travelling in a waggon for expedition, when there is a bridle road will take you by a short cut to Parnassus, and the Polisher has got the key of it; he has elocution for all customers, lawyers, players, parsons, or senators; readymade talents for all professions, the bar, the stage, the pulpit, or the parliament. There is another class of Puffers, who speak strongly to the passions, and use many curious devices to allure the senses, fitting out their lottery offices, like fowlers who catch birds by night with looking-glasses and candles, to entice us to their snare. Some of them hang out the goddess of good fortune in person, with money bags in her hands, a tempting emblem; others recommend themselves under the auspices of some lucky name, confounding our heads with cabalistical numbers, unintelligible calculations, and mysterious predictions, whose absurdity is their recommendation, and whose obscurity makes the temptation irresistible: Omnia enim stolidi magis admirantur amantque, Inversis quæ sub verbis latitantia cernunt. Witlings are always amazingly taken Essences, cosmetics, and a hundred articles of pretended invention for the frivolous adorning of our persons engross a considerable share of our public papers: the puffs from this quarter are replete with all the gums and odours of Arabia: the chemists of Laputa were not more subtle extractors of sunbeams than these artists, who can fetch powder of pearls out of rotten bones and mercury, odour of roses from a turnip, and the breath of zephyrs out of a cabbage stalk; they can furnish your dressing room with the toilette of Junño, bring you bloom from the cheeks of Hebe, and a nosegay from the bosom of Flora. These Puffers never fail to tell you, after a court birth-day, that their washes, powders, and odours were the favourites of the drawing-room, and that the reigning beauties of the assembly bought their charms at their counters. After these follow a rabble of rareeshow men, with mermaids, man-tigers, ourang-outangs, and every monster and abortion in creation; columns of giants and light infantry, companies of dyarfs; conjurers, rope dancers, and posture masters; tooth drawers, oculists, and chiropodists; every one puffs himself off to the public in a style as proud as Ancient Pistol's; every fellow who can twirl upon his toe, or ride a gallop on his head, pastes himself up in effigy on our public offices and churches, and takes all the courts in Europe to witness to the fame of his performances. If a rascal can show a louse through a microscrope, he expects all the heads in England to itch till they behold it; if a son of the gallows can slide down a rope from the top of a steeple, he puffs off his flight in Pindarics that would make a moderate man's head giddy to read; nay, we have seen a gambling house and a brothel thrown open to the town, and public lectures on obscenity audaciously advertised in a Christian city, which would not have been tolerated in Sodom or Gomorrah. I cannot dismiss this subject without hinting to the proprietors of our Royal Theatres, that this expedient of puffing is pardonable only in a troop of strollers, or the master of a puppet show. Whilst the Muses keep possession of our theatre, and genius treads the stage, every friend to the national drama will condemn the practice, and hold them inexcusable who are responsible for it, if they do not discontinue it. It is hardly possible that any cause can be profited by puffing; if any can, it must be a contemptible one; the interests of literature are amongst the last that can expect advantage from it, or that should condescend to so mean a resource: instead of attracting curiosity, it creates disgust: instead of answering the temporary object of profit, it sinks the permanent fund of reputation. As to the impolicy of the measure, many reasons may be given, but these I shall forbear to mention, lest, whilst I am stating dangers, I should appear to suggest them. In conclusion, I have no doubt but the good sense of the proprietors will determine on a reform; for I am persuaded they cannot be profited by houses of their own filling, ner any author flattered by applauses of his own bestowing. NUMBER XXI. SOCIETY in despotic governments is narrowed according to the degree of rigour which the ruling tyrant exercises over his subjects. In some countries it is in a manner annihilated. As despotism relaxes toward limited monarchy, society is dilated in the same proportion. If we consider freedom of condition in no other light than as it affects society, a monarchy limited by law, like this of ours, is perhaps the freest constitution upon earth; because, was it to diverge from the centre on which it now rests, either towards despotism on one hand, or democracy on the other, the restraints upon social freedom would operate in the same degree, though not in the same mode; for, whether that restraint is produced by the awe of a court or the promiscuous licentiousness of a rabble, the barrier is in either case broken down; and, whether it lets the cobbler or the king s messenger into our company, the tyranny is insupportable, and society is enslaved. are not willing to expose their persons for the sake of their opinions, and society is of course exceedingly circumscribed; to trifle away time seems all they aspire to; conversation turns upon few topics, and they are such as will not carry a dispute; neither glowing with the zeal of party, nor the cordial interchange of mutual confidence; day after day rolls in the same languid round through life; their seminaries of education, especially since the expulsion of the Jesuits, are grievously in decline; learning is extinct; their faculties are whelmed in superstition, and ignorance covers them with a cloud of darkness, through which the brightest parts cannot find their way. When an Englishman is admitted into what are called the best circles in Paris, he generally finds something captivating in them on a first acquaintance; for, without speaking of their internal recommendations, it is apt to flatter a man's vanity to find himself in an exclusive party, and to surmount those difficulties which others cannot. As soon as he has had time to examine the component parts of this circle into which he so happily stepped, he readily discovers that it is a circle, for he goes round and round without one excursion; the whole party follows the same stated revolution, their minds and bodies keep the same orbit, their opinions rise and set with the regularity of planets, and for what is passing without their sphere they know nothing of it. In this junto it rarely happens but some predominant spirit takes the lead; and, if he is ambitious of making a masterstroke indeed, he may go the length to de-taining a haughty fortress on the extremity of clare that he has the honour to profess himself an Atheist." The creed of this leading spirit is the creed of the junto; there is no fear of controversy; investigation does not reach them, and that liberality of mind which a collision of ideas only can produce does not belong to them; you must fall in with their sentiments or keep out of their society; and hence arises that overruling self-opinion so peculiar to the French, that assumed superiority so conspicuous in their manners, which destroys the very essence of that politeness which they boast to excel in. Politeness is nothing more than an elegant and concealed species of flattery, tending to put the person to whom it is addressed in good humour and respect with himself; but if there is a parade and display affected in the exertion of it, if a man seems to say " Look how condescending and gracious I am!"—whilst he has only the common offices of civility to perform, such politeness seems founded in mistake, and calculated to recommend the wrong person; and this mistake I have observed frequently to occur in French manners. If this country saw its own interests in their true light, it would conciliate the affections of the Spanish nation, who are naturally disposed towards England; the hostile policy of main their coast, which is no longer valuable than whilst they continue to attack it, has driven them into a compact with France, odious to all true Spaniards, and which this country has the obvious means of dissolving. It is by an alliance with England that Spain will recover her pristine greatness; France is plunging her into provincial dependency; there is still virtue in the Spanish nation; honesty, simplicity, and sobriety are still characteristics of the Castilian; he is brave, patient, unrepining; no soldier sleeps harder, sleeps less, or marches longer; treat him like a gentleman, and you may work him like a mule; his word is a passport in affairs of honour, and a bond in matters of property. That dignity of nature, which in the highest orders of the state is miserably debased, still keeps its vigour in the bulk of the people, and will assuredly break out into some sudden and general convulsion for their deliverance. If there are virtue and good sense in the administration of this country, we shall seize the opportunity yet open to us. It now remains that I should speak of England, and when I turn my thoughts to my native island, and consider it with the impartiality of a citizen of the world, I discern in it all advantages, in perfection, which man in social The national character of the Spaniards is very different from that of the French, and the habits of life in Madrid as opposite as may be from those which obtain at Paris. The Span-state can enjoy. A constitution of government iards have been a great and free people, and, though that grandeur and that freedom are no more, their traces are yet to be seen, among the Castilians in particular. The common people have not yet contracted that obsequiousness and submission which the rigour of their government, if no revolution occurs to redress it, must in time reduce them to. The condition which this gallant nation is now found in, between the despotism of the throne and the terrors of the inquisition, cannot be aggravated by description: body and mind are held in such complete slavery by these two gloomy powers, that men sufficiently monarchical to preserve order and decorum in society, and popular enough to secure freedom; a climate so happily tempered that the human genius is neither exhausted by heat nor cramped and made torpid by cold; a land abounding in all manner of productions that can encourage industry, invite exercise, and promote health; a lot of earth so singularly located as marks it out by Providence to be the emporium of plenty and the asylum of peace; a religion, whose establishment leaves all men free, neither endangering their persons, nor enslaving their minds; a system of enlightened education so general, and a vein of genius so characteristical, that under the banners of a free press must secure to the nation a standing body of learned men, to spread its language to the ends of the world, and its fame to all posterity. What is it then, which interrupts the enjoyments of social life, and disturbs the harmony of its inhabitants? Why do foreigners complain that time hangs heavy on their hands in England, that private houses are shut against them, and that, were it not for the resource of public places, they would find themselves in a solitude, or (more properly speaking) solitary in a crowd? How comes it to pass that country gentlemen, who occasionally visit town, see themselves neglected and forgotten by those very people who have been welcomed to their houses and regaled with their hospitality; and men of talents and character, formed to grace and delight our convivial hours, are left to pace the Park and streets of London by themselves, as if they were the exiles from society. The fact is, trade occupies one end of the town, and politics engross the other. As for foreigners of distinction, who ought in good policy to be considered as the guests of the state, after they have gone through the dull ceremonial of a drawing-room, the court takes no farther concern about them. The crown has no officer charged with their reception, provides no table within or without the palace for their entertainment; parliamentary or official avocations are a standing plea for every state minister in his turn to neglect them. The winter climate and coast of England is so deterring to natives of more temperate latitudes, that they commonly pay their visits to the capital in the summer, when it is deserted: so that after billeting themselves in some empty hotel, amidst the fumes of paint and noise of repairs, they wear out a few tedious days, and then take flight, as if they had escaped from a prison. When parliament is sitting and the town is full, a man who does not interest himself in the politics and party of the day will find the capital an unsocial place; that degree of freedom, which in other respects is the life of society, now becomes its mortal foe: the zeal, and even fury with which people abet their party, and the latitude they give themselves in opinion and discourse, extinguish every voice that would speak peace and pleasure to the board, and turn good fellowship into loud contention and a strife of tongues. The right assumed by our newspapers of publishing what they are pleased to call Parliamentary Debates, I must regard as one of the greatest evils of the time, replete with foreign and domestic mischief. Our orators speak pamphlets, and the senate is turned into a theatre. The late hours of parliament, which to a degree are become fashionable, are in effect destructive to society. I cannot dispense with observing collaterally on this occasion that professional men in England consort more PXclusively amongst themselves, and communicate less generally than in other countries, which gives their conversation, however informing, an air of pedantry, contracted by long habits, great ardour for their profession, and deep learning in it. As for slander, which amongst other evils owes much of its propagation to the same vehicle of the daily press, it is the poison of society; depresses virtuous ambition, damps the early shoots of genius, puts the innocent to pain, and drives the guilty to desperation; it infuses suspicion into the best natures, and loosens the cement of the strongest friendships; very many affect to despise it, few are so high-minded as not to feel it; though common slanderers seldom have it in their power to hurt established reputations, yet they can always contrive to spoil company, and put honest men to the trouble of turning them out of it. It is a common saying that authors are more spiteful to each other, and more irritable under an attack, than other men; I do not believe the observation is well founded; every sensible man knows that his fame, especially of the literary kind, before it can pass current in the world, pays a duty on entrance, like some sort of merchandise, ad valorem; he knows that there are always some who live upon the plunder of condemned reputations, watching the tides of popular favour in hopes of making seizures to their own accountHabent venenum pro victu, immo pro deliciis. The little injury such men do to letters chiefly consists in the stupidity of their own productions: they may to a certain degree check a man's living fame, but if he writes to posterity, he is out of their reach, because he appeals to a court where they can never appear against him. When we give our praise to any man's character or performances, let us give it absolutely, and without comparison, for it is juɛtly remarked by foreigners, that we seldom commend positively. This remark bears both against our good nature and our good sense; but let no man by this or any other declamation against slander be awed into that timid prudence which, affecting the name of candour, dares not to condemn, and of course is not entitled to applaud. Truth and justice have their claims upon us, and our testimony against vice, folly, and bypocrisy is due to society; manly resentment against mischievous characters, cleanly ridicule of vanity and impertinence, and fair criticism of what is under public review, are the prerogatives of a free spirit: they peculiarly belong to Englishmen, and he betrays a right constitutionally inherent in him who from mean and personal motives forbears to exercise it. When I have said this, I think it right to add, that I cannot state a case, in which a man can he justified in treating another's name with | debauches my principle as to make me a party in freedom, and concealing his own. NUMBER XXII. Et quando uberior vitiorum copia? quando JUVENAL, SAT. 1. When did our vices so disgrace the land? At once is staked and lost, a hecatomb to Fate. THE passage which I have selected for the motto of this paper will show, that I intend to devote it to the consideration of the vice of Gaming; and I forbore to state it in my preceding essay amongst the causes that affect society in this country, because I regarded it as an evil too enormous to be brought within the brief enumeration therein contained, resolving to treat it with that particular respect and attention which its high station and dignity in mischief have a claim to. Though I have no hesitation at beginning the attack, I beg leave to premise that I am totally without hope of carrying it. I may say to my antagonists in the words, though not altogether in the sense, that the angel Gabriel does to his "Satan, I know thy strength, and thou know'st mine." What avails my hurling a feeble essay at the beads of this hydra, when the immortal drama of The Gamester lies trodden under his feet? Conscious that I do not possess the strength, I shall not assume the importance of a champion, and as I am not of dignity enough to be angry, I shall keep my temper and my distance too, skirmishing like those insignificant gentry who play the part of teazers in Spanish bull fights, sticking arrows in his crest to provoke him to bellow, whilst bolder combatants engage him at the point of his horns. It is well for Gamesters, that, they are so numerous as to make a society of themselves, for it would be a strange abuse of terms to rank them amongst society at large, whose profession it is to prey upon all who compose it. Strictly speaking, it will bear a doubt, if a Gamester has any other title to be called a man, except under the distinction of Hobbes, and upon claim to the charter of Homo Homini Lupus-As a Human Wolf I grant he has a right to his wolfish prerogatives. He, who so far surprises my reason or my own destruction, is a worse enemy than he who robs me of my property by force and violence, because he sinks me in my own opinion; and if there was any virtue in mankind, sufficient for their own defence, honest men would expel gamesters as outlaws from society, and good citizens drive them from the state as the destroyers of human happiness, wretches who make the parent childless and the wife a widow. But what avail a parcel of statutes against gaming, when they who make them conspire together for the infraction of them? Why declare gaming debts void in law, when that silly principle, so falsely called honour (at once the idol and the idiot of the world) takes all those debts upon itself and calls them debts of honour? It is not amongst things practicable to put gaming down by statute. If the face of society was set steadily against the vice; if parents were agreed to spurn at the alliance of a gamester, however ennobled; if our seminaries of education would enforce their discipline against early habits of play; if the crown as the fountain of honour, and the virtuous part of the fair sex, as the dispensers of happiness, would reprobate all men addicted to this desperate passion, something might perhaps be done. If tradesmen would consult their own interest, and give no credit to gamesters; if the infamous gang of money lenders could be absolutely extinguished, and the people at large, instead of rising against a fellow subject, because he worships God according to the religion of his ancestors at a Catholic altar, would exercise their resentment against those illegal places of resort, where desperadoes meet for nightly pillage, this contagious evil might possibly be checked; but when it is only to be I hoped that a combination of remedies might stem the disease, how can we expect a recovery when no one of them all is administered? Though domestic misery must follow an alliance with a gamester, matches of this sort are made every day; a parent, who consents so to sacrifice his child, must either place his hope in her reforming her husband, or else he must have made up his mind to set consequences at defiance; a very foolish hope, or a very fatal principle. There can be no domestic comfort in the arms of a gamester, no conjugal asylum in his heart. Weak and ignorant young women may be duped into such connections; vain and selfconceited ones may adventure with their eyes open, and trust to their attractions for security against misfortune; but let them be assured there is not a page in the world's history that will furnish them with an example to palliate their presumption; eager to snatch the present pleasures of a voluptuous prospect, they care little for the ruin, which futurity keeps out of sight. With the clearest conviction in my mind of the general advantages of public education, I must acknowledge a suspicion that due attention is not paid in our great seminaries of edu cation to restrain this fatal passion in its first approaches. I fear there are some evidences of a guilty negligence now in operation, spreading poison as they flow, and carrying with them in their course all the charms of eloquence, the flow of wit, and fascinating spell of science; sanctified by passion, gaming houses, which outpeer the royal palace, rise around it in defiance; trophies and monuments of the triumphs of dissipation. The wife, whose husband enters those doors, and the parent, who owns a son within them, must either eradicate affection and nature from their hearts or take leave of happiness for ever. Woe be to the nation, whose police cannot, or dare not, correct such an evil! 'Tis foolish to lament the amputation of a limb, when the mortality is in our vitals. I shall not take upon myself to lay down rules for kings, or affect to pronounce what a sovereign can, or cannot do, to discountenance gaming in this kingdom; but I will venture to say that something more is requisite than mere example. "It was in the decline of Rome, when the provinces were falling off from her empire, whilst a virtuous but unfortunate prince possessed the throne, that the greatest part of Africa was in revolt. The General who commanded the Roman legions was a soldier of approved courage in the field, but of mean talents and dissolute manners. This man, in the most imminent crisis for the interests of Rome, suffered and encouraged such a spirit of gaming to obtain amongst his officers in their military quarters, that the finest army in the world entirely lost their discipline, and remained inactive, whilst a few levies of raw insurgents wrested from the Roman arms the richest provinces of the empire.' History records nothing further of this man's fate or fortune, but leaves us to conclude that the reproaches of his own conscience and the execrations of posterity were all the punishment he met with. The empire was rent by faction, and his party rescued him from the disgrace he merited. The last resource in all desperate cases, which the law cannot, or will not reach, lies with the people at large. It is not without reason I state it as the last, because their method of curing disorders is like the violent medicines of empirics, never to be applied to but in absolute extremity. If the people were, like Shakspeare's Julius Cæsar," never to do wrong but with just cause," I should not so much dread the operation of their remedies; I shall therefore venture no further than to express an humble wish, that when it shall be their high and mighty pleasure to proceed again to the pulling down and burning of houses, those houses may not be the repositories of science, but the receptacles of gamesters. When a man of fortune turns gamester, the act is so devoid of reason that we are at a loss to find a motive for it; but when one of desperate circumstances takes to the trade, it only proves that he determines against an honest course of life for a maintenance, and, having his choice to make between robbery and gaming, prefers that mode of depredation which exposes him to least danger, and has a coward's plea for his vocation. Such a one may say with Ancient Pistol "I'll live by Nym, and Nym shall live by me, And friendship shall combine and brotherhood; Is not this just ? A In the justice of his league I do not join with Ancient Pistol, but I am ready to allow there is some degree of common sense in this class of the brotherhood, of which common sense I cannot trace a shadow amongst the others. preference therefore in point of understanding is clearly due to the vagabonds and desperadoes; as to the man who, for the silly chance of winning what he does not want, risks every thing he ought to value, his defence is in his folly, and if we rob him of that, we probably take from him the only harmless quality he is possessed of. If however such an instance shall occur, and the demon of gaming shall enter the same breast where honour, courage, wit, wisdom reside, such a mind is like a motley suit of cards, where kings, queens, and knaves are packed together, and make up the game with temporary good fellowship, but it is a hundred to one but the knave will beat them out of doors in the end. As there are separate gangs of gamesters, so there are different modes of gaming; some set their property upon games of simple chance, some depend upon skill, others upon fraud. The gamesters of the first description run upon luck: a silly crew of Fortune's fools; this kind of play is only fit for them whose circumstances cannot be made worse by losing, otherwise there is no proportion between the good and the evil of the chance; for the good of doubling a man's property bears no comparison with the evil of losing the whole; in the one case he only gains superfluities, in the other he loses necessaries; and he, who stakes what life wants against that which life wants not, makes a foolish bet, to say no worse of it. Games of chance are traps to catch school-boy novices and gaping country squires, who begin with a guinea and end with a mortgage; whilst the old stagers in the game, keeping their passions in check, watch the ebb and flow of fortune, till the booby they are pillaging sees his acres melt at every cast. |