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ought to elevate its conceptions. Force may cause orders to be executed; but the language of power has no longer any thing more than a feeble authority, if it be not aided by persuasion, and supported by reason. To be listened to by different parties, it is necessary to enter into their passions-to speak to each its own language; there is no longer any general eloquence." (p. 38.)

We recommend the following reflections to the attentive regard of all statesmen; and they should recollect that they are from the highest authority in the department to which they refer.

"We have often been reproached with not having informed the King of what was done every day by his courtiers, his ministers, the ministers of foreign powers, of what passed in the interior of families, &c. &c. &c. This is the policy of a courtier who is desirous of pleasing, or of a subaltern who is in need of such means of making his merit be seen: it is not ours. A minister must calculate well on the indulgence, or on the weakness, of his master, in order to make to him every morning a recital of anecdotes, which tend, more or less, to degrade the objects of his choice. How dangerous are superficial men by the side of princes!—they have always something to say, and nothing to think.

"The tranquillity of states does not depend on the circumstances which affect only the higher ranks of society, or on the disposition of mind which we there observe: the ambition which agitates the great has no political influence when it allies itself not to some popular interest; intrigues, conspiracies, revolts, are impotent and vain, when they are not favoured by opinion, and supported by the effective co-operation of the multitude.

"There is no opposition to be feared in the public councils, no secret factions to be dreaded, when the monarch has in his behalf the affections and the power of the people.

"The tranquillity of the state is intimately connected with the moral dispositions of the laborious classes, of which the people is composed, and which form the basis of the social edifice. A good police judges not of these dispositions by the applauses which men the most vile and the most wicked ever obtain, during the period they are in power.

"The multitude will be perpetually calm, if we frankly attend to its interests; if we remove whatever may alter its confidencemay wound uselessly its prejudices-may corrupt its modes of thinking and of acting-may mislead its ignorance and its credulity." (p. 45.)

M. Fouché vindicates his ultimate retirement from public life in these terms :

My political life was accomplished: it only remained for me to choose the place of my retreat. When a man has the misfortune

to be celebrated, the place which is the least known receives eclat, when he wishes to retire to it. I wished, at least, to escape from calumny, by the simplicity, by the obscurity, and by the happiness of my domestic life.

"Some are astonished that, in quitting the ministry, I did not enter the Chamber of Deputies, to which several electoral colleges, especially that of Paris, had called me. Could I have struggled with advantage against the ever-increasing excess of re-action? Let any one read the debates of the Chamber, and he will judge what I could have expected from such a contest.

"What success could I promise myself in an assembly where influence belonged to exaggeration-where anarchy the most intolerable seemed the necessary instrument of the re-establishment of order? What could I say to men, who see the power and strength of the King in the violation of his word, and treason in the language of moderation: who believe they have the right of excluding from the Chamber one of its members, without judging him-without even pronouncing his name; and of exiling him, by comprehending him in the generalities of a law. Justice, and the voice of a nation, when they are able to make themselves heard, will demand, of what that mandatory has rendered himself culpable, since the time when France has chosen him to defend her rights?-how a vote, given twenty-three years before, which had not prevented Louis XVIII. from nominating him his minister, nor the Allied Sovereigns from bestowing on him marks of consideration, could become, at this day, a subject of proscription? If this were possible, it would not be the proscribed person whom we had reason to pity." (p. 59.)

We shall conclude with observing, that many useful hints are given in the letter before us as to the existing government of France, which we hope will not be disregarded, whatever exertions may be employed to prevent its circulation in that country. It is of the more importance, if the light of truth should by the ministry be withheld from the people, that they should make use of it themselves.* We doubt much if they will be able to see their way with all the assistance they can acquire; and we wonld particularly recommend to their notice, the sentiment in a previous letter, from the same hand, when the wand of authority was yet entrusted to it: "The republic has made us acquainted with whatever is most disastrous in the excess of liberty; the empire with whatever is most disastrous in the excess of power: our prayers are to find, at an equal distance from those excesses, independence, order, and peace.'

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* It is stated from Paris, that the brother of Carnot has been arrested, under the charge of circulating this letter in France.

CRIT. REV. VOL. IV. August, 1816.

2 B

THE DRAMA.

ART. X.-The City of the Plague. By JOHN WILSON, Author of the Isle of Palms. Edinburg, A. Constable and Co.; London, Longman and Co. 1816. 8vo. Pp. 167. MANY authors have taken a pestilence as the subject of poems, or of descriptive and impassioned narrations. The first, we believe, in point of date, and one of the first in point of excellence, is Boccacio, in the Induction to his Decameron; and he was followed by several other Italians. In England they have been extremely numerous since the reign of Elizabeth, when Dr. Lodge (a celebrated physician, poet, and pamphleteer) wrote his eloquent detail of its visitation, and Dr. Phaer (the joint translator of Virgil with Twyne) published his treatise on its prevention and cure. These were succeeded by a most eloquent piece, dated about 1608, and written by George Wilkins, author of "The Miseries of Enforced Marriage," in Dodsley's Collection of Old Plays; and in 1628, appeared George Wither's "Britain's Remembrancer," which the author printed, as he states, with his own hand, not being able to find any person in the trade who would venture to put forth a book by this notorious and severely-punished libeller. A short and striking extract from this singular poem, which is now generally neglected by all but the curious, may serve, in some sort, as an introduction to the work of Mr. Wilson now before us. Wither remained in London during the hottest ravages of the pestilence, as he affirms, on account of a preternatural monition; and in the subsequent passage he first supposes himself walking through the city.

"But far I needed not to pace about,

Nor long inquire to find such objects out;
For every place with sorrows then abounded,
And every way the cries of mourning sounded.
Yea, day by day, successively till night,
And from the evening till the morning light,
Were scenes of grief, with strange variety,
Knit up in one continuing tragedy!

No sooner waked I, but twice twenty knells,
And many sadly-sounding passing-bells,
Did greet mine ear, and by their heavy tolls
To me gave notice that some early souls
Departed whilst I slept; that other some
Were drawing onward to their longest home;

And seemingly presag'd that many a one
Should bid the world good night, ere it were noon.

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My chamber entertain'd me all alone,

And in the rooms adjoining lodged none:
Yet through the darksome, silent night, did fly
Sometimes an uncouth noise, sometimes a cry;
And sometimes mournful callings pierc'd my room,
Which came, I neither knew from whence nor whom."
Canto IV. p. 104.

The scene of the action of Mr. Wilson's piece is fixed in London, when it is devastated in the way above described; when the inhabitants are dying by hundreds; and when the dead-cart is going its rounds, to receive from the windows the bodies of the exanimate victims. Our readers, no doubt, will recollect Defoe's terrific picture of the state of the metropolis at such a time. We have some doubt whether "The City of the Plague" be precisely a fit subject for this department of our Review; but it is in a dramatic form, divided into acts and scenes, and conducted dialogue-wise; and we are so anxious to avoid the practice of resorting to stale common-place criticisms upon the ephemeral productions at our theatres, that we would rather, as we did last month, omit all notice of the drama, than choose a subject of remark not calculated for the nature of our publication.

It is not easy to ascertain at what period Mr. Wilson means to fix the action (as far as it has action) of his piece. A long period has happily now elapsed since the last mortality of this kind, and, we apprehend, that our author does not mean to allude to any specific period of our history; and the state of manners he describes in some portions of his work, neither belongs to the present, nor indeed to any other age. On the whole, however, the complexion of this descriptive drama is modern; and it was perhaps intended that we should read it under the supposition that London is at this moment suffering under the pestilence. Two young naval officers, Frankfort and Wilmot, return from sea, and approach London, where they have learnt that the plague is raging: the former had left his mother behind him, and anxiously makes inquiries of her fate of an old man, who escapes with his grandchild from the infected city. He is told to "think of her with the dead;" and then the old man proceeds with some eloquence to re

present the condition of the town. The following lines are a part of his harangue :

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Stand aloof,
And let the Pest's triumphal chariot
Have open way, advancing to the tomb.
See how he mocks the pomp and pageantry
Of earthly kings! A miserable cart,
Heap'd up with human bodies; dragg'd along
By pale steeds, skeleton-anatomies!

And onwards urged by a wan meagre wretch,
Doom'd never to return from the foul pit,

Whither, with oaths, he drives his load of horror.
Would you look in? Grey hairs and golden tresses,
Wan shrivell'd cheeks, that have not smil'd for years;
And many a rosy visage, smiling still;

Bodies in the noisome weeds of beggary wrapt,
With age decrepit, and wasted to the bone;
And youthful frames, august and beautiful,
In spite of mortal pangs,—there lie they all
Embrac'd in ghastliness! But look not long,
For haply, 'mid the faces glimmering there,
The well-known cheek of some beloved friend
Will meet thy gaze, or some small snow-white hand,
Bright with the ring that holds her lover's hair."

We are then introduced to a very singular character, a mock astrologer, who deludes "the great vulgar and the small," by pretended prophecies of the fate of their relations and friends: he is exposed by Frankfort and his friend Wilmot, who discover him to have been a sailor on board a ship called the Thunderer. This character is most inconsistent, and the incident is ill-chosen and worse managed. It only serves to inform us that Frankfort is in love with a female named Magdalene, then in the city employing herself, unawed, in the charitable duty of attending the sick and the dying. This young lady, while praying at the altar, disarms an assassin of his purpose to murder her; and, by a strange incongruity, the next scene introduces us to a party of young men blasphemously revelling in the midst of the horrors of the pest. Parts of these scenes are written with great power; and a song of triumph for the plague, given by one of the party, will not easily be exceeded. We quote two of the best verses.

"King of the aisle! and church-yard cell!
Thy regal robes become thee well.

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