her that I, mere boy as I was, (not quite fifteen,) | that, if there were no other detection of the holcould not have presumed to direct my admiration to her, a fine young woman of twenty, in any other character than that of a generous champion, and a very adroit mistress in the dazzling fence of colloquial skirmish. My admiration had, in reality, been altogether addressed to her moral qualities, her enthusiasm, her spirit, and her wit. Yet that blush, evanescent as it was,-the mere possibility that I, so very a child, should have called up the most transitory sense of bashfulness or confusion upon any female cheek, first, and suddenly as with a flash of lightning, penetrating some utter darkness, illuminated to my own startled consciousness, never again to be obscured, the pure and powerful ideal of womanhood and womanly excellence. This was, in a proper sense, a revelation; it fixed a great era of change in my life; and this new-born idea, being agreeable to the uniform aspirations of my own nature—that is, lofty and sublime, it governed my life with great power, and with most salutary effects. Ever after, throughout the period of youth, I was jealous of my own demeanour, reserved, and awe-struck in the presence of women; reverencing often not so much them as my own ideal of woman latent in them, and seldom, indeed, more than imperfectly developed. For I carried about with me the idea, to which rarely did I see an approximation, of A perfect woman, nobly planned, To warn, to comfort, to command. And from this day I was an altered creature, and never again was capable of the careless, irreflective mind of childhood. Great, doubtless, is the power of each sex over the other; and greater in proportion to the original nobility of the nature. But I know not why the dominion of woman over man, so far as the contemplation of the reciprocal ideals is concerned, seems the more absolute. I know not why, also, because it contradicts what one might have supposed a priori, the female ideal, (by which much abused term I mean the philosophic maximum perfectionis) seems less earthly and gross, pointing to a possible alliance with some higher form of purity and sanctity. And yet, according to our scriptural mythus, she was the daughter of earth and heaven, whilst man drew his parentage directly from heaven. Whence the Miltonic address, "Daughter of God and man, accomplished Eve." And agreeably to this conception we are told, by the same authentic oracle, that whilst man was "formed for God only," she, on the contrary, was formed "for God in him." He drew his irradiation directly from the Deity, she only by reflex communication with him. However these are curious refinements. But it is a truth of the largest value, that the dominion of woman is potent, exactly in that degree in which the nature of woman is exalted. That woman reigns despotically, never through her image as abstracted from her actual reality, but through her ideal, which is anterior to all actual existences; low and false basis upon which is built savage "And show us how divine a thing Precisely at this stage of my advancement I was, and but just entered on that revolution which I have described, when, as I have said, I became a resident in the family of Lord C. Lady C. was a beautiful and still youthful woman, who acted upon me powerfully through the new-born feelings I have described, and would have done much more so, had she not been known to me from my childhood. A young Irish peeress, who was visiting at the same time in this family, aided Lady C.'s purposes in stimulating my ambition upon all the paths which interest the sympathies of woman. Lady C. was anxious that I should become a sort of Alcibiades, or Aristippus, of ambidexterous powers, and capable of shining equally in little things and in great. Accordingly, whilst I taught her Greek enough to read the Greek Testament, she took measures for my instruction in such accomplishments as were usually possessed by the men of her circle. In particular, she was anxious that I should become a good shot; and, for this purpose, put me under the care of one of her husband's gamekeepers. Duly, for many weeks, I accompanied the zealous keeper into the L-xt-n woods, and did my best to improve. But my progress was slow indeed; and at last my eyes opened clearly to the fact, that my destiny was not in that direction which could command the ordinary sympathies of this world or of woman, even though accomplished women, moving under common and popular impulses. My sense of Lady C.'s kindness made me persevere in all the exercisings and pursuits which she had originated, so long as I remained at L-xt-n. But, internally, I felt that my sphere was not exactly what she pointed out to my ambition, nor the prizes which glittered before my eyes exactly such as almost any woman could be expected to understand. Even then, in the depths of those Northamptonshire woods and ridings, oftentimes I exclaimed internally,—that, if it were possible for me to work some great revolution for man, or to put in motion some great agency upon man's condition, equal, for example, in power and duration, to that wrought by Mahomet, I would set a value upon fame. But else, and as respected the little trivial baubles of literary or social honours, were these only at my disposal, whether it were through defect of power in myself, or defect of opportunity,—in that case, I would prefer to pass silently through life, by quiet paths, and without rousing any babbling echo to my footsteps. Vulgar ambition was already dead within me. And living as I did at To be continued in this time with two young matrons of rank, both emphatically fine young women, and one a celebrated beauty, who had seen the first men of the day at her feet, and grateful in the liveliest degree, to persons of so much distinction, for the interest they condescended to show in my future fortunes, I grieved that it should be so. However, I dissembled, and lost no part of their regard. And, meantime, one great advantage incident to my present situation, I took good care to cultivate as much as was possible. Northamptonshire, partly from its adjacency to the finest sporting grounds in England, and partly from its relation to the capital, (the distance even at that day being easily accomplished between breakfast and dinner,) is crowded with a denser resort of the aristocracy than any other part of the island. Lord C. was absent at his Irish estates in Limerick and perhaps her own taste would have led Lady C. to stay much at home. But, with a view to the amusement of her young Irish friends, Lord and Lady M-sy, but chiefly the latter, she accepted invitations almost daily. Lord M-sy was often called away to London or Ireland; but I was the invariable attendant of the two ladies; and thus, under Lady C.'s protection, I came to see the English aristocracy, the great Houses of Belvoir, (pronounced Beevor,) Burleigh, &c., and the crowds of subordinate families, with their winter visiters, more extensively than ever I had seen the aristocracy of Ireland; and this with a freedom of intercourse which would not have been conceded to me at a more advanced age. our next number. ON NATIONAL MANNERS. "MANNERS," says an able French phrasemaker," are the hypocrisy of nations ;" and, according to his doctrine, that nation whose manners are the most artificial must necessarily be regarded as the most accomplished of hypocrites. Now we do not hesitate to assert that the manners of the English of the present century, viewed in the primary and secondary classes, the aristocracies of birth and wealth, the only two where manners are intimately connected with morals, are the most artificial of civilized Europe! There is not a place on earth where the influence of conventionality is so strong as the west end of London; or where ignorance of forms and ceremonies, of the most contemptible and ephemeral nature, proves so bitter a source of discredit to the ignoramus. In this respect, English society of the present day emulates that of France, under the gorgeous, but emasculate reign of Louis XIV.; since which period, the French have passed through political ordeals, such as could not fail to exercise a potent and profitable influence upon the national manners and national character. Under the splendid presidency of its royal creator, the courtiers of Versailles thought it a proof of good breeding to conceal their licentiousness beneath the spreading skirts of the embroidered court suits in which they strutted; and, in spite of Bossuet's anathemas, Moliere's banterings, and La Bruyère's pungent railleries, the manners of the Grand Monarque and his Grands Seigneurs invariably maintained, amid their profound corruption, a tone of mock-heroic pomposity. The Regency followed; and, for the convenience of the Duke of Orleans, and his roues, the buckram was extracted from those spreading skirts; during the triumph of opera girls, and les petites maisons, dignity gave place to the coarsest effrontery of libertinism. The Court of Louis XV., far from attempting the purification of national manners, or the replacement of the banished buckram, laboured only to conceal the deficiency by additional embroideries and added tinsel; and when at length his unfortunate successor, and his royal partner in weakness, the misguided Marie Antoinette, attempted to throw aside both buckram and tinsel, without having previously provided a pure and wholesome frame of body to supersede the necessity for such extrinsic ornaments as had served to dazzle the eyes of the people, and blind them to the moral leprosy of the unclean beings set in authority over them, the exposure proved fatal to the cause of hereditary monarchy and hereditary | really exist; not in the multitude,-not in the aristocracy in France. From one extreme, the exasperated nation rushed madly into another. Having laid aside the "hypocrisy" of the "manners" of Versailles, they thought proper to adopt the naked obscurity of the Halles, "Making the foul reality too real !" Then came that heterogeneous masque of Kingship, the military despotism of Napoleon; when the "hypocrisy" of Parisian manners was drilled by martial music into an endless march; sometimes a quick march, to lively measures; sometimes a dead march, with muffled drums and colours reversed. To this pageant of power succeeded, with all its incongruities, the troubled epoch of Bourbon Restoration; an admixture of the petticoat government of Maintenon ascendency, with the sensualities of the epicurean sty; afflictingly characteristic of the latter days of Louis the Fourteenth, and shortly to be crowned by the heavy downfall of Charles,—the Jesuit,the Despot, the Deposed! It was amid these political vicissitudes that the nation recovered its candour. Many-masked as she is, Hypocrisy boasted not in her repertory a sufficient assortment of "varnished faces" for the assumption of so rapid a succession of characters. Even France possesses but a single Talleyrand; and the mass of the French nation has, in fact, achieved desophistication of manners, by having unsophistication thrust upon it. Most people have heard the story of the painter who, being required to supply a collection of the national costumes of Europe, depicted the Frenchman naked, with a roll of cloth under his arm; protesting that the mutability of French fashion precluded the existence of a national costume. In like wise, the mutation of national principles has reduced the manners of the nation to a primitive state. But it is not thus with England. From the epoch of the Protestant Revolution, or second Reformation, our progress in the "hypocrisy of nations" has been slow, gradual, and unbroken by political events. We have been fated from reign to reign to ripe and ripe, and then from reign to reign to rot and rot, with uneventful progression. The two first Georges of the Hanoverian succession may have been more prone to March beer and smoked beef; the Third, to port wine and roast mutton; the Fourth, to claret and cutlets ;—and these increasing refinements of royal taste may have operated on the appetites of their loyal subjects; but the progress of manners has been from the grub to the butterfly; from the seed in its husk to the plant, the flower, the second seeding time; and whether the new harvest, to result from our present excess of florescence, is to produce good and wholesome grain, is yet to show. The seed is still in the pod, the parent plant yellow, withered, and decaying. Let us wait patiently, and see what the flail of the thresher may chance to bring to light! At present, however, we are bound to consider the manners (or hypocrisy) of the nation as they vast and noble body of the English people, comprised between the Orkneys and the Isle of Wight; but in the most opulent and educated class, the people clothed in purple and fine linen, the law-makers and breakers,—the vagrants in travelling chariots,-the vagabonds on high-trotting horses! It is an absurd and nearsighted thing when critics, reviewers, and moralists, cry aloud that they care not to hear about the "fashionable" world, and affect to ignore the existence of the hereditary great and diplomatically noble. The deaf adder that stoppeth her ears to a recital of the sayings and doings of such people, is a poor creeping thing, whose head will one day or other be unadvisedly bruised by the angry paw of the lion, or the oppressive weight of the unwieldy hippopotamus. By whom, after all, is the nation at present represented? (A plague on both your houses!) By whom is the public money extracted and distributed? On whom are we dependent for the security of our charters, the conduct of our wars,—the fair fame of our country in foreign negotiation ? Upon the leading "hypocrites" of the kingdom; upon the elect whose "manners" afford" the glass of fashion and the mould of form;" upon the magnats of Grosvenor Square, and satraps of Arlington Street; upon the high-born and wealthy whom, when Tory reviewers wish to disparage, they modify with the name of "fashionable ;" spitting upon their gaberdines-their robes of velvet and ermine-in envy of their tantalizing eminence! The fastidious Quarterly, for so many years the Delphian oracle of the world of do-nothingness, (the mouthpiece of that modern god of music and medicine, whose priesthood consisted in the lordly committee of the Italian opera, and a synod of royal physicians !) affects to nauseate all literary allusion to its quondam patrons. Profoundly conscious of the injury inflicted upon. them, and upon their cause, by those recent exposures in contemporary works of fiction, which were formerly bequeathed in private memoirs for the edification of a succeeding generation, the Dominicans of Albemarle Street decry all portraiture of modern manners; and clamour after fac-similes of poor, weak, shivering human nature, with its natural frailties and infirmities, without perceiving that the covering invented for their disguisal, - whether of serge or point-lace, whether the robing of a peer, the hoop of a Windsor Courtieress, the pauper suit of a workhouse, or the bandages of an hospital,— are alike distinctive, and alike important. While applauding the moral purpose of the satires of Pope, or luxuriating in the tittle tattle of Walpole or Grammont, as an evidence of the manners or "hypocrisy" of a past generation, they insist that similar instruments of reformation, when applied to the passing time, are frivolous and vexatious,-mere pribbles and prabbles; occasionally mischievous, and always contemptible; and by erecting a sort of inquisitorial censure of the press, have at length persuaded themselves that the caricatures which, being great truths, are necessarily great libels, can be altogether suppressed by the influence of their despotic jurisdiction. But can they also manage to gag the lips of those satirists of the continent, who form their opinions of our national character and manners, upon data gathered from the fashionable classes, and the fashionable only? Can they blind the eyes of the Neapolitans, for instance, to the vices and follies of the exclusive coterie, which this very winter has been parading the Chiaja? Can they limit the contempt which the frivolity of our noble, and the servile conventionality of our wealthy, has excited in the minds of foreigners of every degree, and which, if left to the malicious lash of the D'Haussezs and Pückler Muskaus, will certainly gain little from having been secured from the honest and fair reprobation of writers of our own country? Certainly not! The fifty yards of scarlet broadcloth, in which, like the physicians of Charles VI., they consider it a mark of loyalty to envelope the sick, serve to inflame the distemper of the patient; concealing the disease for a time, from the eyes of the uninitiated, only that a foul and infectious corse may at length be paraded forth to public view ! For our own part, we consider few things more worthy of careful investigation and accurate delineation, than the manners of the times. The ebb and flow of a river can be measured by the line of weeds and straws deposited by its receding waters; and the preservation even of a reptile imbedded within less perishable materials, serves to verify events as mighty as the Deluge. Who, for instance, but for the existence of contemporary memoirs, such as the Sketches of Mercier, who would believe that, while the most sanguinary laws were passing in the French Convention, the ladies of fashion of the day sat flirting their fans, sipping lemonade, and eating ices in the Tribunes? or that Blonde wigs, à la victime, formed from the remains of the martyrs of the guillotine, were the nouveauté of the season succeeding the Reign of Terror? What historian of the twentieth century would form an accurate notion of the aspects of the unreformed House of Parliament, and the manners of its members, from a mere senatorial record of its measures? St. Simon's graphic delineation of the royal privacy of Louis XIV., with his bigot concubine, and the Duchesse de Bourgogne and her physic-days, afford a more instructive lesson than all the tirades of all the royal historiographers of France; and a memoir might possibly be indited in our own times, such as "The Adventures of a Royal Pony Phaeton, formerly in the possession of the Marchioness of C-, and now the property of Lord Frederick Fitzclarence," worthy to form a valuable appendix to the speeches of Sir Robert Inglis, and the addresses of Bishop Blomfield! The policy and decisions of the Master of the Rolls would not be half so comprehensible to the weak understandings of the public, were we not familiar with his Honour's "manners," or "hypocrisy ;" nor could we at all times make out the motive of a sudden adjournment of an important debate, did not some recorder of the trivialities of the night duly inform us that the honourable members were engaged to appear at one of her Majesty's balls! "Brutus hath told us that Cæsar was ambitious ;"—but it is a lesser than Brutus who tells us that Cæsar hankers after office, only because the needs of a calico-printer, imbued with the pompous propensities of a Lorenzo de Medicis, are not to be supplied by any channel less copious than the public purse! The works of Byron and of Crabbe have recently received their most valuable annotation, in a mere description of the manners of the two poets-of the piebald hypocrisy" of the aristocratic liberal, and the homely virtues of the parish priest, ministering alike to the bed of travail and the bed of death; and the characteristics of Henry Fielding's mind have long been unfolded to us in six lines of Horace Walpole's delineation of his "Manners," when he speaks of having found the magistrate at supper, with a blind fiddler, a woman of the town, "the bone of a leg of mutton, and the dirtiest cloth!" A genuine and true delineation of the manners of English society in the year 1830, was indispensable as a commentary upon, or corollary to the Reform Bill, for the edification of posterity. But such a tableau must not be the last. Every shade, every tint, every variety of colour exhibited by the dying dolphin, should be expressly portrayed; and we, who are labouring up the glaciers, in order to acquire a more comprehensive view for the benefit of future generations, cannot be too minute, or too explicit, in the narrative of our ascent. We hope to devote many future papers to illustrations of the "Manners" of England and the English. COLLINS'S ODE, IN A PASSION! OR A VOICE FROM SYDNEY. ADDRESSED TO WILLIAM TAIT. "Dennis Collins, the old pensioner who threw a stone at his Majesty, is ordered to be transported for life. His dress, since his convida tion, is most grotesque; all the right side of it being of a bright yell w, and all the left side of a purple brown. His wooden leg (a new one, worn for the first time on his trial.) is painted sky.blue; and, to complete the tout ensemb e, he wears a blue cloth cap, with a red border, and a white tassel on the top "-Extract from the newspapers of the period when Collins was confined in Reading Gaol. "The old wooden legged pensioner,-Dennis Collins,-whose sentence of death, for throwing a stone at the head of his most gracious Majesty, on Ascot Heath, it may be recollected by our readers, was commuted for transportation to New South Wales last year, died about six months ago in that Colony,-having, it is said, refused all sustenance for many days previous to his dissolution."-Public Jour nals. Mayhap you've read about my death,- To poor old Dennis,-now no more! When living, I had one good leg; My last request you can't withstand,— Unless you'll kindly lend a hand. To shame my enemies, my friend, For which-the devil take them! DENNIS COLLINS TO HIS PERSECUTORS. But straight consigned to-Keepers? Yes, on that point you've set me pondering,And if my senses have been wandering, (In case as how I'd got any!) I ne'er could see, by any tack, Why, bless his Majesty!-I knew (You've recompensed me for my pains!) On Ascot Heath, that 'ere small pebbleFor which I've been miscalled a rebel It ne'er could reach the Royal brains! "Tis true, I had enough of prog At Greenwich-but they spoilt my grog! Yes, they cut off my Rum and Gin, And then they lopp'd away my pension. But that's a fraud a Saint would mention! 'Hard-hearted was the Navy board,- Of destiny's dread storm the sport. While law pour'd forth its wrathful vial,- A present came from gentle Meg: She gave me a new well-turn'd leg !* At the time of Collins's trial, it was stated in the newspapers that a lady had presented him-not with her hand, but with a bran new wooden leg; on which he proudly stood the brunt of the capital proceedings against him. Twelve lubbers on the Bible swore, ('Twas well the swabs could do no more,) To find me guilty of high treason: Then that old chap, they call a judge, In his black nightcap, preach'd some fudge"As how Jack Ketch should stretch my weason, Then cut my carcass up like junk!" But still my spirits never sunk ; I'd been cut up in life so often: I'd gather'd from the turnkey's goster, Be sent, I meant to be petitioner. By cruel sentence of the law, For near nine months I've lain on straw,— As though it could improve my breeding. Thus, in my dreary prison-cell, My eyes! I've had a gallows spell, And all the time been close at Reading !+ A cap of blue upon my head,- Bespoke a funny fellow. My body-rigging-half and half Yellow and brown-had made you laugh At a rum Punchinello! But still I was a sailor true: And so my pin I painted blue; And though consign'd to Sydney, The coves have found-through hardest luckIn me a boy of British pluck, And of the proper Kidney! I knew that I had acted wildly,— ('Tis thus, alas, poor tars are tort'red!) Abroad then sent me, to be-quartered! ¦ Bill Tait, although my manner's rude, Depend upon my gratitude, If you'll print this epistle. He calls all hands :-so, Tait, adieu! DENNIS COLLINS, On board of the Charon, mouth of the Styx, off" No. Man's- Land," one P.M.-i.e., Post-mortem. + Admiral Sir Isaac Coffin; under whose command Dennis Collins had served, and by whom his conduct had been frequently commended. Reading gaol. Poor Dennis has doubtless had a tedious spell of it; but we cannot say much for his pronunciation: he complains, however, that his enemies would not gratify him with a "Reading-made-easy.” |