M. M. Paul de Kock, Victor Ducange, de Mortonval, &c. have each published fifty volumes, and there is not a reading femme de chambre in Paris or the Departments, whose tender heart has not been melted by their sentimental effusions. You have abundance of these circulating-library writers in England. M. Victor Ducange certainly possesses talent, and has painted the plots of the Jesuits in such faithful colours, that our complaisant courts of law have two or three times sent him to prison. The Fray Eugenio of M. de Mortonval is the chef-d'œuvre of ladies' maids' novels. It is a good subject, and if treated by such writers as Madame Sophie Gay or Madame de Terase, it would be no less popular than Madame de Stael's Delphine, or Benjamin Constant's Adolphe.

This month has produced nothing new in the higher departments of literature. Two new editions of Sir Walter Scott's Works have appeared, one in French and one in English.

M. Simond's Voyage en Italie is also condemned on the score of dulness. Gravity, to be sure, may naturally be expected in M. Simond, as a native of Geneva; but he carries this quality rather too far, when he informs us that there are 365 coffee-houses in the Piazza di San Marco at Venice. The fact is there are only twelve, and the author has mistaken each of the arches of the Piazza, (which is similar to the Piazza in Covent Garden,) for a coffee-house. Besides this blunder and many others, the work is decidedly dull.

The piece entitled " Yelva, or the Dumb Girl," continues to be performed with undiminished approbation at the Gymnase. It is by no means one of M. Scribe's best productions, but it has been the means of developing the talent of an actress, Mademoiselle Léontine Fay, who, by her admirable per-formance of the heroine, draws tears from every eye. It is a powerful specimen of pantomimic acting.-Macready's Macbeth has been thought dull and cold as a whole. Miss Smithson's Lady Macbeth was decidedly a failure. The English language was never so fashionable in Paris as at present, and the booksellers have great demands for Shakspeare's plays.

A lithographed collection of thirty or forty songs by our immortal poet Berenger is in circulation, but it is exceedingly scarce, and I have not been able to get a sight of it.-M. de Montmerqué, who is a wit as well as a scholar, has published several volumes of Memoirs written in the reign of Henry IV. The collections are exceedingly interesting, and have been very popular since the task of editing them has been transferred from M. Petitot to M. Montmerqué. Of all the French writers of the present day, M. Petitot was the most complete tool of the Jesuits, and that is saying a great ideal. Though a fool, he had the greatest possible conceit of his own abilities. Nothing is more curious in the way of impudence than the Life of Cardinal de Retz, which M. Petitot prefixed to the Memoires of Retz. By the by, these Memoires are a literary chef-d'œuvre to which there is nothing comparable in any other language. But if the French excel in this class of writing, we have, on the other hand, no epic poetry. We cannot boast of a Milton or a Tasso.

1

PUBLIC AFFAIRS.

THIS is certainly the age of cant and of humbug. Our politicians profess to be in a sort of mental ague on the possibility of having our religion and our hierarchy torn up by the roots, if we allow any other to grow in their vicinity; while Ministers are so cautious of amending our Representative System, " venerable from its antiquity," that they gravely propose to make East Retford a close instead of an open borough, which it hitherto has been.

The members of a certain assembly, with rare exceptions, having paid for their seats, must well have known that seats were a pretty common, if not a legitimate subject of sale, or barter. If a thing was bought, it assuredly must have been first sold. And yet, when the worthy burgesses of East Retford are, as the lawyers call it, "taken with the mainour," or, in plain parlance, caught in the fact, they express the most innocent and nearly infantile wonder that such practices should have happened, even so near them as in Nottinghamshire. Cornwall has been proverbially corrupt almost since the institution of Parliaments; and why that sink of disease should not long since have been cleansed we cannot conceive, any more than we can understand why the worthy citizens of this great metropolis should, up to 1828, have been drinking water as injurious to the public health as it has long been disgusting to the senses of sight, taste, and smell:-but so it is. These "Innocents" have let a naturalized Jew and a Cornish squire buy and sell the right of election in market overt, with little other notice than an occasional imprisonment of the Jew, to render him more cautious as to the market in which he exposes his wares for sale.

East Retford has hitherto, it appears, sold itself to the best bidder. The remedy proposed is to throw it open to the surrounding hundred of Basset Law, thus pouring into an already foul vessel some fresh liquid, rather than effectually cleansing, if not destroying, the filthy receptacle. We have long been unwilling to credit the report which has been circulated, that Ministers were so anxious to appease, or conciliate the Duke of Newcastle, that they intended to give him, under the guise of opening the borough of Retford to the hundred of Basset Law, the two votes which are to be put at the disposal of Parliament by the disfranchisement of the former village. In the first place, the claim of the great manufacturing towns, Manchester and Birmingham, appeared to be irresistible; and the precedent, too, would have been good, by showing the country the restorative power inherent in Parlia ment, whenever, from the lapse of time, or the course of events, the representative principle had become unhealthy, or fallen below a certain standard, by transferring the right to a younger, a fresher, and a rising population. A precedent, however, was found in the case of Penryn, where it was proposed to let in certain adjoining hundreds, and thus purify the atmosphere. The pretext was to add weight to the "agricultural interest." The hundreds about Penryn contained, by the last population returns, 107,380 inhabitants, while the hundred of Basset Law contained only 34,025 persons. In the case of Penryn, too, the property is so divided that it is impossible for even four of the proprietors, by uniting, to return a single member; while at Retford, the

June 1828.-VOL. XXII. NO. XC.

2 к

Duke of Newcastle, possessing the whole or the greatest part by far of the property, and consequently of the influence, can return both members; the hundred of Basset Law being, in fact, a part of what is emphatically called "the dukery;" yet, in defiance of all these plain marks for guiding their judgment, the Duke of Newcastle's interest has prevailed. The pretence for the preference is, "that Cornwall has a greater number of members than Nottinghamshire; that it would be unjust to diminish the number of members for the latter county, while those in Cornwall would remain untouched." We are sorry to think so meanly of Mr. Peel's understanding as to suppose that he is unaware of the groundlessness of such pretext, or so ill of his morals as to suppose that he would put it forward, if he perceived its weakness, or its falsehood. The close boroughs of Cornwall have as little to do with the map, or the interests of this country, as the states of Radama, King of Madagascar, have with the manors of Wimbledon or Battersea. We seldom hear of them, except for some gross abuse of the representative principle; to shield some profligate debtor from the hands of his creditor, and in one noted and recent instance to extract from the prison of the King's Bench a gentleman, whose bankers had placed him there in the vain hope of obtaining the amount of their large balance by the aid of the laws of the country. The manufacturing interest is, from its nature, less represented than the agricultural. All of the county, and a majority of the borough members, are sent by the landed interest. Many wealthy and large populous towns, which have arisen, it may almost be said, from manufactures, are unrepresented. Those which we have already named are eminent instances of what we assert. These we therefore put in the first place; but if fears are really entertained for the "weak state" of the agricultural representation, could there not be found in Lancashire, Yorkshire, Devonshire, or Kent, spots, on which these agricultural members might advantageously have been planted, without resorting to the Duke of Newcastle, or the "dukery" of Basset Law! We are not amongst those who are disposed to reject improvements because they are less than the necessities of the state require; but we sincerely believe that the change proposed will, on the whole, prove mischievous. We hope, therefore, that if the bill cannot be improved in point of locality, it may be rejected at once and altogether; and that the responsibility will be thrown upon those who have sought to turn an act of justice and of constitutional improvement into a rank aristocratical and Tory job. As it stands, the matter is an insult to the manufacturing interests of the country, whose just claims are thus postponed to the imperious demands of an individual, already too amply supplied with parliamentary patronage, as clearly appears from the anxiety of Government to meet his wishes; and to the agricultural interest, whose name is abused, by being used as a stalking-horse, as well as to the common sense of England at large.

We had intended to devote some space to the consideration of recent measures of the East Indian Government, but our space will not allow us to say much at present; and we have also been to a certain extent anticipated by the publication of a very able pamphlet on these subjects, which we strongly recommend to general perusal. The time now rapidly approaches when a new charter must be applied for, and

we would suggest to the Parliament and the Government a few considerations connected with that measure. It is admitted by the advocates of the Company that no one branch of the trade is productive, while it is well known that some of them are eminently otherwise : the result has been an accumulation of debt, to the enormous amount of seventy millions, and a perpetual recurrence to Parliament for aid from the finances of this country. And for what? To enable the Company to pay a fictitious dividend to a large proprietary, and to support twenty-four directors, as they are miscalled, in opulence at home and extravagance in India; twenty-four directors, who refuse all information as to its own affairs when called upon to furnish it by the very body which appoints them, and who carry on a losing and ruinous commerce, for the sole purpose of nourishing an extended establishment abroad and at home. To bolster up their credit, while it adds to their patronage, the Court of Directors have attempted to raise an illegal duty on the inhabitants of India in the form of a Stamp act, and levied imposts on commerce abroad, as injurious to the mercantile as the new tax is to all classes of their subjects. Why should this be borne? Why will the Government permit the Directors to hazard the safety of India, by laying on a duty which has heretofore lost us America, and may, if not opposed in time, produce the same effect in the Eastern, that it has already done in the Western World.

The bubble of the sinking fund has, we hope and believe, at length burst, mainly through the instrumentality of an admirable pamphlet of Lord Grenville's. Of this statesman we have always augured well, although we have rarely held similar political opinions with him. We always thought him able, and we are now convinced of his candour and his honesty. After advocating the measure of a sinking fund for nearly forty years he has at length discovered its fallacy, and having done so, he loses no time in acknowledging his former error. This is manly, and it is done with a frankness and ability which enhances the value of the confession, while it directs the whole power of a great mind to produce that conviction in others, which it has so laboriously and so slowly obtained for itself. Like all simple propositions, when once it has become clear to the understanding, we wonder that it should ever have been otherwise, even to the meanest capacity. That borrowing money to pay a debt, and at the same rate of interest, at best but left you where you were; you changed your creditor, but you owed as much as before, is the proposition to which we allude. Yet many and powerful minds were led away by some ignis fatuus, to believe that we were annually diminishing our debt by this operose process. The obdurate intellect of Lord Bexley will, we hope, yield admission to the admirable reasons of his former leader, and give his practical aid to the removal of at least one dead weight, which he has aided in placing, or himself has placed, on the purses or the patrimony of his countrymen.

The interminable and ominous question of Catholic Emancipation has again been brought forward by Sir Francis Burdett with more than usual ability, whether we regard the reasoning, the eloquence, the historical research, or the force with which old arguments have been urged or new ones presented by him.

The moment for bringing this subject before the House and the

country is not, we think, a favourable one; nor so, considered, we suspect, by its most ardent advocates: but allowance must be made for the impatience of nearly a whole people, who have been looking for twenty-seven years to this measure, as the panacea for all their evils, physical or moral. However, although

"We would not seek a battle as we are,

Yet as we are, we say we will not shun it."

The talent, with perhaps the single exception of Mr. Peel's speech, has been all on the side of Emancipation; and from some young members, as well as from old ones, who had not before distinguished themselves on this "Vexata Questio," new views have been elicited, evincing deep thought and reflexion, as well as powerful and impassioned eloquence. The speeches of the Irish Secretary and of the Solicitor General for Ireland were particularly forcible, and came with great weight, reference being had to the offices which the speakers respectively fill.

In a House of five hundred and thirty-eight members, the resolution moved by Sir Francis Burdett was carried, after a debate of three days, by a majority of six. We hope and trust that the main question will be viewed in both Houses rather with the eye of practical statesmen than of theologians, or interested alarmists; and that even our first Minister will see the necessity of conceding now, what must be granted, before he can venture upon a foreign war, or risking the "having one of his flanks turned;" a danger which he well knows how to estimate ;

"And with the breach yourselves have made, thus lose your city."

Much legal fencing and special pleading has, as usual, been produced and expended on the Treaty of Limerick, and the promises expressed or implied, at the framing of the Union with Ireland, to induce the Catholics to give their support to that measure. We own we do not think that "the shoe pinches" on either point; but that, if the argument rested upon the Treaty, it would be difficult for the opponents of emancipation to show, that the government of William the Third, by the first article, intended to confine the promised boon to a small party of armed rebels (the inhabitants of the counties of Mayo, &c. &c.), while it was to be pertinaciously withheld from the unoffending, or at least peaceable, Catholics of the remainder of Ireland; or that if so absurd and so limited a view had been taken by the Protestants of that day, the same body at present could in justice refuse to the descendants of the Mayo Catholics the benefits then promised to their ancestors, and that at least those persons should be suffered to enjoy what they may thus be said to have inherited; thus making a distinction, as weak as it would be impolitic, between the Catholics of different counties in the same country. We state this merely to show of how little importance to the real question this provision of the "Treaty" is held by us, as an argument in the present discussion.

We would equally "throw overboard" the actual or implied promises made at the Union. If one of the contracting parties to that measure, the Catholics, so understood the negotiation between themselves and the government of Lord Cornwallis, and were by 'that understanding induced, if not bribed, to support what they would otherwise have opposed, in justice and in honour they should either have