whether it did or not, the enemies of England would do well to remember, that it would finally strengthen the nation.

Bonaparte, whether at war or at peace, will endeavour to ruin the commerce of England. As for what he can do by war, the English laugh at him. The old saying of the cat and the adulterer holds equally true of the smuggler; and a large portion. of the world is out of reach of his armies,. but not out of reach of their merchantships. He will take the surer method of establishing manufactories at home:-they smile at this too. Manufactories are not to be created by edicts; and if they were, if he could succeed in this, he would do precisely the best possible thing which. could be done for England in the best possible way-first check and then destroy a system, which there is now nothing to check, which cannot be suddenly destroyed without great evil, and which, if it continues to increase, will more effectually tend to ruin England than all the might

4

and all the machinations of its enemies, were they ten times more formidable than they are.

That system certainly threatens the internal tranquillity, and undermines the strength of the country. It communicates just knowledge enough to the populace to make them dangerous, and it poisons their morals.. The temper of what is called the mob, that is, of this class of people, has been manifested at the death of Despard, and there is no reason to suppose that it is not the same in all other great towns as in London. It will be well for England when her cities shall decrease, and her villages multiply and grow; when there shall be fewer streets and more cottages. The tendency of the present system is to convert the peasantry into poor; her policy should be to reverse this, and to convert the poor into peasantry, to increase them, and to enlighten them; for their numbers are the strength, and their

Ireland is the vulnerable part of the British empire and till that empire be restored to the true faith, it will always be vulnerable there. Another conspiracy has just been formed there; the plan was to seize the seat of government, and if the insurgents had not stopped to perpetrate a useless murder upon the way, they would in all likelihood have succeeded; the mails would that night have scattered their proclamations over the whole island, and nine-tenths of the population would have been instantly in rebellion. The exemplary attachment of the Irish to the religion of their fathers is beyond all praise, and almost beyond all example. Nothing but the complete re-establishment of that religion can ever conciliate them to the English government, or reclaim them from their present savage state, and the false hierarchy is too well aware of the consequences ever to consent to this. Dagon knows what would happen if the Ark of Truth were to be set up so near.

LETTER LXII.

Account of Swedenborgianism.

FOUND my way one Sunday to the New Jerusalem, or Swedenborgian chapel. It is singularly handsome, and its gallery fitted up like boxes at a theatre. Few or none of the congregation belonged to the lower classes, they seemed to be chiefly respectable tradesmen. The service was decorous, and the singing remarkably good but I have never in any other heretical meeting heard heresy so loudly insisted upon. Christ in his divine, or in his glorified human, was repeatedly addressed as the only God; and the preacher laboured to show that the profane were those who worshipped three Gods, and

smelling savour ascending to the throne of God, were an obscene stink which offended his nostrils.

There is little remarkable in the civil, or, as his disciples would call it, the human and terrestrial part of Emanuel Swedenborg's history. He was born in 1689, at Stockholm, and was son of the bishop of Ostrogothia. Charles XII. favoured him; Queen Ulrica ennobled him, dignifying his name by elongation, as if in the patriarchal fashion, from Swedberg to Swedenborg. It is certain that he was a man of science, having been assessor of the Metallic College, and having published a Regnum Minerale in three volumes folio; but he abandoned the mineral kingdom for a spiritual world of his own, the most extraordinary that ever a crazy imagination created *.

*The author seems to have looked for no other account of Swedenborg than what his ignorant believers could furnish. At the age of twenty he pub