THE

JUNE 25, 1831.

Government.-Popular Representation.-Newspapers.*

'HE three great ends which a statesman ought to propose to himself in the government of a nation are,1. Security to possessors; 2. Facility to acquirers; and, 3. Hope to all.

A nation is the unity of a people. King and Parliament are the unity made visible. The King and the Peers are as integral portions of this manifested unity as the Commons.1

In that imperfect state of society in which our system of representation began, the interests of the country were pretty exactly commensurate with its municipal divisions. The counties, the towns, and the seaports, accurately enough represented the only interests then existing; that

"What would'st thou with me?' the wicked one cried;
But not a word the young man replied;

Every hair on his head was standing upright,
And his limbs like a palsy shook with affright.

"What would'st thou with me?' cried the author of ill;
But the wretched young man was silent still," &c.

The catastrophe is very terrible, and the moral, though addressed by the poet to young men only, is quite as applicable to old men, as the times show.

"Henceforth let all young men take beed

How in a conjuror's books they read!"

Southey's Minor Poems, vol. iii. p. 92.-H. N. C.

1 Mr. Coleridge was very fond of quoting George Withers's fine

lines:

:

"Let not your king and parliament in one,
Much less apart, mistake themselves for that
Which is most worthy to be thought upon :
Nor think they are, essentially, The STATE.
Let them not fancy that th' authority
And privileges upon them bestown,
Conferr'd are to set up a majesty,
A power, or a glory, of their own!

But let them know, 'twas for a deeper life,
Which they but represent—

That there's on earth a yet auguster thing,
Veil'd though it be, than parliament and king!"

-H. N. C.

is to say, the landed, the shop-keeping or manufacturing, and the mercantile. But for a century past, at least, this division has become notoriously imperfect, some of the most vital interests of the empire being now totally unconnected with any English localities. Yet now, when the evil and the want are known, we are to abandon the accommodations which the necessity of the case had worked out for itself, and begin again with a rigidly territorial plan of representation! The miserable tendency of all is to destroy our nationality, which consists, in a principal degree, in our representative government, and to convert it into a degrading delegation of the populace. There is no unity for a people but in a representation of national interests; a delegation from the passions or wishes of the individuals themselves is a rope of sand.

Undoubtedly it is a great evil, that there should be such an evident discrepancy between the law and the practice of the constitution in the matter of the representation. Such a direct, yet clandestine, contravention of solemn resolutions and established laws is immoral, and greatly injurious to the cause of legal loyalty and general subordination in the minds of the people. But then a statesman should consider that these very contraventions of law in practice point out to him the places in the body politic which need a remodelling of the law. You acknowledge a certain necessity for indirect representation in the present day, and that such representation has been instinctively obtained by means contrary to law; why then do you not approximate the useless law to the useful practice, instead of abandoning both law and practice for a completely new system of your own?

The malignant duplicity and unprincipled tergiversations of the specific Whig newspapers are to me detestable. I prefer the open endeavours of those publications which seek to destroy the church, and introduce a republic in effect: there is a sort of honesty in that which I approve, though I would with joy lay down my life to save my country from the consummation which is so evidently desired by that section of the periodical press.

I

JUNE 26, 1831.

Napier.-Buonaparte.—Southey.

HAVE been exceedingly impressed with the evil precedent of Colonel Napier's "History of the Peninsular War." It is a specimen of the true French military school; not a thought for the justice of the war,—not a consideration of the damnable and damning iniquity of the French invasion. All is looked at as a mere game of exquisite skill, and the praise is regularly awarded to the most successful player. How perfectly ridiculous is the prostration of Napier's mind, apparently a powerful one, before the name of Buonaparte! I declare I know no book more likely to undermine the national sense of right and wrong in matters of foreign interference than this work of Napier's.

If A. has a hundred means of doing a certain thing, and B. has only one or two, is it very wonderful, or does it argue very transcendent superiority, if A. surpasses B. ? Buonaparte was the child of circumstances, which he neither originated nor controlled. He had no chance of preserving his power but by continual warfare. No thought of a wise tranquillisation of the shaken elements of France seems ever to have passed through his mind; and I believe that at no part of his reign could he have survived one year's continued peace. He never had but one obstacle to contend with-physical force; commonly the least difficult enemy a general, subject to courts-martial and courts of conscience, has to overcome.

Southey's History' is on the right side, and starts from the right point; but he is personally fond of the Spaniards, and in bringing forward their nationality in the prominent manner it deserves, he does not, in my judgment, state with sufficient clearness the truth, that the nationality of the Spaniards was not founded on any just ground of good government or wise laws, but was, in fact, very little more than a rooted antipathy to all strangers as such. In this

1 Mr. Coleridge said that the conclusion of this great work was the finest specimen of historic eulogy he had ever read in English; that it was more than a campaign to the duke's fame.-H. N. C.

sense everything is national in Spain. Even their so-called Catholic religion is exclusively national in a genuine Spaniard's mind; he does not regard the religious professions of the Frenchman or Italian at all in the same light with his own.

THE

JULY 7, 1831.

Patronage of the Fine Arts.-Old Women.

'HE darkest despotisms on the Continent have done more for the growth and elevation of the fine arts than the English government. A great musical composer in Germany and Italy is a great man in society, and a real dignity and rank are universally conceded to him. So it is with a sculptor, or painter, or architect. Without this sort of encouragement and patronage such arts as music and painting will never come into great eminence. In this country there is no general reverence for the fine arts; and the sordid spirit of a money-amassing philosophy would meet any proposition for the fostering of art, in a genial and extended sense, with the commercial maxim,-Laissez faire. Paganini, indeed, will make a fortune, because he can actually sell the tones of his fiddle at so much a scrape; but Mozart himself might have languished in a garret for anything that would have been done for him here.

There are three classes into which all the women past seventy that ever I knew were to be divided:-1. That dear old soul; 2. That old woman; 3. That old witch.

JULY 24, 1831.
Pictures.1

OBSERVE the remarkable difference between Claude

and Teniers in their power of painting vacant space.

All the following remarks in this section were made at the exhibition of ancient masters at the British Gallery in Pall Mall. The recollection of those two hours has made the rooms of that Institution a melancholy place for me. Mr. Coleridge was in high spirits, and seemed

Claude makes his whole landscape a plenum: the air is quite as substantial as any other part of the scene. Hence there are no true distances, and everything presses at once and equally upon the eye. There is something close and almost suffocating in the atmosphere of some of Claude's sunsets. Never did any one paint air, the thin air, the absolutely apparent vacancy between object and object, so admirably as Teniers. That picture of the Archers exemplifies this excellence. See the distances between those ugly louts! how perfectly true to the fact!

991

But oh what a wonderful picture is that "Triumph of Silenus ! It is the very revelry of hell. Every evil passion is there that could in any way be forced into juxtaposition with joyance. Mark the lust, and, hard by, the hate. Every part is pregnant with libidinous nature without one spark of the grace of Heaven. The animal is triumphing-not over, but-in the absence, in the nonto kindle in his mind at the contemplation of the splendid pictures before him. He did not examine them all by the catalogue, but anchored himself before some three or four great works, telling me that he saw the rest of the Gallery potentially. I can yet distinctly recall him, half leaning on his old simple stick, and his hat off in one hand, whilst with the fingers of the other he went on, as was his constant wont, figuring in the air a commentary of small diagrams, wherewith, as he fancied, he could translate to the eye those relations of form and space which his words might fail to convey with clearness to the ear. His admiration for Rubens showed itself in a sort of joy and brotherly fondness; he looked as if he would shake hands with his pictures. What the company, which by degrees formed itself round this silver-haired, bright-eyed, music-breathing old man, took him for, I cannot guess; there was probably not one there who knew him to be that Ancient Mariner, who held people with his glittering eye, and constrained them, like three years' children, to hear his tale. In the midst of his speech, he turned to the right hand, where stood a very lovely young woman, whose attention he had involuntarily arrested; to her, without apparently any consciousness of her being a stranger to him, he addressed many remarks, although I must acknowledge they were couched in a somewhat softer tone, as if he were soliciting her sympathy. He was, verily, a gentlehearted man at all times; but I never was in company with him in my life, when the entry of a woman, it mattered not who, did not provoke a dim gush of emotion, which passed like an infant's breath over the mirror of his intellect.-H. N. C.

1 66 Figures shooting at a Target," belonging, I believe, to Lord Bandon.-H. N. C.

2 This belongs to Sir Robert Peel.-H. N. C.