interests of the proprietors were interlinked! Examine the revolution of the Belgic provinces under Philip the Second; the civil wars of France in the preceding generation, the history of the American revolution, or the yet more recent events in Sweden and in Spain; and it will be scarcely possible not to perceive, that in England, from 1791 to the peace of Amiens, there were neither tendencies to confederacy nor actual confederacies, against which the existing Laws had not provided both sufficient safeguards and an ample punishment. But alas! the panic of property had been struck in the first instance for party purposes: and when it became general, its propagators caught it themselves, and ended in believing their own lie: even as our bulls in Burrowdale sometimes run mad with the echo of their own bellowing. The conse. quences were most injurious. Our attention was concentrated to a monster which could not survive the convulsions in which it had been brought forth, even the enlightened Burke himself too often talking and reasoning as if a perpetual and organized anarchy had been a

possible thing! Thus while we were warring against French doctrines, we took little heed whether the means by which we attempted to overthrow them, were not likely to aid and augment the far more formidable evil of French ambition. Like children we ran away from the yelping of a cur and took shelter at the heels of a vicious war horse.

The conduct of the aristocratic party was equally unwise in private life and to individuals, especially to the young and inexperienced, who were surely to be forgiven for having had their imagination dazzled, and their enthusiasm kindled, by a novelty so specious, that even an old and tried Statesman had pronounced it "a stupendous monument of human wisdom and human happiness." This was indeed a gross delusion, but assuredly for young men at least, a very venial one. To hope too boldly of Human Nature is a fault which all good men have an interest in forgiving. Nor was it less removable than venial, if the party had taken the only way by which the error could be, or even ought to have been, removed. Having first sympathized with the

warm benevolence and the enthusiasm for Liberty, which had consecrated it, they should have then shewn the young Enthusiasts that Liberty was not the only blessing of Society; that though desirable, even for its own sake, it yet derived its main value as the means of calling forth and securing other advantages and excellencies, the activities of Industry, the security of Life and Property, the peaceful energies of Genius and manifold Talent, the developement of the moral Virtues, and the independence and dignity of the nation in its relations to foreign powers: and that neither these nor Liberty itself could subsist in a country so various in its soils, so long inhabited and so fully peopled as Great Britain, without difference of ranks and without laws which recognized and protected the privileges of each. But instead of thus winning them back from the snare, they too often drove them into it by angry contumelies, which being in contradiction with each other could only excite contempt for those that uttered them. To prove the folly of the opinions, they were represented as the crude fancies of unfledged wit and

school-boy statesmen; but when abhorrence was to be expressed, the self-same unfledged school-boys were invested with all the attributes of brooding conspiracy and hoary-headed treason. Nay, a sentence of absolute reprobation was passed on them; and the speculative error of Jacobinism was equalized to the mys terious sin in Scripture, which in some inexplicable manner excludes not only mercy but even repentance. It became the watch-word of the party, 66 ONCE A JACOBIN ALWAYS A JACOBIN." And wherefore? we will suppose

• The passage which follows was first published in the Morning Post, in the year 1800, and contained, if I mistake not, the first philosophical appropriation of a precise import to the word Jacobin, as distinct from Republican, Democrat, and Demagogue. The whole Essay has a peculiar interest to myself at the present moment, (1 May 1817) from the recent notorious publication of Mr. Southey's juvenile Drama, the Wat Tyler, and the consequent assault on his character by an M. P. in his senatorial capacity, to whom the Publishers are doubtless knit by the two-fold tie of sympathy and gratitude. The names of the Publishers are Sherwood, Nealy and Jones; their Benefactor's name is William Smith.

this question asked by an individual, who in his youth or earliest manhood had been enamoured of a system, which for him had combined the austere beauty of science, at once with all the light and colours of imagination, and with all the warmth of wide religious charity, and who, overlooking its ideal essence, had dreamt of actually building a government on personal and natural rights alone.) And wherefore? "Is Jacobinism an absurdity, and have we no understanding to detect it with? Is it productive of all misery and all horrors, and have we no natural humanity to make us turn away with indignation and loathing from it? Uproar and confusion, insecurity of person and of property, the tyranny of mobs or the domination of a soldiery; private houses changed to brothels, the ceremony of marriage but an initiation to harlotry, and marriage itself degraded to mere concubinage-these, the wiser advocates of Aristocracy have said, and truly said, are the effects of Jacobinism! In private life, an insufferable licentiousness, and abroad an intolerable despotism? "Once a Jacobin, always a Jacobin"-O wherefore? Is it becausé