argument of the Essay. Can any thing be less conclusive, a more complete fallacy and petitio principii? Mr. Malthus concedes, he assumes a state of perfectibility, such as his opponents imagined, in which the general good is to obtain the entire mastery of individual interests, and reason of gross appetites and passions; and then he argues that such a perfect structure of society will fall by its own weight, or rather be undermined by the principle of population, because in the highest possible state of the subjugation of the passions to reason, they will be absolutely lawless and unchecked, and because as men become enlightened, quicksighted, and public-spirited, they will shew themselves utterly blind to the consequences of their actions, utterly indifferent to their own well-being and that of all succeeding generations, whose fate is placed in their hands. This we conceive to be the boldest paralogism that ever was offered to the world, or palmed upon willing credulity. Against whatever other scheme of reform this objection might be valid, the one it was brought expressly to overturn was impregnable against it, invulnerable to its slightest graze. Say that the Utopian reasoners are visionaries, unfounded; that the state of virtue and knowledge they suppose, in which reason shall have become all-in-all, can never take place, that it is inconsistent with the nature of man and with all experience, well and good, but to say that society will have attained this high and "palmy state," that reason will have become the master-key to all our motives, and that when arrived at its greatest power it will cease to act at all, but will fall down dead, inert, and senseless before the principle of population, is an opinion which one would think few people would choose to advance or assent to, without strong inducements for maintaining or believing it.'

Mr. Malthus's "gospel is preached to the poor." He lectures them on economy, on morality, the regulation of their passions, (which, he says, at other times, are amenable to no restraint,) and on the ungracious topic, that "the laws of nature, which are the laws of God, have doomed them and their families to starve for want of a right to the smallest portion of food beyond what their labour will supply, or some charitable hand may hold out in compassion." This is illiberal, and it is not philosophical. The laws of nature or of God, to which the author appeals, are no other than a limited fertility and a limited earth. Within those bounds, the rest is regulated by the laws of man. The division of the produce of the soil, the price of labour, the relief afforded to the poor, are matters of human arrangement; while any charitable hand can extend relief, it is a proof that the means of subsistence are not exhausted in themselves, that "the tables are not full !" Mr. Malthus says that the laws of nature, which are the laws of God, have rendered that relief physically impossible; and yet he would abrogate the poor-laws by an act of the legislature, in order to take away that impossible relief, which the laws of God deny, and which the laws of man actually afford. We cannot think that this view of his subject, which is prominent and dwelt on at great

length

length and with much pertinacity, is dictated either by rigid logic or melting charity !'

We are inclined to think, that, in urging the necessity of an abolition of the poor-laws, Mr. Malthus's argument is much misrepresented. He denies, it is true, the right of the poor to support; still he recognizes, in several parts of his reasoning, the duty of the rich to assist them: but this duty, he strongly contends, is not fulfilled by indiscriminate assistance. The word right, as it is employed by Mr. Malthus, can only be understood to mean a moral right, -a right compatible with the interests of society. In a state of nature, every man has a right to a participation in the spontaneous products of the earth: but in such a state, brute force would be the sole arbiter of that right. When civil institutions are established to control violence and force, every right is modified by those institutions, and is placed in subordination to the general welfare. In Mr. Godwin's ideal state of things, there could be no poor. The question, then, concerning a provision for them would not arise. In the actually existing state, however, the case is widely different. The right once admitted, what limits can be assigned to it, either as to the nature of the support or the number to be supported? The poor-laws themselves recognize the necessity of limiting and modifying the abstract claim, in order to render it consistent with the institutions of society but support must necessarily enable the poor to increase their numbers. Each additional number will have a like claim to support, and in its turn will produce additional claimants upon the same fund, till the whole is divided among them. This tendency of the poor-laws Mr. Malthus wishes to coun

teract.

The best article in Mr. Hazlitt's book is the late Mr. Horne Tooke. It is a spirited and, in some respects, a faithful

portrait.

Mr. Horne Tooke was in private company, and among his friends, the finished gentleman of the last age. His manners were as fascinating as his conversation was spirited and delightful. He put one in mind of the burden of the song of "The King's Old Courtier, and an Old Courtier of the King's." He was, however, of the opposite party. It was curious to hear our modern sciolist advancing opinions of the most radical kind without any mixture of radical heat or violence, in a tone of fashionable nonchalance, with elegance of gesture and attitude, and with the most perfect good-humour. In the spirit of opposition, or in the pride of logical superiority, he too often shocked the prejudices or wounded the self-love of those about him, while he himself displayed the same unmoved indifference or equanimity. He said

the

the most provoking things with a laughing gaiety, and a polite attention, that there was no withstanding. He threw others off their guard by thwarting their favourite theories, and then availed. himself of the temperance of his own pulse to chafe them into madness. He had not one particle of deference for the opinion of others, nor of sympathy with their feelings; nor had he any obstinate convictions of his own to defend

"Lord of himself, uncumbered with a creed!"

He took up any topic by chance, and played with it at will, like a juggler with his cups and balls. He generally ranged himself on the losing side; and had rather an ill-natured delight in contradiction, and in perplexing the understandings of others, without leaving them any clue to guide them out of the labyrinth into which he had led them. He understood, in its perfection, the great art of throwing the onus probandi on his adversary; and so could maintain almost any opinion, however absurd or fantastical, with fearless impunity. I have heard a sensible and wellinformed man say, that he never was in' company with Mr. Tooke without being delighted and surprised, or without feeling the conversation of every other person to be flat in the comparison; but that he did not recollect having ever heard him make a remark that struck him as a sound and true one, or that he himself appeared to think so. He used to plague Fuseli by asking him after the origin of the Teutonic dialects, and Dr. Parr, by wishing to know the meaning of the common copulative, Is. Once at G's, he defended Pitt from a charge of verbiage, and endeavoured to prove him superior to Fox. Some one imitated Pitt's manner, to show that it was monotonous, and he imitated him also, to show that it was not. He maintained (what would he not maintain?) that young Betty's acting was finer than John Kemble's, and recited a passage from Douglas in the manner of each, to justify the preference he gave to the former. The mentioning this will please the living; it cannot hurt the dead. He argued on the same occasion and in the same breath, that Addison's style was without modulation, and that it was physically impossible for any one to write well, who was habitually silent in company. He sat like a king at his own table, and gave law to his guests, - and to the world! No man knew better how to manage his immediate circle, to foil or bring them out. A professed orator, beginning to address some observations to Mr. Tooke with a voluminous apology for his youth and inexperience, he said, "Speak up, young man !"- and by taking him at his word, cut short the flower of orations. Porson was the only person of whom he stood in some degree of awe, on account of his prodigious memory and knowledge of his favourite subject, Languages. Sheridan, it has been remarked, said more good things, but had not an equal flow of pleasantry. As an instance of Mr. Horne Tooke's extreme coolness and command of nerve, it has been mentioned that once at a public dinner when he had got on the table to return thanks for his health being drank with a glass of wine in his hand,

and

and when there was a great clamour and opposition for some time, after it had subsided, he pointed to the glass to shew that it was still full. Mr. Holcroft (the author of the Road to Ruin) was one of the most violent and fiery-spirited of all that motley crew of persons, who attended the Sunday meetings at Wimbledon. One day he was so enraged by some paradox or raillery of his host, that he indignantly rose from his chair, and said, "Mr. Tooke, you are a scoundrel!" His opponent without manifesting the least emotion, replied," Mr. Holcroft, when is it that I am to dine with you? shall it be next Thursday?"-" If you please, Mt. Tooke!" answered the angry philosopher, and sat down again. It was delightful to see him sometimes turn from these waspish or ludicrous altercations with overweening antagonists to some old friend and veteran poli tician seated at his elbow; to hear him recal the time of Wilkes and Liberty, the conversation mellowing like the wine with the smack of age; assenting to all the old man said, bringing out his pleasant traits, and pampering him into childish self-importance, and sending him away thirty years younger than he came!'

The subjects of this miscellany are too numerous to allow us much farther space for remark or for extract. Besides the names already referred to, there are portraits of Lord Byron, Mr. Coleridge, Mr. Southey, Mr. Wordsworth, Mr. Campbell, Mr. Crabbe, Jeremy Bentham, Mr. Godwin, the Rev, Mr. Irving, Sir James Mackintosh, Mr.Jeffrey, Mr. Brougham, Sir Francis Burdett, Lord Eldon, Mr. Wilberforce, Mr. T. Moore, Mr. Leigh Hunt, Mr. Washington Irvine, and Mr. Knowles; whose respective portraits, as sketched by the pencil of Mr. Hazlitt, are either black or white: there are no softening and intermediate shades in his moral colorings.

It is pleasant to escape from the coarse and savage strokes, with which Mr. Hazlitt dashes off his portraits of political characters, for the softer and more delicate tints touched by the hand of private affection. His sketch of Mr. C. Lamb, dictated apparently by warm and vehement partiality, does equal honor to his own heart and to his friend. We copy the following extract:

Mr. Lamb has a distaste to new faces, to new books, to new buildings, to new customs. He is shy of all imposing appearances, of all assumptions of self-importance, of all adventitious ornaments, of all mechanical advantages, even to a nervous excess. It is not merely that he does not rely upon, or ordinarily avail himself of, them; he holds them in abhorrence, he utterly abjures and discards them, and places a great gulph between him and them. He disdains all the vulgar artifices of authorship, all the cant of criticism, and helps to notoriety. He has no grand swelling theories to attract the visionary and the enthusiast, no passing topics to allure the thoughtless and the vain. He evades

the

the present, he mocks the future. His affections revert to, and settle on, the past, but then, even this must have something personal and local in it to interest him deeply and thoroughly; he pitches his tent in the suburbs of existing manners; brings down the account of character to the few straggling remains of the last generation; seldom ventures beyond the bills of mortality, and occupies that nice point between egotism and disinterested humanity. No one makes the tour of our southern metropolis, or describes the manners of the last age, so well as Mr. Lamb, with so fine, and yet so formal an air, with such vivid obscurity, with such arch piquancy, such picturesque quaintness, such smiling pathos. How admirably he has sketched the former inmates of the South-Sea House; what "fine fretwork he makes of their double and single entries!" With what a firm, yet subtle pencil, he has embodied Mrs. Battle's Opinions on Whist! How notably he embalms a battered beau; how delightfully an amour, that was cold forty years ago, revives in his pages! With what well disguised humour he introduces us to his relations, and how freely he serves up his friends! Certainly some of his portraits are fixtures, and will do to hang up as lasting and lively emblems of human infirmity. Then there is no one who has so sure an ear for "the chimes at midnight," not even excepting Mr. Justice Shallow; nor could Master Silence himself take his "cheese and pippins" with a more significant and satisfactory air. With what a gusto Mr. Lamb describes the inns and courts of law, the Temple and Gray's Inn, as if he had been a student there for the last two hundred years, and had been as well acquainted with the person of Sir Francis Bacon as he is with his portrait or writings! It is hard to say whether St. John's Gate is connected with more intense and authentic associations in his mind, as a part of old London Wall, or as the frontispiece (time out of mind) of the Gentleman's Magazine. He haunts Watling-Street like a gentle spirit; the avenues to the play-houses are thick with panting recollections, and Christ's Hospital still breathes the balmy breath of infancy in his description of it! Whittington and his Cat are a fine hallucination for Mr. Lamb's historic Muse, and we believe he never heartily forgave a certain writer who took the subject of Guy Faux out of his hands. The streets of London are his fairyland, teeming with wonder, with life and interest to his retrospective glance, as it did to the eager eye of childhood; he has contrived to weave its tritest traditions into a bright and endless romance!'

Perhaps the ungentle and deformed character of many of Mr. Hazlitt's portraits is one of the many objections that may be urged against contemporary memoir-writing, to which authors who have strong and impetuous feelings should never addict themselves. To expect the impartial spirit of history, a calm and temperate tone of animadversion in remarks upon living characters, would be to expect what, in divided and agitated periods especially, is beyond the reach of humanity.

Political