definable, indescribable, and ineffable something, which we read of in all the novels and poems so familiar to our youth. I expected to be able to detect a nobleman at first sight, as easy as a thorough bred jockey does a blood horse; and when I first came here, amused myself by selecting nobility from the mass that was continually passing and repassing before me. But numerous and mortifying to my discriminative faculty were the blunders I made. At one time I mistook the Lord for the footman, at another the footman for the Lord. At another time I selected a pickpocket, as he proved afterwards, for his Royal Highness the Duke of ****, who, I understood, was at the public meeting. But the most discouraging affair, and that which determined me no longer to trust instinct in these matters, was mistaking the most noble Marquis of *********, who was driving a stage-coach, for the driver himself! I thought I had got into a terrible scrape by the blunder, but, on the contrary, the Marquis was highly tickled. with it, and told the story to all his friends in proof of his excellence in stage coachmanship.

In honest truth, a great part of the young nobility here do very little credit to their noble blood, either by their persons or their manners; and I defy the most thorough-bred novel reader to tell. one of them either by his air or his appearance. The lion would now no longer recognise the blood royal by instinct, any more than the man would nobility, were either to encounter it devested of its tinsel and trappings. Some of them are the queerest, most diminutive, pinched up, elderly young creatures you ever saw. They always grow old before their time; and were it not for corsets, stuffings, and other inventions, to supply the poverty of dame nature, no stranger would ever think of mistaking them for men. They

would certainly fall to pieces were it not for their geer. There is one of these odd mannikins, or mandrakes, I can hardly tell which, who, it is affirmed, was born with a stump-tail, to the great support of Lord Monboddo's theory. The speculatists argued, that as man, in the long course of improvement, finally got rid of his tail, it was quite in the natural round of events, that it should come back again at the end of a long course of deterioration.

But far be it from me to throw any blame upon these unlucky and degraded beings. Condemned, as they are, by the very nature of their situation, to the absence of almost every motive to exert their faculties, or exercise their virtues, it is not to be wondered at, if they run riot through all the varieties of vicious indulgence or senseless eccentricity. Like butterflies, they toil not, neither do they spin, although many are eminently qualified for the distaff; and yet it may be said of them, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. They possess, without merit or exertion of any kind, what others can seldom or never attain by the highest efforts of talent and industry combined-wealth and honours. Necessity never stimulates them to action; and, for the most part, the only impulse to efforts of any kind, is a sickly appetite for a worthless notoriety, or a desperate ennui, craving for some stimulus, no matter what, to keep them from everlasting dózing. Let us pity them, then, since it is physically, morally, and philosophically impossible for them to equal other classes of men more fortunately situated. I shall conclude this letter with a quotation from our illustrious Franklin, whose fame is every hour gathering like a rolling snowball. It conveys his reflections on the conduct of the House of Peers, when they negatived Lord Chatham's

motion for merely "considering his plan of conciliation with America."

"To hear," says the great philosopher, "to hear so many hereditary legislators declaiming so vehemently against, not the adopting, but the mere considering, of a proposal so important in its nature, offered by a person of so weighty a character, one of the first statesmen of the age, who had taken up his country in the lowest despondency, and conducted it to victory and glory through a war with two of the mightiest nations of Europe to hear them censuring his plan, not only from their own misunderstandings of it, but from their imagination of what was not in it, which they would not give themselves an opportunity of rectifying by a second reading-to perceive the total ignorance of the subject in some; the prejudice and passion in others; and the wilful perversion of plain truth in several of the ministers-and, upon the whole, to see it rejected by so great a majority, and so hastily too, in breach of all decorum and prudent regard to the character and dignity of their body, gave me an exceeding mean opinion of their abilities, and made their claim of sovereignty over three millions of virtuous, sensible people in America, seem the greatest of all absurdities, since they appeared to have scarcely discretion. enough to govern a herd of swine. Hereditary legislators! thought I: there would be more propriety, because less hazard of mischief, in having (as in some German universities) hereditary professors of mathematics. But this was a hasty reflection, for the elected House of Commons is no better, nor ever will be, while the electors receive money for their votes, and pay taxes, wherewithal ministers may bribe their representatives when chosen."

LETTER XX.

DEAR BROTHER,

London.

NOT only the English themselves, but almost all foreign writers, have agreed in pronouncing this government the best in the world. And yet, if we are to judge by its effects, it is one of the worst. Its debts amount to more than those of all the rest of the world put together; its taxes to more than those of all Europe; and the number of its paupers is greater in proportion than that of any country on the face of the earth. If then the tree be known by its fruits-if the effects of a system of government are to be taken as the criterion of its excellence, and the wisdom of its measures is to be tried by consequences, it does appear to me, that the constitution of England must either be a bad one, or that it has been badly administered. Lookers on often see more than actors; and what is overlooked from habit, by the natives of a country, is often precisely the ground upon which a stranger founds his conclusions. For my part, 1 do not make any pretensions to political wisdom; but having been born and brought up in a country where every man pays more or less attention to the subject, and having since had an opportunity of looking pretty narrowly into the mode in which

nations are governed in this old rickety world, I may possibly have caught some views that may serve to amuse, if not enlighten you.

From the time of the Saxon Wittenagemot, the government of England has never been the same for an age together; nor, amidst all the vague adulation lavished upon it at different times, have its most learned writers been able to agree in its principles. The law and the constitution were both settled by Blackstone, whose theories were adopted through the influence of the judges subservient to the crown, simply because they place the authority of the king pretty much upon the same footing with Hume, in his History of England. Both Blackstone and Hume were among the most able and insidious enemies to the freedom of Englishmen that England has ever produced, since they both recognise fundamental principles, that, when acted upon in their fullest extent, amount very nearly to the old dogmas of divine right, passive obedience, and non-resistance. When therefore a controversy arises, involving the prerogative of the king, or the rights of the people, instead of having a written constitution, plain in its language, and intelligible in its meaning, to decide between them, each party forthwith enters upon the most laborious researches into old charters, monkish chronicles, and vague authorities, generally admitting of at least two interpretations. The question thus becomes involved in endless discussion, and at last comes to be settled by a jury of antiquaries, who decide upon the rights of the people of England, pretty much on the same grounds they would settle a dispute about the sarcophagus of Alexander, or the era of Belzoni's mummy. How different from our simple constitution and its admirable commentary, the Federalist. Here is no ambiguity, no necessity to