not pay me for keeping my surplus gold and silver locked up in a chest, but they will pay me for the use of it, as they would for the use of a horse, or a plough, if I will lend it to them and suffer it to go from hand to hand in the market. Money was coined by the government for circulation, just as a plough was made for ploughing.

In order, therefore, that the hoarded money of individuals may pass into circulation, depositories of it, called banks, are instituted, into which the hoards of individuals are poured, either as temporary deposits which they draw upon as they need, or as permanent deposits in the shape of stock, for which they are to be paid by the community;-and in the following

manner:

A farmer, let us say, has a piece of land, but has no funds to buy seed corn with, or to purchase stock, or build a house. The corn and stock dealer is a poor man, and cannot wait until harvest to take his interest, or usance, and he does not care to be paid in corn, or in chickens. The farmer, therefore, goes to a neighbor and gets him to endorse a note for him, to be paid after the harvest. But the corn dealer does not want a note; he wants currency, money; the note is a private affair, and is of no use to him. He therefore puts his own name on the back of the note and goes to the bank with it; and the bank lends him the useless money that has been deposited there by the community at large to be put in circulation. The bank knows that harvest time must come, or at least that the endorsers are in good business, and will pay, barring extraordinary accidents. In exchange, therefore, for this note of which the community know nothing, and which is too large for currency, the bank gives a number of notes of its own, conveniently small, in which the community have entire confidence, and which they will use as money; the bank guaranteeing the payment in gold and silver if it is wanted, being paid for this guarantee and the trouble, a certain increase, usance or interest, just as the lender of seed corn would be paid out of the increase of the grain he lent. Thus it appears that a bank has two offices-first, to collect the hoarded gold and silver of the community and keep it ready for circulation like

a reservoir, for every man's use; and second, to convert the private credit of one man to another into a currency for the community at large; in short, to convert a private inconvenience into a public

benefit.

By this system of banks a kind of community of goods is established; the hoards of individuals are gleaned up and poured back into the markets, and the ends for which government coins specie are carried out to a degree almost of perfection. Moreover, by this system the surplus profits of every man are made serviceable to his neighbor, and the poor, but industrious and honest citizen is placed on an almost equal footing with the rich capitalist who has his chests full of gold and silver. To this system alone may be attributed that wonderful equalization of means and resources which has covered our continent with independent citizens, which has cleared millions of acres of forest, which has made rivers like highways, which has employed the labor of the famishing emigrants of Europe, which has swelled the population of this country from two to twenty-one millions in a century, which has increased our wealth until it now exceeds by two hundred millions annually the united wealth of Great Britain and Ireland.

A philosophical Administration are, nevertheless, violently opposed to this credit system; they see great evils in its abuse. They know that the abuses of the banking system are very injurious to the country. They know this from the most direful experience, having tried their own hand at lending the government funds without adequate security. Ths experience, chiming in with their philosophical views of human nature in general, have set them against banks, and in general against all the means adopted by men of business for keeping up a circulation of gold and silver in the smaller channels of business. Though they continue every year to coin gold and silver in small round pieces at a great cost, they take care to keep it together in large masses and to lock it up from individuals. To prevent a too free and rapid circulation of specie, they take care not to fall in with the system of credit in any shape. "Perish credit," they cry, while they pro

vide great hoarding chests, and put into them the millions of gold and silver collected per force in that shape from the importers; who, to fill these government hoards, are obliged to draw the gold and silver from the reservoirs where it was deposited by the community; so that the man who puts a thousand dollars in gold into the vault of a bank, thinking that from that point it will flow out through all the channels of trade, hears the day after that it has all gone into the hoarding box of the government, to lie there perhaps three months unused, when the community are so much in want of it they would willingly pay an hundred dollars to have it in circulation for that time. | But the evil does not stop here. The bankers, whose business it is to convert private notes into a public currency, which is a good and safe substitute for gold and silver, cannot do this unless they have a proportionate quantity of specie in their vaults, and for every thousand of gold and silver drawn from their vaults they are obliged to refuse to convert three thousand of private notes into current notes. when the government thus indirectly draws a million from the banks of New York, which happens whenever there is a great arrival of foreign dutiable goods, they effectually stop three millions of currency from the smaller channels of the markets. Thus all kinds of business are impeded; nobody has any money to pay their small debts; the small dealers either stop entirely or cease to make profits, while the great capitalists who have money enough, go on and make large profits, and the brokers in Wall street make fortunes by lending at

Thus

exorbitant interest. By this arrangement of the government every importation from Europe is not only made ruinous to the manufacturers, whose distresses are doubled by foreign competition and want of a currency to pay their workmen, but it throws a damp over every species of enterprise, from the publication of reviews (as we are well aware) to the growing of corn and the digging of canals. The whole business of this continent is thus made subject to the whim of the English importing houses, who can make money plenty or scarce as they see fit; and as there is less and less money, and less and less manufactures, they send more and more goods to flood the market, draw specie from the banks, to choke their own and all other profits, and to keep the whole system of society in a perpetual fret and agitation.

Upon the whole, but particularly when we consider this last result of the philosophy of our great Administration, what with the unjust beginning and ridiculous end of the Mexican and Oregon affairs, what with the attempt to change the whole system of our business, the denial of protection and aid to all branches of industry except maritime commerce, and that principally for the protection of English importing houses; what with, in fine, the whole odious catalogue of errors, blunders, lies and meddlesome experiments; what with all this, and the forbearance and noble spirit of our candidate and his friends, it seems to be a matter rather of congratulation than of astonishment that the Whigs have achieved so easy and so complete a victory.

IN the life of Pope, written by Mr. | Bowles and published in the year 1806, it is said, that Lord Hervey wrote the Memoirs of his own time, leaving strict injunctions with his executors that they were not to be published until after the decease of George III. It seems now that such was not the fact, the injunction not to publish having proceeded from a son of Lord Hervey. Augustus, third Earl of Bristol, who, perceiving that the Memoirs were written with great freedom, forbade out of motives of delicacy and duty, that they should ever see the light until two generations, at least, had passed off from the stage. More than the prescribed limits, one hundred and ten years in fact, have elapsed since Lord Hervey completed his manuscript; the actors during the reign of George II. have long since taken their places in the niches of history; the direct male line of the family of Hanover completed its drama in the morning of our day, when the old men around us were first stepping upon the threshold of active life, and the middle-aged were busy in the plays of the school-ground; and the earnest present of the Georgian era, with its wit and learning, its eloquence and poetry, its state and splendor, its fair women and brave men, has long since been hushed into the stillness of the silent past. The time then has come at length, when the Memoirs of Lord Hervey-first announced to the world by Horace Walpole, in his Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors, published in 1757; desiderated by Lord Hailes in his compilation of the Opinions of the Duchess of Marlborough, who, in his lamentation over the fashion of destroying original papers during the eighteenth cen

tury, rejoices that "much which was then in doubt would be made clear, should the writings of Lord Hervey ever see the light;" and alluded to with an ill suppressed curiosity by every historian of the reign of the second George-the time then has come at length, when, without personal offence or public impropriety, they may be given to the world.

* *

The Memoirs are preceded by a prefatory and biographical notice of the noble author, written by the editor, John Wilson Croker, who prepared and published an edition of Lady Hervey's letters in 1821. The original manuscript, as it now exists, was committed to his hand by the present Marquis of Bristol, nephew to the late Earl of Bristol, and grand nephew to the author of the Memoirs. Mr. Croker describes the MS. as being wholly in autograph, remarkable for its clearness and legibility, and complete as it came from the author, with the exception of several chasms, indicated by upon the printed page, occasioned by former possessors having destroyed several sheets here and there, that appear to have contained additional details of the dissensions in the royal family. He thinks that these omissions are not, upon the whole, to be regretted; that they have spared us much scandal; and that they have not essentially diminished the historical value of the work. Now, with all deference to Mr. Croker's apology for his noble employer and his most noble ancestors, we take the liberty of expressing an opinion entirely contrary to his upon this subject. We can discover no possible ground in the whole chapter of rights, upon which one of Lord Hervey's literary executors, in any generation

stock, which Lady Mary immortalized by her division of the human species into Men, Women, and Herveys.

Lord Hervey's early education seems to have been of the most thorough kind. The hope of the family after the death of his brother, the comfort and support of a superior and judicious mother, and the main reliance of many personal friends of his father, whose early retiracy from court had been deeply regretted by the party to which he belonged, his early promise was cherished and cultivated by all the appliances which rank and wealth could evoke. After a successful completion of academic studies, and having made the usual tour of the Continent, the young nobleman attached himself to the court of the Prince and Princess at Richmond, where he soon became a great personal favorite. At this period Pope and his literary friends were in great favor at this young court, of which, in addition to the handsome and clever Princess herself, Mrs. Howard, Mrs. Selwyn, Miss Howe, Miss Bellenden, and Miss Lepell, with Lords Chesterfield, Bathurst, Scarborough, and Hervey, were the chief ornaments. Perhaps the world has rarely seen more of beauty, gaiety, wit, elegance, taste, and refinement than were to be found in the galaxy of the Prince and Princess of Wales during the last years of George I. Pope, the wit and poet of the circle, warmed into a new life by the smiles of royal courtesy, was never tired in after days, when the sunshine of favor had been withdrawn, of satirizing the follies in the midst of which he had basked. In the outset he had courted the acquaintance of Lord Hervey, and an intimacy had sprung up between them and their joint friend, Lady Mary, which promised to be perpetual. Alas, for the mutability of human love, that he should have become the bitterest enemy of the former, and have given ample occasion to the latter to realize the truth of Congreve's mourning bride, when she declares that

*Earth hath no curse, like love to hatred turned,

Nor hell a fury like a woman scorn'd.” How far the quarrel with Lord Hervey induced Pope's subsequent rupture with Lady Mary, we are not informed. It has been often ascribed to the rivalry of the

gentlemen for the good graces of the lady; but besides the improbability of Lady Mary's tact failing her in a matter of gallantry concerning herself, in all points of which it was her pride and boast to give denials without offence and favors without jealousy, we can trace no evidence for, and some little against the statement. Lady Mary told Spence her own version of the quarrel, and he relates it thus in his Anecdotes :

ters by me. "I have got fifty or sixty of Mr. Pope's letYou shall see what a goddess he makes of me in them, though he makes such a devil of me in his writings afterwards, without any reason that I know of. I got a third person to ask him why he left off visiting me; he answered, negligently, that he went as often as he used to do. I then asked Dr. Arbuthnot to get from him what Lady Mary had done to him. He said that Lady Mary and Lord Hervey had pressed him once together-(and I do not remember that we ever were together with him in our lives)-to write a satire on certain persons; that he refused it, and that this had occasioned the breach between us."

The estrangement between Pope and Lord Hervey commenced in 1725, two years before the decease of George I., but it was greatly increased in bitterness two years later, when the new court, to which Lord Hervey soon gave in his adhesion, discarded its old friends, and continued Walpole at the head of the government. Whatever may have been its cause will probably now never be known. Lord Hervey was not unlike Pope, in many characteristics of mind and heart, and especially in that nervous irritability so common to men of a poetical temperament, the genus irritabile vatum. Floating together upon the surface of a life, the brilliancy of which was made up of sententious witticisms and sparkling repartees, lively tittle-tattle and biting pasquinades, and, to a certain degree, rivals for ladies' favors and courtly smiles, it was not wonderful that a disagreement should spring up between them, which should at last grow into public quarrel commenced, or who was open hostility. Where the the first aggressor, it is difficult to tell. In Pope's "Miscellanies," published in 1727; in his first edition of the "Dunciad," published in 1728; and in some lighter pieces published subsequently,