for an honest independence was sure to be caught, tripped up and arrested in his progress at some period or other. It was a country in which none but noblemen and members of parliament voting with the ministry could be said to have the power of doing the thing that seemed to them good. A country the very life of which is commerce; yet commerce was shackled by absurd restrictions on every side. Besides, from the ignorant and inconsiderate measures of government, it was subject at intervals, now to a crisis of one kind, now of another, shaking the mercantile world to its foundations, and bringing down ruin on the heads of thousands. A country which might at any time be led into such a war as its last one, into which the people rushed like maniacs, and out of which they came like idiots, bearing all the loss, and throwing all the gain into the hands of the continental powers.

At first, Hardy had interposed a half

doubting, "Is it so?" at the various alarming points of the many speeches thus summed up in a dozen lines. The answers which he received were facts, details, calculations in plain figures of arithmetic-proofs strong as Holy Writ of the truth of all that had been asserted. His interrogations thus replied to, his expressions afterwards were those of indignation. He asserted that it was the cowardly submission of man that gave strength to injustice and tyranny. And when, after passing through Chester and crossing the Mersey, he found himself in a dirty narrow street in Liverpool, he turned to bid his radical friend "Good bye;" he could not help adding as he took up his portmanteau, with a sigh, "One had better almost be a Frenchman."

With the vigorous ejaculation of the coachman, the other replied "Oh,-no !—Good bye!" andhe hurried away, already forgetting his young companion; every thought was absorbed in his own affairs.

CHAPTER IV.

"That god, whoe'er he was,

I praise, who severed mortals from a life
Of wild confusion and of brutal force,
Implanting reason first, and then a tongue,
That might by sounds articulate proclaim
Our thoughts. He gave earth's products
To refresh and nourish us,

Yet more, fit coverings from the wintery cold

To guard us, and from Hyperion's scorching ray;
The art of sailing o'er the briny deep

Him taught, that we by commerce may supply
The wants of distant regions."

Potter's Euripides.

HARDY left Bristol with some of those sentiments, which drew from the moralising dramatist of Greece, his simple praise of the arts of life, and of commerce, ascribing them

to the direct instruction of a deity. On his first looking around him in Liverpool, such feelings should have been strengthened; and they would have been so, but for the effect of his travelling friend's political discourses. He now only asked impatiently, why arts and commerce, having done so much, should not do more?—Why they, the real blessings of society, should be hindered in their good efforts by ignorant aristocrats, and profligate governments?-And thus questioning, he set out to view the town, after he had secured for himself a very humble lodging in a very humble street.

It was about noon when he arrived; the weather autumnal in its chillness, was much more chill than he had been accustomed to in his native county, yet it was clear and bracing. Under such circumstances, air, exercise, youth, and his naturally aspiring character, triumphed over his first disheartening impressions. He returned late in the evening to his little room with renewed

hope in himself, and with redoubled confidence. Liverpool, a place without the claims of Bristol to consideration for its ancient honors, appeared to him in the rapidity of its rise out of obscurity, significant of what its merchants, as individuals, had done. Each one, low in birth and fortune, had won for himself station and wealth. This he would also do. And, now, in recalling all the truths which he had heard from the Radical, he recalled some of the assertions of the free-will champion with satisfaction, to give greater force to the decision, that, he at least, should not be numbered among the cowardly submitters to a degrading lot.

So, in his notion of things, Bristol and Liverpool were full of men, who after a few years of such industry and attention as he intended to bestow on business, stepped forth to the admiring world with the wealth of crowns and the benevolence of Howardor, it was their own fault if they did not. possess virtue with the fortune they could

VOL. I.

D