1820.7 revolutions, conquests, bloody battles, massacres, and every sort of extreme surgical operation: we are in hopes, however, that our radicalism will pass away without opening another vein; the bleeding at Manchester, rather, it is to be apprehended, added to the inflammatory symptoms of the disease. What we chiefly trust to as the remedy in this case, is the more thorough acquaintance which, in this season of distress and suffering, those in the higher stations of society will form with the lower. As fear subsides, sympathy will increase, and there will be a greater eagerness to supply, in as far as is possible, all the physical and moral wants of the poor. That there is something wrong in our institutions for these purposes, is pretty apparent, from the evil being increased rather than diminished by their means. Nor is it yet clear how the remedy is to be brought about; but there are vast resources in the human mind, when it is brought steadily to bear upon any subject, and methods may be discovered, which even Mr Owen has been unable to hit upon. The great thing, as we have said, is to bring all the classes of society into contact, and to make them take a deep interest in each other, and this the present state of affairs is doing for us. The lower classes, in particular, have been laid open and exhibited, as a subject in an anatomical school, for the inspection of the higher: they have seen them in their ignorance and in their knowledge, in their turbulence, and in their patience, in their piety, and in their infidelity. The spectacle has been terrible and alarming, no less than affecting,-and in both ways, it will operate, we trust, to good. Legislators and the higher classes will be made to feel, that even the less reasonable demands of the lower are not entirely to be neglected, that in their utmost extravagancies, it is still human nature that is at work, and that none of the workings of a nature, which is common to us all, are to be met without some degree of sympathy. Extravagant demands will be silenced by reasonable concessions ;-even our ministers are now become Parliamentary reformers in their way,-every thing must have a beginning, and it is in such beginnings that we rather ground our hopes for the future, than permit our fears to be awakened by any supposed in fringements on the letter of the con- There is an immense deal attempt- We may be asked, perhaps, do we really then expect this perfection of society in the present world, as what is ever likely to be realized? We cannot pretend to predict what will be actually attained, because we have no complete view of the plans of Di vine Providence throughout; we see a little in our own day, and we connect what we see with the history of former ages, however obscurely and imperfectly, that in most instances may be handed down to us. What we see is the progress rather than the beginning or the end, and we cannot speak very distinctly of the beginning, nor very confidently of the end. But it is a noble thing to catch the progress, and, in fact, the highest wisdom that man can show, and what may well call forth his most enlightened efforts, is, in every age, as human nature proceeds, to fix the points of progress, and to make those efforts bear upon them. The point to which the present age seems to have reached is, that human nature is coming out more visibly from its adventitious distinctions: that it is not now as princes, or nobles, or citizens or peasants, that we class men in our imaginations, at all to the degree, at least, that formerly was customary: we are rather disposed to look upon all simply as men, and although there is not yet that charm in the word humanity which we think will one day be attached to it, yet the progress seems to be going on to that point. The French Revolution, and the quantity of wild yet shrewd perceptions which accompanied it, gave a very rude shock to many of the old prejudices of society which they will never recover: we do not know that any thing better has yet come in their room, but we think we can see the tendency to improvement. The only strong aristocracy at present is that of talent, and that we are not disposed to admire, in itself, more than any other, for it is as proud, and supercilious, and selfish as any. Its only advantages are, that it is a lottery in which all men may have nearly an equal chance of drawing -that it is a part of man and not of his condition, and that the efforts of talent must in the long-run benefit the species. It may mislead in individual instances, but misdirected talent is encountered by such as is well directed. This, then, is a great point in the progress; the next grand point must be the overthrow of selfish tastes, and private vanities. Men must love knowledge for itself, and its uses, and not for display, they must love activity for the good of their fellow creatures, and not for their own aggran disement, they must, in a word, know much more of human nature, and enter more thoroughly into all its sentiments, and love it much more, not as it appears in themselves, and in their own retired conceit,-but as it is reflected from every heart, and as it burns from bosom to bosom. We have no fantastic conceptions of a sudden perfectibility, but we see a possibility in men stepping more and more out of themselves and their narrow spheres; and on the realization of such a possibility, we see in man no longer the contracted being of corrupt Nature, but the expanding soul which is touched by the fire of a higher and purer institution. The present state of this country gives, as we have already hinted, no slight facilities for this result. The circumstances of the lower orders are forced upon the attention of the higher, to a degree which never equally took place, and the contemplation must be attended, we believe, with an increase of hearty and sympathetic humanity. Is it not evident how much the character of the higher orders will be improved, in consequence, both their moral and intellectual character? If they see with their own eyes, and come into contact with distresses which their exertions can to a very considerable extent remove, will they not abate somewhat of their thoughtless dissipation, and feel that the real happiness of their nature is to be found in moral and beneficent occupation? And what a field is there opened for the noblest efforts of legislative intelligence, in all those questions respecting the support and the education of the people, which are now agitating in the nation! As to the people, and their extravagancies of disaffection, these are best to be cured by a feeling that they are not neglected; and they will feel this more and more, the more that they become the objects, not only of legislative care, but of the general sympathy of the orders above them. Much, too, is to be done by the progress of sound religion, of which, perhaps, we have more of the scaffolding, at present, among us, than of the solid building. Without this holy principle, indeed, actuating the whole frame of society, nothing will go on well or steadily to good;-all ranks are called devoutly to imbibe it, as what alone can infuse a moral life into the exer- "Let us not suppose, from the regula rity of the works of the Almighty, that having produced that system which we have been contemplating, he ever withdraws himself for a moment from any of the parts of his creation. He who sustains the life of the minutest animacule, while at the same time he launches along the comets, is omnipresent and omniscient, and governeth all. The particular provi. dence of God, however, as consistent with the nature of man as a free agent, is among the difficulties which encircle this great subject. But as an affectionate earthly parent still bends a friendly eye towards a son, though he is set out into the world, leading him with his counsel, and protect ing him with his influence, may we not suppose also our heavenly Father, though he worketh unseen, to turn towards us his children his fostering care, to prompt us to do well, to strengthen our good resolutions, to shield us in the hour of danger, and to guard us in that of temptation? Nor let us doubt of his government, because in that, as in many other instances, we cannot comprehend his doings. The events of it are as unexpected as our foresight is limited. The brethren of Joseph were but selling a slave, while the Ruler of nations was in him sending a prime minister into Egypt, and forming an important doubt that we are his special care-we to earth "* "In systems of false philosophy, attempts have been made to account for what have been considered anomalies in the affairs of human life, by supposing a principle of evil to exist as well as one of good; but let us not detract from the Almighty by such futile conjectures. The Governor of the universe is one and supreme. In the material world every step in the advancement of knowledge has deLet us trust then, that the more we know veloped the most beautiful arrangement. of the moral government of God, the more shall we discover of order; and taking into view, that the present is but a preparatory state, the recollection of our ultimate destination may solve our difficulties and dispel our doubts." IVANHOE, BY THE AUTHOR OF IT is very difficult to write any thing worth reading on the works of • Milton. an author which are in the hands of every one, which the whole world are discussing over their wine and their coffee, and with the remarks on which we are apt to become sickened, by hearing them so often repeated, almost in the very same words, and yet with the tone and look as if they were quite new and original, in the mouth of the fair or the dandy critic, who is retailing them for the fiftieth time. "Have you read Ivanhoe?" is a question from which we turn with a feeling of nausea; and then to be paraded again over the splendid tournamentto listen to debates on the comparative merits of Bois-Guilbert and Front-de Boeuf-to be carried through all the horrors of the latter worthy's castleand to hear some pretty creature say, "Whether do you think the Jewess or Flora M'Ivor is the author's chefd'auvre in female character?"-all this is rather too much for human patience. If we could do so, in decency, we should give Ivanhoe the slip altogether, not that we admire it less than others, but that we really do not know very well how to express our admiration, or what to do with the book at all. Are we to give an account of the story? It would be quite as much to the purpose to relate the story of Macbeth or of Hamlet. Are we to make long quotations from a book which every human creature in his Majesty's dominions that can read at all, has been thumbing over already?-(we cannot say how often our own copy has been lent out, and we are sorry to say it has returned to us very black and dirty, and under a necessity of immediate application to the binder.) Or are we to add to that collection of silly common-place criticisms, of which we have just been expressing our abhorrence? We shall do in this difficulty as the good Knight Le Noir Faineant did when he was lost in the wood,-e'en throw the reins over our horse's neck, and permit him to carry us whithersoever he will. If we light upon as good fare as was to be found in the hermitage of Friar Tuck, after the first mouthful or two of dry pease, we shall not come off ill. We need not inform our readers that this story is laid in the reign of Richard Cœur de Lion; but we may remark, that there could not be a more interesting period fixed upon for an English romance. The great variety --- afforded by the yet imperfect blending of the Saxon natives with their Norman conquerors, the jealousy between the two races,-the disorderly state of the country, which gave scope to all the bad passions of the barons, all the licentiousness of the clergy, and all the wild freedom of outlaws and freebooters,-the singular state of the Jews, who come into prominent view in the picture of that age, then, the splendours of chivalry,the romantic expeditions to the Holy Land,-the character of Richard himself, almost as much belonging, in its real features, to the regions of raised imagination as the most highly-coloured traits in the poetical knights of Ariosto,-contrasted so finely, too, with the baseness and total worthlessness of his brother John, which could yet be partly veiled under the grace of elegant and courtly manners: Here is a fine field, surely, for the most graphic powers of genius to expatiate in, and they have been called forth in their highest energy, by the kindling efficacy of such a picture, opening in all its glow, before our great modern painter of manners. His genius, indeed, seems to expand with the extent of its objects. He had already walked like a ghost-seeing seer through the bold but bleak scenery of his native land, and, wherever his glance was turned, the forms and the manners of ancient times had started up before him-whether in the rude mansions of its chieftains, in the caves of its mountaineers, in the cottages of its intelligent and religious peasantry, or even in the most secret nooks and hiding-places of its dingy cities. He had given colour and poetry to the coldest and least aspiring aspects of human life; and such has been the magic of his genius, that even the Saltmarket of Glasgow and the Grassmarket of our own venerable city are trodden by the pilgrims of the South with as profound an awe of reverence as the streets of Jerusalem of old, or those of Rome and Athens, in the present day. We were not quite prepared, however, to find this great master equally at home in the grand and boundless field of English society and history. Scotland is a page in the history of the world, by itself,—a pagi in which there is a deep and wild fascination when the eye is fastened upon it, a page over which we may weep or laugh, or wonder, but which scarcely can make us burn and glow; there is a coldness in it at the best, except, perhaps, to those who are "native here, and to the manner born,"-and it leads not to any extensive views of human affairs. The page of English history, again, opens into all the splendour, variety, and amazing results of the noblest institutions and manners which the world has ever seen: they are interesting at whatever period we fasten upon them, and not least where, in the chaos of their origin, we can scarcely see any trace of their present form and pressure. The picture of English manners, through the wonders of their history, is, therefore, among the widest and the most concatenated that can be offered to the imagination, and we hope once more to see it presented to us in a fine series of dramatic representations. We had thought there was only one mighty mind for whom these had been reserved-for two at the most-for Chaucer and Shakespeare. Chaucer has painted the external appearances and bearings of the moral map of English manners-Shakespeare has given all the glow of words and of characteristic action. The present author, however, has justified to himself an application of the lines of Dryden The force of Nature could no farther go, To make a third, she joined the former two. We do not mean here to assert the superiority, or even the equality, of his genius to either of these great poets; but we may say, that, in its character, he unites, in the present work, the peculiar excellencies both of Chaucer and of Shakespeare. He gives us, with the former, the minute painting of features, of dress, of demeanour; he enters with the latter into the interior of the soul, and shows the same human nature acting under all outward disguises. He has the wide variety of both, mingled, too, at times, with the fantastic and gay buoyancy of Ariosto, and with some of the wilder extravagancies of the other dramatists of Shakespeare's age, rather than his school. If in this repre-entation we seem to be raising our author too high, we must say, that we are, after all, describing him only as an imitator, and rather as drawing from the sources of poets than of that Nature from which they drew-but then he is an imita VOL. VI. tor who can fly at all game alike, and who, here, has followed close in the traces of those who have hitherto been imagined quite unapproachable and inimitable. Is it necessary for us to give an outline of this story? "Quae quibus anteferam?" The knight of Ivanhoe, son of Cedric, the Saxon, whom his father had banished from his presence, because the love of chivalry had borne him to the court of Richard, returns in disguise from the Holy Land,and wins all the prizes at a tournament held by John, and in the presence of his father and of his lady love,-a Saxon princess, the ward of Cedric, who had likewise imputed it as a crime to his son that he had aspired to her hand, while there was reinaining a branch of the royal house, to whom that zealous partizan had wished to see her united. He is wounded in the last day of the tournament, and is suddenly borne off from the field by the orders of a beautiful Jewess, whose father he had formerly relieved in a pressing difficulty. The fair Israelite thought she was merely repaying her father's debt of gratitude, but she had been witness, too, of all the gallant knight's exploits; and another impression seems imperceptibly to have influenced her. While he was removing in a litter along with her and her father, they joined company in a forest, with Cedric and his friends, on their return home after the tournament, when they were all set upon by a party of John's courtiers in the disguise of banditti, one of whom had & design upon the hand and lands of the Saxon Lady Rowena. They are carried into a castle now in pcssession of a Norman baron, but at no distant time, belonging to one of Cedric's friends. A gallant outlaw (who turns out to be no other than Robin Hood) forms a plan for their rescue, and is assisted by a knight in black armour, to whose aid Ivanhoe had been much beholden during the tournament, but who immediately afterwards took his departure, and could no where be found. Robin Hood accidentally lights upon him, carousing and making merry in the hermitage of Friar Tuck, one of the said Robin's party, who found it convenient to personate a hermit. A great band is collected, in which Cedric's swineherd and Jester are conspicuous figures, |