Directors, or it might amend it; but when so amended, could not enforce its transmission to India.

"The Parliament might vote a declaratory resolution, but it had not the means of giving it effect.

"The Court of Directors might prepare a dispatch, and the Crown might fully approve of it; but the Proprietors might prohibit its being forwarded.

"Such a state of things called loudly for some remedy. The difficulty was to devise a scheme which should preserve the East India Company, who had been found a valuable instrument in administering the affairs of India, and at the same time infuse a vigour into the system, and impart a power to some constituted branch of it, which should be effectual for all the purposes of good government, without endangering the constitution.

"How far the object was attained, will be seen in the measure submitted to Parliament by the Minister, and ultimately passed into a law with the concurrence of all parties interested in its completion.

ART. XI.

1.-Posthumous Memoirs of a Peeress; or, the Days of Fox. Edited by Lady C. BURY. 3 vols. Colburn.

2.-The Clockmaker; or, the Sayings and Doings of Samuel Slick, of Slickville. 12mo. 367 pp. Bentley.

3.-Piso and the Præfect; or, the Ancients off their Stilts. 3 vols. Smith, Elder, and Co.

4.-The Victims of Society. By the Countess of BLESSINGTON. 3 vols. Saunders and Otley.

As usual the most fruitful branch of the literary tree is that of prosaic fiction; and although we have, of late, treated our readers to numerous and various tastings obtained from this prolific source, perhaps on no occasion has this sort of presentation contained such a diversified and richly concocted dish as the one that is now before us. It is really too far gone in the day, among the cents. of novels that are issuing from the press, to attempt anything like a critical classification, or precise appreciation of their individual departments and merits. Such an undertaking would amount to nothing better than a splitting of hairs, or it might be, a disarrangement of niceties. Suffice it, in a general way, to declare that an extraordinary amount of talent-may we not add of presumption-of crudities, and eccentricities, are in these latter times, drafted into the service of the imaginative powers? and being the most open and seemingly available sphere, no wonder, during the era of almost universal authorship, it should be well occupied. Without farther preliminaries, therefore, we now proceed to offer our candid opinion

relative to each of the noticeable, and, indeed, clever works at the head of this article.

The "Memoirs of a Peeress," purport to be edited by Lady Charlotte Bury; that is, as we apprehend, she is the authoress, and and by this very flimsy sort of profession, hopes to throw around the performance, a presumptive excitement and recommendation that may help forward the interest of the story. And yet on our part this is taking matters too seriously, for certainly it is a legitimate device, which studies, either to put the reader of a work of fiction in good terms with the author he is about to consult, or by a harmless stratagem to transport him from the open day of reality to the realms of imagination. But however this may be, no one who reads the smallest portion of the work, can for a moment dream or feel that it required any trickery to recommend it.

The intention of these Memoirs is to show up the fashionable vices and ways that prevailed in the London world fifty years ago. The Prince of Wales, Fox, Sheridan, Carlton House, and many other easily recognized characters and scenes, though not so plainly pronounced, appear on the foreground.

We need not, at least, we will not endeavour to thread the intricacies of the story, nor to pursue the line of art that connects a great number of actors and episodes, which serve to build up the fabric of the plot. It may be enough to state, that a country squire's daughter, noble by the mother's side, is sent to the metrolis, and under the protection of a fashionable but giddy aunt, who happens to be a duchess, and a widow, proud and poor, is appointed to entrap a coronet. The amiable and virtuous young lady, however, chooses for herself, and weds a man who is not rich in gold, but in independence of spirit and high accomplishments. A good deal of tragedy follows this step; and we can only add, always alarmed as we are of forestalling and murdering, that the duchess is made to wind up the moral of the tale by a deserved fate. Now for some specimens, which, though cleverly conceived, may easily be detected, as the work of one accustomed to draw far more upon the resources of a vivid imagination, than the stores of solid study or accurate information. Here is an attempt at a generalized picture of high life, as it existed in London half a century ago.

Though London was then comparatively circumscribed, and the outworks of the great world were far more strongly set up against the approaches of aspiring opulence, society was less easy to collect into a focus. There existed, as in Paris, distinct societies of the court and the town; and Windsor Castle ate its roast mutton, while Carlton House fed upon devilled kidneys. Religion and politics, if less potential, were more polemic. People did not slide from a house where high church implied salvation, to one where low church was all in all: or glide from an assembly given by a Whig premier, to a ball graced by the blessed hierarchy of the Tories.

There were as many divisions and subdivisions in society, as there are canals in the city of Ghent, where a thousand bridges are indispensable to enable neighbour A to live on neighbourly terms with neighbour B. Under such disadvantages a general picture of society must be less accurate than at the present time, when all is imitation,-all echo,-all tautology; -when half the platform just reflects the other,' and the aristocracy of rank stands grimacing, like a posture-master on its pedestal, in order that its illegitimate brother, the aristocracy of wealth, may try to prove affinity, by aping every contortion, and out-vaulting every leap. Nevertheless, some generalities existed that serve to inscribe the epoch on my memory. Much as has been said of the demoralisation of the higher classes during the decrepitude of George IV., the demoralisation prevalent during his youth was far more remarkable. Paris, like a repentant Magdalen, affected just then, on the death of a vicious, and the accession of a virtuous sovereign, the most prudish propriety; and, as Horace Walpole used to say of France and England, that, like the sea and land, one could not gain without the other being a loser,' the vices put out of countenance by Louis XVI., took refuge under the protection of the Prince of Wales. Madame du Barri retreated into the obscurity of her pavilion at Luciennes, and the emblazoned chariot of a Perdita drove triumphantly through the parish of St. James. From the days of Alcibiades, however, to those of Brummel, fine gentlemen have existed, like excrescences on the oak, the disease and not the product of the age. It is rather from the women, the matrons of the times, I would draw deductions of its morality; and I own that, in defiance of the example of a most domestic court, the noble ladies, my contemporaries, would have little to learn from the levities of their granddaughters. Though less graced with superficial accomplishments than the damsels of to-day, our reasoning faculties were at that time better cultivated. We performed no miraculous concertos, competed for no prizes at the Society of Arts; but we were the chosen associates of a Johnson, a Cowper, a Sheridan. We listened more, we chattered less. But this superiority of intellectual cultivation added only a new page to the annals of gallantry. It was only the conversion of Laïs into Aspasia. From Mrs. Robinson to my lovely relative, the danger was but magnified through the atmosphere of refinement surrounding the meretricious charms of the goddess of voluptuousness. In its highest circles of haut ton, London already emulated the witty profligacy of Paris under the sceptre of Louis XV., and the influence of a Boufflers and a Du Deffand. Of these, enough, and too much, has been consigned to us, in the memoirs of their day. But, saving in the archives of Doctors' Commons, nothing remains to perpetuate the peccadilloes of our grandmothers; for England is a prude who, like the Spartan virgins, heeds not that her zone should be unbound, so it be done in silence and obscurity. Nevertheless, a few septuagenarians, like myself, are not hypocritical enough to witness, unmoved, the canonization of our century. Like the devil's advocate. general, whose duty it is to plead against every new aspirant to the honors of the kalendar, I lift up my voice to attest that the last age was a sinner in its generation; and, unmisled by maternal blindness or bitterness, have no hesitation in tracing the effeminacy and fatuity of certain lords of the creation and the realm of the present day, to the enervating and vicious

habits of their progenitresses. When I arrived in London, its ways were pleasant, but wrong.' It was something, at least, that they were • pleasant,' for I have since found them 'wrong,' yet mightily disagreeable.”

There are some hard rubs upon saintship; but being put into the mouth of a frivolous person, and levelled at hypocrisy, do not militate against the piety of the author. For example, the Duchess asks, "What but the desire of high distinction in paradise is the origin of saintship?" Then there is Sir Obadiah Shenstone, a man of low extraction, who on his return from Bengal, thought to gloze over, in the eyes of man, that origin, by bribing into wedlock the daughter of an earl; and "to gloze over, in the eyes of Heaven, the sin of his oriental peculations, by trying to make a conventicle of the House of Commons, and assuming in the conventicle the dictatorial importance of a conscript-father."

We return, in our last extract, in preference to these imaginary scandals, to some notices, perhaps not less fanciful, which yet allude to real personages. The Prince again is introduced.

"From the day of obtaining his majority, he had laid the foundations of expensive buildings at Carlton House, and of debts of honour and **** innumerable. Every folly of the day grew to excess under his cultivation. He out-drove Sir John Lade-he out-diced Charles Fox. Ten thousand guineas were expended in a single year on his toilet; and, between play-debts and debts of gallantry, the turf and the tailor's shop, it was hard to say in what quarter his royal highness's pecuniary engagements lay heaviest. But the nation, or (as the London part of the nation is called) the public, was satisfied! So long as he shared his hazard with Charles Fox, his claret with Sheridan, not a syllable was to be said. The sordid respectability of Kew, or the petty German courtliness of Windsor, might be lampooned by Wolcot, reviled by Junius, and burned in effigy by Wilkes's mob ;-while the fine, gay, bold-faced *** of Carlton House was a thing to be applauded in play-houses, and rewarded by prodigal grants to his Majesty's court of parliament. Well!-Heaven mend us! -The cardinal virtues of this virtuous kingdom of Great Britain have ever been a stiff-necked and perverse generation! Time out of mind our sovereigns expectant have waged war against our sovereigns regnant, with a ready faction at their heels."

There is cleverness and too much truth in the current of these shadowings. But what we are now about to speak of, and cite, will surpass the Peeress's Memoirs, at least in the matter of vulgarity and humour; for "Samuel Slick of Slickville" is a sly and a queer fellow. This work, we believe, appeared first in some one of the Nova Scotia journals, or periodicals, and being full of the Yankee character, is hardly so well suited to our quarter of the globe, as more familiar slang and sallies of humour might be. In fact, these materials are rather too thickly laid on, and frequently repeated, to meet in a taking manner our taste. Nevertheless, the perambulating clockmaker is a shrewd chap, and has an excellent

knack at disposing of his goods to the best advantage, as well as at making homely and home-thrust remarks.

"What a pity it is, Mr. Slick,' (for such was his name), 'what a pity it is,' said I, that you, who are so successful in teaching these people the value of clocks, could not also teach them the value of time!' I guess,' said he, they have got that ring to grow on their horns yet, which every four-year-old has in our country. We reckon hours and minutes to be dollars and cents. They do nothing in these parts but eat, drink, smoke, sleep, ride about, lounge at taverns, make speeches at temperance meetings, and talk about house of assembly. If a man don't hoe his corn, and he don't get a crop, he says it is all owing to the bank; and if he runs into debt, and is sued, why, he says the lawyers are a curse to the country. They are a most idle set of folks, I tell you.'

There is a good deal said of certain great men both in England and the United States. Here is a sample.

"Taking a small penknife from his pocket, he began to whittle a thin piece of dry wood which lay on the hearth; and, after musing some time, said, 'I guess you've never been in the States.' I replied that I had not, but that, before I returned to England, I proposed visiting that country. There,' said he, you'll see the great Daniel Webster; he's a great man, I tell you; King William, No. 4, I guess, would be no match for him as an orator; he'd talk him out of sight in half an hour. If he was in your house of commons, I reckon he'd make some of your great folks look pretty streaked; he's a true patriot and statesman, the first in our country, and a most particular cute lawyer. There was a Quaker chap too cute for him once, tho'. This Quaker, a pretty knowin' old shaver, had a cause down to Rhode Island; so he went to Daniel to hire him to go down and plead his case for him; so, says he, Lawyer Webster, what's your fee?' Why,' says Daniel, let me see, I have to go down south to Washington to plead the great insurance case of the Hartford Company; and I've got to be at Cincinnati, to attend the convention; and I don't see how I can go to Rhode Island without great loss and great fatigue; it would cost you, may be, more than you'd be willing to give.' Well, the Quaker looked pretty white about the gills, I tell you, when he heard this; for he could not do without him no how, and he did not like this preliminary talk of his at all: at last he made bold to ask him the worst of it, what he would take? Why,' says Daniel, 'I always liked the Quakers; they are a quiet, peaceable people, who never go to law if they can help it, and it would be better for our great country if there were more such people in it. I never seed or heerd tell of any harm in 'em, except going the whole figure for Gineral Jackson, and that everlastin', almighty villain, Van Buren; yes, I love the Quakers; I hope they'll go to the Webster ticket yet, and I'll go for you as low as I can any way afford; say 1000 dollars.' The Quaker well nigh fainted when he heerd this, but he was pretty deep too; so, says he, Lawyer, that's a great deal of money; but I have more causes there: if I give you the 1000 dollars, will you plead the other cases I shall have to give you?' 'Yes,' says Daniel, I will, to the best of my humble abilities. So down they went to Rhode Island, and Daniel tried the case, and carried it for