now but too apparent. Prior to the year 1709, three only existed in Scotland; in the course of last century ninety-eight were introduced; and within the present century fifty-one have been added to the number. Their introduction seems to have produced the usual consequences, the assessments, in some instances, doubling themselves in ten years, in others in four. The numbers of the paupers have, of course, gone on in similar ratios, and the collections at the churchdoors are diminished, and in some given up as altogether unproductive.

Nothing can afford a more decisive proof of the ruinous tendency of assessments than the result of Tables 2d and 3d. From these it appears, that the number of poor in those parishes where assessments are not resorted to, is 2 in the hundred; and the average cost for maintenance of each £3:6:9. While in those parishes where the practice of assessment obtains, the number of paupers is 3 in the hundred, and the cost of maintenance £5, 14s. These facts are indeed important, and their weight is increased by the universal report of the clergy, that in the assessed parishes the spirit of honest pride and independence, which once characterised their inhabitants, is rapidly giving way to the baneful influence of this ruinous system. The total number of paupers in the 750 parishes is about 30,000, of whom one-third are males. There are no instances of forced removal from one parish to another, and the expense of litigation is extremely trifling, amounting, within the last ten years, to about £1640, of which sum the assessed parishes are charge able with £1230. During the same period, the expense of litigation in England has amounted to about two

millions.

Although the original and chief ob ject of the committee was to inquire into the situation of the poor, they availed themselves of this favourable opportunity for collecting information on other important subjects relative to the general condition of the lower orders. Thus it is stated, that the number of blind persons is 745, and of deaf and dumb 542: that there arc 130 savings banks (exclusive of Edinburgh and Glasgow), whose funds are stated at £30,000, and that there are 7000 depositors.

There are, as will be seen from the Index, many other important points on which ample and accurate information has been procured. Of these there is one which we own has filled us with grief and astonishment, and which must serve to lower that tone of exultation in which our countrymen have hitherto been accustomed to boast, of the universal facilities afforded to the lower orders of Scotland for the acquisition of common and religious education. It now appears from incontrovertible evidence, that while in the Lowland districts of Scotland there are ample provisions for education, there are many parishes in the Highlands and Islands where onethird, one-half, and three-fourths of the inhabitants cannot read; and who, it may be almost literally said, have not the gospel preached to them. In one parish, containing 5000 inhabitants, there are absolutely eleven-twelfths in this wretched condition. A Bible is even of difficult acquisition to many who can read, and though some families are possessed of one, they have none for their children to take to school;-and this has been, and still is, the state of extensive districts in Scotland. While thousands and tens of thousands of pounds are obtained, from a zealous and religious people, to carry the Scriptures to every nation on the earth, thousands of our own countrymen are destitute of these inestimable treasures; and while even the lowest menial is called upon from the pulpit to contribute his mite to send the gospel of Christ to the Mongolian Tartars, his brethren of the Hebrides are allowed to remain in darkness, utterly destitute of those consolations which the Scriptures alone can impart. Yet these poor people are thirsting for knowledge, and many affecting instances are given in the Returns, of their anxiety to obtain for their children those blessings which have been denied to themselves. In more than one remote parish, where the lower orders are so poor as to be unable even to send one of every family to a distance to be educated, a subscription is entered into, and some clever boy is maintained at school till he can read the Scriptures; after which he returns home and repays the friends who had supported him, by teaching their children at his leisure hours, or by reading during the long nights of

winter to an audience collected from the adjoining country, many of whom, indeed, come from a distance of several miles. Without resorting to this expedient, old and young must be almost entirely ignorant of the gospel; for in those remote and stormy regions, the most zealous pastors (and none are to be found more zealous than those in the Islands) cannot venture far from home, during six months of the year.

In stating these facts, we would not be understood to convey censure on the Bible Societies. They have not known the true state of things, else would they have long since directed a portion, and a large one too, of their immense funds to objects of such paramount importance as those now laid before them. Here there can be no doubt as to the result of their exertions, for the people are imploring assistance, and they have the most unexceptionable assurance of the proper management of their bounty in the zeal and intelligence of a resident and enlightened Clergy, and in the patriotic exertions of the Highland Societies. Indeed, after the melancholy pictures which the returns from many Highland parishes present to us, it is not to be expected that any Scottish Bible or Missionary Society will direct a shilling of their funds to foreign objects, till satisfactory assurances are received that the " means of common and religious education" in the Highlands, are on a level with those of the most favoured Lowland districts.

tainments, or unsettled principles. I rely, however, upon the liberality of your professions; and doubt not that you will give a place in your pages to my opinion of this great author, although it should chance to be more different from your own, than, after a little more serious reflection on your part, I expect it to be.

The notion which I had long ago formed of Lord Byron's true charac ter, has lately received confirmation, more than I ever looked for, from the publication of his Beppo. The baseness of his principles is there represented in a manner not indeed more open, but, I doubt not, infinitely more dangerous, than before; and I cannot help wondering very much at the conduct of the ingenious critic, who, in the last number of the Edinburgh Review, entertained us with a little, lively, flimsy dissertation on ludicrous poetry in general, and with many expressions of admiration for the ease, grace, and vivacity of this Venetian Story, without thinking himself bound to express a single feeling of indignation at the wickedness of those topics on which so much of all this ease, grace, and vivacity has been wasted. One should have thought that no Englishman, who understands so well as Mr Jeffrey does the value of that pure domestic morality on which the public prosperity of his country is founded, would have failed to think "foul scorn," that a great English poet should degrade his genius, by writing a series of cool sarcasms in ridicule of the fidelity of English wives. my business is with the poet, not with his reviewer; although I think the latter has, on this occasion, laid himself quite as open to a serious rebuke as the former. If it should seem worth while to honour his misconduct with any more formal notice, I leave that business to those who have already so severely chastised him in your Magazine, and rendered both you and it the horror of all the infidels in Edinburgh, I mean the German Baron, and Idoloclastes.

TO THE AUTHOR OF BEPPO. MY LORD,

But

IT has for many years been almost impossible that any thing should in

crease my contempt for the professional critics of this country, otherwise the manner in which these persons have conducted themselves towards your Lordship, would, most certainly, have produced that effect. The hyperboles of their sneaking adulation, in spite of the far-off disdain with which you seem to regard them, have probably reached, long ago, the vanity of the poet, and touched, with a chilling poison, some of the better feelings of the man. I have formed, however, a very mistaken opinion of your character, if, conscious as you still are of the full vigour of youthful genius, you can allow yourself to be permanently satisfied, either with the subjects or the sources of the commendation which has been poured upon you. If you feel not within yourself a strong and tormenting conviction, that as yet you have done little more than exhibit to the world, the melancholy spectacle of a great spirit, self-embittered, selfwasted, and self-degraded,―if, in your solitary moments, there shoot not sometimes across your giddy brain, the lightnings of a self-abhorrent and unhypocritical remorse, the progress of the mental paralysis has been more deadly than I had been willing to believe; but even then, a friend of Charity and of Virtue may expect a ready pardon for having hoped too much, and for having spoken to you in vain.

To few men, either in ancient or in modern times, has been afforded an opening destiny more fortunate than yours. Sprung from a long line of generous cavaliers, and inheriting from them a name to which no English ear could listen without respect,—and, adding to these, the advantages of a graceful person and a powerful genius,-where was that object of worthy ambition which could have appeared to be beyond the wishes or the hopes of Byron? You chose to build your fame upon poetry, and your choice was wise.

The names of Marlborough, Nelson, Chatham, Pitt, Fox, and Burke,-what, after all, are these when compared with those of Spenser, Shakspeare, and Milton? To add another name to the great trio of English Poets, and to share the eternal sovereignty which these majestic spirits exert over the souls of the most free, and the most virtuous of people,

this was indeed a high and noble ambition, and the envy of kings might have been due to its gratification. Such were the proud aspirings that a few years ago possessed your mind, and your countrymen were eager to believe and to proclaim the probability of your success. Alas! my Lord, when you reflect upon what you have done, and upon what you are,-when you remember with what wanton hypocrisy you have tortured our feelings, and with what cool contemptuousness you have insulted our principles, you cannot scruple to confess, that the people of England have been shamefully abused, and are, with justice, disappointed.

I admire the natural splendour of your genius as much as the most violent of your slavish eulogists. I do more

I reverence it; and I sigh with the humility of a worshipper, over the degradation of its divinity. The ideas which you must have of the true greatness of a poet, are, doubtless, very different from those of ordinary mortals. You have climbed far up among the crags and precipices of the sacred hill, and have caught some glimpses of their glory, who repose amidst the eternal serenity of its majestic summit. It is not necessary to tell you by what an immeasurable space your loftiest flights have as yet fallen short of the unseen soarings of the illustrious dead. You know and feel your superiority to the herd of men; but the enviable elevation which enables you to look down upon them, convinces you at the same time of your inferiority to those, who sit together in unapproached greatness, the few peerless spirits, alone among men and among poets,-HOMER, DANTE, and the British THREE. Distances and distinctions which are lost to weaker and remoter optics are seen and penetrated by your more favoured eye. Beholding, as you do, Alps on Alps rising beyond you, even the gratification of your self-love cannot prevent you from contemning their voice, who would extol you as having already reached the utmost limit of ascension. Nor will this contempt for their foolish judgment be lessened by the consciousness, which I believe you feel, that your progress might have been more worthy of their admiration, had you not clogged your march with needless fetters, and loitered perverse

ly beneath difficulties, which, by a bold effort, you might for ever have

overcome.

In spite, then, of the shouts of vulgar approbation, you feel, my Lord, a solitary and unrevealed conviction, that you have not as yet done any thing which can give you a permanent title to being associated with the demigods of poetry. This conviction, to a spirit so haughty as yours, must be bitterness and wormwood. To others it might afford no trivial consolation to know, that although, since poetry began, scarcely one age has passed which did not suppose itself to be in possession of a first-rate poet, the names of those whose claims to that character the world has ratified, may all be written with a single drop of ink. But you, unless you be a greater hypocrite than even I suppose you, have that within which would make you prefer total obscurity to any fame that falls short of the most splendid. By comparing the nature of your own with that of more glorious productions,—above all, by observing the contrast which your own character affords to that of greater poets,-you may perhaps discover somewhat, both of the cause of your failures, and of the probable method of retrieving them. The compliment which I pay to your genius, in supposing, that, even under any diversity of circumstanees, you might have become the rival of those master-spirits with whom you have as yet been so unworthy of comparison, is assuredly a great one. Of all that read my letter, none will understand its weight so well as you: none will so readily confess that it verges upon extravagance, or be so apt to accuse of unconscious flattery the admonisher that has bestowed it.

It is not my purpose (for from me to you such a disquisition would be absurd) to describe, or to attempt to describe, to your Lordship, wherein your productions and your spirit differ from those of the great poets that have preceded you. I am not of the opinion of certain modern sophists, who affect to try every thing in poetry by the rules of logic. I feel, and so does every man of common understanding, that if you were born with the elements of heroic growth within you, your stature has been stunted; and that, when brought into contact with those whom

perhaps you might have emulated, you are but a pigmy among a band of giants. One great distinction, however, between you and them, as it relates not to your art alone, but to the interests and welfare of those to whom that art addresses itself, a plain man, who makes no pretensions to the character of a poet, but who loves and venerates the nature of which he is partaker, hopes he may notice in a few words, without giving just offence either to you or your admirers. Your predecessors, in one word, my Lord, have been the friends-you are the enemy of your species. You have transferred into the higher departments of poetry (or you have at least endeavoured to transfer) that spirit of mockery, misanthropy, and contempt, which the great bards of elder times left to preside over the humbler walk of the satirist and the cynic. The calm respect which these men felt for themselves inspired them with sympathetic reverence for their brethren. They perceived, indeed, the foibles and the frailties of humanity, and they depicted, at least as well as you have ever done, the madness of the senses and the waywardness of the passions; but they took care to vindicate the original dignity of their nature, and contrasted their representa tions of the vice and weakness, which they observed in some, with the more cheering spectacle of the strength and the virtue, whose stirrings they felt within themselves, and whose workings they contemplated in others. Conscious of the glorious union of intellectual grandeur and moral purity within, they pitied the errors of other men; but they were not shaken from their reverence for the general character of man. Instead of raving with demoniacal satisfaction about the worthlessness of our motives and the nothingness of our attainments, they strove, by shewing us what we might be and what we had been, to make us what we should be. They drew the portraits of wrath, jealousy, and hatred, only that we might appreciate more justly the kindly feelings which these fierce passions expel from the rightful possession of our bosoms. They took our nature as it is, but it was for the purpose of improving it: they sung of our miseries and our tumults in noble strains,

"Not wanting power to mitigate and swage With solemn touches troubled thoughts, and chace

Anguish, and doubt, and fear, and sorrow, and pain,

From mortal or immortal minds."

With the names of SPENSER, SHAKSPEARE, MILTON, we associate the idea of our nature in its earthly perfection, of love, pure, tender, and ethereal,-of intellect, serene and contemplative,-of virtue, unbending and sublime. As the Venus, the Apollo, and the Theseus, are to our bodies, the memories of these men are to our minds, the symbols and the standards of beauty and of power. The contemplation of them refines and ennobles those who inherit their language. The land that has given birth to such ministers of patriotism and of virtue, fears not that the sacred flame should expire upon her altars. We are proud of England because she produced them, and we shrink from degradation, lest their silent manes should reproach us.

Had it been your destiny to live two centuries ago, and in the place of these illustrious spirits, to form the national poetry of England, how miserably different had been, with regard to you and to themselves, the feelings of your countrymen! In all your writings, how little is there whose object it is to make us reverence virtue, or love our country! You never teach us to despise earthly sufferings, in the hope of eternal happiness. With respect to all that is best and greatest in the nature and fate of man, you preserve not merely a sorrowful, but a sullen silence. Your poetry need not have been greatly different from what it is, although you had lived and died in the midst of a generation of heartless, vicious, and unbelieving demons. With you, heroism is lunacy, philosophy folly, virtue a cheat, and religion a bubble. Your Man is a stern, cruel, jealous, revengeful, contemptuous, hopeless, solitary savage. Your Woman is a blind, devoted, heedless, beautiful minister and victim of lust. The past is a vain record, and the present a fleeting theatre, of misery and madness: the future one blank of horrid darkness, whereon your mind floats and fluctuates in a cheerless uncertainty, between annihilation and despair.

The interest which you have found means to excite for the dismal creations of your poetry, is proof abundant of the vigour of your genius, but should afford small consolation to your conscience-stricken mind. You are a skilful swordsman ; but you have made use of poisoned weapons, and the deadliness of your wound gives no addition to your valour. You have done what greater and better men despised to do. You have brought yourself down to the level of that part of our erring and corrupted nature, which it was their pride and privilege to banish from the recollection and the sympathy of those to whom they spake. In the great struggle between the good and the evil principle, you have taken the wrong side, and you enjoy the worthless popularity of a daring rebel. But hope not that the calm judgment of posterity will ratify the hasty honours which you have extorted from the passions of your contemporaries. Believe me, Men are not upon the whole quite so unprincipled,-nor Women quite so foolish,-nor Virtue so useless,-nor Religion so absurd,-nor Deception so lasting,-nor Hyprocrisy so triumphant, as your Lordship has been pleased to fancy. A day of terrible retribution will arrive, and the punishment inflicted may not improbably consist of things the most unwelcome to a poet's view-the scorn of many, and the neglect of all. Even now, among the serious and reflective part of the Men and the Women of England, your poetry is read, indeed, and admired, but you yourself are never talked of except with mingled emotions of anger and pity. With what pain do the high spirits of your virtuous and heroic ancestors contemplate the degradation of their descendant. Alas! that the genius which might have ennobled any name, should have only assisted you to stamp a more lasting stain upon the pure, the generous, the patriotic, the English name of Byron.

-as

Any other poet might complain with justice, should he see remarks of a personal nature mixed up with a criticism upon his writings. You, my Lord, can scarcely flatter yourself that you have any right to expect such forbearance. If the scrutiny of the world be disagreeable to you, either in its operation or in its effects, you need blame no one but yourself We were