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or weak characters: they are the legitimate consequences of a consistent and complicated system, and cannot be dispelled but by a decided rejection of the whole.

The involuntary train, however, both of feeling and thought, which was to make me break out into complete rebellion, had long been sapping the foundations of my faith, without my being aware that the whole structure nodded to its ruin. A dull sense of existence, a heaviness that palled my taste for life and its concerns, had succeeded my first ardour of devotion. Conscientiously faithful to my engagements, and secluded from every object that might ruffle the calm of my heart, I looked for happiness in the performance of my duty. But happiness was fled from me; and, though totally exempt from remorse, I could not bear the death-like silence of my soul. An unmeaning and extremely burdensome practice laid by the Church of Rome upon her clergy, contributed not a little to increase the irksomeness of my circumstances. A Catholic clergyman, who employs his whole day in the discharge of his duty to others, must yet repeat to himself the service of the day in an audible voice-a performance which, neither constant practice, nor the most rapid utterance, can bring within the compass of less than an hour and a half in the four-and-twenty. This exhausting exercise is enjoined under pain of mortal sin, and the restitution of that day's income on which any portion of the office is omitted.

"Was mine a life of usefulness?-Was not the world, with all its struggles, its miseries, and its vices, productive of nobler and more exalted minds than this tame and deadening system of per fection? How strong must be the probability of future reward, to balance the actual certainty of prolonging misery? Suppose, however, the reality and magnitude of the recompense-am I not daily, and hourly, in danger of eternal perdition? My heart sinks at the view of the interminable list of offences, every one of which may finally plunge me into the everlasting flames. Everlasting! and why so? Can there be revenge or cruelty in the Almighty? Such were the harassing thoughts with which I wrestled day and night. Prostrate upon my knees I daily prayed for deliverance; but my prayers were not heard. I tried to strengthen my faith by reading Bergier, and some of the French Apologists of Christianity. But what can they avail a doubting Catholic? His system of faith is indivisible. Whatever proves it all, proves absurdity. To argue with a doubting Catholic is to encourage and hasten his desertion. Chateaubriand has perfectly understood the nature of his task, and, by engaging the feelings and imagination in defence of his creed, has given it the fairest chance against the dry and tasteless philosophy of his countrymen. His book propped up my faith for a while.

"Almost on the eve of the mental crisis, I had to preach a sermon upon an extraordinary occasion; when, according to a fashion derived from France, a long and ambitious discourse was expected. I made infidelity my subject, with a most sincere desire of convincing myself, while I laboured to persuade others. What effect my arguments may have had upon the audience I know not; they VOL. II. No. 9.-1821.

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were certainly lost upon the orator. Whatever, in this state, could break the habit of awe which I was so tenaciously supporting whatever could urge me into uttering a doubt on one of the Articles of the Roman Creed, was sure to make my faith vanish like a soap-bubble in the air. I had been too earnest in my devotion, and my Church too pressing and demanding. Like a cold, artful, interested mistress, she either exhausts the ardour of her best lovers, or harasses them to distraction. As to myself, a moment's dalliance with her great rival, Freedom, converted my former love înto perfect abhorrence.

One morning, as I was wrapt up in my usual thoughts, on the banks of the Guadalquivir, a gentleman, who had lately been named by the government to an important place in our provincial judicature, joined me in the course of my ramble. We had been acquainted but a short time, and he, though forced into caution by an early danger from the Inquisition, was still friendly and communicative. His talents of forensic eloquence, and the sprightliness and elegance of his conversation, had induced a conviction on my mind, that he belonged to the philosophical party of the university where he had been educated. Urged by an irresistible impulse, I ventured with him upon neutral ground-monks, ecclesiastical encroachments, extravagant devotion-till the stream of thought I had thus allowed to glide over the feeble mound of my fears, swelling every moment, broke forth as a torrent from its long and violent confinement. I was listened to with encouraging kindness, and there was not a doubt in my heart which I did not disclose. Doubts they had, indeed, appeared to me till that moment; but utterance transformed them, all at once, into demonstrations. It would be impossible to describe the fear and trepidation that seized me the moment I parted from my good-natured confidant. The prisons of the Inquisition seemed ready to close their studded gates upon me; and the very hell I had just denied, appeared yawning before my eyes. Yet, a few days elapsed, and no evil had overtaken me. I performed mass with a heart in open rebellion to the Church that enjoined it; but I had now settled with myself to offer it up to my Creator, as I imagine that the enlightened Greeks and Romans must have done their sacrifices. I was, like them, forced to express my thankfulness in an absurd language.

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This first taste of mental liberty was more delicious than any feeling I ever experienced; but it was succeeded by a burning thirst for every thing that, by destroying my old mental habits, could strengthen and confirm my unbelief. I gave an exorbitant price for any French irreligious books, which the love of gain induced some Spanish booksellers to import at their peril. The intuitive knowledge of one another, which persecuted principles impart to such as cherish them in common, made me soon acquainted with several members of my own profession, deeply versed in the philosophical school of France. They possessed, and made no difficulty to lend me, all the Anti-christian works, which teemed from the French press. Where there is no liberty, there can be

no discrimination. The ravenous appetite raised by a forced abstinence makes the mind gorge itself with all sorts of food. I suspect I have thus imbibed some false, and many crude notions from my French masters. But my circumstances preclude the calm and dispassionate examination which the subject deserves. Exasperated by the daily necessity of external submission to doctrines and persons I detest and despise, my soul overflows with bitterness. Though I acknowledge the advantages of moderation, none being used towards me, I practically, and in spite of my better judgment, learn to be a fanatic on my own side.

"Pretending studious retirement, I have fitted up a small room, to which none but my confidential friends find admittance. There lie my prohibited books, in perfect concealment, in a well-contrived nook under a staircase. The Breviary alone, in its black binding, clasps, and gilt leaves, is kept upon the table, to check the doubts of any chance intruder."

CANT.

"Gratiano says an infinite deal of nothings,

More than any man in all Venice."-Merchant of Venice.

MR. EDITOR,-Do you wish to know what cant is? "Tis. what Hamlet studied,' Words, words, words,'—not Wordsworth, (as a gentleman of my acquaintance would say, who has the gift of making the very worst puns possible,) for there is no worth in them. They stand for no ideas, or rather stand for all. They are expressions to let, and are taken into the service of those muddy conceptions, that are beyond the reach of all ordinary language. Were writing and speaking confined to their legitimate ends, there would be no such thing; but where quill and tongue go for the writing and speaking sake, there is no way of getting over the breaks, the puzzles, and the dubiosities of meaning, without a copious vocabulary of cant. It is like its parent a many-headed monster; and from the cobbler to the king, each calling hath its stock. With but this difference between the kinds, that the more vulgar are the more expressive -nothing being so dull, so stupid, and utterly fâde, as the cant of high life.

The only person free from this habit, and independent of this auxiliary, is the citizen of the world; but he is almost an imaginary being. We are a universe of tradesmen, and all delve at something; there are labourers in the palace, as well as in the vineyard. We are each surrounded with our own little atmosphere, of which the atoms are mighty to us: the objects with which we are there conversant, are ever present to our senses, become a part and parcel of our minds, and when we take distant and more general views of things, we tacitly refer them to, and illustrate them by those lesser objects, which are hourly before our eyes. Hence the expressiveness of the vulgar, who

apply the homely and the tangible, where the learned and fashionable use the affected and ideal. Cant with the vulgar is metaphor; with others, conceit-as a term of reproach, indeed, it should be applied only to the latter.

Those who lay most claim to be considered citizens of the world, are travellers; yet among this class are to be found the oldest and most egregious of canters-from Sir John Mandeville to Tom Coryatt, and from the much-abused author of the Crudities to any one you please. Travel, I fear, wears out more shoes than prejudices:-as the greatest and most startling novelty to the voyager is the language and strange sounds of foreign countries, he catches words first, and leaves ideas to follow at their leisure-often omits them altogether, by particular desire. Much in the same way with all of us, when we travel into life and knowledge: we are taught vocabulariesmade to repeat whole dictionaries by rote-learn explanations ten times more formidable than what they explain, ignotum per ignotius, and get our ideas of things by the same method that, folks say, lawyers get to heaven. No wonder if we cant and babble nonsense. We are taught dead languages and dead sciences, and are left to catch the living principles, the vital knowledge of humanity, from unmeaning conversation, and from the worthless stray volumes on the subject which may fall into our hands. We are left for all this discipline-this nurture of the soul, in boyhood and youth to sanguine fancy and untempered passion; and, as years roll on, are compelled to learn from that hard, cold teacher, Experience, the futility of former hopes and old ideas. We are led thus to judge of things that are to be, by the things that were to be: we learn the vanity of hope, but, in learning the harsh lesson, we lose the mental strength, the independent, self-subsisting spirit, which might have enabled us to do without it. Thus cheated of the future, we turn our views upon the past-our reflections upon ourselves. We consider our race of existence as run; and, with the spiritual pride of beings that have fulfilled their period of existence, we turn philosophers, and speculators, and teachers. Our feelings and perceptions, dormant upon one another, lie rankling and rotting into morbidity and corruption. Ever contemplating our own confused minds, and their more confused copies of things, we grow dizzy, as we flatter ourselves we grow wise. A haze spreads itself between us and the world of intellect; yet we talk on, as if the objects were as distinct as ever. The crazed mind, from which has been blotted every idea, clings in vanity and dotage to the words, and the sounds, with which it has been familiar; and in pleasing and happy self-delusion takes sound for sense, and cant for philosophy, like Lear with his straw sceptre, it is every inch a king.' It is often the primates of intellect who are thus visited; but it is some consolation to them,

that the world can scarce perceive their aberrations-there is no measure by which they can be meted. If their effusions be unmeaning, a spirit still glows through them, which affrights the vulgar from questioning, and makes them esteem it profane to attempt unveiling the nothingness that is enshrined within. There is generally a slight glimmer throughout that looks like Platonicism, and is more striking from the surrounding darkness. With the vulgar reverence for obscurity, we are at first more inclined to attribute the unintelligibility of a work to our own dulness than to that of the author, till we take up books of philosophy and perspicacity united, which shake our worshipful opinions of the obscure.

"The works of Des Cartes," says Le Clerc, "were the first books that brought Mr. Locke (so he himself told me) to the study of philosophy: for though he did not assent to the truth of all his notions, he found that he wrote with great clearness, which made him think that it was the fault of the authors, rather than his own, that he had not understood some other philosophical books."

If we proceed from hence to poetry, we shall find cant more at home: it is here in its original signification of song, and not inexpressively derived, bearing as it does, even in its most prosaic state, such a resemblance to those popular snatches of tune, which "We whistle as we go, for want of thought."

There are many who could no more live without the favourite tune or favourite line of the hour, than they could without the morning newspaper; it is to them just what tobacco is to the poor artizan a soothing employment, a gentle opiate,

"To steep the senses in forgetfulness."

We are such unspiritual beings that thought requires some mechanical accompaniment; some people, even of intellectual habits, cannot raise an idea while they sit their minds won't go without their legs. We know an author who regularly destroys a pair of gloves-literally eats them-for every song he writes; and another, who always sits down to a lathe, as a preparative for composition. For those whose cogitations do not tend paperwards, a tune is the simplest spell of the kind, at once soothing and exciting. But we have heard or read somewhere, that medical men look upon a person's having one of these snatches continually in his head, as a symptom of some disorder. I have not had much experience in this line, but I have found, that people thus affected are generally very much inclined to commit verse. The fashionable catch the air from the last opera, and the expression from Boxiana or Cribb's Memorial. The Savoyards have been a national benefit in this way, and have furnished : matter for humming to all the boys about town: this humming is at first an accompaniment, and afterwards a substitute for

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