of his conduct that I cannot forgive so entirely as perhaps I ought, and as I wish to do. "His public conduct may have arisen from mistaken motives of right, carried to a length to which none but persons of his ardent imagination would have pursued them. But the letter to the Duke of Portland and Lord Fitzwilliam, with the worst possible opinion of me, is what I never can think of without sensations which are as little habitual to me as to most men. To attempt to destroy me in the opinion of those whom I so much value, and in particular that of Fitzwilliam, with whom I had lived in the strictest friendship from our infancy; to attempt it too, at a time and in a way which made it almost certain that they would not state the accusation to me, and consequently, that I should have no opportunity to defend myself-this was surely not only malice, but baseness in the extreme; and if I were to say that I have quite forgiven it, it would be boasting a magnanimity which I cannot feel. "In these circumstances, therefore, 1 think that, even not opposing, much more supporting, any motion made in honour of his memory as an individual amongst the rest, without put ting myself forward as a mover or seconder, is all that can be expected or desired of me by those who are not admirers of hypocrisy. I shall have great pleasure, however, in seeing your plan for an epitaph for him, and will tell you freely my opinion of it, both in general and in the detail. He was certainly a great man, and had very many good as well as great qualities; but his motto seems the very reverse of undir fav; and, when his mind had got hold of an object, his whole judgment, as to prudent or imprudent, unbecoming or indecent, nay, right or wrong, was perverted when that object was in question. What Quintilian says of Ovid, Si ingenio temperare quam indulgere maluisset,' was eminently applicable to him, even with respect to his passions. Si animi sui affectibus temperare quam indulgere maluisset quid vir iste præstare non potuerit?' would be my short character of him. By the way, I do not know that affectibus is the right word; but I know no other." Monstrous as we must consider this view of Mr Burke's conduct, which, under every provocation from the underlings of Mr Fox's party, continued irreproachably honourable towards those whom he had been compelled (and whom others had been compelled) to abandon,-still, under the perverse prejudices which had possession of Mr Fox, we must allow his temper and his conduct, as here stated by himself, to have been sincere, manly, and liberal. That he did not speak with more fervour of admiration, in summing up the claims of a man so immeasurably beyond his contemporaries in the fineness and compass of his understanding, is not to be imputed to jealousy of his powers, or to the smothered resentments which Mr Fox acknowledges-but entirely to the extreme plainness, simplicity, and almost homely character of his own mind, which laboured under a specific natural inaptitude for appreciating an intellect so complex, subtle, and elaborate, as that of Burke. We see how readily he clings to the slang notion of Burke's "imagination" as explaining the differences between them; and how resolutely he mistakes, for an original tendency to the violence of extremes, what in fact was the mere breadth and determinateness of principle which the extremity of that crisis exacted from a mind of unusual energy. Charles Fox had one sole grandeur, one originality, in his whole composition, and that was the fervour, the intensity, the contagious vehemence of his manner. He could not endure his own speeches when stripped of the advantage they had in a tumultuous and self-kindling delivery. "I have always hated the thought," says he to Dr Parr," of any of my speeches being published." Why was that? Simply because in the mere matter, he could not but feel himself, that there was nothing to ensure attention, nothing that could give a characteristic or rememberable expression to the whole. The thoughts were every body's thoughts: Mr Burke's, on the other hand, were so peculiarly his own, that they might have been sworn to as private property in any court of law. How was Dr Parr affected by the great schism in politics, the greatest which ever hinged upon pure difference of abstract principle? A schism which was fatal to the unity of the Whig Club, could not but impress new determinations on the political bias, conduct, and language of every Whig partisan. At the time of the Bellenden Preface, it was a matter of course to praise Burke; he was then the ally of Fox, and the glory of the Whigs. But what tone of sentiment did Dr Parr maintain towards this great man after he had become an alien to the revolutionary cause which he himself continued to patronise, and the party whom he continued to serve? For previously to that change his homage was equivocal. It might be to the man, or it might be to his position. There are many ways of arriving at a decision in letters, in tracts, (Letter on Fox's James II.) and in recorded conversations, Dr Parr's sincere opinions on this question (a question as comprehensive as any personal question ever can have been) were repeatedly obtained. He wrote, besides, an inscription for Burke's public monument; and this, which (in common with all his epitaphs) was anxiously weighed and meditated in every syllable, happens to have been the most felicitous in the opinion of himself and his friends of all which he executed. What was its prevailing tone? "I remember," says Parr himself, writing to Lord Holland," one or two of Mr Burke's admirers said to me that it was cold; and I answered, that I had indeed been successful; for as I really did not feel warmth, I had not attempted to express it." Perhaps in these words, Dr Parr, with a courtier's consideration of the person whom he was addressing, has done some injustice to himself. Enough remains on record, both in the epitaph and elsewhere, to shew that he had not indeed attained to a steady consciousness of Burke's characteristic merits; but it is manifest that he struggled with a reluctant instinct of submission to the boldest of his views, and fought up against a blind sense of his authority as greater than on many accounts it pleased him or suited him to admit. Even in this personal accident, as it may seem, taken in connexion with the fetters of party, lay a snare to the sobriety of Parr's understanding. The French Revolution, with him as with multitudes beside, unhinged the sanity of his moral judgments. Left to the natural influences of things, he, like many of his political friends, might have recovered a steady equilibrium of mind upon this great event, and "all which it inherited." He might have written to others, as Lady Oxford, (once the most violent of democrats,) sickened by sad experience of continental frenzies, had occasion to write to him-"Of Burke's writings and principles I am now a very great admirer; he was a great lover of practical liberty. In my days of darkness, prejudice, and folly, I never read a line of Burke; but I am now, thank heaven, in a state of regeneration." Obstinacy, and (except by occasional starts) allegiance to his party, made this noble confession of error impossible to Dr Parr. And the intellectual results to one who lived chiefly in the atmosphere of politics, and drew his whole animation from the fluctuations of public questions, were entirely mischievous. To those who abided by the necessities of error, which grew upon a systematic opposition to Mr Burke, the French revolution had destroyed all the landmarks of constitutional distinctions, and impressed a character of indeterminate meaning upon ancient political principles. From that time forward, it will be seen, by those who will take the trouble to examine, that Dr Parr, struggling (as many others did) between the obscure convictions of his conscience, and the demands of his party, or his personal situation, maintained no uniform opinions at all; gave his faith and his hopes by turns to every vagrant adventurer, foreign or domestic, military scourge, or political reformer, whom the disjointed times brought forward; and was consistent in nothing but in those petty speculations of philology, which, growing out of his professional pursuits, served at last no end so useful as that of relieving the asperities of his political life. MR SADLER AND THE EDINBURGH REVIEWER.* A PROLUSION, IN THREE CHAPTERS. BY CHRISTOPHER NORTH. CHAPTER 1. THE great object of Mr Malthus's celebrated Essay on the Principle of Population, is, as he himself has told us, almost, we believe, in the words we are now using, to examine the effects of one cause intimately united with the very nature of man,-one cause that has hitherto impeded the progress of mankind towards happiness-to wit, the constant tendency in all animated life to increase beyond the nourishment prepared for it. That population has this constant tendency to increase beyond the means of subsistence, and that it is kept to its necessary level by some or other of the various forms of misery, or the fear of misery, sufficiently appears, he thinks, from a review of the different states of society in which man has existed. It may, he thinks, be safely pronounced, that population, when unchecked, goes on doubling itself every twenty-five years, or increases in a geometrical ratio; and he thinks that it may be fairly pronounced, that, considering the present average state of the earth, the means of subsistence, under circumstances the most favourable to human industry, could not possibly be made to increase faster than in an arithmetical ratio. The checks which repress this prodigiously su perior power of population, and put its effects on a level with the means of subsistence, are, according to him, all resolvable into moral restraint, vice, and misery. To shew this, then, is, as we said, the object of his Essay which necessarily takes a wide and various historical view of the conditions of human nature in many countries, and at many erasand necessarily comprehends many enquiries into the operation of other causes to which that condition, happy or miserable, had been erroneously ascribed. The Principle of Population was laid down so clearly, that he who ran might read; the illustrations Mr Malthus collected of it from historical and statistical works, and from books of voyages and travels, were striking and impressive; the order and arrangement of his materials were free from confusion, and his style clear, animated, and eloquent, so that the work speedily attracted notice, and Mr Malthus all at once acquired the reputation of original genius, and became founder and head of a School. But though adopted by many zealous, and, as they have always chosen to call themselves, scientific disciples, this doctrine of a supposed great Master in Political Economy, revolted not only the feelings, but the reason, of men who studied the nature and condition of their own race in the schools of common humanity; and was thought by them irreconcilable with much of what they humbly believed it had been permitted them to know of the attributes and providence of God. Accordingly, many answers to the Essay, from time to time, appeared -written by men of very various powers-some good, some bad, and some indifferent-but, we confess, all more or less unsatisfactory, and leaving Mr Malthus intrenched behind the position he had so skilfully and laboriously taken up, and which his devoted followers continued to affirm he maintained against all such assaults, in a state, not only of security, but triumph. But though the opponents to whom we have now alluded, cannot be said to have severely shaken the Principle of his Essay, they forced him *The Law of Population, a Treatise, in Six Books, by Michael Thomas Sadler, M. P. London: John Murray, 1830.-Edinburgh Review, No. CII. Refutation of an Article in the Edinburgh Review, No. CII. by M. T. Sadler, Esq. M. P. London: John Murray. to modify it; and Mr Malthus, who in the first edition of his work, we believe, did not mention moral restraint as a check at all, in subsequent editions attributed to it more and more power; and at last allow ed that it was always the more and more operative as society advanced in civilisation-when the checks of vice and misery were less brought into play. It appears, therefore, that Mr Malthus was not deaf to the outcry Nature herself may be said to have raised against his doctrine as it was first promulgated; and that it assumed a shape and character less painful and revolting-though even with that important modification, most melancholy and humiliating still-and hanging like a dead weight on the hopes of all who hoped highly of the future happiness and virtue of man. For many years, however, the Malthusians were even more intolerant than their master of all objections to the creed of the only true faith. He answered his opponents, generally, though not always, with temper and moderation -for Mr Malthus is an amiable man; but many of his followers shewed a bad spirit-a spirit of contumely and contempt towards all who ventured to dispute or deny a single dogma of the School; and as if nature had endowed them exclusively with faculties capable of understanding the principle of population -hooted and yelled at every man who called it in question, and impugned it by reasoning, or by facts. A revelation had been made to them alone of the Great Truth-they alone had been initiated into the mysteries of the Faith-and in the pride of their philosophy, they shewed themselves the worst of bigots and fanatics. ted out of the pale of humanitymeasures which, as they were addressed, we believe, so could they only have had any temptation, to a tailor. Others, again, who did not directly recommend men to become monkeys or monsters, aimed abuse in words to us unintelligibleagainst marriage. Thus one Oracle delivers this dark and dubious response to the kneelers at the inner shrine-"Legislation can sometimes produce considerable effects by its indirect operation; as when a desire, which gratifies itself in a hurtful course of action, (which seems, in the instance of these suppliants, to mean marriage,) and cannot easily be coun teracted by reward and punishment, is drawn to gratify itself in a less hurtful or innocent direction." Response second-" The progress of legislation, the improvement of the education of the people, and the decay of superstition, will in time, it is hoped, accomplish the difficult task of reconciling those important objects." In these oracular responses, who may expound the meaning of the words " innocent direction" and "superstition?" In all this horror of the pure" waters of life," which domestic enjoy. ments have been always esteemed thus preying on the very vitals of some irrational and disgusting wretches, and disturbing the reason even of such intellectual persons, and blameless in their practical ethics as the authoritative writer whom we have ventured to call an Oracle, the People of England,—for really in Scotland we do not seem ever to have cared, or indeed to have known, much about the anti-populationists,-saw the hydrophobia, in its most hideous and loathsome shape: and, though little afraid of Some of them, too, would not being bitten by the rabid animals even suffer the modifications of the running fast and loose in all direcLaw made by Mr Malthus him- tions, not only along High-ways but self; and pushed it to consequences By-ways, they issued what may be -and to the recommendation of un- called a national edict, or decree, to hallowed practices, from the horrid send the monks to Coventry, a town whisper of which his kinder, and of which it is not easy to ascertain purer, and higher nature instinctive- the latitude, and there most of them ly recoiled with abhorrence. We at present abide. That is often sound have seen in bad Latin, schemes and salutary advice, which counsels proposed to thwart the principle of young persons not to marry and bepopulation, which, as they were dis- get children, till they see a reasongraceful and disgustful to manhood, able prospect of providing for them it was satisfactory to know origina--and it is too often set at naught; but we cannot help thinking that such advice had many million times been taken as well as rejected before the stars of Malthus, Mill, or M'Culloch rose on a benighted world "with fear of change Perplexing workmen." Men are not naturally the brute beasts these writers have insultingly represented them to be. They do not propagate more pecudum; and Mr Malthus let some expressions escape him on that subject, of which he afterwards gave us reason to know he was both ashamed and sorry-as well he might be as a Christian clergyman. That egregious wiseacre, Ex-Professor Senior, seems to have lately felt this-and, with all the pomposity and pedantry of the school and the schools, has dedicated some pages of a lecture to prove that human beings have reason as well as passions. When it is a duty to marry, and what are the duties of marriage, Nature herself dictates; nor have there ever been wanting in this long-enlightened land, moral and religious teachers to expound such duties, not out of such books as these pragmatical coxcombs and Cockney political economists have produced or studied, but out of a book which few of them know much about, and many of them nothing-THE BIBLE. With regard, again, to that mighty class, which we have higher authority than that of the political economists for believing never shall cease out of the land, the Poor, the deductions drawn from the Malthusian law of population were impious as cruel; and just, generous, humane, and Christian England scorned the creed, of which it is a leading article, that they who may be dying of hunger have no right to life; that they had forfeited it by imprudent marriage and wicked propagation-therefore, let them die of starvation, they and their misbegotten brats-while the monks, seeking the gratification of their desires in some more "innocent direction," and unenslaved to "superstition," laughed and grew fat, and sent Hymen and Lucina to the dogs. But mark now how inconsistent and unstable is even speculative vice. Why, not from any compunctious visitings of nature" to which their hearts were shut, but from light let in upon their darkened understandings by one who owned no communion with their faith, they all at once began eating in their own words, and their own principles, and recommending the introduction of Poor Laws-some kind of modification of the English Poor Laws-these fatal stimulants to propagation-into Ireland! An enlightened Christian philosopher in the Quarterly Review, while he exposed with a masterly hand the pernicious abuses-and above all, one abuse-that had vitiated the English Poor Laws by changing their very spirit—at the same time proved that there were causes existing in the rural economy of England, which had not only prevented the English Poor Laws, as long as they were not abused, from unduly increasing the population, but had absolutely made them productive of an opposite effect; and then, the economists, as we have said, first drew in their horns, and then pushed them out in right angles to their numskulls towards another “airt,” taking care, however, not to say a single syllable about the quarter from which they had derived the new light, but impudently and dishonestly claiming it as a revelation made to the world from the cloudy shrine of their own understandings. Thus Mr M'Culloch, when examined before a Committee of the House of Commons on the state of Ireland, pompously gives a list of the statistical authorities on which he had seen reason to modify his former opinions on this questionwhereas he had been taught or rather forced to give them up, by the irresistible logic and facts of the admirable writer in the Quarterly Review, to whose existence even he had not the common honesty to allude before the Committee. Now, we could point out a passage, had we time to tumble over some musty numbers of a Review with which he is probably familiar, written, if not by himself, by one of his brethren, in which it is averred that he who would recommend the introduction into Ireland of any modification whatever of the English poor-laws, would be fitter for a cell in Bedlam than a seat in the House of Commons. Let the cell in Bedlam, therefore, be prepared; and let it be roomy enough for |