqualification of an expense that we cannot sustain, and of that expense lavished without an approach to the attainment of the object. To transport over 100,000 Irish labourers to Canada, and place them on the located ground, is, at the lowest rate, and by the friends of the measure, computed at L.30 a-man. Thus we plunge, at the very first step, into an outlay of no less than three millions of money! But the labourer must be supplied with money for the erection of a dwelling, with utensils, with clothing against a seven months' winter of prodigious severity, and with a year's provisions. The probable expense of the entire amounting to about L.100 a-man. Thus to locate 100,000 people, would amount to ten millions of pounds! And what relief would the abstraction of 100,000 men, from a growing population of eight millions be? Absolutely nothing. Their places would be filled instantly, the relief would not be discernible at the end of a month, and the whole process would require to be commenced again. But if it should be said, that the idea of settling the waste lands has been tried in England, and without success, the answer is obvious:-It has not been tried but in the most inadequate, and even the most dishonest manner. When a common has been inclosed, has it been given in divisions as property to the poor people who have hitherto fed their pigs and poultry upon it? Quite the contrary. The inclosure has been the signal of expulsion to those poor. The neighbouring gentlemen have each grasped the share nearest to themselves, and the intentions of the Legislature have been perverted to the actual increase of pauperism. It is thus, that in England, any further haranguing upon the benevolence of inclosure acts, excites only disgust.

If it be said, that even the cultivation of the Irish waste lands would only put off the evil day, and that the burden of our population must return as soon as those lands were fully peopled, the answer is plain. It is, VOL. XXIII.

in the first place, of importance to put off the evil day, in all cases where postponement does not increase the original mischief. But the more sufficient fact is, that the only remedy for pauperism from multitude is to be found in the increased respectability of the national habits, mind, and property. The Irish peasant now follows the impulse of youth, and marries without a care for the provision of a family, because he knows that, let him care as he will, he must throw away his pains. Expecting, till his life's end, little better than beggary, or ill-paid daily toil, he thinks that his children can beg and dig for tenpence a-day just as well as himself, and perish out of the world as little indebted to clothing or comforts as any of their tribe. But let this man become the master of any property in the ground he tills, and find that he can be by degrees something better than the drudge at tenpence a-day; his decent feelings will be roused. There is no man incapable of such feelings, and no man more rapidly excited to them, than the Irishman; and before he involves himself with a family, he will consider whether he can put shoes and stockings on their feet, give them some degree of education, clothe them so as not to be laughed at by his thriving fellow-proprietors round him, and do all this without sinking from the station of a farmer.

Such a man will not marry to see his wife and children driven to beg from door to door, as is now the common resource. Early marriages, which are generally ruinous to the peasantry, will be avoided. Something of dower, and decent housewifely habits on the woman's side, will be required, and the fashion of decency, competence, and education will spread, to the signal prevention of the long lists of miseries and crimes attendant on a pauper population.

We are to remember also that every man who makes a livelihood by this cultivation and reclaiming of the deserted ground, not merely brings so much produce into the general mart, for it is by the surplus produce that he must grow rich enough to supply himself with necessaries; and not merely adds to the actual strength of the country in its most vigorous and peculiar arm a healthy and wealthy yeomanry, but increases the consumption of what

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is more tempting still in the eyes of the English public, its manufactures. The trade too is at home; one of all trades the most productive. It has no ocean to cross, no insurance to pay, no storms to struggle with, no privateers to dread, and, above all, no delay to warp and enfeeble its power and credit. It is the most rapid, the most easy, the most constant, and, as the general result, the most profitable.

And to this, what can the location in Canada, or any of our remote settlements, compare? What can the settler return from Canada? Wood, we have already more than enough; furs are in the same condition. Peach brandy, and

maple sugar-and there are but few districts where they can be producedare not among our luxuries. At the same time there should be no restriction on the voluntary emigrant. Let him make his way into the forest, and erect a hut, and after he has fought out the wolves, and frightened away the backwoodsmen, and thieving voyageurs, and mastered the misery of solitude, and hardened his frame against a frost that would split rocks, let him found a dynasty. But let our legislators first look at home, which is not more the place of charity than wisdom.

THE London newspaper authorship is forced into something like common sense, by the perpetual necessity of writing. Men may be as sentimental by inclination as a German dramatist; but the absolute drain on their sentimentality in the wear and tear of London, would exhaust the "fount of feeling" in a week; and the "thoughts that lie too deep for tears" would be fished up, and turned to service inexorably before a month renewed its moon. But in the country the case is different. The interval of a week allows an accumulation of the tender feeling, which inevitably overflows through the pen the moment it is taken in hand. A dog "suspected of being mad," an over-drove ox, a village quarrel, a rustic elopement, or the breaking down of a safety coach, can never be done justice to in London. The facts may be given, and the conclusion, whether by inquest or induction, declared for the general behoof. But it is in other and more verdant quarters that the narrative is touched as a narrative ought to be, with the whole picturesque of the affair, "with mellowness of pencil, and magic of detail," as the most celebrated auctioneer alive says of every picture that undergoes his hammer.

Of course there are exceptions, and some of the country journals are written with a spirit that would do honour to the sagacity or skill of any public writer. But still the "sentimental" flourishes along with the cab

bages and cauliflowers, chiefly at a distance from the "fumum strepitumque," and the richest class of description is never found on this side of the fifty mile stone.

Metaphor is the native language of fancy, and fancy is the daughter of feeling, and feeling is the daughter of the fields. Then the use of metaphor is established as an heir-loom in the soil of the hawthorns and blue bells; and accordingly the dialect of rural description is always magnificent, profound, eloquent, and rather puzzling;

as

to do common things in an uncommon way," has been considered an evidence of genius, so to say common things in an uncommon way, is an evidence of similar superiority to the race of mankind.

Thus, if your true describer has to talk of pen, ink, and paper, he disdains the homeliness of the immediate expression, and invests his meaning in the dignified phrase of "writing materials." If one clown's wig takes fire from another clown's pipe, we hear of the operation of "the devouring element," fire being obviously beneath the rustic pen. If a flash of lightning set a haystack in a blaze, or ring the bells of a steeple, the approved epithet is, "the electric fluid.' If a dog bite a pig, the narrative teems with "virus," the "rabid animal," and the "latration" of the patient. Or if a stage-coach running races meet its natural fate, the world are called to wonder at "centripetal force," " dire concussions," and "compound fractures