quiet in his tomb, is evoked against you. If this exhumation take place in vain-if a gentle genealogy be established, and the fact of your being, in vulgar parlance, ' a gentleman,' placed beyond denial-then your good blood is made the reservoir of all evil passions; you are obligingly painted as the incarnation of envy, of malice, and all uncharitableness; your picture is drawn in some friendly magazine, twisted into contortions that would terrify all the witches of the Hebrides. You have got a horrid nose, red hair, and a heart blacker than all Valpy's, and Whittingham's, and Bentley's printing devils could paint it. At last, your banker's book is looked into, and it is found out, or presumed, that you are poor-or, if you are not poor, it is quite clear that you are penurious. You refused ten guineas to a dozen authors more forlorn than yourself, and did not give 1007., as you ought to have done, to the Literary Fund.

How many gentlemen have refused, and how many gentlemen would refuse their purse to a poetical impostor, without being pelted with every species of abuse, as Horace Walpole was on that story of Chatterton, and simply because Horace Walpole, though a gentleman, and a moderately rich man, was also, unfor

tunately for him, an

author! How many

people does one meet quite as be-mummified and twice as ill-natured and disagreeable as poor Mr. R, and who yet are neither called dead men, nor such very odious and disagreeable men as everybody, chuckling, calls Mr. R-, because he is an author! A thousand husbands are as bad as Lord Byron ever was - and yet they are not cut, nor called diabolical, and satanic, as poor Lord Byron was cut and called all this-because Lord Byron was an author. It is a most singular thing, but no sooner is a man pointed out in England as having wielded a pen with tolerable success, than everybody spits upon him every kind of venom.

Some-many-of the reasons for this difference between France and England I have stated. They belong to history; they belong to the past; they belong to the fact, that a monarchy governed in France, which sought to humble the aristocracy, while an aristocracy governed in England, which sought to abase the Commons. But there are three causes which more especially operate at the present time to maintain the distinction originated by former laws, and customs, and institutions.

First-The influence of women in France,

and the higher cast of their thoughts and their pursuits. Secondly- -The 'esprit de corps,' which, in France, as connected with the natural vanity of the French, I have already noticed. And lastly-The state of property in France-the state of property, which enters more than people imagine into every relation of life, into every production of human intelligence, into every law passed for social happiness, and which, when we consider the present condition of France, it is most especially our duty to keep before us.

The greater frivolity of English women, and consequently the greater frivolity of English society, necessarily creates a kind of fear and horror amongst that body for a being who, having been guilty of writing, is supposed, oftentimes very fallaciously, to have been guilty of thinking, and who is therefore considered what a sober man would be by a set of drunken associates, viz.—a bore and a critic. The esteem which every man sets upon himself in England-so different from the vanity which makes every man in France connect himself, wherever he can, with all that is greater than himself-induces persons to view with jealousy, instead of with pride, any man who, employing no more pens, ink, and paper

VOL. II.

L

than he does, contrives to make a greater

reputation.

His first saying is, "That man cannot be cleverer than I am." Then he says, "Why should he be more successful?" Then he hates and abhors him because he is more successful; and then he very naturally abuses him because he abhors him. No men in France hang more together than literary men; no men defend their order with more tenacity. M. Thiers, as 'ministre,' does not forget that he is 'homme de lettres.' No men in England pull one another so much to pieces. When Mr. Brougham, when Mr. Macaulay, first appeared as politicians, all the papers, and all the newspaper writers, poured forth their ridicule and their abuse on those literary young men who presumed to make speeches. "It was utterly impossible,” shouted forth all these gentlemen, -employed themselves every day, by the bye, in writing and deciding upon the politics of Europe," for any man who had also written, to have any notion of these politics." It was indignation, it was scorn, it was vituperation, that these two gentlemen excited, just among those very persons who, in France, would have been most proud and most happy to say:"We are delighted at Mr. Brougham's or

Mr. Macaulay's eloquence; it shows the advantages of a cultivated taste, the position which literary men might and ought to aspire to"-secretly whispering to themselves, "and we, too, are literary men."

As for property and its division in France, that subject is one too vast for me here to do more than glance at. But it is easily seen that, where fortunes are not of themselves sufficient to make great and important distinctions; where every person is more or less in the situation of the basket-maker and the nobleman among the savages, and chiefly dependent for what he receives on what he is able to do: it is easy to see that, where the pen easily procures an income which not three thousand persons possess from land, the profession of writing must hold a different rank from that which it occupies in a country where fortunes are sufficiently great to overbalance every other distinction.

There are many things to say in disparagement and in favour of this, which, as I observed before, I should wish to say more amply and satisfactorily elsewhere-which I should wish to say-after having more fully explained the various effects for good and evil which the great division of property in France has produced