THE FIRST OF AUGUST, A PROCLAMATORY SONNET. Beneath the standard of old Dan De Foe, High hearts have ranged themselves-joy to them all! At this auspicious time, no care we know, Our royal breast beats free from worldly thrall— We summon all good liegemen to our hall, Where, quaffing rapture from glad earth and sky, DANIEL REX. THE ENGLISHMAN'S MAGAZINE. APRIL. OUR PRINCIPLES. As there is but ONE INTEREST in the Nation, I wish there were but ONE PARTY, and this Party would adhere to unbiassed Justice. DE FOE. On the surcoat of the ENGLISHMAN is stamped "the counterfeit resemblance" of a British Writer known over the wide world of intellect as the author of one of the most delightful fictions that ever rivetted the attention of a susceptible mind. The bond of unsophisticated feeling, which, in beautiful acknowledgment of the redeeming principles of our general nature, is common to every inhabited clime, has made even the wilds of Arabia familiar with the Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. It is not, however, merely as a master of moral narrative, or as an athletic versifier, that we have chosen DANIEL DE FOE to typify the genius of our pages. He raises his bold front before his countrymen on grounds more flattering to them, more honourable to himself, and more closely in accordance with the purpose of our undertaking. Through a life of seventy years, amidst sore buffettings of fortune, the desertion of pretended friends, and the close-cleaving malignity of numerous and powerful adversaries, the dauntless advocate of stubborn Truth pursued his undeviating path, supported by the majesty of conscious rectitude. While he unsparingly and successfully satirized national prejudices, no son of the soil was ever better entitled to claim the proud distinction of being, in the most elevated sense of the expression, a "True-born Englishman." De Foe was a healthy shoot of that intermediate class which may be pronounced the moral regulator of the community. In a clouded career of political controversy, his eye still turned in constancy and love towards the mild light of the domestic hearth. His arguments derived no spurious strength from an unhallowed alliance with slanderous invective. The whole body of his multifarious works is consecrated by the wish and the endeavour to make men wiser and better. He went forth VOL. I. NO. I. B to do battle with error, intolerance, and oppression; and his masculine understanding disdained to seek less exalted confederates than Religion and the Social Virtues. The period at which our worthy contended for Civil and Religious Liberty, in many characteristic circumstances resembled the present. The King William of that day, like the King William of 1831, had to deal with a party selfishly inimical to the extension of popular rights.De Foe, as became a faithful subject, exposed the sophisms of the faction, and the friendship of his sovereign rewarded his ability and zeal. In adopting a similar course, our exertions shall not slacken, although they should fall short of producing so gratifying a return as the enjoyment of amicable intercourse with a Prince who consults and respects the opinions of his people. In avowing those principles, the adhesion to which will constitute our chief claim to public support, we may specify some that our prototype, in his day and generation, embraced with all his heart and with all his soul. He struggled for Freedom of Conscience-for Freedom of Trade-for the privileges of the Commons of England-and for the amelioration of the condition of his fellow-creatures, wherever they were degraded by ignorance, or maltreated by injustice. Considering the tribunal in his own bosom to be the paramount court of appeal, he experienced the ordinary lot of honest writers who, avoiding the extremes of all parties, are sure to satisfy none. Both Whig and Tory wreaked their resentments on De Foe. In a kindred position we should act as he acted, even at the hazard of being placed in the self-same predicament. Trusting in the universality of the spirit that animates, and always will animate the ENGLISHMAN, we devote a laugh to those pleasant prognosticators who herald in the nativity of every new venture by indiscriminating oracles of evil. Without attempting an ungracious sarcasm at the expense of our precursors in the field of periodical literature, we state our unhesitating conviction, that so far as we are concerned, the field in question is as naked of competitors as is the great African desert of the symbols of civilized life, or as are the pericrania of certain Right Honourables of the elements of rational cogitation. We put it to the reader whether any of the motley Children of the Month resembles us in the following important particulars-points which we regard as the pledges of a lofty, irreproachable and unapproachable triumph. In the first place we are UNTRAMMELLED AS THE WINDS. We have not established a petty political warehouse for the accommodation of personages too nervous to encounter the pressure of the general mart. The expression of our sentiments will be controlled by a power superior to the fluctuations of parliamentary benches, or the reckonings of mercenary speculation-we are neither chained to a stateman's chariot, nor nailed to a trader's counter. It is a leading object of our ambition to be considered the representative of the intellectual dignity and moral worth of the unpretending majority of an enlightened nation; and it is equally our ambition to elevate the standard of morality and taste as high as may be compatible with the capabilities of human nature. In the second place—we have taken Liberty to be our handmaid, and as our soul's cherished partner, we glory in proclaiming her before all the world. Craving pardon of the mountain nymph for neutralizing her sex, we say, with our excellent Daniel, that "he who won't fight for liberty is a fool; he that denies it to others is a knave”— "Thy spirit, INDEPENDENCE, let us share, Lord of the lion heart and eagle eye!" Yea-independence in its noblest latitude-independence not less jealous of its own intrinsic purity than of the designs of a despot. The most sublime of victories is that which is achieved over degenerate affections and froward passions; and it will be our study to attain the enduring honours of the ethic laurel. The part we shall take on questions involving the inherent and inalienable rights of mankind, will best demonstrate the sincerity of our declarations. Nothing that affects these rights can be indifferent to us, occur where it may, from arctic to antarctic. Our sympathies girdle the great globe itself; and rather than recede within a solitary shell, we should prefer the total forfeiture of our rank in the scale of animal creation. It is alike strange and true, that no Magazine extant has undertaken the generous task of redressing the wrongs inflicted on insulted and abused humanity, by the accursed traffic in the flesh and blood of those unhappy beings who are only inferior to their tormentors in the accidental measure of knowledge and power. Against every species of iniquitous thraldom, and primarily, and especially, against the abominable system of Negro Slavery, the ENGLISHMAN flings down his mailed glove-the avenger of Nature's broken charter. His sword shall not repose in the sheath until the land of his love be permanently purified from the odious stain-until the statute-book be cleansed once and for aye, from the legislative impurities which mark the unrighteous reign of colonial bondage. Individual property should be respected to every reasonable extent, but there ought not to be the shadow of a compromise of the sacred truth promulgated by the Deity, in the hour when a master was given to a sphere exulting in the exuberance of young and uncorrupted life—a truth which inscribed upon the universal heart, declares that man can have no property in man- —nay, that man ceases to have a legitimate property in himself, if he be disposed to forget that he owes the allegiance of an unfettered spirit to the Sovereignty of his race. There is much to rectify in the home relations of the empire. Institutions framed for a backward state of society, call loudly for revision and reconstruction. The cramp of monopoly arrests the energies of commerce; the usurpation of the aristocracy excludes the people from the national councils; the revenues of the church are lavished upon laziness and profligacy, while indigence is the portion of those that do the duty; money wrung from suffering industry is showered abroad upon filthy sycophants and complying women; the shattered Temple of Justice has been turned into a legal chaos full of ruinous complexity; this baleful combination demands the intervention of a fearless hand, and it shall go hard with us if we spare either axe or knife in the wholesome business of reformation. Our trust-worthiness in literary matters may be inferred from a few facts. Possessing ample means to compensate talent, we despise the miserable restrictions of a coterie, and deride the ostentatious parade of a sounding catalogue of names. With assistants among the most illustrious ornaments of literature, the value of contributions is left to be determined by their absolute merit. From the unexhausted mine of rising genius we shall draw liberally and often; and altogether destitute of partialities or antipathies, and regardless of party or personal distinctions, as we are and must ever be, it is scarcely too much to expect that our labours will be received in good faith, as the result of an anxious desire to accomplish a laudable object upon honourable grounds. The ENGLISHMAN concludes in the words of him with whom he commenced-"I am content to stand or fall by the public justice of my native country." THE COUNTRY AND ITS PROSPECTS. IT has been gained at last-gained after a weary season of patient vigilance and half-hopeless supplication, when the prayer of the petitioner was met by ribald jests and intimations, not idly uttered, of dungeon, steel, and scaffold-it has been GAINED AT LAST-the position on which, like that Archimedes sighed for, the lever of opinion may firmly rest, and upturn from its foundation the fabric raised by the accumulated corruptions of above a hundred years. To the wise and the good this must assuredly be a day of triumphan occasion of thankfulness-yet one on which they will "mingle trembling with their mirth."-Joyous emotions will be tempered by a solemn sense of a great deliverance, and the conviction that there is more, much more, to be done ere the citizen can return to the haunts of commerce-the husbandman to his fields—the knight to his old hall -the man of letters to his fellowship with the unforgotten dead—and raise their voices in glad acclaim to the new-born liberties of their country. It was a principle of action worthy of all remembrance that counted past deeds as nothing while aught remained to be achieved; and this principle we would impress upon the mind of every well-wisher of the GENERAL CAUSE, as emphatically as men can impress it whose utmost energies shall be freely and fearlessly exerted to aid in placing that CAUSE above the chances of time and tide. If there be in Britain a single individual, out of the pale of the interested few, who labours under such an opacity of vision as to survey the rank fens of collective misrepresentation, and say to himself this is truly a fair garden, and blessed with excellent fruits, we would recommend him, if he be not deaf as well as blind, to suspend his ejaculations, and |