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live in a distant part of the country? How much commerce and navigation in particular, how many shipbuilders, sailors, sail-makers, rope-makers must have been employed to bring together the different drugs made use of by the dyer, which drugs often come from the remotest part of the world? What a variety of labour, too, is necessary in order to produce the tools of the meanest of these workmen. To say nothing of such complicated machines as the ship of the sailor, the mill of the fuller, or even the loom of the weaver, let us consider what a variety of labour is requisite in order to form that very simple machine, the shears with which the shepherd clips the wool. The miner, the builder of the furnace for smelting the ore, the feller of the timber, the burner of the charcoal to be used in the smelting house, the brick-maker, the brick-layer, the men who attend the furnace, the millwright, the forger, the smith, must all of them join their different arts in order to produce these shears.

Were we to examine in the same manner all the different parts of his dress and household furniture, the coarse linen shirt which he wears next his skin, the shoes which cover his feet, the bed he lies on, and all the different parts which compose it, the kitchen grate at which he prepares his victuals, the coals which he uses for that purpose, dug from the bowels of the earth and brought to him perhaps by a long sea and a long land carriage, all the other utensils of the kitchen and furniture of his table, the knifes and forks, the earthen or pewter plates on which he serves up and divides his victuals, the different hands employed in making his bread and his beer, the glass window which lets in the light and heat, and keeps out the wind and rain, with all the knowledge and art requisite for preparing that beautiful and happy invention, without which these northern parts of the world could scarce have afforded a very comfortable habitation, together with the tools of all the different workmen employed in producing all these different conveniences; if we examine, I say, all these things, and consider what a variety of labour is employed about each

of them, we should be sensible that without the assistance and co-operation of many thousands, the very meanest person in a civilized country could not be provided, even according to what we falsely imagine the easy and simple manner in which he is commonly accommodated. Compared, indeed, with the more extravagant luxury of the rich, his accommodation must no doubt appear simple and easy; and yet it may be true, perhaps, that the accommodation of a European prince does not always so much exceed that of an industrious and frugal workman, as the accommodation of the latter exceeds that of many an African king, the absolute master of the lives and liberties of ten thousand savages.

EDMUND BURKE.

EDMUND BURKE, born A.D. 1731, died in 1797, statesman and orator, is author of an Enquiry into the Origin of the Sublime and Beautiful, Reflections on the French Revolution, Letter to a Noble Lord, Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, Letters on a Regicide Peace, etc.

DEATH OF HIS SON.

HAD it pleased God to continue to me the hopes of succession, I should have been, according to my mediocrity, and the mediocrity of the age in which I live, a sort of founder of a family; I should have left a son, who, in all the points in which personal merit can be viewed, in science, in erudition, in genius, in taste, in honour, in generosity, in humanity, in every noble sentiment, and every liberal accomplishment, would not have shown himself inferior to the Duke of Bedford, or to any of those whom he traces in his line. His grace would soon have wanted all plausibility for his attack upon that provision, which, after all, belonged more to mine than to me. He would soon have supplied every deficiency, and symmetrized every disproportion. It would not have been for my

successor to resort to any stagnant reservoir of merit in me, or in my ancestry. He had in himself a salient living spring of generous and manly action. Every day he lived he would have repurchased the bounty of the crown, oftentimes more than he had received. He was made a public creature; and had no enjoyment whatever but in the performance of some duty. At this exigent moment, the loss of a finished man is not easily supplied.

I am

But a Disposer, whose power we are little able to resist, and whose wisdom it behoves us not at all to dispute, has ordained it in another manner, and, whatever my querulous weakness may suggest, a far better. The storm has gone over me, and I like one of those old oaks which the late hurricane hath scattered about me. stripped of all my honours; I am torn up by the roots, and lie prostrate on the earth! There, and prostrate there, I most unfeignedly recognise the Divine justice, and in some degree submit to it. But whilst I humble myself before God, I do not know that it is forbidden to repel the attacks of unjust and inconsiderate men. patience of Job is proverbial. After some of the convulsive struggles of our irritable nature, he submitted himself and repented in dust and ashes. But even so, I do not find him blamed for reprehending, and with a considerable degree of verbal asperity, those ill-natured neighbours of his, who visited his dunghill to read him moral, political, and economical lectures on his misery.

The

I am alone. I have none to meet my enemies in the gate. Indeed, my lord, I greatly deceive myself, if in this hard season I would give a peck of refuse wheat for all that is called fame and honour in the world. This is the appetite of but a few. It is a luxury; it is a privilege; it is an indulgence for those who are at ease. But we are all of us made to shun disgrace, as we are made to shrink from pain, and poverty, and disease. It is an instinct; and under the direction of reason, instinct is always in the right. I live in an inverted order. They who ought to have succeeded me, have gone before me. They who should have been to me in the place of

posterity, are in the place of ancestors. I owe to the dearest relation, which must ever subsist in memory, that act of piety which he would have performed to me; I owe it to him to show that he was not descended, as the Duke of Bedford would have it, from an unworthy parent.

REFORM OF THE CIVIL LIST.

They

IN the feudal times it was not uncommon, even among subjects, for the lowest offices to be held by considerable persons; persons as unfit from their incapacity as improper from their rank to occupy such employments. were held by patent, sometimes for life, and sometimes by inheritance. If my memory does not deceive me, a person of no slight consideration held the office of patent hereditary cook to the Earl of Warwick. The Earl of Warwick's soups, I fear, were not any better for the dignity of his cook. I think it was an Earl of Gloucester who officiated as steward of the household to the Archbishops of Canterbury.

The king's household has not only several strong traces of this feudality, but it is formed also on the principle of a body corporate; it has its own courts, magistrates, and bye-laws. This might be necessary in the ancient times, in order to have a government within itself capable of regulating the vast and unruly multitude which attended it. This was the origin of the court called the Green Cloth, composed of the marshal, treasurer, and other great officers of the household, with certain clerks.

The rich subjects of the kingdom have since altered their economy, and turned the course of their expense

from the maintenance of vast establishments within their walls, to the employment of a great variety of independent trades abroad. Their influence is lessened; but a mode of accommodation, and a style of splendour suited to the manners of the times has been increased. Royalty itself has insensibly followed, and the royal household

carried away by the resistless tide of manners; but with this material difference, viz., private men have got rid of their establishments along with the reason of them; whereas the royal household has lost all that was stately and venerable in the antique manners, without retrenching the cumbrous charge of a Gothic establishment. It is shrunk into the polished littleness of modern elegance and personal comfort; it has evaporated from the gross concrete into an essence and rectified spirit of expense, where you have tuns of ancient pomp in a vial of modern luxury.

But when the reason of old establishments is gone, it is absurd to preserve nothing but the burthen of them. This is superstitiously to embalm a carcase not worth an ounce of the gums that are used to preserve it; it is to burn precious oils in the tombs; it is to offer meat and drink to the dead, not so much an honour to the deceased, as a disgrace to the survivors. Our palaces are vast inhospitable halls. There the bleak winds, there "Boreas and Eurus and Caurus and Argestes loud," howling through vacant lobbies, and clattering the doors of deserted guard-rooms, appal the imagination, and conjure up the grim spectres of departed tyrants, the Saxon, the Norman, the Dane, the stern Edwards and fierce Henrys, who stalk from desolation to desolation, through the dreary vacuity and melancholy succession of chill and comfortless chambers.

And a dead and still more frightful silence would reign in this desert, if every now and then the tacking of hammers did not announce that these constant attendants upon all courts, jobs, were still alive; for whose sake alone it is that any trace of ancient grandeur is suffered to remain. These palaces are a true emblem of some governments; the inhabitants are decayed, but the governors and magistrates still flourish. They put me in mind of Old Sarum, where the representatives, more in number than the constituents, only serve to inform us that this was once a place of trade, and sounding with the busy hum of men, though now you can only trace

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