reigning over a country, whether by treachery, crime, and usurpation, was a legitimate sovereign. For this convenient principle the lecturer was tried, and declared not guilty-by persons who have lately found their advantage in a confusion of words. In treaties between nations, a 'confusion of words' has been more particularly studied; and that negotiator has conceived himself most dexterous who, by this abuse of words, has retained an arrierepensée which may fasten or loosen the ambiguous expression he had so cautiously and so finely inlaid in his mosaic of treachery. A scene of this nature I draw out of 'Mesnager's Negotiation with the Court of England.' When that secret agent of Louis XIV was negotiaung a peace, an insuperable difficulty arose respecting the acknowledgment of the Hanoverian succession. It was absolutely necessary on this delicate point, to quiet the anxiety of the English public, and our allies; but though the French king was willing to recognize Anne's title to the throne, yet the settlement in the house of Hanover was incompat ible with French interests and French honour. Mesnager told Lord Bolingbroke that the king, his master, would consent to any such article, looking the other way, as might disengage him from the obligation of that agreement, as the occasion should present.' This ambiguous language was probably understood by Lord Bolingbroke: at the next conference his Lordship informed the secret agent, that the queen could not admit of any explanations, whatever her intentions might be; that the succession was settled by act of parliament; that as to the private sentiments of the queen, or of any about her, he could say nothing.' All this was said with such an air, as to let me understand that he gave a secret assent to what I had proposed, fc; but he desired me to drop the discourse.' Thus two great negotiators, both equally urgent to conclude the treaty, found an insuperable obstacle occur, which neither could control. Two honest men would have parted; but the skilful confounder of words,' the French diplomatist, hit on an expedient; he wrote the words which afterwards appeared in the preliminaries, that Louis XIV will acknowledge the queen of Great Britain in that quality, as also the succession of the crown according to the present settlement.' The English agent,' adds the Frenchman, would have had me add-on the house of Hanover, but this I entreated him not to desire of me.' The term present settlement, then was that article which was looking the other way, to disengage his master from the obligation of that agreement as occasion should present! that is, that Louis XIV chose to understand by the present settlement, the old one by which the British crown was to be restored to the Pretender! Anne and the English nation were to understand it in their own sense-as the new one, which transferred it to the house of Hanover! When politicians cannot rely upon each other's interpretation of one of the commonest words in our language, how can they possibly act together? The Bishop of Winchester has proved this observation, by the remarkable anecdote of the Duke of Portland and Mr Pitt, who, with the view to unite parties, were to hold a conference on fair and equal terms. His grace did not object to the word fair, but the word equal was more specific and limited; and, for a necessary preliminary, he requested Mr Pitt to inform him what he understood by the word equal? Whether Pitt was puzzled by the question, or would not deliver up an arriere-pensée, he put off the explanation to the conference. But the Duke would not meet Mr Pitt till the word was explained; and that important negotiation was broken off, by not explaining a simple word which appeared to require none ! There is nothing more fatal in language than to wander from the popular acceptation of words; and yet this popular sense cannot always accord with precision of ideas, for it is itself subject to great changes. Another source, therefore, of the abuse of words, is that mutability to which, in the course of time, the verbal edifice, as well as more substantial ones, is doomed. A familiar instance presents itself in the titles of tyrant, parasite, and sophist, originally honourable distinctions. The abuses of dominion made the appropriated title of kings; odious; the title of a magistrate, who had the care of the public granaries of corn, at length was applied to a wretched flatterer for a dinner; and absurd philosophers occasioned a mere denomination to become a by-name. To employ such terms in their primitive sense would now confuse all ideas; yet there is an affectation of erudition which has frequently revived terms sanctioned by antiqui ty. Bishop Watson entitled his vindication of the Bible an Apology: this word, in its primitive sense, had long been lost for the multitude, whom he particularly addressed in this work, and who could only understand it in the sense they are accustomed to. Unquestionably, many of its readers have imagined that the bishop was offering an excuse for a belief in the Bible, instead of a vindication of its truth. The word impertinent by the ancient jurisconsults, or law-counsellors, who gave their opinions on cases, was used merely in opposition to pertinent-ratio pertinens is a pertinent reason, that is, a reason pertaining to the cause in question; and a ratio impertinens, an impertinent reason, is an argument not pertaining to the subject. Impertinent then originally meant neither absurdity, nor rude intrusion, as it does in our present popular sense. The learned Arnauld having characterized a reply of one of his adversaries by the epithet impertinent, when blamed for the freedom of his language, explained his meaning by giving this history of the word which applies to our own language. Thus also with us, the word indifferent has entirely changed: an historian, whose work was indifferently written, would formerly have claimed our attention. In the Liturgy it is prayed that 'magistrates may indifferently minister justice.' Indifferently originally meant impartially. The word extravagant, in its primitive signification, only signified to digress from the subject. The Decretals, or those letters from the popes deciding on points of ecclesiastical discipline, were at length incorporated with the canon law, and were called extravagant by wandering out of the body of the canon law, being confusedly dispersed through that collection. When Luther had the Decretals publicly burnt at Wittemburgh, the insult was designed for the pope, rather than as a condemnation of the canon law itself. Suppose, in the present case, two persons of opposite opinions. The catholic, who had said that the decretals were extravagant, might not have intended to depreciate them, or make any concession to the Lutheran. What confusion of words has the common sense of the Scotch metaphysicians introduced into philosophy! There are no words, perhaps, in the language, which may be so differently interpreted; and Professor Dugald Stewart has collected, in a curious note,in the second volume of his 'Philosophy of the Human Mind, a singular variety of its opposite significations. The Latin phrase, 'sensus communis,' may, in various passages of Cicero, be translated by our phrase common sense; but, on other occasions, it means something dif ferent; the sensus communis of the schoolmen is quite another thing, and is synonymous with conception, and referred to the seat of intellect; with Sir John Davies, in his curious netaphysical poem, 'common sense is used as imagination. It created a controversy with Beattie and Reid; and Reid, who introduced this vague ambigu ous phrase in philosophical language, often understood the term in its ordinary acceptation. This change of the meaning of the words, which is constantly recurring in metaphysical disputes, has made that curious but obscure science liable to this objection of Hobbes, with many words making nothing understood! Controversies have been keenly agitated about the principles of morals, which resolve entirely into verbal disputes, or at most into questions of arrangement and classifica tion of little comparative moment to the points at issue. This observation of Mr Dugald Stewart's might be illus trated by the fate of the numerous inventors of systems of thinking or morals, who have only employed very dif ferent and even opposite terms in appearance, to express the same thing. Some, by their mode of philosophising, have strangely unsettled the words self-interest and selflove; and their misconceptions have sadly misled the vo taries of these systems of morals; as others also, by such vague terms as utility, fitness,' &c. *It is still a Chancery word. An answer in Chancery, &, is referred for impertinence, reported impertinent-and the im pertinence ordered to be struck out, meaning only what is immaterial or superfluous tending to unnecessary expense. I am indebted for this explanation to my friend, Mr Merivale; and to another learned friend, formerly in that court, whs describes its meaning as an excess of words or manter in the pleadings,' and who has received many an official see for expunging impertinence,' leaving, however, he acknow ledges, a suflicient quantity to make the lawyers ashamed of their verbosity. When Epicurus asserted that the sovereign good coned in pleasure, opposing the unfeeling austerity of the ics by the sofiness of pleasurable emotions, his prinle was soon disregarded; while his word, perhaps chosen he spirit of paradox, was warmly adopted by the sensust. Epicurus, of whom Seneca has drawn so beautiful omestic scene, in whose garden a loaf, a Cytheridean eese, and a draught which did not inflame thirst,* was the e banquet, would have started indignantly at The fattest hog in Epicurus' sty!' ich are the facts which illustrate that principle in the use of words,' which Locke calls an affected obscurity ising from applying old words to new, or unusual signi ations.' ་ It was the same confusion of words' which gave rise the famous sect of the Sadducees. The master of its under Sadoc, in his moral purity was desirous of a disAterested worship of the Deity; he would not have men ae slaves, obedient from the hope of reward, or the fear punishment. Sadoc drew a quite contrary inference om the intention of his master, concluding that there were either rewards nor punishments in a future state. The esult is a parallel to the fate of Epicurus. The moality of the master of Sadoc was of the most pure and levated kind, but in the confusion of words,' the liberines adopted them for their own purposes-and having nce assumed that neither rewards nor punishments exsted in the after-state, they proceeded to the erroneous consequence that man perished with his own dust! The plainest words by accidental associations, may suggest the most erroneous conceptions, and have been productive of the greatest errors. In the famous Bangorian controversy, one of the writers excites a smile by a complaint, arising from his views of the signification of a plain word, whose meaning, he thinks had been changed by the contending parties. He says, the word country, like a Treat many others, such as church and kingdom, is, by the Bishop of Bangor's leave, become to signify a collection of ideas very different from its original meaning; with some it implies party, with others private opinion, and with most interest, and, perhaps, in time, may signify some other country. When this good innocent word has been tossed backwards and forwards a little longer, some new reformer of language may arise to reduce it to its primitive signification-the real interest of Great Britain" The antagonist of this controversialist probably retorted on him his own term of the real interest, which might be a very opposite one, according to their notions! It has been said, with what truth I know not, that it was by a mere : confusion of words that Burke was enabled to alarm the great Whig families, by showing them their fate in that of the French noblesse; they were misled by the similitude of names. The French noblesse had as little resemblance with our nobility, as they have to the Mandarins of China. However it may be in this case, certain it is, that the same terms misapplied, have often raised those delusive notions termed false analogies. It was long imagined in this country, that the parliaments of France were somewhat akin to our own; but these assemblies were very differently constituted, consisting only of lawyers in courts of law. A misnomer confuses all argument. There is a trick which consists in bestowing good names on bad things. Vices, thus veiled, are introduced to us as virtues, according to an old poet, As drunkenness, good-fellowship we call! The right divine of kings-to govern wrong! But the nominalists and the realists, and the doctores fundatissimi. resolutissimi, refulgentes, profundi, and ex. Latici, have left this heir-loom of logomachy to a race as subtile and irrefragable! An extraordinary scene has recently been performed by a new company of actors, in the modern comedy of Political Economy; and the whole dialogue has been carried on in an inimitable confusion of words! This reasoning, and unreasoning fraternity never * Sen. Epist. 21. No. 10. use a term, as a term, but for, an explanation, and which employed by them all, signifies opposite things, but never the plainest! Is it not, therefore, strange, that they cannot yet tell us what are riches? what is rent? what is value? Monsieur Say, the most sparkling of them all, assures us that the English writers are obscure, by their confounding, like Smith, the denomination of labour. The vivacious Gaul cries out to the grave Briton, Mr Malthus, If I consent to employ your word labour, you must understand me,' so and so! Mr Malthus says, they are also exchanged for labour; and when the hypo 'Commodities are not exchanged for commodities only; chondriac Englishman with dismay, foresees the glut of markets,' and concludes that we may produce more than we can consume, the paradoxical Monsieur Say discovers, that commodities' is a wrong word, for it gives a wrong idea; it should be productions!' for his axiom is, that 'productions can only be purchased with productions.' Money, it seems, according to dictionary ideas, has no existence in his vocabulary; for Monsieur Say has formed a sort of Berkleian conception of wealth, being immaterial, while we confine our views to its materiality. Hence ensues from this confusion of words,' this most brilliant paradox; that 'a glutted market is not a proof that we produce too much, but that we produce too little! for in that case there is not enough produced to exchange with what is produced!' As Frenchmen excel in politeness and impudence, Monsieur Say adds, I revere Adam Smith; he is my master; but this first of political economists did not understand all the phenomena of production and consumption, this I leave to the ablest judge, Mr Ricardo, to decide in a commentary on Adam Smith, if he will devote his patriotism and his genius to so excellent a labour. We, who remain uninitiated in this mystery of explaining the operations of trade by metaphysical ideas, and raising up theories to conduct those who never theorise, can only start at the 'confusion of words,' and leave this blessed inheritance to our sons, if ever the science survives the logomachy. Caramuel, a famous Spanish bishop, was a grand architect of words. Ingenious in theory, his errors were confined to his practice: he said a great deal and meant nothing; and by an exact dimension of his intellect, taken at the time, it appeared that he had genius in the eighth degree, eloquence in the fifth, but judgment only in the second! This great man would not read the ancients; for he had a notion that the moderns must have acquired all they possessed, with a good deal of their own into the bargain. Two hundred and sixty-two works, differing in breadth and length, besides his manuscripts, attest, that if the world would read his writings, they could need no other, for which purpose his last work always referred to the preceding ones, and could never be comprehended till his readers possessed those which were to follow. As he had the good sense to perceive that metaphysicians abound in obscure and equivocal terms, to avoid this confusion of words,' he invented a jargon of his own; and to make 'confusion worse confounded,' projected grammars and Vocabularies by which we were to learn it; but it is supposed that he was the only man who understood himself. He put every author in despair by the works which he announced. This famous architect of words, however, built more labyrinths than he could always get out of, notwithstanding his cabalistical grammar,' and his audacious grammar.' Yet this great Caramuel, the critics have agreed, was nothing but a puffy giant, with legs too weak for his bulk, and only to be accounted as a hero amidst a 'confusion of words." Let us dread the fate of Caramuel! and before we enter into discussion with the metaphysician, first settle what he means by the nature of ideas; with the politician, his notion of liberty and equality; with the divine, what he deems orthodor; with the political economist, what he considers to be value and rent! By this means we may avoid what is perpetually recurring; that extreme laxity or vagueness of words, which makes every writer or speaker, complain of his predecessor, and attempt, sometimes not Since the first edition of this work, the lamented death of Mr Ricardo has occurred-and we have lost the labours of a mind of great simplicity and native power, at, perhaps, the hour of its maturity. [English Editor.] Baillet gives the dates and plans of these grammars. The cabalistic was published in Bruxelles, 1642, in 12mo. The audacious was in folio, printed at Frankfort, 1654.-Jugemens des Savans. Tome II. 3me partie. in the best temper, to define and to settle the signification of what the witty South calls those rabble-charming words, which carry so much wild-fire wrapt up in them.' POLITICAL NICK-NAMES. Political calumny is said to have been reduced into an art, like that of logic, by the Jesuits. This itself may be a political calumny! A powerful body, who themselves had practised the practices of calumniators, may in their turn, often have been calumniated. The passage in question was drawn out of one of the classical authors used in their colleges. Busembaum, a German Jesuit, had composed, in duodecimo, a Medulla Theologiæ moralis,' where, among other casuistical propositions, there was found lurking in this old jesuit's marrow' one which favoured regicide and assassination! Fifty editions of the book had passed unnoticed; till a new one appearing at the critical moment of Damien's attempt, the duodecimo of the old Scholastic Jesuit which had now been amplified by its commentators into two folios, was considered not merely ridiculous, but as dangerous. It was burnt at Toulouse, in 1757, by order of the parliament, and condemned at Paris. An Italian Jesuit published an apology' for this theory of assassination, and the same flames devoured it! Whether Busembaum deserved the honour bestowed on his ingenuity, the reader may judge by the passage itself. Whoever would ruin a person, or a government, must begin this operation by spreading calumnies, to defame the person or the government; for unquestionably the calumniator will always find a great number of persons inclined to believe him, or to side with him; it therefore follows, that whenever the object of such calumnies is once lowered in credit by such means, he will soon lose the reputation and power founded on that credit, and sink under the permanent and vindictive attacks of the calumniator.' This is the politics of Satan-the evil principle which regulates so many things in this world. The enemies of the Jesuits have formed a list of great names who had become the victims of such atrocious Machiavelism.* In This has been one of the arts practised by all political parties. Their first weak invention is to attach to a new faction a contemptible or an opprobrious nick-name. the history of the revolutions of Europe, whenever a new party has at length established its independence, the origi nal denomination which had been fixed on them, marked by the passions of the party which bestowed it, strangely contrasts with the name finally established! The first revolutionists of Holland incurred the contemptuous name of 'Les Gueux,' or the Beggars. The Duchess of Parma inquiring about them, the Count of Barlamont scornfully described them to be of this class; and it was flattery of the Great which gave the name currency. The Hollanders accepted the name as much in defiance as with indignation, and acted up to it. Instead of broaches in their hats, they wore little wooden platters, such as beggars used, and foxes' tails instead of feathers. On the targets of some of these Gueur they inscribed, 'Rather Turkish than Popish!' and had the print of a cock crowing, out of whose mouth was a label Vive les Gueur par tout le monde! which was every where set up, and was the favourite sign of their inns. The Protestants in France, after a variety of nick-names to render them contemptible, such as Christodins, because they would only talk about Christ, similar to our Puritans; and Parpaillots, or Parpirelles, a small base coin, which was odiously applied to them; at length settled in the well-known term of Huguenots, which probably was derived, as the Dictionnaire de Trevoux suggests, from their hiding themselves in secret places, and appearing at night, like king Hugon, the great hobgoblin of France. It appears that the term has been preserved by an earthen vessel without feet, used in cookery, which served the Huguenots on meagre days to dress their meat, and to avoid observation; a curious instance, where a thing still in use proves the obscure circumstance of its origin. The atrocious insurrection, called La Jacquérie, was a term which originated in cruel derision. When John of France was a prisoner in England, his kingdom appears to have been desolated by its wretched nobles, who, in the indulgence of their passions, set no limits to their luxury and their extortion. They despoiled their peasantry without mercy, and when these complained, and even reproached this tyrannical nobility with having forsaken their sove See Recueil, Chronologique et Analytique de tout ce qui a fait en Portugal la Société de Jesus. Vol. ii, sect. 406. reign, they were told that Jacque bon homme must pay for appeared under this fatal name, and the peasants revolting all. But Jack good-man came forward in person-a leader in inadness, and being joined by all the cut-throats and thieves of Paris, at once pronounced condemnation on every gentleman in France! Froissart has the horrid nar rative; twelve thousand of these Jacques bon hommes expiated their crimes; but the Jacquérie, who had received their first appellation in derision, assumed it as their num de guerre. In the spirited Memoirs of the Duke of Guise, written by himself, of his enterprise against the kingdom of Na ples, we find a curious account of this political art of mark ing people by odious nick-names. Genaro and Vicenzo, says the duke, cherished under-hand, that aversion the rascality had for the better sort of citizens and civiler people, who, by the insolences they suffered from these, not unjustly hated them. The better class inhabiting the suburbs of the Virgin were called black cloaks, and the ordinary sort of people took the name of lazars,' both m French and English an old word for a leprous beggar, and hence the lazaroni of Naples. We can easily conceive the evil eye of a lazar when he encountered a black cloak! The Duke adds- Just as at the beginning of the revolt tion, the revolters in Flanders formerly took that of beg gars; those of Guienne, that of eaters; those of Nor inandy, that of bare-feet; and of Beausse and Soulogne, of woollen-pattens.' In the late French revolution, we observed the extremes indulged by both parties chiefly con cerned in revolution-the wealthy and the poor! The rich, who, in derision, called their huinble fellow-cuizens by the contemptuous term of sans-culottes, provoked a reacting injustice from the populace, who, as a dreadful return for only a slight, rendered the innocent term of aristocrate, a signal for plunder or slaughter! It is a curious fact that the French verb fronder, as well as the noun frondeur, are used to describe those who condemn the measures of government; and more extensively, designates any hyperbolical and malignant crit cism, or any sort of condemnation. These words have been only introduced into the language since the intrigues of Cardinal de Retz succeeded in raising a faction against Cardinal Mazarine, known in French history by the unckname of the Frondeurs, or the Slingers. It originated in pleasantry, although it became the pass-word for insurrec tion in France, and the odious name of a faction. A wit observed, that the parliament were like those school-boys, who fling their stones in the pits of Paris, and as soon as they see the Lieutenant Civil, run away; but are sure to collect again directly he disappears. The comparison was lively, and formed the burthen of songs; and afterwards, when affairs were settled between the king and the parliament, it was more particularly applied to the faction of Cardinal de Retz, who still held out. • We encouraged the application,' says De Retz; for we observed that the distinction of a name heated the minds of people; and one evening we resolved to wear hat-strings m the form of slings. A hatter, who might be trusted with the secret, made a great number as a new fashion, and which were worn by many who did not understand the joke; we our selves were the last to adopt them, that the invention might not appear to have come from us. The effect of this trifle was immense; every fashionable article was now to assume the shape of a sling: bread, hats, gloves, handkerchiefs, fans, &c., and we ourselves became more in fashion by this folly, than by what was essential.' This revolutionary term was never forgotten by the French, a circumstance which might have been considered as prognostic of that after-revolution, which De Retz had the im agination to project, but not the daring to establish. We see, however, this great politician, confessing the advantages his party derived by encouraging the application of a by-name, which served to heat the minds of people.' It is a curious circumstance that I should have to recount in this chapter on Political Nick-names' a familiar term with all lovers of art, that of Silhouette! This is well understood as a black profile; but it is more extraordinary that a term so universally adopted should not be found in any dictionary, either in that of L'Academie, or in Todd's, and has not even been preserved, where it is quite indispensable, in Millin's Dictionnaire des Beaux-Arts! It 18 little suspected that this innocent term originated in a po litical nick-name! Silhouette was minister of state in France in 1759; that period was a critical one; the treasury was in an exhausted condition, and Silhouette, a very est man, who would hold no intercourse with financiers, >an-mongers, could contrive no other expedient to pret a national bankruptcy, than excessive economy, and rminable reform! Paris was not the metropolis, any e than London, where a Plato or a Zeno could long minister of state, without incurring all the ridicule of wretched wits! At first they pretended to take his ade, merely to laugh at him!-they cut their coats shorter, I wore them without sleeves; they turned their gold ff-boxes into rough wooden ones; and the new-fashed portraits were now only profiles of a face, traced by black pencil on the shadow cast by a candle on white per! All the fashions assumed an air of niggardly onomy, till poor Silhouette was driven into retirement, th all his projects of savings and reforms; but he left name to describe the most economical sort of portrait, id one as melancholy as his own fate! This political artifice of appropriating cant terms, or odi18 nick-names, could not fail to flourish among a people perpetually divided by contending interests as ourselves; very party with us have had their watch-word, which has rved either to congregate themselves, or to set on the an-dogs of one faction to worry and tear those of another. Ve practised it early, and we find it still prospering! The Puritan of Elizabeth's reign survives to this hour; the ying difficulties which that wise sovereign had to overome in settling the national religion, found no sympathy n either of the great divisions of her people; she retained s much of the catholic rites as might be decorous in the new religion, and sought to unite, and not to separate, her children. John Knox, in the spirit of charity, declared, hat she was neither gude protestant, nor yet resolute paist; let the world judge quilk is the third." A jealous party arose, who were for reforming the refor mation. In their attempt at more than human purity, they obtained the nick-name of Puritans; and from their fastiJiousness about very small matters, Precisians; these Drayton characterizes as persons that for a painted glass window would pull down the whole church. At that early period these nick-names were soon used in an odious sense; for Warner, a poet in the reign of Elizabeth, says, If hypocrites, why puritaines we term be asked, in breese, 'Tis but an ironised-terme; good-fellow so spels theefe! Honest Fuller, who knew that many good men were among these Puritans, wished to decline the term altogether, under the less offensive one of Non-conformists. But the fierce and the fiery of this party, in Charles the First's time, had been too obtrusive not to fully merit the ironical appellative; and the peaceful expedient of our Moderator dropped away with the page in which it was written. The people have frequently expressed their own notions of different parliaments by some apt nick-name. In Richard the Second's time, to express their dislike of the extraordinary and irregular proceedings of the lords against the sovereign, as well as their sanguinary measures, they called it The wonder-working and the unmerciful parliament.' In Edward the Third's reign, when the Black Prince was yet living, the parliament, for having pursued with severity the party of the duke of Lancaster, was so popular, that the people distinguished it as the good parliament. In Henry the Third's time, the parliament opposing the king, was called 'Parliamentum insanum,' the mad parliament, because the lords came armed to insist on the confirmation of the great charter. A Scottish Parliament, from its perpetual shiftings from place to place, was ludicrously nick-named the running parliament; in the same spirit we had our long parliament. The nick-name of Pensioner parliament stuck to the House of Commons which sate forty years without dissolution, under Charles the Second; and others have borne satirical or laudatory epithets. So true it is, as old Holingshead observed,' The common people will manie times give such bie names as seemeth best liking to themselves.' It would be a curious speculation to discover the sources of the popular feeling; influenced by delusion, or impelled by good sense! The exterminating political nick-name of malignant darkened the nation through the civil wars: it was a proscription-and a list of good and bad lords was read by the leaders of the first tumults. Of all these inventions, this diabolical one was most adapted to exasperate the animosities of the people, so often duped by names. I have never detected the active man of faction who first hit on this odious brand for persons, but the period when the world changed its ordinary meaning was early; Charles, in 1642, retorts on the parliamentarians the opprobrious distinction, as 'The true malignant party which has contrived and countenanced those barbarous tumults.' And the royalists pleaded for themselves, that the hateful designation was ill applied to them: for by malignity you denote, said they, activity in doing evil, whereas we have always been on the suffering side in our persons, credits, and estates; but the parliamentarians, grinning a ghastly smile,' would reply, that the royalists would have been malignant had they proved successful.' The truth is, that malignancy meant with both parties any opposition of opinion. At the same period the offensive distinctions of round-heads and cavaliers supplied the people with party-names, who were already provided with so many religious as well as civil causes of quarrel; the cropt heads of the sullen sectaries and the people, were the origin of the derisory nick-name; the splendid elegance and the romantic spirit of the royalists long awed the rabble, who in their mockery could brand them by no other appellation than one in which their bearers gloried. In these distracted times of early revolution, any nick-name, however vague, will fully answer a purpose, although neither those who are blackened by the odium nor those who cast it, can define the hateful appellative. When the term of delinquents came into vogue, it expressed a degree and species of guilt, says Hume, not exactly known or ascertained. It served however the end of those revolutionists, who had coined it, by involving any person in, or colouring any action by, delinquency; and many of the nobility and gentry were, without any questions being asked, suddenly discovered to have committed the crime of delinquency! Whether honest Fuller be facetious or grave on this period of nick-naming parties [ will not decide; but, when he tells us that there was another word which was introduced into our nation at this time, I think at least that the whole passage is an admirable commentary on this party vocabulary. Contemporary with malignants is the word plunder, which some make of Latin original, from planum dare, to level, to plane all to nothing! Others of Dutch extraction, as if it were to plume, or pluck the feathers of a bird to the bare skin.* Sure I am we first heard of it in the Swedish wars; and if the name and thing be sent back from whence it came, few English eyes would weep thereat.' All England had wept at the introduction of the word. The rump was the filthy nick-name of an odious faction-the history of this famous appellation, which was at first one of horror, till it afterwards became one of derision and contempt, must be referred to another place. The rump became a perpetual whetstone for the loyal wits, till at length its former admirers, the rabble themselves, in town and country vied with each other in 'burning rumps' of beef which were hung by chains on a gallows with a bonfire underneath, and proved how the people, like children, come at length to make a play-thing of that which was once their bugbear. Charles II during the short holiday of the restorationall holidays seem short!-and when he and the people were in good humour, granted any thing to every one,the mode of Petitions' got at length very inconvenient, and the king in council declared, that this petitioning was A method set on foot by ill men to promote discontents among the people,' and enjoined his loving subjects not to subscribe them. The petitioners however persistedwhen a new party rose to express their abhorrence of petitioning; both parties nick-named each other the petitioners and the abhorrers! Their day was short, but fierce; the petitioners, however weak in their cognomen, were far the bolder of the two, for the commons were with them, and the abhorrers had expressed by their term rather the strength of their inclinations, than of their numbers. Charles II said to a petitioner from Taunton, How dare you deliver me such a paper? Sir,' replied the petitioner from Taunton, My name is DARE! A saucy reply, for which he was tried, fined, and imprisoned: when lo! the commons petitioned again to release the petitioner ! 'The very name,' says Hume, by which each party denominated its antagonists discover the virulence and rancour which prevailed; for besides petitioner and abhorrer, this year is remarkable for being the epoch of the wellknown epithets of Whig and Tory.' These silly terms of reproach are still preserved among us, as if the palladium Plunder, observes my friend, Mr Douce, is pure Dutch or Flemish-Plunderen, from Plunder, which means property of any kind. Gray, the critic who passed his days amidst the busy hum of men,' and the poet who mused in cloistered sol tude, have fatally injured a fine natural genus in Shenstone. Mr Campbell, with a brother's feeling, has (since the present article was composed) sympathized with the endowments and the pursuits of this poet; but the facts I had collected seem to me to open a more important view. I am aware how lightly the poetical character of Shepstone is held by some great contemporaries—although this very poct has left us at least one poem of unrivalled on of British liberty was guarded by these exotic names; for they are not English which the parties so invidiously bestow on each other. They are ludicrous enough in their origin; the friends of the court and the advocates of lineal succession, were by the republican party branded with the title of Tories, which was the name of certain Irish robbers: while the court party in return could find no other revenge than by appropriating to the covenanters and the republicans of that class, the name of the Scotch beverage of sour milk, whose virtue they considered so expressive of their dispositions, and which is called whigg.ginality. Mr Campbell has regretied that Shenstone not So ridiculous in their origin were these pernicious nicknames, which long excited feuds and quarrels in domestic life, and may still be said to divide into two great parties this land of political freedom. But nothing becomes obsolete in political factions, and the meaner and more scandalous the name affixed by one party to another, the more it becomes not only their rallying cry or their pass word, but even constitutes their glory. Thus the Hollanders long prided themselves on the humiliating nickname of les gueux: the Protestants of France on the scornful one of the Huguenots; the non-conformists in England on the mockery of the puritan; and all parties have perpetuated their anger by their inglorious names. Swift was well aware of this truth in political history: ' each party,' says that sagacions observer, grows proud of that appellation which their adversaries at first intended as a reproach; of this sort were the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, Huguenots and Cavaliers.' Nor has it been only by nick-naming each other by derisory or opprobrious terms that parties have been marked, but they have also worn a livery, and practised distinctive manners. What sufferings did not Italy endure for a long series of years, under those fatal party-names of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines; alternately the victors and the vanquished, the beautiful land of Italy drank the blood of her children. Italy, like Greece, opens a moving picture of the hatreds and jealousies of small republics; her Bianca and her Nera, her Guelphs and her Ghibellines! In Bologna, two great families once shook that city with their divisions; the Pepoli adopted the French interests; the Maluzzi the Spanish. It was incurring some danger to walk the streets of Bologna, for the Pepoli wore their feathers on the right side of their caps, and the Maluezzi on the left. Such was the party-hatred of the two great Italian factions, that they carried their rancour even into their domestic habits; at table the Guelphs placed their knives and spoons longwise, and the Ghibellines across; the one cut their bread across, the other longwise. Even in cutting an orange they could not agree: for the Guelph cut his orange horizontally, and the Ghibelline downwards. Children were taught these artifices of faction-their hatreds became traditional, and thus the Italians perpetuated the full benefits of their party-spirit, from generation to generation.* Men in private life go down to their graves with some unlucky name, not received in baptism, but more descriptive and picuresque; and even ministers of state have winced at a political christening. Malagrida the Jesuit and Jemmy Twitcher were nick-names, which made one of our ministers odious, and another contemptible. The Earl of Godolphin caught such fire at that of Volpone, that it drove him into the opposite party for the vindictive purpose of obtaining the impolitical prosecution of Sacheverell, who in his famous sermon had first applied it to the earl, and unluckily it had stuck to him. 'Faction,' says Lord Orford, is as capricious as fortune; wrongs, oppression, the zeal of real patriots, or the genius of false ones, may sometimes be employed for years in kindling substantial opposition to authority; in other seasons the impulse of a moment, a ballad, a nick-name, a fashion, can throw a city into a tumult, and shake the foundations of a state.' Such is a slight history of the human passions in politics! We might despair in thus discovering that wisdom and patrotism so frequently originate in this turbid source of party; but we are consoled when we reflect that the most important political principles are immutable; and that they are those, which even the spirit of party must learn to reverence. THE DOMESTIC LIFE OF A POET.-SHENSTONE THE dogmatism of Johnson, and the fastidiousness of only affected that arcadianism, which gives & certam air of masquerade in his pastoral character' adopted by our carlier poets, but also has rather incongruously blended together the rural swain with the disciple of Veriu. All this requires some explanation. It is not only as a port, possessing the characteristics of poetry, but as a creator in another way, for which I claim the attention of the reader. I have formed a picture of the domestic life of a poet, and the pursuits of a votary of taste, both equally contracted in their endeavours, from the habits, the emotions, and the events which occurred to Shenstone. Four material circumstances influenced his character, and were productive of all his unhappiness. The neglect he incurred in those poetical studies to which he had do voted his hopes; his secret sorrows in not having formed a domestic union, from prudential motives, with one whom he loved; the ruinous state of his domestic affairs, arising from a seducing passion for creating a new taste in landscape-gardening and an ornamented farm; and finally, his disappointment of that promised patronage, which might have induced him to have become a political writer; for which his inclinations, and, it is said, his talents in early life, were alike adapted: with these points in view, we may trace the different states of his mind, show what he did, and what he was earnestly intent to have done. Why have the Elegies' of SHENSTONE, which forty years ago formed for many of us the favourite poems of our youth, ceased to delight us in mature life? 18 per haps that these Elegies, planned with peculiar felicity, have little in their execution. They form a series of poetical truths, but without poetical expression; truths,-for notwithstanding the pastoral romance in which the poet has enveloped himself, the subjects are real, and the feelings could not, therefore, be fictitious. In a Preface, remarkable for its graceful simplicity, our poet tells us, that He entered on his subjects occasional ly, particular incidents in life suggested, or dispositions of mind recommended them to his choice." He shows that 'He drew his pictures from the spot, and he felt very sen sibly the affections he communicates.' He avers that all those attendants on rural scenery, and all those allusions to rural life, were not the counterfeited scenes of a town poet, any more than the sentiments, which were inspired by Nature. Shenstone's friend, Graves, who knew him early in life, and to his last days, informs us, that these Elegies were written when he had taken the Lensowes into his own hands; and though his ferme ornée engaged his thoughts, he occasionally wrote them, 'partly,' said Shen tone, to divert my present impatience, and partly, as it will be a picture of most that passes in my own mind; a portrait which friends may value.' This, then, is the secret charm which acts so forcibly on the first emotions of our youth, at a moment when not 100 difficult to be pleased, the reflected delineations of the habits and the affections, the hopes and the delights, with all the domestic associations of this poet, always true to Nature, reflect back that picture of ourselves we instantly recognae. is only as we advance in life that we lose the relish of our early simplicity, and that we discover that Shenstone was not endowed with high imagination. These Elegies, with some other poems, may be read with a new interest, when we discover them to form the true Memoirs of Shenstone. Records of querulous, but delightful feelings; whose subjects spontaneously offered themselves from passing incidents; they still perpetuate emotions, which will interest the young poet, and the young lover of taste. Elegy IV, the first which Shenstone composed, i entitled Ophelia's Urn,' and it was no unreal one! It was erected by Graves in Mickleton Church, to the me mory of an extraordinary young woman, Utrecia Smith the literary daughter of a learned, but poor, clergyman. Utrecia had formed so fine a taste for literature, and com posed with such elegance in verse and prose, that an ex |