Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

to expect among the set of men, whose acquaintance, naturally resulted from attaching oneself to the Platonic, the Stoic, or the Epicurean, sect. And is not the like observable in our different denominations of Christians?

Let the man of fashion be a Catholic. It is the essence of fashion to fall in, it knows not why, with the splendid ceremonial in use among the exalted, and to place vital perfection in exterior compliance. The catholic is the form of Christianity which has been found least unfavourable to the military spirit, and most indulgent to the genteeler foibles. It patronizes the fisheries, by its dietetic interference; and the fine arts, by its ostentatious delight in monuments of architecture, of sculpture, and of painting. But let not the entire multitude be catholic. It is a religion which operates in the manner of military discipline, so as to secure decency without reforming the inward man. Wherever the catholic populace have broken loose, they have exceeded, in a savage, cruel, and blood-thirsty spirit, the populace of any other sect; and they are every where more idle and ignorant than their Protestant neighbours.

Let the magistrate be a Bucerist. Bucerism, or else a national establishment, favours religious indifference and political toryism. The members of the Church of England, in general, are apparently free from those anxieties of the soul, those mean selfish ambitious frettings about its future condition, which haunt and vex so large a portion of the methodistical sect. They are, in general, inclined to lend the authority of their support to the ministers of the Crown, and to receive with a favour ing prejudice all the measures of the government. Such predispositions adapt a justice of the peace to execute the laws with tolerance and alacrity. But let not the mass of citizens be Bucerists. That habitual antagonism to the party in power, which coinpels the discussion of all, and the modification of many, public acts, and which prevents still more abuses than it corrects, would want the requisite popular encouragement, if the inhabitants of our large towns were not in the main embodied under a priesthood less servile than the established clergy. The parliamentary friends of liberty, derive their popular support almost entirely from dis

senters.

Let the trader be a Calvinist. Austerity favours frugality and industry. Calvinism, at least where it is a sect, and not, as in Scotland, an establishment, seldom

attracts the higher classes, or the very low. est class; as if some degree of instruction and education were requisite to prepare the votary-as if a considerable degree of introduction and education unfitted him again for this form of belief. It is often accompanied with a punctilious easeless behaviour, the result probably of a reciprocal inspection and vigilant controul, devised for purposes of moral discipline, and incorporated with the constitutions of their congregations. It is often accompanied also with an apparent gloom of mind, the result perhaps of an excessive use among their teachers of terrific denunciations; but which to a mere by-stander might suggest the idea of secret remorse, or worldly embarrassment; and thus tend to affect the moral or pecuniary credit of these children of dejection. Such melancholics are apt to fly for relief to sottishness. Still the Calvinists, in general, are seen to be industrious, provident, continent, neat, hospitable, but in other respects frugal, loth to military ser vice, lovers of justice, of order, and of civil liberty. These are qualities, on the whole, desirable in the numerous class of tradesmen: it seems easier to increase their happiness than their utility.

Other sects are insufficiently vast to be appreciated in the gross. One cannot yet decide whether the Socinians owe the meritorious qualities by which they are distinguished, to their station in society, or to the influence of their favourite writers. Unitarianisin is not yet vulgarized; but from the recent reports of the Anti-trinitarian missionaries, it may be suspected that, in proportion as the sect gains ground among the vulgar, it will have to adopt something of the cant, the bigotry, and the zeal, for positive opinions, which commonly characterize the vulgar. The Italian and Polish Unitarians appeared, while the sect was new, to aim at allying the splendid ritual of Rome with the simple creed of theism, and to aspire at blending the taste of the Catholic, the principle of the Calvinist, and the liberality of the philosopher. But notwithstanding the conventions of noblemen held at Vicenza and at Cracow, the Unitarian party could no where attain the ascendancy, either in the dukedoms of Italy, or in the republic of Poland. The educated and ambitious ranks gradually slid back through unbe. lief to conformity; the forsaken multitude was classed with fanatic Anabaptists, and squeezed, between contempt and oppression, into mactive insignificance. As Socinianisin is peculiarly the reverse of a mystical

[ocr errors][merged small][merged small]

The merely philosophic sects have also their use. Teachers of this persuasion have been very efficacious in resisting va rious pernicious moral prejudices, which have occasionally resulted from excessive attachment to the sacred books. The attempts of the Anabaptists to introduce community of goods, of the Quakers to abolish military service, of the Calvinists to extinguish fornication, of the Catholics to torture and burn alive for heresy, have been got under, not by the arguments of theology, but by those of philosophy.There is a reciprocity of morality necessary in the external relations of states, to which Scripture is less plastic than reason. Hence every civilized society has found it expedient to keep alive an illuminated sect,lifted either by pride or science,above all the forms of popular credulity. In many churches of the once Lutheran provinces of Germany, the anti-supernaturalist christianity of the professors Eichhorn and Paulus has lately been brought to anchor on the sacred books. In China, the religious establishment of the country is habitually engaged in a like hostility against all the forms of superstition. Yet in Germany, as in China, to a large body of the people, such opinions are unwel. comely licentious.

Nor are the Jews undeserving an appropriate and limited patronage. They bave, indeed, some usages which interfere with sociability, and which are necessarily an impediment to that neighbourly intercourse with Christians, which would tend to efface reciprocal dislikes. Such are their notions about diet. In early and ignorant communities, it is expedient to teach the essential arts of life in the laws. We have statutes which direct how to brew, and how to bake, and which render criminal a departure from the national recipe. We have also laws about fish and butcher's meat, which resist the sale and use of unwholesome food. The Jews have many such laws, which divide animals into clean and unclean, or, as the words ought to be rendered, into wholesome and unwholesome. The Jews wish to keep their sabbath on the seventh day; but, since the alteration of the calendar, they, in fact, keep it wrong, and might as well keep it on the Sunday. The Jews

encourage among their children a predilection for some occupations, which are necessarily held in disrepute; such as pedlary, frippery, pawn-broking, and usury. A pedlar will always appear to be a cleat, because he must always charge higher than a stationary shopkeeper. In addition to the regular profit of the retailer, he must be paid for the porterage of his wares from door to door, and for the time lost in fruitless applications. Frippery will always be held somewhat offensive. The man who sells his cast-off clothes instead of giving them away, is ashamed of the avarice or penury which that implies; he dislikes therefore to see his fripperer, which reminds him of a meanness. Pawnbroking is regulated by law; it is often an honest and useful employment, and might be a most humane and generous occupation: but it can never be an honourable one. A sense of shame inevitably baunts the man who pledges his watch, or the woman who pawns a cloak, to relieve the necessities even of a sick child. Usury is odious: not merely because the lawgiver has idly made it a crime, but because, in all cases of bankruptcy, those persons who have received exorbitant interests for their advances, appear to be the only persons benefited at the expense of more scrupulous creditors. In all these branches of commerce, and other such might be enumerated, the nature of the employment tends to excite a feeling of disgust, which is improperly transferred to the Jewish people, because it happens that they frequently exercise such employments. By preferring for their chil dren the more respectable lines of business, hostile prejudices would abate; but society would still be compelled to seek out other persons for this division of la bour. And to whatever individuals it be consigned, moral instruction and admonition is surely expedient.

If so many forms of sectarism can strike root in a given community with obvious advantage to the whole, why should they not be all alike favoured by the magistrate? They would then seve rally be embraced by the adapted converts, and prevail every where in the desirable proportions. The charities of tolerance abound most where piety has many shapes. Moral competition, and general instruction, is increased by the variety of sects.

And why should they not be suffered to ramify within, as well as without, the national church? Suppose

patronage indefinitely: and surely the patriotic statesman, instead of making a new pension for every new exertion, ought to hold it better to divert into an usefut channel some of those preferments which are become superfluous to the encourage ment of theological literature, and which only operate as bounties for advocating the cause of ecclesiastic monopoly and intolerance. Without burdening afresh the people, the means would thus exist of recompensing their real illustrators and benefactors: the mighty machine, erected by the efforts of a barbaric superstition, would retain its energies unimpaired, but be employed in diffusing the lessons of civilization, and in remunerating the toils of unbiassed learning and creative genius.

Suppose the Act of Uniformity repealed.A duke of Grafton might then present the benefices of which he has the advowson to his Unitarian chaplains. A ford Petre might bestow similar preferment on eminent catholics-on a Geddes, or a Milner. If the Jew-banker Gold: smid acquired with his estate a vacant presentation, he might allow the tythe of his parish to a rabbi. Mr. Wilberforce could confer livings on his evangelists; and lord Sheffield on a disciple of Gibbon. God keeps many religious, said the Gothic king Theodoric, why should not we? The affects of this change could not but be advantageous. Every sect, inasmuch as it had converted to its persuasion the property of the country, would acquire a share of the advowsons, and station itself in the national church. A co-establish. ment of all religions would be accom plished, in which each would have an extent of influence equitably proportioned to the wealth of its votaries. A consider able comprehension of dissenters would immediately result; and with the wish and power to acquire the use and property of the established temples, an altered feeling, the harbinger of constitutional loyalty, would pervade all the ancient separatists. The danger which the Greek empire formerly, and which our own country lately, incurred,of finding among its schismatics a pernicious foreign faction, would cease with the intolerance of the magistrate, which both there and here occasioned that incalculable evil. The chieftains, not only of the embodied, but of the literary, sects, finding the ecclesiastic order open to them unconditionally, and without any subscribed definitions of opinion, would more generally embrace it: and all classes of public instructors, the men of letters and science, the poets and artists, might be conveniently patronized out of the revenues of the hierarchy. Thus, all sects, popular and philosophic, would acquire a common interest in the preservation of such a church, and would join in a chocus of Esto perpetua!

The patronage of the sovereign would remain as at present in point of amount; but as the number of claimants on public grounds would be increased, more of that patronage would be given to merit, and less to favouritism. The right of presenting prebends to laymen already resides in the Crown-Camden having been rewarded for his literary exertions by queen Elizabeth with a prebendal stall. A repeal of the Act of Uniformity would, in fact, extend this right of lay

To the Editor of the Monthly Magazine.

As

SIR,

SI believe no description of Alderley Edge in Cheshire, and the Cobalt Mine lately discovered there, has yet been published, perhaps the inclosed account may be acceptable to your readers.

Alderley Edge is an eminence situated about five miles west from Macclesfield, from which place the road rises by an almost imperceptible ascent through narrow sandy lanes; the sand chiefly of a reddish-brown colour: so very gradual is the rise, that when you approach the western side declivity, which is much steeper, you are astonished with the vast extent of country which at once opens upon the sight. The whole plain of the county of Cheshire, with a part of Lancashire, stretching from the feet of the Derbyshire and Yorkshire hills to the sea: the pastures, woods, and villages, the towns of Stockport and Manchester, the distant smoke of the city of Chester, with the blue mountains of Wales on the horizon, form part of the features of the scene.

On the eastern side rise the Derbyshire and Yorkshire hills, which are part of the central range that passes through these counties. The whole prospect comprises a scene of extensive and varied magnificence, which can scarcely be equalled in the kingdom. After a month's residence amongst the mines and naked mountains of the High Peak, a sudden view of so much fertility and grandeur was peculiarly ex hilarating and delightful. The hill on which I stood is low, compared with most of our secondary hills: but being detached from the central range, and advanced several miles towards the plains

of Cheshire, there is nothing to obstruct the view from thence to the Irish sea. But this place is an object of more interest to the mineralogist than the picLuresque tourist: in the space of a few acres, he may be presented with ores of most of the metals found in England, but placed in such situations, and presenting such appearances, as are rarely to be seen elsewere. The hill is evidently of alluvial formation, being composed chiefly of gravel, and soft white and reddish sand-stone the white is intermixed with rounded quartz pebbles, the red with particles of mica. In some parts the red and white sand-stone assume a nearly stratified appearance; in others, the red stone intersects the white in very thin seams, branching in various directions. In the white sand-stone are found various ores of lead, as small portions of compact galena; and the same in a granular state intermixed with sand-stone. In other places, particles of blue and brown ore were collected in nodules of various sizes, and imbedded along with pebbles in the sand.rock, like currants in a pudding. The black ore or earth of lead, is here met with; and the carbonate or white ore; but intermixed, like the others, with sand-stone. These ores do not lie in regular veins, horizontally or vertically inclined, but are found in masses, or intersecting and mixing with the sandstone and pebbles. In some few places there are appearances of a regular vein, in which there are seams of cawk interspersed between the sand-rock and the ore; but these appearances are soon lost, and the vein is broken off and thrown into a state of confusion. The cawk* is also mixed with quartz pebbles. These ores are found in considerable quantities, and smelted at the place, but they are in general poor in quality. Copper ore was formerly got here in large quantities, as appears by the scoria or slagg which remains. The works have been discontinued during nearly forty years. The copper was taken to Macclesfield; and, with calamine from Derbyshire, made into brass at that place. Last summer an attempt was made again to get the ore, and a furnace erected for reducing it. I was there the day after the trial, which had not succeeded, owing to the poorness of the ore, and want of skill

in the persons employed. I could dis cern the presence of copper, in small streaks in the product, by the assistance of a lens, and also on the irons employed to stir the ore when in fusion. The cop per ores are found intermixed with those of lead, lying in the confused state I have described. Something like a regu lar vein was opened last summer, its direction nearly vertical, its width about three feet, with a floor of cawk interposed between the ore and the rock on one side; the other was united with the sand-rock.

The ore, as it was called, was of a reddish-brown colour, extremely hard, with quartz pebbles imbedded within it. Neither its specific gravity, nor appearance, gave indication of the presence of copper. On trial, I found it precipitated that metal upon iron from a nitrous solution. It is more properly an iron-stone combined with copper pyrites, than an ore of copper: it contains very little of the latter metal. The most remarkable production of the place is cobalt ore, which was very recently discovered here, existing in the red sand

stone.

It had long been unnoticed or employed in mending the roads, until a miner, who had worked upon the Continent, and seen the cobalt ores of Saxony, first discovered it in the estate of a gen tleman in the neighbourhood. The at tention of the tenants of the Alderley Mines was then directed to the subject, and the Cobalt mines were let for one thousand pounds per annum, to a company near Pontefract, in Yorkshire. The proprietor of Alderley Edge is Sir I. T. Stanley, bart. whose grounds and seat are in its immediate vicinity. The ores of cobalt, so valuable to the manufacturers of porcelain and paper, are very scarce in this island. They have been found in small quantities in Cornwall, chiefly of the kind called grey cobalt ore, which contains cobalt combined with iron and arsenic. The ore at Alderley is the black cobalt ochre of mineralogists. It is in the form of grains, of a bluishblack colour.

The best specimens in colour and appearance, resemble grains of gunpowder, disseminated in red sandstone, or lying in thin seams between the stone, which has a shistose or slaty fracture. It lies from eight to ten yards under the surface, and is got out in thin pieces, and separated afterwards as I regret that I did not examine this sub-much as possible from the stone; it is stance more particularly; I suspect it to con- then packed in tubs, and sent near Pontain baroselenite and calc spar, like the cawk tefract, where it is manufactured into of Derbyshire. smalt. Amidst the confusion of mineral substances

[ocr errors]

substances at this place, there are some distinct features of regularity. The cobalt ore is stratified, and though near, is separate from the other ores: it is chiefly, if not entirely, in the red sand-stone. It lies near the surface, and is evidently of later formation than the other part of the hill; as the red sand-stone, where it is found, always lies upon, or intersects, the white. The latter stone is the repository of the other metals.

The quality of the smalt produced from it does not equal that made from foreign cobalt. Whether this inferiority arise from the nature of the ore, or some defect in the process of separation, may be doubtful. Cobalt is one of the most refractory metals in the hands of the che mical analyst. It is so intimately combined with iron, nickel, and arsenic, that its separation, in a state of perfect purity, is a process requiring great care, and attended with considerable difficulty. Cobalt, in its metallic form, has not hitherto been applied to any useful purpose. Amongst German miners cobalt ores wete long known, before their nature or use was suspected. Finding frequently a black substance, which impeded their progress in the mines, cut across the inetallic veins, and occasioned them much trouble, they called it cobbel, the name of a fearful dæmon, the genius of these subterranean abodes; against whose wicked machinations their priests had a Latin form of prayer, in which he is styled Cobalus. In Yorkshire, where many Saxon words are retained, ignorant nurses still appal the terrified imagination of children, with the threatened approach of Cobby.

The ores of cobalt are separated as much as possible from the other minerals with which they are combined; the blue oxyd is then fused with powdered flints, and forms the substance called zaffre, used to give the beautiful blue colouring to china. It is also employed in forming blue enamels. With a different portion of siliceous earth and potash, it forms a blue glass, which is afterwards finely pulverized and washed; this is smalt; which is used to give the blue tint to writing paper. From the coarse smalts are made the powder and stone-blue of commerce, used by laundresses. For nearly the whole of these articles we are indebted to the Continent. I think it is highly probable, that, were the western side of our island scientifically explored, many repositories of this valuable mineral MONTHLY MAG. No. 209.

would be found.

The gentleman on

whose adjoining estate the ore of cobalt was first found, has hitherto declined all offers for the purchase of it: it is believed to be of a superior quality to that at Alderley. The works of the company at Pontefract, owing to particular circumstances, and the difliculties attending other extensive speculations, were 03pended at the close of the last year, 1810. The general appearance of the mineral substances at Alderley, their position and intermixture with rounded pieces of quartz, prove, I think, they have been washed down from higher metalliferous hills, once existing near the place, and that they have been carried and deposited in their present situation by currents and eddies, when the whole plains of the counties of Cheshire and Lancashire were covered with the sea; which has once been the case, there can be little doubt. The existence of pebbles in me tallic veins is mentioned by Werner as occurring in Hesse, and other parts of Europe; and he adduces these facts in proof of his theory. The same appearances at Alderley, I think, prove only that the hill is composed from the debris and ruins of other mines and rocks, and that any general geological conclusions drawn from this place, would not be applicable to regular mining districts.

In a future Number I may probably offer some further observations on this part of the kingdom. In the mean time, I trust you will allow me to correct a notice respecting myself, which has been inserted in your Magazine of the last month, in which it is stated that I had discovered a new mode of analysing soils and minerals. The error probably arose from a mistaken idea of an undertaking in which I am engaged for the mineralogical survey and examination of estates, to ascertain the quality of the minerals by chemical analysis, and to accompany the survey with a manuscript description. In the proposals for the execution of this plan, I have laid claim to no discoveries, but such as are the legitimate deductions from mineralogical observation chemical experiment. From these, if properly applied, landed proprietors might derive more advantage than from almost any other mode of national inprovement; for hitherto, the application of mineralogical science to increase the value of land, has been greatly neglected in this country. ROBERT BAKEWELL. Bury-street, St. James's.

B

and

To

« ZurückWeiter »