66 inquired after Mary. The old lady smiled. Indeed, William," said she, and I started at the voice," indeed we have both paid the tax for growing old: in the aged woman who speaks to you, you see your onceloved Mary." At that moment, casting my eyes in the direction of the inirror, I saw the reflection of a withered old man. I remembered what I had been when I looked there last, and I now saw that I was as much altered as even poor Mary, or, as she now termed herself, Mrs Mary Linde say. And yet, so gently and gradually had Time laid his hand upon me, that till that moment I never thought myself half such an antique as in reality I was. Here, then, was an end to all my dreams. The hope of returning to Mary was what cheered me when I left home, it was that which sus tained me while in India. I foolishly believed that I was to find her the same fond, blushing girl, that I had left her; and never reflecting that time would rob the face of its youth, and the deepest love of its romance, I expected that when I returned there would be many a year of happiness and love in store for us. These delightful visions were baseless. I came home an old man, and found Mary-an old woman. A short time, however, blunted the edge of my disappointment. Reconciled to old age, I may say that I am happy. Mary and I have for several years been man and wife; we have retired to a sweet spot away from the bustle of town, and if we do not feel the raptures of a youthful love, we at least experience the happiness which springs from a wellfounded friendship. THE CORONATION OF HIS MOST SACRED MAJESTY KING GEORGE THE FOURTH. THE greater portion of the various objects of human industry may be ranged under the several classes of the useful, the ornamental, and the frivolous. We purposely omit a fourth division, the noxious, because our present subject is not particularly connected with the matters which would specially require its comprehension. The first class includes all those beneficial operations, whether mental or corporeal, whose results are the formation of productive capital, or of things capable of being rendered instrumental in the creation of other things; the second, those operations which, although less practically useful, are highly essential to the interests of civilization,-such as, for example, the labours of the poet and sculptor; and the last, that numerous family of busy doings which exclusively minister to the prurient appetite of folly, nonsense, vanity, and extravagance. There are particular periods in the history of human affairs in which each of these several classes of action predominate. In saying this, we are not to be misunderstood as asserting that in any period hitherto experienced, any one of them has ceased to operate; but we wish our observation to be taken as merely pointing to certain marked differences in different times, in their respective combinations. In referring to those times, it is necessary to alter the order of the above enumeration. The ornamental has decidedly the preference in the earliest triumphs, or among the first fruits of civilization. In that season, the one certainly not the most favourable for sober reflection, men are exhilarated by the dawning light and the beautiful prospect: not yet depressed by the knowledge of a thousand inconveniences, which, in our present imperfect stage of existence, surround even the happiest results of our wonderful mental organization, they indulge with rapture, unchastised by the chilling suggestions of caution, in the enjoyments of the time. The lighter and more amiable creations of mind are there The Coronation of His Most Sacred Majesty King George the Fourth, solemnized in the Collegiate Church of Saint Peter, Westminster, upon the 19th day of July 1821. Published by his Majesty's Special Command, by Sir George Nayler, Garter Principal King of Arms. London 1824. Price 40 guincas. most highly esteemed. A Homer, a Phidias, a Demosthenes, prescribe laws to the general industry as well as to the popular taste, whose tendency is to place each of the great masters, in his turn, on the very pinnacle of human glory. Utility, taken in the severe sense in which the term is circumscribed by political economists, was among the polite ancients only a secondary object of attention: ornamental arts and sciences, ornamental literature, were favoured by them with a decided preference. That portion of past time which is known under the denomination of the middle ages, was almost equally unfavourable to the predominance of the ornamental and the useful: many of the preceding fruits of the operations of mind were lost or forgotten; and an illiterate people were left pretty much to their own hair-brained in ventions. In this period, FRIVOLITY established his empire, and was puffed up with delight in the contemplation of the crazy superstructure. The constitution of society, its occupations, its amusements, were the formation of his busy, misdirected hand. Factitious gradations,—an injurious system of hereditary distinctions,-of exclusive privileges awarded generally to the most vicious and the most worthless, of legitimacy, in fact, with all its unreasonable and nonsensical pretensions, were the lords of the ascendant: mock splendour, absurd pageantries, monstrous fashions, universal prostration of intellect, servility in the abstract, docility under the inflictions of tyranny, and, by the same hand, oppression, grinding and unrelenting, dealt out to inferiors, these were some of the blessed fruits of those merry days and good old times, in which the frivolous predominated over the ornamental and the useful. Last in order appears the age of utility. The ornamental is not disregarded, but is reduced to its proper subordinate station among the elements of human action; the frivolous is pushed from its vantageground, and is, for all important ends, in fair course towards a final ejectment. Men begin to look more to what has a tendency to promote their real happiness, than to what can, at best, afford them only a moment ary, perhaps a criminal, gratification. Whatever is best in government, in legislation, in policy, is sedulously sought, and, with more or less appearance of impatient zeal, pursued with steady, fixed views, of ultimate attainment, in spite of intervening obstructions, in spite of the concen trated host of inveterate prejudices, which owe their baleful existence to times of defective experience. Literature and the other produc tions of mind are particularly subser vient to this order of progression. We still appreciate the merits of a Byron and a Chantrey, who revive in our recollection the beauties of an cient art; but in our estimate of the true benefactors of mankind, we give the preference to those really superior minds, which are capable of inventing machines to diminish the severities of human toil; to the men of godlike prowess, who may most truly be said to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, and to shelter the houseless; who, while the feeble hand of Charity doles out its ineffectual mite to the individual sufferer, crumble the bonds of misery in the mass, and relieve countless generations from the fell thraldom of poverty and vice. But while the balance inclines in favour of the useful to the diminution, in a just proportion, of the ornamental, no room is left for the bare toleration of the purely frivolous,-to that class of mental production (if mind has any thing to do in the case) which rejects both what is chaste, tasteful, and beautiful, in ornament, and what is noble and desirable in utility; and offers us nothing in their stead but that caput mortuum, the residuum of the follies and nonsense of a half-witted age. We have been led into this train of reflection by the consideration of that stupendous production, "The Coronation of his Most Sacred Majesty, by Sir George Nayler, Garter Principal King of Arms." A brief, and, we trust, candid account of its contents, will decide under which of the three heads pointed out in our preceding hasty analysis it ought to be classed. But first, a word or two with respect to the compiler. The coronation took place during the lifetime of the late respectable Garter, Sir Isaac Heard; and Sir George rated tailor's pattern-book, which, however liable to be contemned by the trade of the present generation, might have been considered a valuable acquisition by a master artist in the less fastidious days of the Plantagenets, or of good Queen Bess. It is not necessary to say another word to prove, with reference to the classification with which we set out, that this work is as widely removed from the ornamental as the useful, and that its appropriate department is unquestionably the purely frivolous. If its intrinsic qualities failed in pointing this out to the most undiscerning, the fact, openly avowed, of extraordinary aid having been found necessary to promote the momentous parturition, instead of its being suffer cases, by its own proper merits, must be considered decisive of the question. Nayler (then recently and unexpect edly promoted from the junior post of York Herald, to that of Clarenceux King of Arms) acted upon the occasion as his deputy. The appoint ment to these offices does not rest with the Crown, but in consequence of one of those antiquated anomalies in the distribution of power which still remain for reformation, with the chief of the Norfolk family, who holds the hereditary post of Earl Marshall: it is proper to state this, by the way, to exonerate Government from the charge sometimes erroneously made, of having acted in this instance with undue partiality, the present Garter having been suddenly, and without any perceptible ground, raised above the heads of three or four gentlemen very much his seniors. The princi-ed to stand or fall, as in all common pal, if not the professed object of the book under review is, to exemplify, with the help of costly, coloured plates, the various grotesque vestments, partly fashioned after the usage of the earlier times of our history, which the Court had directed to be worn by the several ranks and individuals who graced the procession. Every thing else connected with the speculation is evidently auxiliary to this singular purpose. In the first part, now ly ing before us, there is exhibited, indeed, sundry figures, purporting to be likenesses of particular Dukes, Earls, &c.; but they are introduced with no other view than to fill the necessary office of pegs, whereon to hang the clothes, or, to speak more reverently, the "superb habiliments," as it delighteth our King (of Arms) to style them*. Nothing can be conceived more jejune, or ill-arranged, than the letter-press; and when we come to look upon this extravagantly priced folio, undazzled by the glitter of a most gaudy style of colouring, or with the judgment uninfluenced by the somewhat pleasing accompaniments of a most royal margin, and certainly a beautiful type, we behold little more than a highly-deco The pomposity and folly of the author's dedicatory address are in perfect keeping with all the other points of this wonderful performance. It is a work, according to him, designed for POSTERITY; the duty of compiling it is HONOURABLE and GRATIFYING; he has laboured in its completion (his own language) with the PROUDEST ANXIETY; and in consequence, he acknowledges himself to be that individual of “ His Most Sacred Majesty's brave, affectionate, and loyal people," who has been judged worthy of favour. In short, the presumption and slip-slop of the thing alluded to is quite marvellous and astounding; and if it be not the dainty composition of the honest knight himself, as is charitably supposed, from his well-known literary deficiencies, it must have been that of some sly mischievous wag, who, under the specious pretence of lifting him along his weary road, has by this device purposely attracted to his undertaking the attention of criticism, which, from its really humble and insignificant character, it might otherwise have escaped. "It is not a little singular, that, in the print of the "Ceremony of the Homage,” the figure designed to represent the King is a striking likeness of his Majesty's late Royal Consort. We presume (but we say this without being much conversant with the flatteries current among courtiers) that this was not meant as a compliment to the august personage to whom the work is dedicated. REPLY TO C. c.'s DEFENCE OF THE DOCTRINES OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH. IN noticing C. C.'s defence of " Irish Miracles," which particular circumstances have prevented us from doing earlier, we shall begin at the end; observing, thereby, the maxim-"That the first shall be last, and the last first." We have many reasons for this; but one of them, and not the least, is, to gratify the mania raging at present in Parliament, and through the nation, by directing their attention to one of the finest bursts of eloquence any where to be found, on the admissibility of Roman Catholics to power, and a full participation in the blessings of the Constitution. 6 This burst of impassioned eloquence is to be found in pages 694 and 695 of your Number for December last, and is in these words: "We incessantly hear a great deal of plausible nonsense about the glory of the British Constitution, as they fancy it, as if it consisted in those penal laws which disfigure it, or as if no part of it had existed antecedently to those blots of humanity and religion which stain the fair charter of British freedom. Who ever heard of liberty by restraint? Who ever heard of a free Constitution of pains and penalties, of tithes, and the glorious ascendancy? Yet this is the blessed Constitution which has been forced' upon the Irish nation, and because they spurn at it, they are declared incapable of freedom! The essence of the Constitution is, to make all who live under it free and happy; and the hoary bigot, or selfish monopolist, who would exclude us from it on account of our religion, neither understands that religion, nor the law of Nature, which has been written, not with ink, but with the finger of the living God, on the fleshly tablets of our hearts. Such a one does not, cannot understand the heart-burnings of a high-minded man, who is unjustly excluded from his rights, nor that first-fruit of the law of self-preservation, which makes us love our country, reject whatever could diminish her glory or independence, and labour to make her free and happy. When I am told that I am unfit for freedom, on account of the religion which I profess,-when I have considered all that has been said in support of so heinous a proposition, I feel amazed and confounded, and ask, Is it possible that any man could suppose, that, were I in possession of the rights and privileges of a British subject, that all the power on earth would induce me to forego them, that I would be influenced by any consideration to reject the first and clearest principles of my religion,-to hate my country, to subject her to the sway of a stranger, to destroy my own happiness and that of my kindred? No; I conclude it is impossible that any rational man could suppose that Catholics, under equal laws, would be less loyal, less faithful subjects than any others. The followers of the religion of a Wallace, of a Bruce, of a More, and of a Fenelon, incapable of freedoin, and the dupes of a barbarous and slavish superstition!' Those who say so have every claim upon our pity, but their sentiments must receive the reprobation of our unqualified contempt. The eloquent writer from whom I have so often quoted, in his address to the Marquis Wellesley, ▪ Vind. of the Civil and Religious Principles of the Irish Catholics by J. K. L. pp. 28, and 29. 3 G VOL. XVI. thus speaks of our creed: It was the creed, my Lord, of a Charlemagne and of a St. Louis; of an Alfred and an Edward; of the monarchs of the feudal times, as well as of the Emperors of Greece and Rome; it was believed at Venice and at Genoa; in Lucca and the Helvetic nations, in the days of their freedom and greatness: all the barons of the middle ages, all the free cities of later times professed the religion we now profess. You well know, my Lord, that the charter of British freedom, and the common law of England, have their origin and source in Catholic times. Who framed the free constitutions of the Spanish Goths? Who preserved science and literature during the long night of the middle ages? Who imported Literature from Constantinople, and opened for her an asylum at Rome, Florence, Padua, Paris, and Oxford? Who polished Europe by art, and refined her by legislation? Who discovered the new world, and opened a passage to another? Who were the masters of architecture, of painting, of music? Who invented the compass and the art of printing? Who were the poets, the historians, the jurists, the men of deep research and profound literature? Who have exalted human nature, and made man appear again little less than the angels? Were not they almost exclusively the professors of our creed? Were they, who created and possessed Freedom under every shape and form, unfit for her enjoyment? Were men, deemed even now the lights of the world, and the benefactors of the human race, the deluded victims of a slavish superstition? But what is there in our creed which renders us unfit for freedom? Is it the doctrine of passive obedience? No; for the obedience we yield to authority is not blind, but reasonable; our religion does not create despotism; it supports every established constitution which is not opposed to the laws of Nature, unless it be altered by those who are entitled to change it. In Poland, it supported an elective Monarch; in France, an hereditary Sovereign; in Spain, an absolute or constitutional King indifferently; in England, when the houses of York and Lancaster contended, it declared that he who was King de facto' was entitled to the obedience of the people. During the reign of the Tudors, there was a faithful adherence of the Catholics to their Prince, under trials the most severe and galling, because the Constitution required it; the same was exhibited by them to the ungrateful race of Stuart; but since the expulsion of James, (foolishly called an abdication), have they not adopted, with the nation at large, the doctrine of the Revolution, that the crown is held in trust for the benefit of the people; and that, should the Monarch violate his compact, the subject is freed from the bond of his allegiance? Has there been any form of government ever devised by man, to which the religion of Catho lics has not been accommodated? Is there any obligation, either to a Prince or to a Constitution, which it does not enforce?'" Such is the splendid passage which is the nucleus of all the glowing declamation on Catholic Emancipation," both in and out of Parliament, and which, by its tinsel litter, has deceived many. But eloquence and truth are two different things. That Catholicism has existed under every form of government, that great men have risen up in countries where it was professed, that the arts of architecture, painting, and music,-that poets, historians, jurists, and men of deep research and profound learning, have flourished under popery, is not denied; but we do most positively deny, and shall be able to show, that in no country did it ever" create freedom," but, on the contrary, created "despotism;" that instead of promoting the arts and the sciences, it was the only drawback upon them; and that whilst it produced learned canonists or jurists, the first principles of civil and religious liberty were hid from Christendom till the time of the Reformation, and then, and then only, promulgated by reformers, and by reformers alone. A short commentary on the above passage will make all this clear. We pass over C. C.'s plausible nonsense about the glory of the British Constitution, about its existing " antecedently" to pains and penalties, "which disfi Vind. by J. K. L. pp. 24, 25. |