finding an abundance of materials on the surface, he is obliged to search the depths of his own mind, the region of original thoughts and unhackneyed speculations. It is too often with minds as with bodies; those which are most easily set in motion have the least momentum.

It is somewhat curious, at this day, to consider the crude opinions held on the subject of commerce, by such men as Burke, Fox, and Sheridan. It is not, perhaps, the last instance in which mere legislators, setting out with partial views of the subject, and swayed either by party prejudices, or the clamours of those interested in keeping up old abuses or introducing new ones, have mistaken the true welfare of their country. On this subject we copy the following remarks from the work before us :

"The same erroneous views, by which the opposition to the Irish Commercial Propositions was directed, still continued to actuate Mr. Fox and his friends in their pertinacious resistance to the Treaty with France--a measure which reflects high honour upon the memory of Mr. Pitt, as one of the first efforts of a sound and liberal policy to break through that system of restriction and interference, which had so long embarrassed the flow of international commerce.

"The wisdom of leaving trade to find its own way into those channels which the reciprocity of wants established among mankind opens to it, is one of those obvious truths that have lain long on the highways of knowledge, before practical statesmen would condescend to pick them up. It has been shown, indeed, that the sound principles of commerce, which have at last forced their way from the pages of thinking men into the councils of legislators, were more than a hundred years since promulgated by Sir Dudley North ;-and in the Querist of Bishop Berkeley may be found the outlines of all that the best friends not only of free trade but of free religion would recommend to the rulers of Ireland at the present day Thus frequently does Truth, before the drowsy world is prepared for her, like

"The nice Morn on the Indian steep,

From her cabin'd loop-hole peep."-p. 295.

After saying that Mr. Fox founded his chief argument against the commercial intercourse between Great Britain and France, on the natural enmity between the two countries, the biographer proceeds:

"Another of Mr. Fox's arguments against entering into commercial relations with France, was the danger lest English merchants, by investing their capital in foreign speculations, should become so entangled with the interests of another country as to render them less jealous than they ought to be of the honour of their own, and less ready to rise in its defence, when wronged or insulted. But, assuredly, a want of pugnacity is not the evil to be dreaded among nations-still less between two, whom the orator had just represented as inspired by a natural enmity' against each other. He ought rather, upon this assumption, to have welcomed

the prospect of a connection, which, by transfusing and blending their commercial interests, and giving each a stake in the prosperity of the other, would not only soften away the animal antipathy attributed to them, but, by enlisting selfishness on the side of peace and amity, afford the best guaranty against wanton warfare, that the wisdom of statesmen or philosophers has yet devised.

"Mr. Burke, in affecting to consider the question in an enlarged point of view, fell equally short of its real dimensions; and even descended to the weakness of ridiculing such commercial arrangements, as unworthy altogether of the contemplation of the higher order of statesmen. 'The right honourable gentleman,' he said, had talked of the treaty as if it were the affair of two little counting-houses, and not of two great countries. He seemed to consider it as a contention between the sign of the Fleur-de-lis, and the sign of the Red Lion, which house should obtain the best custom. Such paltry considerations were below his notice.'

"In such terms could Burke, from temper or waywardness of judgment, attempt to depreciate a speech which may be said to have contained the first luminous statement of the principles of commerce, with the most judicious views of their application to details, that had ever, at that period, been presented to the house.

"The wise and enlightened opinions of Mr. Pitt, both with respect to trade, and another very different subject of legislation, religion, would have been far more worthy of the imitation of some of his self-styled followers, than those errors which they are so glad to shelter under the sanction of his name. For encroachments upon the property and liberty of the subject, for financial waste and unconstitutional severity, they have the precedent of their great master ever ready on their lips. But, in all that would require wisdom and liberality in his copyists-in the repugnance he felt to restrictions and exclusions, affecting either the worldly commerce of man, or the spiritual intercourse of man with his God,—in all this, like the Indian that quarrels with his idol, these pretended followers not only dissent from their prototype themselves, but violently denounce, as mischievous, his opinions when adopted by others."—p. 296, 297, 298.

We pass over the account of the impeachment of Hastings, which occupies a large portion of the book. If we are to judge of the powers of an orator by the effect he produces on, his audience, which is undoubtedly the best criterion, there can be no doubt of the great, and even wonderful ability shown by Sheridan on this occasion. But the speeches, in the shape in which they remain to us, including even that correctly reported one, from which Mr. Moore has given such copious extracts, do not by any means come up to our idea of that manly eloquence, by which the wonders of this art have at all times been wrought. They have too much of the rhetorician, we might perhaps say of the school-boy, about them; there is too visible an attempt at display, too great a profusion of false and cold brilliancy. How these speeches should have produced so powerful an effect on those who listened to them, can only

be accounted for by supposing the elaborate and frigid passages we have mentioned, to have been redeemed by others of genuine and irresistible eloquence, and by an uncommonly interesting manner in the speaker. Mr. Moore is no apologist for Hastings. After mentioning several circumstances alleged in palliation of his conduct, he thus concludes his summary of the trial:

"Allowing Mr. Hastings, however, the full advantage of these and other strong pleas in his defence, it is yet impossible for any real lover of justice and humanity to read the plainest and least exaggerated history of his government, without feeling deep indignation excited at almost every page of it. His predecessors had, it is true, been guilty of wrongs as glaring-the treachery of Lord Clive to Omichund in 1757, and the abandonment of Ramnarain to Meer Causim under the administration of Mr. Vansittart. are stains upon the British character which no talents or glory can do away. There are precedents, indeed, to be sound, through the annals of our Indian empire, for the formation of the most perfect code of tyranny, in every department, legislative, judicial, and executive, that ever entered into the dreams of intoxicated power. But, while the practice of Mr. Hastings was, at least, as tyrannical as that of his predecessors, the principles upon which he founded that practice were still more odious and unpardonable. In his manner, indeed, of defending himself, he is his own worst accuser-as there is no outrage of power, no violation of faith, that might not be justified by the versatile and ambidextrous doctrines, the lessons of deceit and rules of rapine, which he so ably illustrated by his measures, and has so shamelessly recorded with his pen.

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Nothing but an early and deep initiation in the corrupting school of Indian politics, could have produced the facility with which, as occasion required, he could belie his own recorded assertions, turn hostilely round upon his own expressed opinions, disclaim the proxies which he himself had delegated, and, in short, get rid of all the inconveniences of personal identity, by never acknowledging himself to be bound by any engagement or opinion which himself had formed. To select the worst features of his administration is no very easy task; but the calculating cruelty with which he abetted the exte mination of the Rohillas-his unjust and precipitate execution of Nuncomar, who had stood forth as his accuser, and, therefore, became his victim--his violent aggression upon the Raja of Benares, and that combination of public and private rapacity, which is exhibited in the details of his conduat to the royal family of Oude ;-these are acts, proved by the testimony of himself and his accomplices, from the disgrace of which no formal acquittal upon points of law can absolve him, and whose guilt the allowances of charity may extenuate, but never can remove. That the perpetrator of such deeds should have been popular among the natives of India, only proves how low was the standard of justice, to which the entire tenor of our policy had accustomed them; but that a ruler of this character should be held up to admiration in England, is one of those anomalies with which England, more than any other nation, abounds, and only inclines us to wonder that the true worship of liberty should so long have continued to flourish in a country where such heresies to her sacred cause are found."-p. 338, 339, 340.

In 1792, Mrs. Sheridan died. The work before us is full of the eulogium of her virtues. Her beauty, her various accomplishments, her amiable temper, the sweetness and grace of her manners, and her devoted affection for her husband, are probably described without any exaggeration; and we are constrained to say, that they leave the follies and errors of Sheridan's private life without the shadow of palliation. If any attraction could have been strong enough to keep him within the orbit of virtue, it must have been the possession of a woman, who is still remembered by all who knew her, as uniting, in her person and character, all that was lovely and excellent in her

sex.

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"There has seldom, perhaps, existed a finer combination of all those qualities that attract both eye and heart, than this accomplished and lovely person exhibited. To judge by what we hear, it was impossible to see her without admiration, or know her without love; and a late bishop used to say, that she seemed to him the connecting link between woman and angel." The devotedness of affection, too. with which she was regarded, not only by her own father and sisters, but by all her husband's family, showed that her fascination was of that best kind, which, like charity, begins at home;" and that while her beauty and music enchanted the world, she had charms more intrinsic and lasting for those who came nearer to her. We have already seen with what pliant sympathy she followed her husband through his various pursuits, identifying herself with the politician as warmly and readily as with the author, and keeping love still attendant on genius through all his transformations. As the wife of the dramatist and manager, we find her calculating the receipts of the house, assisting in the adaptation of her husband's opera, and reading over the plays sent in by dramatic candidates. As the wife of the senator and orator, we see her, with no less zeal, making extracts from state papers, and copying out ponderous pamphlets--entering with all her heart and soul into the details of elections, and even endeavouring to fathom the mysteries of the funds. The affectionate and sensible care with which she watched over, not only her own children, but those which her beloved sister, Mrs. Tickell, confided to her, in dying, gives the finish to this picture of domestic usefulness When it is recollected,

too, that the person thus homelily employed was gifted with every charm that could adorn and delight society, it would be difficult, perhaps, to find any where a inore perfect example of that happy mixture of utility and ornament, in which all that is prized by the husband and the lover combines, and which renders woman what the Sacred Fire was to the Parsees--not only an object of adoration on their altars, but a source of warmth and comfort to their hearths.'-p 391, 392.

We find, on looking over what we have written, that we have already exceeded the limits we had prescribed to ourselves when we set out. We are, therefore, under the necessity of laying aside the book, without commenting on several passages which we had marked for that purpose. The style of this work is such as we might have expected from the

pen of Mr. Moore, abounding with the ornaments and figures of speech, generally employed without effort or affectation, as the abundant and ready riches of an exuberant fancy. In another respect, however, the occasional carelessness and incorrectness of the diction, it differs from that of his poetry.

ART. XIV.-(1.) Logan, an Indian Tale, by SAMUEL WEBBER, A. M. Cambridge. 1821.

(2.) The Pleasures of Friendship, a Poem, with a few other Poems, and Original Melodies. By JAMES M'HENRY. Philadelphia. 1825.

(3.) Zophiel, a Poem. By MRS. BROOKS. Boston. 1825. (4.) Poems by JOHN TURVILL ADAMS. New-Haven. 1826. (5.) Don Juan. Cantos 17 and 18. New-York. 1825. (6.) Leisure Hours at Sea. By a MIDSHIPMAN OF THE UNITED STATES NAVY. New-York. 1825.

(7.) Poems, by EDWARD C. PINKNEY. Baltimore. 1825. (8.) Odds and Ends. Original and Translated. By ROBERT SWEENY. New-York. 1826.

(9.) Mina, a Dramatic Sketch; with other Poems, by SUMNER LINCOLN FAIRFIELD. Baltimore. 1825.

PHEBUS APOLLO! Look down, not upon a poet, but upon a distressed reviewer, who has dared to summon for inspection, a small platoon of thy votaries! May he handle their laurels tenderly; and discompose no single chaplet, in endeavouring to ascertain whether it be real or artificial! May he crack no chords of any individual lyre, in examining whether it be strung after the fashion of thine own! He bears no malice against the tuneful tribe; for their strains have made many an hour glide away happily, and innocently, and unregretted. He knows the morbid (or rather the sacred) sensibility of the bard; for he committed poetry once, and was cut up delightfully. The dog of a Reviewer who worried him, did his business in a workmanlike manner; but, unfortunately, showed so much abominable ignorance, as to make his brutal castigation ineffectual in the way of improvement.

Fate never wounds so deep the generous heart,

As when a blockhead's venom points the dart.

We wish to rouse the indignation of none of the followers of the "joyous science." We do not wish, either, to display our own ignorance; and, therefore, candidly confess, that we have not particularly read all the metre, arranged under its several VOL. II.

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