whom Mr. Hazlitt has traduced; but we soon found that an illustration of it would exceed the limits which we must assign to these remarks. The following names occur to us at once: Pitt, Fox, Burke, the Marquis Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, Lord Eldon, Lord Liverpool, Mr. Canning, and all other ministers of course; Mr. Wilberforce, Dr. Paley, Mr. Malthus, Mr. Wordsworth, Mr. Southey, Mr. Coleridge. That we may not be accused of doing him any injustice, we must add the list of those on whom he bestows his admiration. It will not take up much room, and comprizes, we believe, only Buonaparte, the very god,' Mr. Hazlitt says, ' of his idolatry,' Murat, Mr. Cobbett, Mr. John Hunt, Mr. Leigh Hunt, and one other whom we should wish to see in more respectable company. For the general complexion of this man's slander we must refer again to our review of the Round Table; but we will here add a few instances to those before adduced. The subject of the first extract is the kind-hearted and venerable Paley; for Mr. Hazlitt, as we know, wars with the dead. Listen!

This same shuffling divine is the same Dr. Paley who afterwards employed the whole of his life, and the whole of his moderate secondhand abilities in tampering with religion, morality, and politics-in trimming between his convenience and his conscience-in crawling between heaven and earth and trying to cajole both.'-p. 298.

The subject of the second is He, who was the first to confound the armies of Buonaparte;-who rid Spain and Portugal of their devouring enemies;-who led the English forces across the Pyrenees; who marched them in triumph into Paris;-who fettered the Tyrant;-who saved the world at Waterloo.-Listen again!

We are glad the Duke is not an Englishman. Let no country go about to enslave another with impunity: for out of the very dregs of rottenness and debasement will arise a low creeping fog of servility-a stench of corruption to choak the life of liberty wherever it comes-a race of fortune hunting, dastard, busy, hungry, heartless slaves and blood suckers, eager to fawn upon power and trample upon weakness, with no other pretensions than want of principle, and a hatred of those who possess what they want. Ireland has given us Castlereagh, Wellington, Burke :-is she not even with us? Ireland, last of the nations, repose in peace upon thy green western wave. Thou and the world are quits. p. 182.

When Mr. Hazlitt can no longer find individuals on whom he may lavish the language of his palatinate, he bespatters parties. and professions.

A Tory is not a man, but a beast. He is styed in his prejudices— he wallows in the mire of his senses-he cannot get beyond the trough of his sordid appetites, whether it is of gold or wood. Truth and falsehood

hood are to him something to buy and sell: principle and conscience something to eat and drink. He tramples on the plea of humanity, and lives like a caterpillar on the decay of public good. Beast as he is, he knows,' &c. p. xxvi.

A Whig is properly what is called a Trimmer-that is, a coward to both sides of the question; who dare not be a knave nor an honest man; but is a sort of whiffling, shuffling, cunning, silly, contemptible, unmeaning negation of the two.' He stickles for the letter of the constitution with the affectation of a prude, and abandons its principles with the effrontery of a prostitute.'-p. xxxiii. xxxiv.

Of the abstract character of a lawyer he says,

'His soul is in his fee. His understanding is upon the town.' 'He will not swear to an untruth to get himself hanged, but he will assert it roundly by the hour together to hang other persons-if he finds it in his retainer.'

'What a tool in the hands of a minister is a whole profession habitually callous to the distinctions of right and wrong, but perfectly alive to their own interest; with just ingenuity enough to be able to trump up some fib or sophistry for or against any measure, and with just understanding enough to see no more of the real nature or consequences of any measure than suits their own or their employers convenience.'-pp. 151, 152.

In the midst of these effusions we confess we were surprized, notwithstanding our previous experience, at the sight of the following veracious assertion. We do not wish to say any thing illiberal of any profession or set of men in the abstract.'-p. 153. Truth is represented naked. Her antagonist resembles her so far, at least, that she too is sometimes barefaced.

'Man,' says Mr. Hazlitt, (and it must be allowed, that he is a competent witness as to the taste and propensities of one individual of the species,) is a toad-eating animal.'

Any of our readers who will bear in mind this charitable definition, and what the author has in other places said of Burke, may, by turning to p. 361. of these valuable essays, amuse themselves by an instance of that uniformity of thought, which, as Butler remarks, we may always expect to meet with in the compositions of the same author, when he writes with simplicity and in earnest.' They will there find a long and laboured eulogy on Burke, in which it is made one of the chief articles of praise, that he thought nobly of his fellows.'

The character of Murat is another instance of the same sincerity of heart, and clearness of spirit. Murat was senseless enough to believe that he, who had been made a king by Buonaparte, would be cordially received in the list of kings by those who were so by divine right: and he was base enough to turn against his benefactor, his country and the human race: but in himself,

he

he appears to have been a gallant, generous, and heroic-minded man.'-p. 175.

That so misty a brain should be disturbed by spectres, is not to be wondered at: and there is one which seems to torment our author to a degree, that must make his bitterest enemies pity him. Poor Tom never saw the foul fiend in so many or such fearful shapes. Some of our readers may be learned in dæmonology, and for their sakes we insert the most striking descriptions given by Mr. Hazlitt, of his Phantom, which he calls Legitimacy. It is an ugly spider' a new Jaggernaut 'a foul blatant beast, breathing flame and blood' an old lady, with a tissue of patches and of paint, and a quantity of wrinkles, and of proud flesh'-' an old hypocritical hag-a vile canting, mumbling witch;-an old rotten demirep; who towered above the conflagration of Moscow, dressed in a robe of flame coloured taffeta;' and who exenterates' Mr. Hazlitt of his affections.'-p. 308. We wish the fiend joy of her prize. There is something, however, in these wanderings of the author which is symptomatic of mania, and rather tragical. It is time to look for the farce. At the close of another publication, in which he is more than commonly ridiculous, we are favoured with the writer's own opinion of himself, and he therein gravely informs the world that the object of his literary labours is the fame of a Pascal, a Leibnitz, or a Berkeley!' and plainly intimates that he expects to be classed with them after his death. There is something beyond all farce or caricature in this angry buffoon's selfsatisfied assumption of a seat amongst these three great men, whom Religion, Genius, Philosophy and Science raised almost above the nature of mortals-and this too, immediately after a more striking display than we remember to have seen elsewhere of Mr. Hazlitt's peculiarities. We doubt whether a Dutch signpainter would make his own apotheosis equally ludicrous: even if he were to depict himself recumbent at the table of the Gods, with trunk hose, grasping a tobacco-pipe with one hand, and striving to purple his lips in nectar with the other.

Having got this slanderer of the human race in an attitude, in which it is possible to smile at him, we willingly leave him there. He ought to feel obliged to us. Many will think that we have, on this and other occasions, wasted more time on him than he deserved. We are ourselves of that opinion: but when the Hazlitt first appeared within our province, it struck us that it was of a new species; its activity, disagreeable hum, and glittering blackness-but, above all, the value of the objects, which it seemed to be its nature to defile, excited our attention. We did not know, moreover, but that it might then be only in its

arca, or grub state; and there was no saying to what extent, if it should change to the perfect image, it might increase its numbers. We confess, however, that we wanted skill in entomology. It is plain that it had reached its perfection when we first noticed it; that its powers of mischief hardly extend beyond the making of some dirt and some noise that it does not belong to our climate, nor can multiply here; but that its presence is owing to the láte extraordinary seasons, which have brought us so many new plagues. Its minutes were nearly over, and it would have perished as the heats declined. Yet, perhaps, it may not be entirely without advantage that we have fastened it down upon a sheet of paper amongst our other specimens.

17 B

ART. IX.-Essays on the Institutions, Government, and Manners of the States of Ancient Greece. By Henry David Hill, D.D. Professor of Greek in the University of St. Andrews. THEY who are conversant with that dark and gloomy period,

when it was granted, as a peculiar privilege, to the school of Osnaburgh to unite instruction in the Greek and Latin languages with the studies intended to advance theological knowTedge, can best appreciate the advantages of that powerful reaction in society, which, after suffering for centuries the evils of complete ignorance and the still greater miseries of a partial and. imperfect knowledge, concluded by making the study of languages, and more particularly the two just mentioned, the basis of all higher education throughout Europe.

The benefits derived from this system have been too often discussed to render it necessary to repeat them here: but, as persons. interested in the question, we may be permitted to add one not always included in the estimate. The nightingales, which sang near the tomb of Orpheus, felt it incumbent on them, according to the testimony of Pausanias, to sing with more sweetness and force than other birds of the same species; and a similar sort of feeling generally leads men, who have grown up with the appalling models of perfection of ancient literature before them, to prefer a prudent silence, where they cannot elicit from themselves something of more than common excellence. With few authors therefore, there exist, among this class of men, admirable judges of authorship, and severe and even fastidious readers, from whose minds the fallacies which dazzle or confound the intellects of the half-learned roll like winter-drops from eaves of reed. Critical journalists, who have so many webs of ignorance and

Brucker De Philosoph. Christ. Occident.
L2

deception

deception to unravel and expose, may safely leave then the underraters of the advantages derived from an acquaintance with the Greek and Roman writers, to enjoy their own triumph. It was a triumph confined for some time, in our own country, to a sect, whose tenets in religion are as offensive to the understanding as the phraseology in which they are conveyed is repulsive to the taste. But the same opinions seem now to be taken up by a different set of men. A political party, which has yet its fortune, to make in the world, has found out that the youth of this kingdom have been villainously corrupted by the erection of grammar schools. Cordery and Huntingford have accordingly become to these men what the retainers of Lord Stafford, who talked of such abominations as a verb and a noun, were to Jack Cade: and were they possessed of equal authority with that sturdy rebel, we believe the fiat of condemnation with some of them would be precisely the same-Away with him, away with him, he speaks Latin!

We turn gladly from persons of this stamp, whom the contempt of the well-informed will always keep in the place to which they belong, to those who, grateful for the advantages derived by themselves from early initiation in classical knowledge, endeavour to make others participators in the same benefit. The piety of the Chinese lights up a perpetual lamp in the tombs of those whom he recognises as the authors of his existence. The scholar feels bound in the same way not to let the shades of night enter those sepulchres, where repose

The dead but scepter'd sov'reigns, who still rule
Our spirits from their urns.'

The little publication before us has been framed in the spirit of this principle. It contains the substance of some lectures delivered to the professor's academical pupils, and is the effect of more reading than the unpretending manner in which it is communicated might at first lead to imagine. To young persons who are just entering upon the higher classics, and to studious men who are desirous of repairing, by their own industry, the accidental defects of an imperfect education, a more useful assistant, we think, cannot well be furnished. In the first six essays, the author treats of the heroic age, and those institutions which concerned the Greeks generally; in the subsequent ones he confines himself to the manners and customs of those two leading states in Greece, which, as intellect or morals, a taste for the arts of peace or war, have severally most influence on men's minds, will command a corresponding effect on nations and individuals throughout all ages. An Essay on the Government, Manners and Religion of the Persians, a people whom the more brilliant history of the Greeks has been suffered to throw too much into obscurity,