the greater good, and the lesser or the least evil, the view of human reason, will vary and correspond with the extent and accuracy, of its knowledge of good and evil.

wisdom or learning, of his predecessors and contemporaries. In doing justice to other authors, and in liberality, forbearance and forgiveness, even towards his most implacable adversaries, his most rancorous revilers; he displays a magnanimity, candor and christian charity, unexampled in the annals of literature; and strangely contrasted with the polemical and more than pagan acrimony, that often characterises even religious controversies. He makes free use of the discoveries and speculations of other philosophers, but his manner of combining, illustrating, applying and impressing these principles, is all his own.

With more than "Roman boldness," and often with Attic simplicity, energy and eloquence; and with a sincerity, benignity and earnestness, infusing into the soul of the reader, the philanthropy from which they flow, this author inculcates what he believes to be truth, and exposes, what he believes to be His severest censor may be safely challenged, to point out a single paragraph in his writings, marked by illiberality, misanthropy or uncharitableness. In these respects, he is a model to authors.

error.

It may be added, that by far the most conclusive and persuasive reasonings against rash innovation and revolutionary violence, that have ever been urged; are urged by this author, in his chapters on "political associations," "resistance," and "revolutions."

Anarchy, conspiracy, tyrannicide, and lawless violence in every shape it can assume, have no more decided and conscientious adversaries; nor has the tranquil, gradual, temperate and measured progress of improvement and reform, a sincerer or a more able advocate, than the author of " Political Justice." Hateful as that work is, in the eyes of all the blind idolaters, more hateful still in the eyes and to the hearts, of all the hypocritical

R

But farther, as the Creator of the universe, is believed to have announced through the medium of divine reve

but interested slaves, of feudal institutions; it is most hateful in the eyes of Jacobins, and imo corde, most hated, by headlong enthusiastic and self-idolizing innovators.

Should the "Political Justice" fall into the hands of the arch-jacobin, in his melancholy exile in the island of St. Helena; and it is far better fitted to console and sooth his remorse. ful spirit, than the immetrical effusions, of the monster-monger, (Milton's antipode and ape, and Moloch's catamite) who has been alternately the blasphemer and the blazoner, the iconoclast, and the idolater, of Satan's extinguished satellite: should the fallen Napoleon, chance to peruse the "Political Justice," he may be conceived to apostrophise its author, in the language which the great poet, has imagined to be addressed by Satan to the sun.

To thee I call,

But with no friendly voice, and add thy name
To tell thee, how I hate thy beams.

Spontaneously and deeply too, will the heart of the fallen Napoleon, respond to another burst of superhuman sublimity, in this wonderful soliloquy:

Ay me, they little knew

How dearly I abode that boast so vain,

While they ador'd me on th' imperial throne,

With diadem and sceptre high advanc'd,

The lower still I fell, only supreme

In misery; SUCH JOY AMBITION FINDS.

Amen. So be it: So has it ever been: So may it ever be So, under the government of God, must it ever be.

Yet with all these solid claims to the respect and esteem of every intelligent public, in an enlightened age: with these peculiar claims, to candid expostulation, rather than stern remonstrance; "to grave rebuke," softened by generous forgiv

lation, the awful, but animating, the solemn and sublime, but consolatory truth; that the human soul is immortal:

ness, for his involuntary and conscientious errors, this author has been for sixteen years, a bye-word of infamy; the butt of ridicule; a mark for the sharp-shooters of calumny; a victim for the tomahawk of vituperative satire; and the selected victim on which, the odium theologicum, has poured out the " consuming phials of its wrath."

This is the author whose name innocent infancy, has been taught by amiable mothers, to lisp with horror; which generous and ingenuous youth has been instructed, to utter with alternate detestation and derision; which manhood has forgotten its dignity, and "fallen to cursing like a very drab;" which hoary and hoarding age," without heat, affection, limb, or bounty, to make its riches pleasant," has opened its faultering lips, to execrate.

It has been too long and too tamely endured, by the timid and temporising friends of freedom, by the panic-struck partizans of justice, and even by the gallant and chivalrous champions of truth; that this mild, magnanimous, unresisting, uncomplaining martyr, at the altar of philanthropy and sincerity; should not do pennance merely, (that justice would award;) but be pilloried like a caitiff, gibbetted like a malefactor; for the admixture of involuntary, conscientious and speculative errors, with the promulgation of inestimable and practical truths.

It has been too long and too tamely endured; not in London, Paris, Vienna, and St. Petersburg; but in the metropolis of Scotland, and by the appellate tribunals for the administration of literary justice, which the genius of metaphysical and ethical philosophy, has established there.

It has been too long and too tamely endured, not in insular, but in continental Albion, in the American republic; the last, the vast, and we are permitted to trust, the inviolable asylum of persecuted virtue and of exiled freedom: It has been too long and too tamely endured, in this young republic, rising into destinies "beyond the reach of mortal eye;" whose political institutions establish the truth, proclaim the triumph, illustrate the

and has announced also, that its immortal destiny, its happiness and misery in a future state of existence of

practicability and realize the practical blessings of the principles, that were for the first time systematically combined, perspicuously developed, and persuasively inculcated, in the "Political Justice."

It has been too long and too tamely endured, not in the old but in the new world; that, whilst the author of Political Justice was doomed to expiate his honest errors, in insignificance and infamy; obscene jesters, and blaspheming bards, and venal ballad-mongers, and lascivious minstrels, and soul-less sophists, and heart-less sentimentalists, and frontless hypocrites, and wonder working, horror-breathing novelists, have basked in the sunshine, not of courtly favour, (that might be forgotten;) not of fashionable favour, (that might be unnoticed;) but, of popular favour, which he must be more or less than man, who can regard with indifference, or forfeit without reluctance.

In

The author, meanwhile, has no right to murmur or even to wonder, at the injustice which has been done to his book. the injustice done to it, he has himself, not only been an abettor but a participator; not a secondary instrument, but a principal. He has perpetrated a kind of moral and intellectual suicide.

At the post, where he had voluntarily stationed himself, the post of danger, of duty and of glory; he has for ycars slumbered in a portentous trance: whilst the errors to which his book gave temporary sanction and circulation, drew down denunciations from the tribunals of criticism: denunciations, echoed back, not by the profanum vulgus, merely, but by philanthropists and patriots, by sages and by saints: Whilst the "concave shores of Europe made awful replication" to the anathemas fulminated at his devoted head, by the ministers of the gospel, from the temples of the living God: Whilst fathers and sons, and mothers and daughters, and brothers and sisters, and friends and lovers worthy to love and to be beloved, were giving utterance to the astonishment and horror, the disgust and dismay,

endless duration, will essentially depend; upon belief or disbelief of the doctrines, and upon the conformity or re

with which his unhallowed delusions overwhelmed their souls: Whilst the thunder and lightning of human and divine wrath, were pealing and flashing around him, he has thrown himself

On the ridgy steep

Of a loose hanging rock-To sleep:

And slept so profoundly there, that it would seem as if the voice only which said, " Lazarus come forth!" could reach his death-deafened ear.

It has been urged in his behalf, that in the preface to St. Leon, he has expressly recanted some of the errors contained in his "Political Justice," and that this novel was composed and published, for the purpose of operating as an antidote to the evils, which these errors might have done. Bootless expedient! abortive antidote! The "bane," but not the "antidote, is still before" us. Was a preface to a novel the place? Was a novel the suitable vehicle for the recantation of errors, which had been defended by specious and solemn sophistry, and powerful eloquence, in two ample volumes! and circulated for years, in that imposing shape, throughout the most civilized countries, of either hemisphere?

It was not in this reverie of remorse; by the cosmetics of artificial rhetoric; in the toy-shop of phantastic fiction; that he could wipe out so foul a spot." Could the taint and guilt of errors that had "incarnadined the multitudinous waves" of opinion in the ocean of living mind, be "washed clean" by ablution in the oblivious and polluted pool, of an immoral and improbable romance?

It was the mockery of recantation: The idle mummery of pennance, not the healing pang of penitence: The wretched compromise of vanity and pride, in the market of popularity; not the self-denying, self-condemning immolation of vanity and pride, at the altar of justice: