posing from twenty to fifty times as many tickets and shares as I had ever done before. Besides the small commission on the amount sold, being from that time allowed the perquisite for registering the numbers myself, and communicating the results to my customers, I received from day to day the lists of the drawings, and became practically acquainted with the risks and the returns,-indeed so well acquainted, that, during the term of my agency, I was never for a moment tempted to hazard a shilling on a turn of the wheels for myself. On one occasion only, when the drawing was to be closed on an early day, and I had to send back to my principals the unsold shares in my hands, I retained two-eighths in expectation of having calls for them before the last drawing. One was sold, the other remained with me, but proving a small prize I escaped comparatively unscathed. Now of all the thousands in every variety of numbers which passed through my hands, including sold and returned, I do not recollect more than three shares of prizes above 257.—namely, two of 50l. and a third of 1207.; the former disposed of, the latter sent back. I thought at first that the rage for this losing game would soon abate of itself. I was mistaken; and though after a year or two it was less prodigally and promiscuously, yet it was more steadily pursued by regular customers, to whom the habitual stimulus became as necessary to provoke and appease, while in both cases it mocked, the "auri sacra fames," as dram-drinking and opium-eating are to diseased appetites of another kind. In addition to these perennials, there was an annual succession of inexperienced votaries of wealth, who came and tried, and withdrew, when they had grown wiser or warier at a reasonable cost. And here I must observe that the grosser evils of lotteries, flagrant as they were in the metropolis, came not within my observation here; what I knew personally of the original sin of the system was learned by its ordinary effects. My dealings were principally with persons in moderate circumstances, yet with a considerable proportion of work-people and others who might have invested their small savings (if savings they were) on much better securities than the notes which my bank issued. It was one of the lame pleas for the State Lottery in Parliament, that after the suppression of the infamous insurance-offices-which never existed here-there remained no longer a snare to tempt the poor to take this royal way to riches, the lowest fraction of a ticket in the market being beyond their power of purchase. Whatever the case might be in London, the rich in this neighbourhood, if they speculated at all, did not come to me. One of these, a friend of mine, told me that he had obtained an eighth of a 20,000Z., and I heard of another who was said to have had a sixteenth of a 10,000l. prize. On this part of the subject, from an article in my newspaper of March 25, 1817, in which I questioned some statements made by high authorities in the House of Commons, I may quote a memorandum, that, in three lotteries drawn in 1803, I "sold, Whole Tickets-not one; Halves-one; Quarters-twenty; Eighths-eighty-eight; Sixteenths-five hundred and sixtysix! and in previous years far greater numbers of the latter; many, very many of which were bought by poor people." Familiarity with some kinds of sin deadens the consciousness of it. This was not the case with me in reference to the State Lottery. It was familiarity with it which convinced me of the sin of dealing in its deceptive wares. I was occasionally surprised to notice the different kinds of money which were brought to me by persons of the humbler class,-hoarded guineas, old crowns, half crowns, and fine impressions of smaller silver coins, at a time when bank-paper, Spanish dollars, and tokens of inferior standard, issued by private individuals and companies, formed a kind of mob-currency throughout the realm, instead of the sterling issues of the Royal Mint. These, like the guinea of my Derbyshire matron, were ventured "for the sake of luck," in several instances by poor women who had inherited them from their parents, received them as birth or wedding-day gifts, saved them for their children's thrift-pots, or laid them up against a rainy day for family wants or sickness. With these they came to buy hope, and I sold them disappointment!—It was this very thought passing through my mind like a flash of lightning, in the very words, and leaving an indelible impression, (deepening with every recurrence of the haunting idea,) which decided a long-meditated but often procrastinated purpose; and I said to myself, at length, “I will immediately give up this traffic of delusion." I did so, and from that moment never sold another share. This, however, was only cutting off the left hand of a profitable sin, while with the right I was still accepting the hire of iniquity. The proprietors of newspapers do not deem themselves responsible for the contents of advertisements which appear on their pages, so long as these are free from libellous, immoral, or blasphemous matter. During the palmy days of the State Lottery, and even when it began to fall into disrepute, the office keepers were among the most liberal contributors of such precious articles to the public journals. The columns of mine were never much burdened with these opima spolia,-wealth won without labour of the hands or the brains, gratuitously bestowed, collected at little risk, and small additional expense in the economy of the printing-office. Lottery advertisements, therefore, formed a considerable proportion of the very moderate amount of pecuniary means, by which I was enabled, under many disadvantages, some local, and others personal, to maintain my paper at all. But when my friend Mr. Roberts and I, several years after my relinquishment of lottery sales, determined to attack the great state evil itself, with open, uncompromising hostility, I felt that I could not consistently, nor indeed honestly, support him in his plans of aggression, while I was an actual accessory before the fact to the mischiefs which it was perpetrating throughout the length and breadth of the land, and especially, so far as I was implicated, within the range of my editorial influence. The question had long troubled me in secret; but, as in the former case, a final decision upon it was deferred, till my friend one day unexpectedly attacked me with a recommendation to renounce all connection with "the accursed thing," which we both had now made up our minds to hold up to public abhorrence and reprobation. The counsel was hard to a person in my circumstances: conscience and cupidity had a sharp conflict; but the battle was not a drawn one; the better principle prevailed; and after the autumn of 1816 I never admitted another lottery advertisement into my paper. Nor did I ever, for one moment, repent the sacrifice. From that time till the abandonment of the State Lottery by government itself in 1824, Mr. Roberts and I, in various ways, but principally by paragraphs and philippics in my columns, and pamphlets from my press, waged a desultory warfare with those ministers of the day and their supporters in Parliament who persisted in employing these unhallowed means of recruiting the revenue. With the late Lord Lyttelton (then Mr. Lyttelton) and other members of the House of Commons who held the same sentiments as ourselves on the subject, we had frequent correspondence; nor did the Chancellor of the Exchequer (otherwise one of the most upright and conscientious statesmen of the age) escape the annoyance of our remonstrances and solicitations. In March, 1817, we promoted a petition to Parliament from Sheffield against this national nuisance. Whether this example was followed at that time by any other towns I do not remember. We know, however, that our various labours were not altogether in vain,—but that two obscure individuals in a remote part of the kingdom, by strenuous perseverance in advocating a good cause, contributed something (however little it may have been) towards the removal of the greatest plague that ever infested the country in the shape of a tax, upon the poverty, the morals, and the happiness of the people. In 1817, Mr. Roberts published The State Lottery, a Dream, a work of startling eccentricity in its plan, and no small ingenuity in the execution. Its frontispiece, representing A Petty State Lottery within the walls of Christ's Hospital, in which not the drawers only, but all the adventurers, were children of that venerable establishment, was not without its effect in abating one of the most plausible but pernicious exhibitions at Guildhall and elsewhere, in the annual pantomime of The Grand State Lottery. MY THOUGHTS ON WHEELS were but the glimmering tail of my friend's portentous comet. The latter, having long ago passed its perihelion, is no more visible in the literary hemisphere; and the former would have disappeared with it, had not the last section, the address To Britain, been deemed worthy of preservation by judges more competent to decide upon its claims than the public will allow an author to be in his own case. October 20, 1840. VOL. II. NO. I. THE COMBAT. Or old when fiery warriors met, That laid his brave assailant low, But whirl'd in fetters round the plain, That look'd for vengeance to the skies; Who falls in honourable strife 2 NO. II. THE CAR OF JUGGERNAUT. ON plains beneath the morning star, Breaking the billows of the crowd, It creaks, and groans, and grinds along, Such as would turn to blood the moon; Impieties so bold, so black, The stars to shun them would reel back; And secret horrors, which the Sun cry: For me, if Juggernaut were God, And bow to such a brute the knee; On tears and blood, on groans and cries, NO. III. THE INQUISITION. THERE was in Christendom, of yore, Where priestcraft made the demons sport : There show'd such feats of strength and skill And well the blow of death might pass For what he call'd it-coup de grace; : The foul fiends quaked amidst their mirth :- (Where lately burn'd a fire divine, (Hope's dying accents in despair,) |