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To the Editor of the Monthly Magazine.

A

SIR,

MONG the papers of a valued friend has been found the following analysis of Scott's Human Life, a poem of the last half century, which is now but little read, and which is, in fact, a versified and embellished translation of the celebrated Greek Picture of Cebes, the model of so many modern allegories. Dr. Johnson, in his Vision of Theodore, has profusely borrowed from it; and to Aikin's Hill of Science it has perhaps, though less obvihints. ously, furnished some Scott's poem, if elegant, is diffuse and tedious; but, as its moral tendency entitles it to lasting respect, it may possibly be welcome to your readers to possess a coneise sketch of its contents.

The poem introduces certain strangers,

who are are ushered into a Theban tem

"ple, where votive offerings were suspend ed, and whose attention is drawn by a tablet, designed for a picture of Human Life. It represented a walled court, whence rose another; and higher still, a third. At the gate of the nether arca a vast crowd seemed to wait.

A hierophant approaches the strangers, and, after a short preliminary address, expounds to them the delineation.

The "natal" gate, represents the num'bers thronging into mortal life. On one side the good genius of mankind exhibits the code of Reason and Delusion, on the other offers a bowl, whence all drink, some to fal excess, others but taste, less erring and less blind.

He then proceeds to describe the first court, or the Sensual Life, with its attendant moral. The Desires, Pleasures, and Opinions, entice with powerful charms the unguarded mind. Happy those whom Wisdom tutors, and consigns to right opinions.

The strangers then behold a globe on which stands Fortune, blind, frantic, and deaf, whose tottering and unstable ball, when most trusted to, is most likely to deceive the footstep. Fortune is adored, or curst, by her various suitors, according

to their success.

Their attention is next directed to the garden of Sensuality. Here

Sin her powerful spells employs;
See Lewdness, loosely zon'd, her bosom bares;
See Riot her luxurious bowl prepares.

There stands Avidity, and dimpling Adulation-all in watch for prey; while the prodigal, bereft at length of all resource, are left in the dire gripe of Pu

ishment.

The Cave of Punishment is next described. At its entrance the Furies:

In sentry see these haggard crones, whose brows

Rude locks o'erhang, a frown their forehead plows;

High brandishing her lash, with stern re-
gard

Stands Punishment, an ever-waking ward;
While sullen Melancholy mopes behind,
Fix'd, with her head upon her knees reclin'd;
And, frantic with remorseful fury, there
Fierce Anguish stamps, and rends her shaggy

hair.

Loud Lamentation, wild Despair, are also
personified; and to some of these the cap-
tive is consigned,

Unless, rare guest, Repentance o'er the gloom
Diffuse her radiance, and repeal his doom.
In this case, the hand-maids of Truth,
him to True Wisdom, who is sometimes
Right Opinion, and Good Desire, lead
personated by False Philosophy.

distinctive marks the true can be known
The strangers now enquire by what
from the counterfeit Wisdom. Their re-
gard is directed to the second court, in
Here are assembled wrangling sophists,
which is pourtrayed the Studious Life.
fanciful poets, laborious pedants;

All, who in learned trifles spin their wit, Or comment on the works by triflers writ. In the walks of this academic court certain active and bewitching females are present, who resemble lewd harlots, and who frequently entangle Art, Wit, and Reason, in their toils; until awakened to a sense of their condition, the seduced shall have found

Th' exalted way to Truth's enlightened ground: and, having quaffed her cathartic, are cleansed, healed, and saved. Yet, by loitering here, they are still in danger of degeneracy.

The strangers now ask the faithful road, Which mounts us to the joys of Truth's abode.

A strait and lonely gate is pointed out, its avenue a rugged rocky soil; beyond the wicket rises the craggy mountain of Difficulty:

each edge a brink Whence to vast depth dire precipices sink. Two sister figures stand on the mountain, Continence and Patience, stationed there by Wisdom, to urge on her sons. These generous guides, swift descending, draw up their trembling charge, "with their own force his panting breast they arm," and assist his progress along the road to Virtue,

whose

whose blissful land is freed from the annoyance

Of thorny evil, or perplexing fear. The third court, or the Virtuous Life, is now to be examined by the strangers. Lefty groves, and delicious bowers, encircling a luminous enamelled meadow, are there depicted: these are the abode of all the Virtues, and of Happiness, whose palace, encircled by a golden wall, has a gate of diamond.

Hence are expelled Blindness and Error, and high-boasting Pride, Intemperance, Lust, Wrath, Avarice, and all the Plagues which, in the first court, oppressed the pupil. On his admission, the Virtues approach to hail their enraptured guest. See Knowledge grasping a refulgent star; See Fortitude in panoply of war; Justice her even scale aloft displays, And rights both human and divine she weighs. There Moderation, Liberality, Temperance, Meekness, Probity, attend to lead their votary to Happiness, the rewarder of the just.

They are then directed to a lofty castle. This majestic pile extends its front above a hill, whose boundless prospect commands the courts below. Within the porch, high on a jasper throne, sits Happiness, the imperial mother, who adorns her hero with a starry crown,

honourable meed Of conquests won by many a valiant deed. The curiosity of the strangers enquires what conquests. They learn that these were of the moral kind: that he had subdued the Bad Habits, formidable beasts, to which he was once a weak prey, nearly devoured; until rouzed from his sloth, he attacked them and curbed with a power ful chain. The hierophant describes these foes of mankind, Error, Ignorance, Impatience, Incontinence, Avarice, and numbers more; and again panegyrizes, as man's proper bliss, independent of power and wealth, a self-approving conscience, the true substantial peace.

To the Editor of the Monthly Magazine,

B

SIR,

EFORE the destruction of monasteries, the poor were under the protection of the church, afterwards committed to parish officers; and the very excellent principle established by the statute of Elizabeth, for their food, clothing, and employment, was only defeated by the mode adopted for enforcing it-the principle, was national; the practice, parochial. Limiting the burthen to a mere parochial

fund, laid the foundation of the evils which followed; these have rendered the machinery so very complex, that very few, even of the lawyers themselves, understand sions of the superior courts upon Settlethe subject. The number of legal deciment Cases, from the Quarter Session, form as complete a code of laws for be wildering and confounding the judgment, as ingenuity could suggest.

This statute, in the same breath in which it announced a great national principle, crippled and bound it in swaddling. clothes, by declaring, that every parish should maintain its own poor; for, questions arising who where to be considered as the poor of the parish, several acts afterwards passed to ascertain them. To enter into the detail would be tedious; but from the multiplicity of statutes and de-. depends upon ten distinct general heads: cisions, the settlement of the poor now Birth, Apprenticeship, Certificate, Estate, Hiring and Service, Marriage, Office, Purchase, Rating, and Renting a Tenement. Funds destined to the relief of the languid and distressed, have been dissipated in attempting to remove the burthen of maintenance from limits, in which the unhappy wanderer sought shelter.

For more than two centuries have the poor been driven up and down, often afflicted with disease and infirmity, to the imminent danger of life. Let us imagine a poor woman just delivered of a child, deserted by her husband, and cast upon the parish, waiting for the Doctor's cer tificate of her being sufficiently recovered to be removed to a distant settlement in an inclement season. Upon such occasion, an appeal to the passions may be fairly allowed, for it is only by arousing the feelings, we hope to meliorate the condition of the poor.

National protection is not confined to locality, nor can the pauper receive a bet ter or cheaper maintenance, by transporting him to a place of settlement near 200 miles.

If the desire for reform be sincere, we must not affect alarm at novelty in prac tice, convinced by experience of the utter' insufficiency of particular systems: to suffer them to remain, is shutting our eyes against the light, and sinning against con viction. To meliorate what is false, is a vain attempt; radical defects may be removed, but never admit of improvement., Many laws have passed; and as many thousands pursuing the same plan, would be equally fruitless. What is the cause of the removal? the answer is, to get rid of the

burthen

burthen Then let the fund be national, and instantly vanish parish removals, appeals, certificates, and settlement cases, with all the miserable train of endless litigation upon questions of no other importance, than as the poor man's naturai liberty is abridged, and to encourage a practice which obstructs labour, and is therefore at once an injury to the state and an aggravation of distress. Treating the poor as the children of a particular district, is a petty expedient; and this forsooth, because it was the place where their parents were born, or casually resided. Is not the king intitled to their allegiance, as members of the state; and are they, on account of poverty, to be excluded from the ordinary pale of protection, and to be imprisoned within their own parish? The enjoyment of natural liberty, not incompatible with public safety, might be allowed as their consolation-Their country should be their settlement, the nation their guardians.

In order to economy, the plan must be simple and universal. Under the fostering hand of national protection, the poor would feel that they have a home to fight for, a country to defend. This grand object accomplished, the vessel of state, although on a dangerous sea, in a tempest, may yet brave the storm; but when every heart and hand are wanted in the steerage, leave none to perish on the rocks, nor unprotected after her arrival in port.

1st. Establish a national fund by an equal annual pound-rate on all visible property throughout the country; the first not exceeding the average of the pre

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county treasurer; the latter, in like manner, receive from, or pay to, the national treasurer. The accounts of district treasurers certified to the county treasurers, those of the latter to the national treasurer: deficiency in the national treasury provided for by the ensuing rate. Districts, guilty of wanton excess in expenditure, chargeable with it.

5th. Paupers not removable without their consent; and all reinovals with such consent, at the public expence, subject to the discretion of the Board of Gover

nors.

6th. The Boards may convert parish workhouses, or any other parochial building, into temporary lodgings for them within the district, and out of the savings may erect schools of industry, purchase materials and implements for their employment, appoint officers, and make weekly allowances to each pauper, or family, according to thɛ numbers.

7th. All beggars to be apprehended and conveyed before the governors, who should commit them to hard labor to the House of Correction within the district, ar for the county, for one week: for every subsequent offence, the quantum of the preceding punishment doubled.

8th. The Boards to make other regulations necessary to forward the general plan, and to carry the law into execu tion.

For the Monthly Magazine. On the COMPULSIVE BINDING-OUT OF POOR CHILDREN APPRENTICES, without their own, or the consent of their

I

PARENTS.

HAVE omitted longer than I could have wished, the case of binding-out as an apprentice a child to a great distance from the father by compulsion.

If proper persons can be found in the same parish, they ought certainly to be preferred.

The act of binding-out a child, without either its own consent or that of its parents, tends so much to violation of humanity and natural right, without which there is no true policy, that it ought to be most strictly watched. It depends on 43 Eliz. c. 2. § 5, which is the foundation of the English system of the Poor Laws. I cannot say that I think this the best part of it. By this act, a male child, if it appear that his parents are not able to maintain it, either the child or they being chargeable to the parish, may be bound out to twenty-one, and a female to twenty-one,

or marriage, by the parish-officers, with the assent of two justices, to be appren tices where they shall see convenient.

And it has been determined, that both justices must be present, for that it is a judicial act, and not merely ministerial; they being bound to exercise their best deliberation as to the fitness of the person, the place, and the employment, to which the apprentice is to be bound. It would be void, if they were not both present at the binding: their assent is not formal, but necessary; and they are bound to withhold it if they see any reasonable objection.

It is manifest that convenient means

excite painful associations, or any strong emotion.

The tranquillising power of music is no new idea. It is a fact of repeated experience, more or less observed in every age and country; and whether we regard that assemblage of sensative powers, which we call our body, or that active energy which we denominate mind, the salutary and benign influence of harmonious sound appears every way conformable to Nature. Nov. 22, 1810. CAPEL LOFFT.

To the Editor of the Monthly Magazine.

SIR,

WAS exceedingly glad to see the sub

what is fitting, (xabras) in every view. I ject of the present war taken up by

The circumstances of the case must be peculiar and clear, and very strongly proved, that would justify binding-out to a very great distance from the dwelling of the child, or of the parent; much mere from almost one side of the island to the other.

If an evident abuse of power should in any such case be detected, the justices would, of course, be criminally answerable; either by indictment or information, according to the circumstances; or the father might bring an action of special trespass on the case.

The binding-out of apprentices at the age of ten years, under 3 Anne, c. 6, is certainly an exceedingly strong in stance of legislative interference.

P.S. Where an incorporated hundred in terfered to bind-out a child to service, with out consent of the child, the legislature not having entrusted them with such a power, it met with the strongest reprehension from Lord Chief Justice Ellenborough.

I should greatly doubt the validity of a binding under either Act, where the child was not present at the binding: for how otherwise are the justices to judge of its Stness to be bound as proposed.

ILLNESS MITIGABLE BY MUSIC.

In a late illness, which has been and is the subject of public solicitude, I take the liberty of intimating, and especially considering the habitual predilection of the sufferer for the highest compositions in that divine art, that the disorder may be at least considerably alleviated, and possibly even removed, by music; meaning, assuredly, music of the slow, soft, and soothing, kind. In the selection, care would of course be taken, if it

should be thought adviseable to try its influence, to avoid every thing likely to

↑ T. 29, E. ill. K. v. Hams tall Ridwaer.

your correspondent, "A True Briton;" and I further hope that it will be re sumed in every succeeding Magazine, till the thing itself, melancholy and distres ing in every point of view, shall wholly

cease to exist.

Descriptions of this kind, in order to leave behind them a due impression on the reader's mind, should be as brief as possible; and therefore I shall instantly proceed to answer your correspondent's questions.

1. What are the English fighting for? I was about to amend this interroga tory, and to make it "compelled to fight for," till I recollected that, from the most artful means that perhaps have ever been practised, the very people themselves have been deluded into a belief in the justice and necessity of the measure. Indeed, a very considerable portion of the public, in the various shapes of loan-mongers, contractors, gatherers, gun-smiths, gun-powder merarmy-agents, newspaper editors, taxchants, and merchants of all kinds, are most materially benefited by a continu ation of the war. The wild beasts too at the City Menagerie, the StockExchange, are incessantly grunting against peace, or roaring for eternal war, innocent men. that they may fatten on the carcases of All the jubilee tribe too and there is some reason to fear that are greatly interested on this occasion; they, or their descendants, will celebrate another jubilee for the fiftieth year of the war. Even a branch of the constitution

itself, the chief member of which we declare, and indeed happily know to be incapable of doing wrong, might be inplicated in the suspicion of being interested in the profits of the war, if we did not likewise know that all the profits, or droits, as they are legally termed,

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were generously applied towards the reduction of the public expences, or in rewarding the merits and services of eminent characters. But to return to the question: it is to gratify all the above classes, with the last exception; it is to humour and administer to the spleen and malice of clumsy, baffled, and dis. appointed, ministers, against a successful foe, who has by their means alone been elevated to his present height of glory and pre-eminence; it is to satisfy their

unquenchable thirst after power and patronage, that we are still pursuing a hopeless and indefinite contest, and that we are bleeding at every pore.

2. What have been the motives and objects of those persons who are the promoters and abettors of this war?

Their motives and objects are to enrich themselves and their adherents at the public expence; to accumulate all the wealth, and consequently the power, of the country into their own hands; and by the continuance of a war of unexampled expenditure, and which has created taxes to an amount unknown in any other time or country, to extinguish the middle classes of society, and to depress that spirit of independance which, by constitutional exertions, could alone defeat their purposes.

the concerns of the state, or in sober re-
flection on the miseries that await thein:
and fourthly, though not lastly, by any
means, from the terror that almost every
honest individual feels of the conse-
quences to his interest, from any resist-
ance to the principles of those on whort
Z.
they may have dependance.
Liverpool, Nov. 8, 1810.

To the Editor of the Monthly Magazine.

SIR,

N the Life of Mr. Beddoes, lately

published by me, an accidental error has been detected, which I should be happy to avail myself of the medium of your Magazine to correct.

From the account given at page 389, it would appear as if Dr. Craufuird had expressed a wish that further advice should be called in, when the alarming change had already taken place, which so shortly preceded Dr. Beddoes's dissolution. The fact however is, as I have since been informed, that this wish was expressed not by Dr. Craufuird, but by some members of the family, and, though complied with on his part, was accoinJ. E. STOCK. panied by a remark that it must neces sarily be useless. Bristol, Dec. 19, 1810.

For the Monthly Magazine. CONTINENTAL SUBSTITUTES to remedy the SCARCITY of SUGAR.

TH

By a German.

HE still-repeated attempts of the people of the Continent to find out some tolerable substitute for West India sugar, evidently proves that those already discovered, are not fully satisfactory, and that all the improvements and refinements of art and science have not been able to supply the obvious deficiency of this almost indispensable ar ticle to the comfort of life, to which the greatest part of Europe is condemned, by the stubbornness of a tyrannic usurper. The endeavours of Dr. Achard to procure it from turnips, &o. are too old and too well-known to need to be Two other experiments mentioned. seem about to share the same fate.

3. How are we to account for the apparent apathy and indifference of the On great mass of the people to the destructive, impoverishing, and truly calamitous, effects of this long-protracted war? The answer is variously-as 1. From the gross and general corruption of the times. 2. From the selfishness of the commercial part of the community, which, whilst it maintains by means of war carried on at the expence of others, a proud preeminence in wealth, feels not for the distresses of those who are ruined by the war, and its unjust and unequal pressure. 3. From the monopoly of wealth in the hands of a few persons, and the consequent interest which those persons have, and the unfortunate power they possess, of governing and deluding others. 4. From the interest which the numerous classes of individuals adverted to in the answer to question 1, have in the prosecution and continuance of the war. 5. From the great mass of the people themselves being driven from necessity to get money by every means in their power, whether honest or otherwise; from the consequent destruction of the moral principle, as well as of the means, and even time, to occupy themselves in

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I. M. Parmentier's Syrup of Grapes, This syrup was at first so much ap proved of in the south of France, that in the autumn of 1808 nearly 200,000 cwt. were made, each valued at 100 franks, and it was called Sirop de Parmentier, to declare the common sentiments of gratitude entertained towards its inventor. In the month of December,

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1807,

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