Sir Robert, from a portrait, by Sir Thomas Laurence. Mild, calm, firm, and dignified, and strongly expressive of manly common sense, finely tempered with that peculiar kind of discernment which belongs to perfect good taste. It gives, of course, a more youthful idea, than suits the present age of the honourable baronet.

The address of which we have given a hurried and inadequate outline, must, of course, be printed in a separate form. We trust it will circulate widely. It will be the manual of the season in the conservative's hand to mark with clearness and precision our objects and our hopes. It has a recommendation of another kind which the absorbing interest of its political views prevented us from even noticing. We mean the strong tone of personal character which pervades it, and the clear and beautiful touches of the spirit, the taste and homebred feelings of the man. We naturally desire to see those for whom we have been taught to feel deep respect in the undress of their private pursuits, in their homes, in their travellings, in their studies, in their friendships. And there is ever felt, by all who have a touch of enthusiasm in their admiration of intellect and public worth, an earnest desire to gather those distinct notions which the events of public life, as we see them in the public journals, can never impart. In the honourable baronet's academical address which we are sorry to have been forced by extreme haste to pass, the reader will trace the honourable baronet's mind through the course of study that has made him what he is. We were forcibly reminded in reading it, of the picture which his classfellow, Byron, gives of him at Harrow." There were always great hopes of Peel

among us all-masters and scholarsand he has not disappointed them. As a scholar he was always greatly my superior; as an actor and declaimer I was reckoned at least his equal; as a schoolboy, out of school, I was always in scrapes, and he never; and in school he always knew his lesson, I rarely."

Such was the steady and bright beginning of a career, which, we trust, will be made illustrious by the prosperity of the high cause in which we are committed. There are, in the poli. tical address, some flashes of a higher spirit, for which the calm sobriety of the honourable baronet's speeches has not prepared us. He describes to an auditory, who could appreciate the appeal, his own wanderings through the sublime wilds of the Scottish Highlands. In this beautiful digression, if it may bear the name, the heart of the poet seems tempered by the deeper and more social views of the stateman's mind. And we are let into the secret of those loftier and more deepseated yearnings, that inward spirit which is only seen to the world in outward acts or in the dignified calm of patient endurance.

Sir Robert Peel, the first statesman of his own day, and with the full confidence of England, has been long obliged to take a stand in the platform of observation. He has been obliged to strive against power and authority, in high places, and to witness much that must have wrung his inmost heart. But in this position his conduct has been as high and honourable as if the conversative King of England (God bless him!) with the whole weight of his true and loyal subjects were at his side, and the truckling Melbourne administration where they should bein the dust beneath his feet.

There are many sensible people who justly think that life is too short for reading the large and learned books which a few unconscionable persons have found leisure to write. The practical part of the world may be said to abhor metaphysics, as nature was once supposed to abhor a vacuum. For its tortuous logic few men have time, and no woman patience; the former have mostly something better to employ their thoughts, and the latter come to conclusions by a shorter method of their own. It is indeed no less a curious than an edifying sight, to see the gentle shudder, or the more portentous relaxation that passes like a summer-cloud across the muscles of the nether jaw, with which a person of this shrewder sex is visibly affected, on happening to lift up by any chance the Russia leather binding which quietly inurns the deep learning of Stewart, or the magniloquent metaphysics of Brown.

Now, though we are not unwilling to admit that some little portion of this fastidious reluctance is to be attributed to a very reasonable dislike to the combined exertions of mind and muscle, which all such ponderous works require, yet there are much better reasons with which it is just that our gentle fellow students should be conversant, in order the better to be enabled to sustain the superiority of their own acquirements. The whole difference between folly and wisdom consists oftener than any one would imagine in the different reasons which can be given for the same conduct.

Of that ponderous learning which the wiser part of the world has ever and will ever leave to moulder among the kindred cobwebs of the academic shelf, it may truly be said that it conduces nothing to the knowledge of mankind. It may offer a specious scope to the unlimited aspirations of juvenile inexperience, in the unworldly twilight of college chambers, and may amuse the strenuous leisure of the pale student who pores over dissertations upon mind, until body has almost re

solved itself into a dew; but never yet, has one of these dreamers elicited from his dull researches a single practical truth, or taught any thing in life that can be of any possible use. But we must not ourselves be metaphysical.

If there is one man more likely than another to lose his way in the streets, or come smack against a lamp-post, and raise inextinguishable laughter among cabs and coaches as he somersets backward and rolls wigless into the kennel, be assured that he is deep in Brown on Causation," and the Scottish metaphysics. Should you chance unluckily to sit for half an hour in the same com pany with some wise and puzzled personage, who mars the social moments of scandal and flirtation, music and song, tale-telling and joke, with nice distinctions about reason, imagination, association of ideas, and such like immaterial entities-of the very existence of which there is little or no evidence in the waking work-day world-depend upon it that person is talking you dead out of "Hume's Essays," or "Locke upon the Human Understanding." Lastly, not to be prolix, should you have the luck to be made love to in language that sounds like a mixture of high Dutch and low English :—Oh, beware of those jaws of darkness lest they devour thee-beware of matrimo nial prolixity, and prose that knows no end till left half told by death. have fallen into the merciless hands of a disciple of Kant, who does not know what he is saying, and wants you to comprehend what he means.

You

Of these and all their tribes, one common caution must serve-close the book, fly the man, shudder at the woman. They can tell you nothing that you do not know already ten times better than themselves. That, for instance, you have within your cranium more or less of something called mind, of which you can make various uses, of which they have little or no distinct notion. That you can talk, invent stories, lecture your husband, describe the features of your acquaintance, and

hit off her character to a hair-be wise, witty, fanciful, or foolish, love or hate, contemn ог admire. But all the shrewdness in Glasgow, all the learning in Oxford, all the subtlety of Sorbonne, all the dark depths of Germany, where truth lies hidden in a well, inscrutable to mortal sense, could not enable you to do any one of these all-important things one atom better than your natural gifts admit of.

But here, we fancy ourself to hear some one ask; is it then to be concluded that all philosophy is but a fiction got up between the pedant and the publisher to impose upon the purses of mankind. No such thing-the publishers know better and so do the pub. lic. No one is imposed upon but the luckless wight who has wasted his life in trying to be wiser than the rest of the world. Few will be found to believe fewer to read, and fewest to buy. The world will infallibly write him down an ass-without troubling itself to stand one single instant puzzling about the matter.

We are ourself not quite so uncharitable, having, if it must be confessed, when very young, been once betrayed into such readings; and it excited our admiration to notice how much labor and time were so curiously wasted in searching for what every body knows, or what has no existence and is at the very highest a grain of wheat in a bushel of chaff. We may indeed sum the whole of our discoveries in these sage books, in the Poet's just and admirable maxim which should be inscribed in golden letters over the gates of all universities in Europe

"And thinking but an idle waste of thought." Having discoursed thus far, upon this unprofitable study, we must now, with like distinctness, explain that which we propose to substitute for it. It is then, our opinion, that all such knowledge as can be usefully brought to bear on life, must be derived from the observation of its phenomena. Instead of commencing, like some well-known authorities, with the oyster, and elaborately tracing from this simple stage of animal existence, to the more complex combinations of two-legged unfeathered humanity, we take our stand at once among the visible and audible scenes of life; the street-the fire-side-the assembly-and, like the Athenian, bring down philosophy from the tenth beaven, into the haunts of men. Uniting the sagacity of Socrates, the shrewd

sarcasm of Diogenes, the pathos of Heraclitus, and the laughter-moving drollery of Democritus, as occasion may require, we shall then develope our stores of accumulated observation into a well-digested philosophy. This we promise, shall be as a faithful mirror in which the moving world shall be reflected, and to which every one may come to take a peep at her own lovely face.

As we are most especially anxious to avoid being for an instant confounded with that class, whose utter absurdity we have so precisely demonstrated, we shall take care to be as unlike them as possible in all things. And as it has always been the custom for these gentlemen to discuss the most insignificant absurdity, as if it were matter of the most solemn importance; we shall, on the contrary, settle the profoundest questions, and irrefragably establish upon immortal foundations, the most vital truths, with the most apparent unconsciousness of being more deep than our neighbours. We shall use our wisdom, as Newton is said to have used his fluxionary calculus : having by the deepest reasoning discovered our conclusious, we shall explain them by a simpler method to the rest of the world. We shall vary at every page from the sublime to the closely bordering limit of the grotesque -from the laughable to the patheticfrom the light to the profound: as the subject may require we shall be poetically luxuriant or dryly sententious. One thing we must seriously promise, that every reader must not expect to find our whole meaning always quite apparent on the surface-this would obviously be inconsistent with having much meaning. It must be ever recollected that reality has its depths as well as invention its obscurities. It is therefore to be recommended to our more youthful students; however frivolous a remark may seem, to trust that it means more than meets the ear of inexperience, and patiently to read on to the end of the next page. If he should not find it there, we assure him that when he is a few months older, a second perusal will change his mind. If this will not do, we must refer him to posterity; which, it is presumed, will always appreciate rightly what the present age cannot understand.

The person who pretends to be wiser than the rest of mankind, has no business with the affectation of superior modesty. Yet, strange to say, the

most inordinate pretenders are those who have affected this virtue the most. We utterly reject this impudent pretension-this nolo episcopari of authorship. We have no notion of dressing our philosophy in the blushing attire of self-convicted folly, and hanging our heads before those we offer to instruct.

We must, therefore, in concluding this introduction, endeavour to convey some distinct notion of our qualifications and personal character.

If the reader is a frequenter of public places he has of course often particularly noted a tall, slight-built, darklooking gentleman, with a pale and sallow, but singularly expressive faceof whom it might be said with truth, that being once seen, he cannot easily be forgotten. This is ourself. We commonly walk the streets, having our head bent a little forward, and very slightly (for we avoid exaggerations) inclined towards our right or left shoulder, our lip yet quivers with the movement of some recent emotion, or is compressed with the energy of tacit thought our eye betrays the quick observer. At moments a smile, indicating shrewd, but not ill-natured remark, stands tiptoe on our cheek, or plays with unsettled purpose round the corners of our mouth and last, a slight triple furrow between our brows,

:

marks that habitual intensity of intellectual concentration, which must belong to one who looks through and through the deeds of men. In a word, by thinking of the "lean and hungry Cassius," the reader may do us justice in many respects.

Such is the semblance of our outward man. Our study is the world: men and women are our books; our ponderous folios and our light, ornamented octavos-our sermons and jestbooks; our tragic volumes and gay romances, all written in the same old universal language, which pedant cannot teach, or dull pretender read.

Often have we stood in the marketplace—and while, to vulgar eye, we seemed to be pondering the merits of a cauliflower—in reality read off whole chapters of moral truth, such as might well astonish the deepest academic into the confession of helpless ignorance. Still more frequently are we seen in crowded theatre, or thronged exhibition, observing nature, not art, and intently watching the play of feeling or thought upon the surrounding galaxy of bright eyes. Philosophy, as Lord Brougham has observed, has its pleasures as well as its advantages.— Of this we shall have to exhibit num.

berless illustrations in the progress of

our discourse.

J. U. U.

It was on a splendid morning in the autumn of the year 181-, the Howard transport, with four hundred of his Majesty's 4-th Regt. dropped anchor in the beautiful harbour of Cove; the sea shone under the purple light of the rising sun with a rich rosy hue, beautifully in contrast with the different tints of the foliage of the deep woods already tinged with the brown of autumn. Spike Island lay "sleeping upon its broad shadow," and the large ensign which crowns the battery was wrapped around the flag-staff, there not being even air enough to stir it. It was still so early, that but few persons were abroad; and as we leaned over the bulwarks, and looked now, for the first time for eight long years, upon British ground, many an eye filled, and many a heaving breast told how full of recollections that short moment was, and how different our feelings from the gay buoyancy with which we had sailed from that same harbour for the Peninsula; many of our best and bravest had we left behind us, and more than one, native to the land we were approaching had found his last rest in the soil of the stranger. It was, then, with a mingled sense of pain and pleasure, we gazed upon that peaceful little village, whose white cottages lay dotted along the edge of the barbour. The moody silence our thoughts had shed over us was soon broken the preparations for disembarking had begun, and I recollect well to this hour how, shaking off the load that op pressed my heart, I descended the gangway, humming poor Wolfe's wellknown song

"Why, soldiers, why

Should we be melancholy, boys ?"

And to this elasticity of spirits, whether the result of my profession, or the gift of God as Dogberry has it-I know not, I owe the greater portion of the VOL. IX.

happiness I have enjoyed in a life, whose changes and vicissitudes have equalled most men's.

Drawn up in a line along the shore, I could scarce refrain from a smile at our appearance. Four weeks on board a transport will certainly not contribute much to the "personel" of any unfortunate therein confined; but when, in addition to this, you take into account that we had not received new clothes for three years if I except caps for our grenadiers, originally intended for a Scotch regiment, but found to be all too small for the long-headed generation. Many a patch of brown and grey, variegated the faded scarlet, and scarcely a pair of knees in the entire regiment did not confess their obligations to a blanket. But with all this, we showed a stout weather-beaten front, that, disposed as the passer-by might feel to a laugh at our expense, very little caution would teach him it was fully as safe to indulge it in his sleeve.

The bells from every steeple and tower rung gaily out a peal of welcome as we marched into "that beautiful city called Cork," our band playing "Garryowen"

for we had been originally raised in Ireland, and still among our officers maintained a strong majority from that land of punch, priests, and potatoesthe tattered flag of the regiment proudly waving over our heads, and not a man amongst us whose warm heart did not bound behind a Waterloo medal. Well— well! I am now-alas that I should say it-somewhat in the "sear and yellow;" and I confess, after the experience of some moments of high, triumphant feeling, that I never before felt within me, the same animating, spirit-filling glow of delight as rose within my heart that day, as I marched at the head of my company down George'sstreet.

L