but then their minds are set, and our minds are set, and they will not, in mature age, grow into each other. But with a home filled with those whom we entirely love and sympathize with, and with some old friends, to whom one can open one's heart fully from time to time, the world's society has rather a bracing influence to make one shake off mere dreams of delight. You must not think me

bilious or low-spirited; I never felt better or more inclined to work; -but one gets pathetic with thinking of the present and the past, and of the days and the people that you and I have seen together, and of the progress which we have all made towards eternity; for I, who am nearly the youngest of our old set, have completed half my three score and ten years. Besides, the aspect of the times is really to my mind awful :-on one side a party profaning the holiest names by the lowest principles, and the grossest selfishness and ignorance, on the other, a party who seem likely nanòv nanữ lãobaı, who disclaim and renounce even the very name of that, whose spirit their adversaries have long renounced equally. If I had two necks, I should think that I had a very good chance of being hanged by both sides, as I think I shall now by whichever gets the better, if it really does come to a fight. I read now, with the deepest sympathy, those magnificent lines of your Uncle's, on the departed year, and am myself, in fact, experiencing some portion of the abuse which he met with from the same party; while, like him, I feel utterly unable to shelter myself in the opposite party, whose hopes and principles are such as I shrink from with abhorrence. So what Thucydides says of τὰ μέσα τῶν πολίτων often rises upon my mind as a promising augury of my future exaltation, ή που πρὸ Νεαπύλης αἰωρηθέντος, ἢ ἐμοῦγε πρὸ Ρουγβεῖας.

November 3rd.-I wrote these two sides in school on Monday, and I hope to finish the rest of my letter this evening, while my boys are translating into Latin from my English that magnificent part in the De Oratore, about the death of Crassus. I see I have given you enough of discourse on things in general-I will only add one thing more; that I know there are reports in Oxford of my teaching the boys my politics, and setting revolutionary themes. you hear these reports, will you contradict them flatly? I never disguise or suppress my opinions, but I have been and am most religiously careful not to influence my boys with them; and I have just now made them begin Russell's Modern Europe again, because we were come to the period of the French Revolution, and I did

not choose to enter upon that subject with them. As to the revolutionary themes, I cannot even imagine the origin of so absurd a falsehood, except it be that one of my subjects last half year was "the particular evils which civilized society is exposed to, as opposed to savage life," which I gave for the purpose of clearing their notions about luxury, and the old declamations about Scythian simplicity, &c.; but I suppose that I am thought to have a longing for the woods, and an impatience of the restraint of breeches. It is really too great a folly to be talked of as a revolutionist, with a family of seven young children, and a house and income that I should be rather puzzled to match in America, if I were obliged to change my quarters. My quarrel with the anti-liberal party is, that they are going the way to force my children to America, and to deprive me and every one else of property, station, and all the inestimable benefits of society in England. There is nothing so revolutionary, because there is nothing so unnatural and so convulsive to society as the strain to keep things fixed, when all the world is by the very law of its creation in eternal progress; and the cause of all the evils of the world may be traced to that natural but most deadly error of human indolence and corruption, that our business is to preserve and not to improve. It is the ruin of us all alike, individuals, schools, and nations.

XXIV. TO HIS SISTER SUSANNAH ARNOLD.

Rugby, November, 1830.

The paramount interest of public affairs outweighs with me even the school itself; and I think not unreasonably, for school and all would go to the dogs, if the convulsion which I dread really comes to pass. I must write a pamphlet in the holidays, or I shall burst. No one seems to me to understand our dangers, or at least to speak them out manfully. One good man, who sent a letter to the Times the other day, recommends that the clergy should preach subordination and obedience. I seriously say, God forbid they should; for, if any earthly thing could ruin Christianity in England, it would be this. If they read Isaiah and Jeremiah and Amos and Habakkuk, they will find that the Prophets, in a similar state of society in Judea, did not preach subordination only or chiefly, but they denounced oppression, and amassing overgrown properties, and

grinding the labourers to the smallest possible pittance; and they denounced the Jewish high-church party for countenancing all these iniquities, and prophesying smooth things to please the aristocracy. If the clergy would come forward as one man from Cumberland to Cornwall, exhorting peaceableness on the one side, and justice on the other, denouncing the high rents and the game laws, and the carelessness which keeps the poor ignorant, and then wonders that they are brutal, I verily believe they might yet save themselves and the state. But the truth is that we are living amongst a population whom we treat with all the haughtiness and indifference that we could treat slaves, whom we allow to be slaves in ignorance, without having them chained and watched to prevent them from hurting us. I only wish you could read Arthur Young's Travels in France in 1789 and 1790, and see what he says of the general outbreak then of the peasantry, when they burnt the chateaux all over France, and illused the families of the proprietors, and then compare the orderliness of the French populace now. It speaks volumes for small subdivided properties, general intelligence, and an absence of aristocratical manners and distinctions. We know that, in the first revolution, to be seen in decent clothes was at one time a sure road to the guillotine; so bitter was the hatred engendered in a brute population against those who had gone on in luxury and refinement, leaving their poorer neighbours to remain in the ignorance and wretchedness of savages, and therefore with the ferocity of savages also. The dissolution of the ministry may do something; but the evil exists in every parish in England; and there should be a reform in the ways and manners of every parish to cure it. We have got up a dispensary here, and I am thinking of circulating small tracts à la Cobbett in point of style, to show the people the real state of things and their causes. Half the truth might be of little use, but ignorance of all the truth is something fearful, and a knowledge of the whole truth would, I am convinced, do nothing but pacify, because the fault of the rich has been a sin of ignorance and thoughtlessness; they have only done what the poor would have done in their places, because few men's morality rises higher than to take care of themselves, abstaining from actual wrong to others. have got a long sermon. showed me a copy of the Record newspaper, a true specimen of the party, with their infinitely little minds, disputing about anise and cummin, when heaven and earth are coming together around them; with much of Christian harm

Q

So you

lessness, I do not deny, but with nothing of Christian wisdom; and these are times when the dove can ill spare the addition of the serpent. The state of affairs, therefore, keeps me doubtful about going from home in the holidays, because, if there is likely to be any opening for organizing any attempts at general reform, I should not like to be away from my post. But the interest is too intense, and makes me live ten lives in one every day. However, I am very well, and perfectly comfortable as far as regards family and school.

XXV. TO REV. JULIUS HARE.

Rugby, November 12, 1830.

Your account of the MSS. is very tempting:-the one which I wanted is that marked “Hudsoni Codex Clarendonius,” but I find from you that there is another, and I know that it can never have been collated, so that I am exceedingly desirous, if it be possible, to get the two. But would it not be better that I should give the seeurity in my own name, rather than entail that trouble upon you? And if the bond required be for a considerable sum, perhaps it ought to be in my name, to prevent difficulties with my executors in the case of my death; a contingency which I think every man should bear in mind in all money transactions. The Birmingham coach I think goes through Dunchurch, within three miles of us, and if so, any parcel sent by it to me would be left there, if so directed, and would be forwarded to me immediately. I cannot close this letter without thanking you most warmly for the invaluable man you procured me in Lee. He is, indeed, far too good for any subordinate situation, yet having once had such a man here, it will be a bitter loss to be obliged to part with him. I trust, however, that we may keep him for a few years at least.

XXVI. TO REV. AUGUSTUS HARE.

December 24, 1830.

I have longed very much to see you, over and above my general wish that we could meet oftener, ever since this fearful state of our poor has announced itself even to the blindest. My dread is, that when the special Commissions shall have done their work, (necessary and just I most cordially agree with you that it is,) the richer classes will again relapse into their old callousness, and

the seeds be sown of a far more deadly and irremediable quarrel hereafter. If you can get Arthur Young's Travels in France, I think you will be greatly struck with their applicability to our own times and country. He shows how deadly was the hatred of the peasantry towards the lords, and how in 1789 the chateaux were destroyed, and the families of the gentry insulted, from a common feeling of hatred to all who had made themselves and the poor two orders, and who were now to pay the penalty of having put asunder what God had joined. At this moment Carlile tells the poor that they and the rich are enemies, and that to destroy the property of an enemy, whether by fire or otherwise, is always lawful in war-a Devil's doctrine, certainly, and devilishly applied; but unquestionably our aristocratical manners and habits have made us and the poor two distinct and unsympathizing bodies; and from want of sympathy, I fear the transition to enmity is but too easy when distress embitters the feelings, and the sight of others in luxury makes that distress still more intolerable. This is the plague spot to my mind in our whole state of society, which must be removed or the whole must perish. And under God it is for the clergy to come forward boldly and begin to combat it. If you read Isaiah, chap. v. iii. xxxii.; Jeremiah, chap. v. xxii. xxx.; Amos, iv.; Habakkuk, ii.; and the Epistle of St. James, written to the same people a little before the second destruction of Jerusalem, you will be struck, I think, with the close resemblance of our own state to that of the Jews; while the state of the Greek Churches to whom St. Paul wrote is wholly different, because from their thin population and better political circumstances, poverty among them is hardly noticed, and our duties to the poor are consequently much less prominently brought forward. And unluckily our Evangelicals read St. Paul more than any other part of the Scriptures, and think very little of consulting most those parts of Scriptures which are addressed to persons circumstanced most like ourselves. I want to get up a real Poor Man's Magazine, which should not bolster up abuses and veil iniquities, nor prose to the poor as to children; but should address them in the style of Cobbett, plainly, boldly, and in sincerity, excusing nothing-concealing nothing-and misrepresenting nothing-but speaking the very whole truth in love-Cobbett-like in style-but Christian in spirit. Now you are the man I think to join with me in such a work, and most earnestly do I wish that you would think of it. . . . I should be for putting my name to whatever I wrote of this nature,