several hundreds of years. Everything has tended to bring our continent and its resident nations to the knowledge that the first principles of social liberty have now to be asserted and contended for, and to prepare the assertors for the greatest conflict that the human race has yet witnessed. It is my belief that the war has actually begun, and that, though there may be occasional lulls, no man now living will see the end of it.

Russia is more Asiatic than European. It is obscure to us who live nearest to her where her power resides. We know only that it is not with the Emperor, nor yet with the people. The Emperor is evidently a mere show,-being nothing except while he fulfils the policy or pleasure of the unnamed power which we cannot discern. But, though the ruling power is obscure, the policy is clear enough. The aim is to maintain and extend despotism; and the means chosen are the repression of mind, the corruption of conscience, and the reduction of the whole composite population of Russia to a brute machine. For a great lapse of time, no quarter of a century has passed without some country and nation having fallen in, and become a compartment of the great machine; and, the fact being so, the most peace-loving of us can hardly be sorry that the time has come for deciding whether this is to go on,— whether the Asiatic principle and method of social life are to dominate or succumb. The struggle will be no contemptible one. great tarantula has its spiderclaws out and fixed at inconceivable distances. The people of Russia, wretched at home, are better qualified for foreign aggression than for any thing else.

The

And if, within her own empire, Russia knows all to be loose and precarious, poor and unsound, and with none but a military organisation, she knows that she has for allies, avowed or concealed, all the despotic tempers that exist among men. Not only such governments as those of Spain, Portugal, Rome and Austria, are in reality the allies of Eastern barbarism; but all aristocracies, all self-seekers, be they who and where they may. It is a significant sign of the times that territorial alliances are giving way before political affinities, the mechanical before the essential union; and, if Russia has not for allies the nations that live near her frontier, she has those men of every nation who prefer self-will to freedom.

This corrupted 'patriarchal' system of society (but little superior to that which exists in your slave States) occupies one-half

of the great battle-field where the hosts are gathering for the fight. On the other, the forces are ill-assorted, ill-organised, too little prepared; but still, as having the better cause, sure, I trust, of final victory. The conflict must be long, because our constitutions are, like yours, compromises, our governments as yet a mere patchwork, our popular liberties scanty and adulterated, and great masses of our brethren hungry and discontented. We have not a little to struggle for among ourselves, when our whole force is needed against the enemy. In no country of Europe is the representative system of government more than a mere beginning. In no country of Europe is human brotherhood practically asserted. Nowhere are the principles of civilisation of Western Europe determined and declared, and made the ground-work of organised action, as happily your principles are as against those of your slave-holding opponents.

But, raw and ill-organised as are our forces, they will be strong sooner or later, against the serried armies of the Asiatic policy. If, on the one side, the soul comes up to battle with an imperfect and ill-defended body, on the other, the body is wholly without a soul, and must, in the end, fall to pieces. The best part of the mind of Western Europe will make itself a body by dint of action, and the pressure which must bring out its forces; and it may be doubted whether it could become duly embodied in any other way. What forms of society may arise as features of this new growth, neither you nor I can say. We can only ask each other whether, witnessing as we do the spread of Communist ideas in every free nation of Europe, and the admission by some of the most cautions and old-fashioned observers of social movements that we in England cannot now stop short of a modified communism,' the result is not likely to be a wholly new social state, if not as yet undreamed-of social idea. However this may be, while your slave question is dominant in Congress, and the Dissolution of your Union is becoming a familiar idea, and an avowed inspiration, our crisis is no less evidently approaching. Russia has Austria under her foot, and she is casting a corner of her wide pall over Turkey. England and France are awake and watchful; and so many men of every country are astir, that we may rely upon it that not only are territorial alliances giving way before political affinities, but national ties will give way almost as readily, if the principles of

social liberty should demand the disintegration of nations. Let us not say, even to ourselves, whether we regard such an issue with hope or fear. It is a possibility too vast to be regarded but with simple faith and patience. In this spirit let us contemplate what is proceeding and what is coming, doing the little we can by the constant assertion of the principles of social liberty, and a perpetual watch for opportunities to stimulate human progress.

Whether your conflict will be merely a moral one, you can form a better idea than I. Ours will consist in a long and bloody but inevitable now.

warfare-possibly the last,

The empire of brute force can conduct its final struggle only by brute force; and there are but few yet on the other side who have any other notion or desire. While I sympathise wholly with you as to your means as well as your end, you will not withhold your sympathy from us because our heroes still assert their views and wills by exposing themselves to wounds and death in the field and assenting once more to the old non sequitur about Might and Right. Let them this time obtain the lower sort of Might by the inspiration of their Right, and in another age, they will aim higher. But I need not thus petition you; for I well know that where there is most of Right, there will your sympathies surely rest. Believe me your friend,

HARRIET MARTINEAU.

CCCXXXII.

Miss Novello has knitted a purse for Douglas Jerrold, and the pungent satirist bethinks himself with some shame of all the cutting things he has said about woman. He sits down accordingly to write a palinode, and thinks to conceal his fault by lavishing compliments on the sex, but the cloven foot of the would-be cynic peeps out.

Douglas Jerrold to Miss Sabilla Novello.

Putney Green: June 9, 1852.

Dear Miss Novello,-I thank you very sincerely for your present, though I cannot but fear its fatal effects upon my limited fortunes, for it is so very handsome that whenever I produce it I feel that I have thousands a year, and as in duty bound, am inclined to pay accordingly. I shall go about, to the astonishment of all omnibii men, insisting upon paying sovereigns for sixpences.

Happily, however, this amiable insanity will cure itself (or I may always bear my wife with me as a keeper).

About this comedy. I am writing it under the most significant warnings. As the Eastern king-name unknown, at least to me-kept a crier to warn him that he was but mortal and must die, and so to behave himself as decently as it is possible for any poor king to do, so do I keep a flock of eloquent geese that continually, within ear-shot, cackle of the British public. Hence, I trust to defeat the birds of the Haymarket by the birds of Putney. But in this comedy I do contemplate such a heroine, as a set-off to the many sins imputed to me as committed against woman, whom I have always considered to be an admirable idea imperfectly worked out. Poor soul! she can't help that. Well, this heroine shall be woven of moon-beams-a perfect angel, with one wing cut to keep her among us. She shall be all devotion. She shall hand over her lover (never mind his heart, poor wretch!), to her grandmother, who she suspects is very fond of him, and then, disguising herself as a youth, she shall enter the British navy and return in six years, say, with epaulets on her shoulders, and her name in the Navy List rated post-captain. You will perceive that I have Madame Celeste in my eye-am measuring her for the uniform. And young ladies will sit in the boxes, and with tearful eyes, and noses like rose-buds, say, "What magnanimity!" And when this great work is done-this monument of the very best gilt gingerbread to woman set up on the Haymarket stage, you shall, if you will, go and see it, and make one to cry for the author, rewarding him with a crown of tin-foil, and a shower of sugar-plums.

In lively hope of that ecstatic moment, I remain, yours truly, DOUGLAS JERROLD.

СССХХХІІІ.

Barry Cornwall was the first person to discover the quaint genius of Beddoes, that Elizabethan dramatist born out of his due time, and struggling in vain against an unsympathetic generation. Some of the best of Beddoes' letters, all of which teem with forcible and original literary thought, were addressed to Procter. It should perhaps be noticed that Ajax Flagellifer was George Darley, then fulminating as critic to the London Magazine,' and that the last author' is Beddoes himself, who was engaged in composing his Death's Jest-Book.'

Thomas Lovell Beddoes to Bryan Waller Procter.

Bristol: March 3, 1824.

Dear Procter, I have just been reading your epistle to our Ajax Flagellifer, the bloody John Lacy: on one point, where he is most vulnerable, you have omitted to place your sting,—I mean his palpable ignorance of the Elizabethans, and many other dramatic writers of this and preceding times, with whom he ought to have formed at least a nodding acquaintance, before he offered himself as physician to Melpomene.

About Shakespeare you don't say enough. He was an incarnation of nature, and you might just as well attempt to remodel the seasons, and the laws of life and death, as to alter one jot or tittle' of his eternal thoughts. 'A star' you call him if he was a star, all the other stage-scribblers can hardly be considered a constellation of brass buttons. I say he was an universe; and all material existence, with its excellences and defects, was reflected in shadowy thought upon the chrystal waters of his imagination, ever-glorified as they were by the sleepless sun of his golden intellect. And this imaginary universe had its seasons and changes, its harmonies and its discords, as well as the dirty reality; on the snowmaned necks of its winter hurricanes rode madness, despair, and 'empty death, with the winds whistling through the white grating of his sides;' its summer of poetry, glistening through the drops of pity; and its solemn and melancholy autumn, breathing deep melody among the 'sere and yellow leaves' of thunder-stricken life, &c. &c. (See Charles Phillips's speeches and X. Y. Z. for the completing furbelow of this paragraph.) By the 3rd scene of the 4th act of Macbeth, I conclude that you mean the dialogue between Malcolm and Macduff, which is only part of the scene; for the latter part, from the entrance of Rosse, is of course necessary to create an interest in the destined avenger of Duncan, as well as to set the last edge to our hatred of the usurper. The Doctor's speech is merely a compliment to the 'right divine' of people in turreted night-caps to cure sores a little more expeditiously than Dr. Solomon; and is, too, a little bit of smooth chat, to show, by Macduff's manner, that he has not yet heard of his wife's murder.

I hope Guzman has grown since I saw him, and has improved

in vice.