uttered a word that could have caused him pain. There was a change which I well could mark, however, in their physical feelings. The first day they clung together, and every movement I felt was like that of one person. The next, the man alone struggled; and the woman moaned in helplessness. The third night-how shall I tell it?-but have bid me go on. All the horrible and loathsome excruciayou tions of famine had been undergone; the disunion of every tie of the heart, of passion, of nature, had commenced. In the agonies of their famished sickness, they loathed each other;-they could have cursed each other if they had had breath to curse. It was on the fourth night that I heard the shriek of the wretched female;—her lover, in the agony of hunger, had fastened his teeth in her shoulder; that bosom, on which he had so often luxuriated, became a meal to him now.' II. 234.

6

We have omitted this miscreant's flippant allusion to Madame de Sevigné and his own damnation, uttered in a spirit which (to use the author's own words upon another occasion), mingled ridicule with horror, and seemed like a Harlequin in the infernal regions flirting with the furies: '-But we must not forget to mention, as little characteristic touches in this scene of preposterous horrors, that the monster who describes it was also a parricide, and that the female, on whose dying agonies he had feasted, was his only sister! After this appalling extract, we need not pursue our quotations from pages which, as more than one of the personages say of themselves, seem to swim in blood and fire; and we shall conclude with the following passage from a dream.

The next moment I was chained to my chair again,-the fires were lit, the bells rang out, the litanies were sung;-my feet were scorched to a cinder,-my muscles cracked, my blood and marrow hissed, my flesh consumed like shrinking leather, the bones of my leg hung two black withering and moveless sticks in the ascending blaze; it ascended, caught my hair,-I was crowned with fire,my head was a ball of molten metal, my eyes flashed and melted in their sockets:-I opened my mouth, it drank fire,-I closed it, the fire was within,-and still the bells rang on, and the crowd shouted, and the king and queen, and all the nobility and priesthood looked on, and we burned and burned! I was a cinder, body and soul, in my dream.' II. 301.

These, and other scenes equally wild and abominable, luckily counteract themselves;-they present such a Fee-fa-fum for grown up people, such a burlesque upon tragic horrors, that a sense of the ludicrous irresistibly predominates over the terrific; and, to avoid disgust, our feelings gladly take refuge in contemptuous laughter. Pathos like this may affect women, and people of weak nerves, with sickness at the stomach;

it may move those of stouter fibre to scornful derision; but we doubt whether, in the whole extensive circle of novel readers, it has ever drawn a single tear. The Society for the Suppression of Mendicity has fortunately cleared our streets of the offensive vagrants who used to thrust their mangled limbs and putrid sores into our faces to extort from our disgust what they could not wring from our compassion:-Be it our care to suppress those greater nuisances who, infesting the high ways of literature, would attempt, by a still more revolting exhibition, to terrify or nauseate us out of those sympathies which they might not have the power to awaken by any legitimate appeal.

Let it not be imagined, from any thing we have now said, that we think meanly of Mr Maturin's genius and abilities. It is precisely because we hold both in respect that we are sincerely anxious to point out their misapplication; and we have extended our observations to a greater length than we contemplated, partly because we fear that his strong though unregu lated imagination, and unlimited command of glowing language, may inflict upon us a herd of imitators who, possessing the contortions of the Sybil without her inspiration' will deluge us with dull, turgid, and disgusting enormities; and partly be cause we are not without hopes that our animadversions, offered in a spirit of sincerity, may induce the Author himself to abandon this new Apotheosis of the old Raw-head-and-bloody-bones, and assume a station in literature more consonant to his high endowments, and to that sacred profession to which, we understand, he does honour by the virtues of his private life.

ART. VI. An Inquiry concerning the Power of Increase in the Numbers of Mankind. Being an Answer to Mr Malthus's Essay on that Subject. By WILLIAM GODWIN. London, 1821.

WE E are surprised at this publication of Mr Godwin. Notwithstanding the prejudices which have prevailed against him on account of his moral and political theories, we have always felt a respect for his talents; and have thought that his reputation has been as much too low of late years, as it was too high soon after he wrote his Political Justice. The present work proves, either that we were wrong in our estimate of his powers, or that they are now greatly impaired by time. It appears to us, we confess, to be the poorest and most old-womanish performance that has fallen from the pen of any writer of name, since we first commenced our critical career. So long

as Mr Godwin's judgment remained in sufficient vigour to repress useless ebullitions of anger against Mr Malthus, he seems to have bit his lips in silence; and this laudable restraint lasted twenty years. But the sight of a fifth edition of the Essay on Population, operating, as we must suppose, upon an enfeebled judgment, was at length too much for him. As he says himself, he could refrain no longer : he determined, at all events, to take the field; and, not being well prepared with the weapons of sound argument, he, like an old scold, unpacks his heart in words.' Though he professes a personal respect for Mr Malthus, there is no kind or degree of abuse which he does not pour out upon his doctrines. He regards them with inexpressible abhorrence. They are portentous; they are calamitous; they are appalling; they are disgusting; they are atrocious; they are cabalistical, &c. &c. &c. He says he is full of matter, and that the spirit within constraineth him; † and this is the kind of stuff which he pours forth.

Now, we really think that this mode of treating a subject, on which a just decision is confessedly of great importance to the happiness of society, is utterly disgraceful to any writer of character and ability. If the arguments which Mr Godwin can advance against Mr Malthus's theory be just, there can be little doubt of its being overthrown without the aid of abuse. If, on the other hand, Mr Malthus be correct in the view which he has taken of the law of population, abuse cannot possibly do any good, though it may obviously do some harm.

We confess that we have, for many years, been in the habit of considering the question of the principle of population as set at rest by Mr Malthus. We should not, however, in any degree, have objected to see the view which he has taken of it proved to be fundamentally erroneous; but we really think that it would be a serious misfortune to society, and to the labouring classes in particular, that it should be believed to be erroneous, when it is not.

On first looking over Mr Godwin's work, we were certainly not disposed to pay such a compliment to his eloquence, aided even by the zest of abuse, as to think that it would make what was true appear to be false; and, as the book was dear, and not likely to fall into the hands of the labouring classes, unless brought forward and quoted by others, which, from the manner in which the subject is treated, could not have been expected, we had no thoughts of noticing it. To our great surprise, however, we heard that it had made some impression in London upon a certain class of readers; and, to our still greater

surprise, we learned from the papers, that, upon occasion of a late discussion on the Poor-Laws Amendment Bill, it had been referred to by a member of the House of Commons as an elaborate work, which, in the opinion of good judges, had shown that Mr Malthus's statements respecting the rate of the increase of population were quite unfounded. This set us upon looking again at the work which we had thrown aside; and, having convinced ourselves that the tables, and remarks upon them, brought forward by Mr Godwin and his friend Mr Booth, instead of weakening the statements of Mr Malthus, tend to establish them on firmer foundations than ever, we think it may be of use, in reference to the subject generally, to state the grounds of this conviction.

It would be quite a waste of time to follow Mr Godwin through the mass of abuse, repetition, and irrelevant matter, of which the different divisions of his work consist. We shall hasten at once to the latter part of the third book, which contains the only argument which has any appearance of shaking, by an appeal to facts, the ratios of the natural increase of population laid down by Mr Malthus.

In this part of the work, which appears to be written by a Mr Booth, after many pages of the most solemn and absurd trifling which we have ever witnessed, the following useful observation occurs.

When enumerations are taken every ten years, it is obvious, exclusive of immigration, that in any particular census the persons living above ten years of age must have all existed in the census immediately preceding. In that of 1810, for instance, all above ten years formed part of the population of 1800; and are in reality the same, except inasmuch as they are diminished by death. Those under ten have all been born in the interval between the censuses.'

This observation may serve to form a rule by which to judge of the amount of immigration in any country where such censuses are taken; because the excess of the population above ten years of age in the second census, after a proper allowance has been made for the mortality in the interval, must consist of persons who have emigrated from other countries.

We are disposed to give Mr Booth some credit for this rule, which, though obvious, has not, that we are aware of, been sug

Mr Booth gravely informs us, that in fact the Swedish children are brought into the world by the child-bearing females, p. 270. He takes a world of pains to prove, that population can never increase in a geometrical progression, strictly regular. In this attempt he fails; but, if he had succeeded, of what possible consequence would it be to the general argument?

gested before. But we cannot give him credit for the manner in which he applies it. Here his general want of information shows itself, and leads him into gross errors, which render his conclusion quite wide of the truth. A very slight consideration will be sufficient to show the nature and effect of those errors.

Before we can ascertain the amount of immigration from the numbers above ten years old in the second census, it is obvious that we must make a proper allowance for the mortality of the population of the first census in the ten years between the first and second. Mr Booth, proceeding, we suppose, upon the supposition that the mortality in the United States is 1 in 40, imagines that he shall obtain the mortality of the ten years in question, by multiplying the mortality of one year by ten; and so infers, that the population of the first census would, in ten years, be diminished by or. He forgets, or perhaps he never knew, that the very early years of life are the greatest contributors to the annual mortality. In a table of the numbers in different ages dying annually in Sweden, brought forward by Dr Price, it appears, that the mortality of the male children under one year of age was 1 in 31, while the mortality between the ages of 5 and 10 was 1 in 68; between the ages of 10 and 15, 1 in 131; and between the ages of 15 and 20, 1 in 139. It is quite obvious, therefore, that the ten years' mortality of a population which is rising into the healthiest stages of life, and is not affected by fresh births, and the frail tenure of existence in its earliest periods, must be essentially different from the annual mortality of the whole population multiplied by ten.

According to Dr Price's table, before adverted to, the annual mortality of the male population of Sweden for 21 years, from 1755 to 1776, was 1 in 334, and of the male and female taken together, 1 in 34.6; but, if a calculation be made from this, and the table immediately preceding it, with a view to ascertain the loss in ten years on a population, none of which had been born during that time, it will appear that this loss will be 1 in 52.89, or nearly 1 in 53.; while, if the annual mortality had been multiplied by ten, the loss would have been as much as 1 in 34.6.

On the annual mortality of the population of the United States, writers have differed. Mr Barton, in the Transactions of the Society at Philadelphia (Vol. iii. No. 7.), has stated it to be 1 in 45; while Mr Winter and others, without referring to any documents of authority, have made it as high as 1 in 40. We should suppose, from the peculiar structure of the American population, and the great excess of the births above the deaths, that it was less than Mr Barton's estimate, as, even upon

Observations on Reversionary Payments, vol. ii. p. 124.