that providential care which for ages was the guide and guardian of us as a Protestant people; we are no longer, as even in Cromwell's days, the acknowledged safeguard of the Protestants of Europe. All is changed; our power is weakened, our prosperity has decayed, and the prospects presented to our contemplation are such as in the days of old would have aroused the population as one man, to manful exertions to the preservation of their freedom and their faith. Too long, alas! have we been deluded by the vain idea that the enlightenment of this generation was proof against the assaults of Popery. Bitter experience now calls on every preacher to warn his people with the solemn mandate "let him that thinketh he standeth, take heed lest he fall." To that warning we add our feeble counsel, and bid every man who pretends to patriotic feelings, to look around on the portentous signs of the times, and fearlessly to do his duty to his country and himself. We all have now a common enemy thundering at the gates, and he is a traitor who refuses to repel the danger; doubly, then, is that man a foe to the land in which he now enjoys ancestral blessings that his children may claim to have handed down unimpaired, who gives up a single post he was bound to guard, or meanly sells his birthright for honours, or places, or from base sectarian ambi.

tion.

In concluding our glance at this question, we have only to proceed as we have proposed, to call for vigorous and united exertions in the Protestant cause. We do so from a most deep, and painful, and conscientious conviction of the important consequences to which resistance or assistance to Popery under present circumstances must surely lead. We do so from a knowledge of the necessity of immediate efforts, and with a hope that our appeal will not be entirely in vain. Little has yet been done by the friends, and much, very much, by the enemies of the Constitution. There never was a time before in this country, not even during the reign of the last infatuated monarch of the Stewart dynasty, when evils more terrible threatened the land. At that period, memorable in the history of this country which was then marvellously saved, memorable in the history of Europe which has often

since owed its rescue from oppression or Popery to the contagious spirit of this emancipated island-at that period our Universities, our Legislature, our executive Government in England and in Ireland, our corporations, and our Court were for a time in the grasp of the popish tyrant, and were content to impose on the people the scornfully rejected thraldom of apostate Rome. But by the providence of God, the Protestants of Ireland rallied round the banner of their faith, and drove even their proud foreign invaders from the shore. Popery then called all its energies, and throwing forth its whole force on the stubborn and awakened population, broke itself on the rock they had erected, instead of sweeping every vestige of its strength from the surface of the land it protected. Like the heroic Dutchmen, when they conquered the power of Spain and expelled the Inquisition, the people exclaimed "Turks rather than Papists." Thus Popery fell prostrate before the determined spirit of a Christian nation, that knew and could value its privileges. We ask our fellow-countrymen why the same agency should not overcome the same evil now? Away with the petty jealousies which prevent men from cooperating together, which give the country and its interests a secondary place in the hearts of all who have a crotchet to prate of, or a paltry prejudice to display. Away with all maudlin sentimentality about "the religious have-nothing-to-do with politics," at the time when all the means of disseminating Christianity in the country are assailed through the instrumentality of political partisans. We do not ask any to become party men, we ask only for justice and for consistency. To the Dissenters we say " You declare yourselves against endowments, behold Popery endowed both at home and in the colonies." To the Whig who still affects to act on the principles which distinguished his ancestors and placed the family of Brunswick on the throne, we say, "Enquire if Government is now carried on with the objects the Whigs of 1688 professed to have steadily in view." If a man call himself a friend of freedom, we ask him if he hopes for that blessing, when the iron hoof of the Papacy is crushing the land, and the poisonous falsehoods of her superstition are corroding the

hearts of the people? No matter what any one avows himself, Dissenter, Whig, Liberal, or Conservative, Churchman or Patriot, we appeal to him to deceive himself no longer, to believe, ere it be too late, the facts which it is impossible to deny, that Popery, the same now as when the whole western population groaned in bondage, is gaining ground by crafty devices and open violence, is coming forth from the dungeons of persecution and the cells of bigotry, once more to prostitute Christianity, once more to conquer and to enthral. To the simpleton who talks of Popery being changed, we retort, with the evidence of Dens's Theology, the assumption of infallibility, and the recent instances of violated oaths; and if the Papist himself impudently takes up this contemptible jargon, we know of no answer but to laugh him to scorn. A very short time will prove who is right, and will show whether our statements are as fanciful and our fears as absurd as some will pretend to believe them. To the verdict Time will give, we refer all who are too ignorant to know the truth and too idle at once to seek it; but this we beg them to remember, that each increase of danger increases the responsibilities of those who, being warned, neglected to avert it; and further, as dangers and responsibilities augment, so also do difficulties, pari passu. We therefore once more earnestly call on all who value Protes tantism, on all to whom the blessings

we enjoy are dear, to acquit themselves of a solemn duty now resting on every one who has the slightest influence and the smallest power. Every thing worth preserving is at stake; policy and each higher obligation unite to excite us to exertion; the means of usefulness are possessed by all; the evils of delay increase and accumulate; we have experience of the past to guide us, and hopes of the future to excite us, and above all, the noblest cause that ever yet animated the spirits of freeborn men. The choice is between the system enthroned in the passions of corrupted nature, that has cursed every land on which it has trampled, the master-contrivance of priestcraft and fraud, which has dignified the insolence of pride and monopolised the presumption of power, which has palliated crime, indulged depravity, and restored idolatry, which for centuries has warred against the temporal and eternal happiness of man, and derogated from the honour of God; and, on the other hand, that mild benignant sway that inculcates piety and promotes peace, succouring the afflicted, protecting the oppressed, giving freedom to the enslaved, that shines on the spirit of human-kind with beams reflected from the clear refulgency of heaven. It is the cause for which martyrs have perished, for which our purest patriots have courted peril, and which now affords to all classes of the people the promise of liberty and knowledge.

DEAR AND RESPECTED SIR, THE kind interest which on many occasions you displayed in my welfare and pursuits, had but ill prepared me for the severe blow which my private and professional feelings have lately received at your hands. I cannot bring myself to enter, even under this provocation, on a direct controversy with one whom I have long regarded as a friend and a father; but I appeal to your sense of justice to insert in the pages of Maga the following expostulation, addressed to another party concerned, which has long lain by me, nearly in its present shape, but which can now no longer be withheld from bursting into publicity, at once to convince yourself of the shameful partiality which you have shown for the follower of a different line of commercial business, and to overwhelm with confusion the presumptuous and pitiful competitor who has seduced you into so groundless a preference. Referring you to your late observations on Mr Words worth's Excursion, and your attempted vindication of that gentleman's choice of a hero, I remain, dear sir, ever yours with much respect (after all that has passed),

ISAAC TOMKINS. Commercial Room, Hen and Chickens, Birmingham, 15th September, 1838.

On hand at present an unusually excellent assortment of patent registers; also self-adjusting pokers, fireshovels, and warming-pans. The smallest orders attended to with the same punctuality as the largest.

losophical poem; and if the great genius of that gentleman had not conferred on you a factitious, but, as I confidently anticipate, a short-lived fame, to be now speedily converted into a less honourable but more enduring notoriety. I long ago asked Mr Jeffrey to allow me to put an extinguisher on your pretensions; but he would not trust me to do it, and undertook to crush you himself. The poor dear man accordingly did his petit possible in that way, and for a time I almost thought the thing was accomplished, at least on the northside of the Sark; but it had not been put on a right footing. The snake was scotched but not killed, and you and your poet again reared your heads aloft like Skiddaw himself, as if nothing had been the matter. Bitterly did I deplore the provoking popularity that seemed gradually pressing upon you, and often did I resolve to deal you a blow that should dispense with the necessity of its own repetition. You might, however, have been spared from this fate for some further interval, if the late ill-advised eulogium of our friend Mr North had not made the cup of my resentment flow over in an irrepressible cascade. Christopher, it is plain to me, is in his dotage. He seems now either to be without guile or gall in his crazy composition, or to exert them in the wrong places and on the wrong persons, and to be totally unable to tell the difference between drivel or dulness and sense or sublimity.

Without further preface I proceed to consider upon what grounds the author of the Excursion could adopt you as the prominent figure in that very able composition. The subject leads at once to a question, often asked but seldom answered, viz., Who are you? I shall afterwards, in order, proceed to consider another question, not so often asked, viz., Who am I? and shall finally draw a comparison between our respective positions, which, if I do not egregiously err, will for ever lay you, Murdoch Macglashan, supine in the dust of your own insignifi. cance, and elevate me, Isaac Tomkins, to a pedestal of popularity more lofty

and conspicuous than any one of us all, whether in the hard or in the soft line, has hitherto been able to attain.

Firstly, then, of the first point, Who are you? I was unwilling, Murdoch, to smite you with a sense of degradation in the eyes of Macpherson and his daughter, who keep the Highland Bagpipe, and I therefore addressed this letter to you, under the description of Travelling Merchant. Therein I adopted, out of delicacy, the phraseology of your friend Mr Wordsworth, who speaks of you as a vagrant merchant, bent beneath his load!' Your title to the appellation of vagrant I am not prepared to contest; on the contrary, I shall be able to fortify your possession of it by some striking proofs. But that you are a merchant I wholly deny. A merchant, Mr Macglashan, is what you neither are nor can in the least degree understand. The term implies an extent of credit, capital, intelligence, and energy, to which you never could prefer the least pretensions. I am aware that, borrowing the degraded use of the French word marchand, your countrymen dignify with the name of merchant the most pitiful shopkeeper in the most paltry clachan. But an English merchant scorns to limit his exertions to so narrow a field. His views and transactions embrace the globe itself. He sees, with a penetrating eye, the whole complexity of commercial relations in every quarter and corner of the world; is ready to supply the wants, and carry off the superfluities of all nations; preserves or restores, like the winds of heaven, an universal equilibrium in the elements of life and happiness, and by his knowledge of exchanges can at any time waft a remittance from Indus to the Pole, with infinite benefit to others and a handsome per centage to himself. These are sublime achievements that you never could aspire to or even dream of. You are no merchant, Murdoch, and you know it. You are, or you were, a hawker or pedlar, a packman, or petty chapman. In what estimation, public and private, the species of traffic involved in these terms, is, and ought to be held, will presently appear.

Observe how your profession has been dealt with by the legislature. In a statute of Edward VI. (I am indebted to a legal friend for the statements

VOL. XLIV. NO. CCLXXVI,

now to be made), you are classed with tinkers, the very rubbish and refuse of mankind. By 5 and 6 Edward VI., c. 21, it is provided, "that no tinker, pedlar, or petty chapman shall wander about from the town where he dwelleth, or exercise the trade of tinker, but such as shall be licensed by two Justices of the Peace or more, under their hands and seals, upon pain of fourteen days' imprisonment."

No doubt this statute was repealed by your countryman, James I., who thought it might bear rather hard upon some of his original subjects; but it shows the status that your bre thren held in those days, to which you might have been inclined to look back as to the age of chivalry in your honourable vocation.

Again, by 9 and 10 Will. III. c. 7, a duty of L.4 per annum was imposed on the licenses of every pedlar, hawker, petty chapman, and other trading person or persons, going from town to town, or to other men's houses; and any such person not having or not producing a license when demanded, shall forfeit L.5, and for non-payment thereof shall suffer as a common VAGRANT, and be committed to the House of Correction.

By a subsequent act of Geo. III., the duties on licenses of hawkers and pedlars are placed under the management of the Commissioners of Hackney Coaches; and it is farther thereby provided, that every person to whom any such license shall be granted, and who shall trade under colour thereof, shall cause to be written in large capitals upon every pack, box, bag, trunk, &c. in which he shall carry his goods, the words "LICENSED HAWKER.'

I have some reason to believe, though I would peril no part of my argument on this point, that for some years you travelled in the North of England without a license, and that this irregularity first brought you in contact with Mr Wordsworth, in consequence of his connexion with the revenue. It was very good-natured in him to deal so handsomely with so doubtful an acquaintance.

Such is the eminent and honourable station to which you may boast of having attained at the acmè of your career. Its fitness to form the basis of a poetical or philosophical character must at once be apparent; but on

2 K

this subject I reserve my remarks until I have completed my review of your personal history.

Among the hills of Atholl you were born.' Just so I know the place perfectly nearly half-way between Dalnacardoch and Dalwhinnie, the bleakest, barrenest, stoniest, and stupidest portion of the Perthshire Highlands. Your father, Dugald Macglashan, was a very decent carle, though fond occasionally of the mountain dew. He rented a little croft, which Mr Wordsworth has correctly described as "an unproductive slip of rugged ground," and must, with his large family, have been in abject poverty. Nothing is said in the poem as to your costume in early life; but it is certain that, till twelve years old, you had neither hat to your head, shoes to your feet, nor breeches to your pelvis. In this condition you might have sat for the picture, drawn in another part of the Excursion, of that

"Ragged offspring with their own blanched hair,

Crowned like the image of fantastic fear; Or wearing, we might say, in that white growth

An ill-adjusted turban for defence

Or fierceness, wreathed around their sunburnt brows,

By savage nature's unassisted care.
Naked and coloured like the soil, the feet
On which they stand, as if thereby they

drew

Some nourishment, as trees do by their

roots,

From earth, the common mother of us all.”

You certainly realized one side of the Frenchman's observation as to the differences of custom-" Par example, on lave les mains tous les jours-les pieds jamais."

I suspect strongly, too, that another feature of Mr Wordsworth's portrait already noticed, might also apply, and that when any travellers passed by the Highland road, you were to be seen among other imps, running in your blue kilt alongside of the chaise, and whining for a bawbee, the only English word you could then pronounce.

Your attainments in literature must in boyhood have been somewhat limited, if I may judge from probabilities. Gaelic unquestionably was your mother tongue, and would be with difficulty exchanged for the very singular lingua franca which your commercial pursuits afterwards compelled you to employ. Any books that you

might pick up on the stalls of Pitlochrie, or Moulinearn, the nearest towns to your abode, would not make a very handsome library; and Mr Wordsworth's assertion that, "among the hills, you gazed upon that mighty orb of song, the divine Milton," seems to border on the incredible. Equally startling is the idea that you became an adept in the purer elements of truth involved in lines and numbers-that your triangles were the stars of heaven

and that you often took delight "to measure the altitude of some tall crag that is the eagle's birthplace." Had you ever a quadrant or theodolite for this last operation? I doubt it, and as to your knowledge of figures or numbers, I can only say, that old Jack Jones, of Griffiths and Co., who knew you well, used to tell us, in the Commercial Room, that you were as ignorant of the Italian method of bookkeeping as a babe at the breast, and never could tell for your life whether cash should be debtor to sundries, or sundries debtor to cash. I may afterwards say something as to the likelihood of your acquiring the moral, metaphysical, and poetical feelings, which are said to have animated you in your mountain solitudes. My own belief is, that the only strong emotions of which you were then susceptible, were those of hunger and thirst, or at least of hunger, which you must often have experienced on the hill-side in ravenous intensity. Jones used to say that he had seen you sometimes when a lad gnawing at a raw turnip on a cold day with the same relish as if it had been a pine-apple in summer. But my own impression is, that your acquaintance with turnip husbandry was derived from a district of country much more to the southward than your own.

Thus reared and accomplished, you commenced that itinerant career, on the dignity of which I have already commented. Whether from your native hills you wandered far' is matter of opinion, but I rather believe that Kinross and Kendal were to you as the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. That in your long wanderings among the rural villages and farms, you saw a good many persons, and had observed the history of several families, is unquestionably true. From the national faculty of second-sight, or a keen ob servation of suspicious appearances, you had always a sure anticipation of