1860.]

mixed chicory and coffee, I should accede to their wishes, but at the same time should inform them in my advertisement of the exact proportions of admixture. If the public can relish those pickles only which have a delicate and baleful hue of green, I would tell them in my advertisement what proportion of poisonous or unwholesome material I had worked up with my pickles in order to produce that verdant tint, so fascinating in their eyes. Physicians should be able to prescribe with my drugs, for I should candidly proclaim how much, or rather how little, of the genuine article was present in the substance which I should sell under the name of any particular drug. If I could be induced to mix brewer's stuff with my beer, the public should know to a nicety how much salt and quassia it was imbibing. The milk that I would sell should not deceive anybody into the vain and idle belief that it came wholly from the cow, if such were not the case. The chalk and the water and the calves' brains should be made no secret of. And, in a word, whatever I should sell might be an odious compound, but should not at any rate be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.' In all cases those who chose to pay the proper price should have the real thing. Even the mysterious composition of my wine should be made known to the public. The man who bought it should be able to tell whether it was fit for his own drinking, or only good enough to be given at supper parties to young men and women, who, poor things, do not often know what a good glass of wine is, and can conduct their foolish lovings and flirtations just as well upon the liquor extracted from the plant called rhubarb, as upon the rare juice of the vine that is gracious enough to supply a few of us with champagne. No man who dealt with me should doubt whence he obtained the head-ache which confuses him after the festivity of some delightful evening.' Whether such daring honesty could turn an honest penny, would re

VOL, LXII, NO. CCCLXVII.

111

main to be seen; but at least the great experiment should be fairly and fully tried.

Let no man think, however knowing he may be in the ways of the world, that he has mastered the subject of advertisements, and that, to use a commercial phrase, he can allow the proper discount to them, and thus arrive at exact truth. They are often contrived with so much subtlety as almost to defy detection. For example, most of us thought that those little extracts you see in newspapers from books were genuinely made. We have often been tempted to read and even to buy a book by reason of such extracts. We do not say that the extracts are not to be found in the book. But it now appears (and this was quite a new discovery to most of us) that sometimes the extract, instead of being made by some independent person, is sent to the newspapers ready made, accompanied by the work to be extracted from.

In literature it certainly would be very difficult to maintain my proposed system of truthfulness in advertisement. Here is an article of which beforehand the public know nothing, and even when they have it before them, can hardly make up their minds about it without assistance from those whom they suppose to be the proper authorities. The public cannot long be duped about good or bad beer, but it may be very slow to find out about well-written or illwritten books. One thing I should certainly like to do if I were an author or a publisher. If I gave extracts from reviews, I would extract from those that were hostile as well as from those that were favourable. If the Stinger, or the Sneerer, or the Universal Depreciator, or the Ignorantium deigned to notice my book, I should certainly advertise their remarks, if I advertised any remarks at all. The appearance of my advertisement would at least be very comical, and so far would be attractive. Subjoined is a specimen:

We can cordially recommend the perusal of this work to a discerning public.

H

Light where it should be light, grave where it should be grave, always healthy in its tone, and logical in its statements, it carries the reader pleasantly onwards through a very thorny and intricate subject. Most men will be the better as well as the wiser for having read it.THE GOOD-NATURED FRIEND.

It is such works as these which make it incumbent upon every honest critic to declare his mind fully to the public, and to warn them from spending their hardly earned money upon delusive, inaccurate, ill-considered, unmethodized, ill-digested trash.-THE STINGER.

A pleasant little volume, which would form a charming companion for any thoughtful person who is on his travels, and likes to have a book by him, in every page of which there is something which may beguile or instruct a leisure moment. -THE WANDERER.

Poverty of thought is here prettily disguised by a certain gracefulness of language; and to those who do not care to think accurately-by far the majority of mankind-and can be amused by any trifles, this work will be welcome. It would form a very good Christmas present to children of a certain age; but the age must not be far advanced, for the child who could understand the subject would not read the book.-THE SNEERER.

A great subject grandly but simply treated; the language as forcible as the matter is pregnant.-THE PLEASANT EX

POSITOR.

Good paper is not likely to become much cheaper by reason of the budget of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, whose arguments for taking off the duty are almost as fallacious as those of the papermakers for retaining it. Such writers as Mr. Smith, as well as his opponents, should really sometimes consider whether their lucubrations are not a serious and culpable waste of the best kind of paper, for the book is rather handsomely got up than otherwise.

There is a paper manufactured chiefly of straw, which, on every account, we should recommend to the publishers of any future work with which Mr. Smith may be pleased to favour a public that from its general ignorance is perhaps very fairly catered for by persons of the calibre of Mr. Smith.-THE GENERAL DEPRECIATOR.

What strikes us in this work of Mr. Smith, is its naturalness. Nothing is forced, nothing is out of place: nowhere is the argument pressed too far. The illustrations, whether in metaphor or by anecdote, are singularly felicitous.-THE PROTECTOR.

The name of Smith sounds oddly when contrasted with those of Pliny, Macrobius, Dionysius Halicarnessensis, and the learned Apuleius, all of whom have also been pleased to treat upon the same subject as Mr. Smith; and, from our acquaintance with those writers, we can safely affirm that the treatment is of a very different kind. Had Mr. Smith inverted the order of his proceedings, proving what he has assumed, and assuming what he has intended to prove, and had three or four chapters in the middle of the book been entirely omitted as irrelevant, it might have been a useful work for beginners, and for those who have no acquaintance with the dead languages.THE IGNORANTIUM.

IT

is one of the melancholy pleasures of those who have attained the meridian of life to indulge in retrospection. Nor is this looking back on the past unprofitable, or without most wholesome uses. Of nations it has been said by Burke, none can look with confidence to the future that does not occasionally cast back its regards on the past. The same observation may be applied to communities and classes of men, as well as to individuals. We are all, too, the better for this self-examination-for this comparison between our early youth and our adolescence-between our ripening and mature age, between our maturity and that gradual declination and descent which ends in total decay. While those great Christian and moral principles on which human society and social order repose remain during the allotted life of man necessarily the same, the modifications introduced by custom, by fashion, by accidental causes, by wider and more familiar intercommunication with foreign nations, by literature, by legislation, and by law are quite innumerable, producing changes in manners and morals, in tones of thought and feeling, in social habitudes, and modes of domestic and public life. These changes these ebbs

and

flows in the great tide of human existence-are interesting and useful subjects of contemplation to minds not contracted or soured by an intimate acquaintance with their rivals and contemporaries. It is true, as Dr. Johnson says in his Rambler, the notions of the old and young are like liquors of different gravity and texture, which can never unite or well mingle together. The man born in 1780, unless most happily constituted, is undoubtedly not likely to be very tolerant to the golden youth or the fast livers of 1860; whereas the man born a quarter of a century

later, though no longer young, is yet not quite so old as to see no virtue in the present times, and scarcely any fault in the past. The tendency of extreme old age is in general to too fondly babble perpetually of the past; to be a laudator temporis acti, and to see no goodness whatever in the present. But a man standing between the past and the present, having attained the shady side of fifty, to use a current phrase, is not so much wedded to the past as to account former days better than the present; nor is he, on the other hand, so much in love with the present as to do injustice to the past. Whilst new forms arise and different views engage' his attention, he is not so much of a bigoted veteran as to talk, like Justice Woodcock, in Love in a Village, of the joys of his dancing days' as the only joys worthy to recompense the most bitter pangs and troubles of life. The man on the shady side of fifty, too, has still judicial breadth and unbiassed judgment sufficient to discriminate between the past and the present, and to strike a fair balance between his early majority and his mature age, between 1825 and 1860. It is at this more than half-way house in the short human pilgrimage, and in a frame of mind neither peevish nor fretful, that I would contrast these two epochs.

In nothing does that contrast appear more striking or more to the advantage of the present time than in the representative of royalty. Five-and-thirty years ago George IV. had been five years upon the throne, and a sufficient time had elapsed to judge him as a ruler. Age and the possession of power had not tended, it must be admitted, to the purification of his character. He was in his sixty-third year as profuse in his expenditure, as luxurious in his tastes, as sensuous in his enjoyments, as exclu

sive in his associates, as in 1780, in 1787, in 1791, or in 1806. The errors of his youth as a Prince, of his middle age as a Regent, still clung to him as a King; and he had his favourites and his confidantes, among whom he for the most part lived in complete isolation from the nation which he governed. Occasionally magnificent and splendid banquets and balls were given at Carlton-house, which then stood not far from the spot on which the Athenæum, the Travellers', and the Reform Clubs have since been erected; but these banquets and balls were few and far between, and were nearly exclusive in character and composition. A few personal friends among Grenvillites, Whigs, and Liberals, the monarch possessed, such as the late Duke of Devonshire, the Marquis of Buckingham, Lord Lauderdale, Lord Donoughmore, Lord Fife, and half a dozen others whose names it is unnecessary to mention.

These

especial favourites were honoured with invitations on great occasions, but the great mass of the Whig and Liberal aristocracy, and all the great commercial and middle classes, were nearly excluded from the intimacy, and even from the attentions and notice, of the Court. Lords Grenville, Grey, Lansdowne, Spencer, Fitzwilliam, and scores of other peers and commoners, were coldly looked on by a monarch whose earliest political friends had been Fox, Grey, Moira, Fitzpatrick, and Sheridan. Even several of the independent Tory nobility (for the word Conservative was not then known), who were old-fashioned in their views, were regarded by George IV. as rococo. The commercial and manufacturing elements found no place in the royal symposia. Though a rich banker (Smith) had, owing to Mr. Pitt's influence, been made Lord Carrington in the reign of George III., his father, yet it is doubtful whether George IV. would have willingly accorded a promotion into the peerage to an Alexander Baring, a Poulett Thomson, a Jones Lloyd, an Edward Strutt, or a Thomas Macaulay, all of whom were raised

to the rank of peers in the reigns of King William and Queen Victoria. Happily things were changed in the subsequent reign. The nobility and gentry of all political shades were then invited to royal hospitalities; and her Most Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria, as the Sovereign of all her people, has since her accession addressed her invitations to Conservatives and to Whigs, to Protectionists, Liberals, and Radicals. Nor have the commercial and industrial classes been excluded from levees, drawingrooms, or the private entertainments of royalty. With fair social standing and unspotted character, any one may now approach the Sovereign of these realms.

There are no exclusive cliques, there is no isolation, as in the days of George IV. Nine-tenths of that monarch's existence was spent at Brighton, or at the cottage at Virginia-water, in the company of minions and favourites, or of sultanas of equivocal repute. The Buckingham Correspondence, published within the last three years, throws a flood of light on this subject, and tells us the names of the irresponsible persons who possessed and exercised a back-stairs influence from February, 1811, to June, 1830, the epoch of the King's death. The Hulses, the Hangers, the Nagles, the Jack Paynes, the Macmahons, the Bloomfields, the Knightons, were amongst the parasites, flatterers, and servants who obtained and exercised an undue influence. More than two foreign ambassadors also lived in intimacy with the monarch, and presumed to interfere in the affairs of this realm. How Canning resented their conduct and retaliated on them, may be seen from Mr. Stapleton's work. In those days demi - reputations flourished and flaunted at court, and females of equivocal character stood unabashed in St. James's Palace. Exclusiveness, extravagance, and folly were the order of the day. The ladies patronesses of Almacks' exercised an authority supremely despotic, and only gave vouchers for the balls to men of what was