been among the rushes. Swift said, that a nice person was a person of nasty ideas. He had reason to say so, as far as he spoke from his own experience; but we do not believe it any further, and for this reason, that a habit is a habit, and does not imply the necessity of being kept alive by thinking of its reverse habit. A clean man will wash himself regularly, because he is in the habit of doing so; not because his imagination wallows in all the dirt which he would have accumulated, had he not washed himself. So a man, who never deviates from nicety of conversation, is nice because he is accustomed to be so. He perhaps has a greater power of imagining the reverse, if he chuses it, as Spenser who painted Belphoebe, could describe the foulness of Dnessa; but he does not chuse it, and his thoughts do not go that way. If we live in a pleasant world, it does not follow that we must always be thinking of a painful one. But thus much, with Mr Hazlitt, we think with regard to clean people, and thus much we will state for the sake of rendering some of them tolerant, and hindering them from doing an injury to the cause they profess to have at heart; and that is, that as in some the love of cleanliness arises from a taste for what is graceful and proper, and is a part of the general beauty in which they keep their minds and persons, so in others it is caused by a fidgetty sense of the unclean, and a natural tendency in their imagination to run into disagreeable thoughts. Of this description of persons (unless he had an intention and an excuse beyond what appears on the face of his writings) was Swift, and, like him, you may know them by their talk. Of the former are all the truly delicate and nice-minded; and as these, in their own persons, will always do the best, so they will be glad to think the best, wherever they can, even of habits the reverse of their own, philosophizing on the elements of things, physical as well as moral, and like a merry friend of ours, who was consoling a lady on getting into the mud, discovering that mud itself, on occasion, is nothing but "planet;" to wit, a part of the aboriginal substance which went to compose this star of ours, the Earth! For the benefit of the intolerant on whatever subject, we extract the masterly passage with which Mr Hazlitt has concluded this striking essay:

"It may by this time be conjectured why Catholics are less cleanly than Protestants, because in fact they are less scrupulous, and swallow what is set before them in matters of faith as well as other things. Protestants, as such, are captious and scrutinising, try to pick holes and find fault, have a dry, meagre, penurious imagination. Catholics are buoyed up over doubts and difficulties by a greater redundance of fancy, and make religion subservient to a sense of enjoyment. The one are for detecting and weeding out all corruptions and abuses in doctrine or worship; the others enrich theirs with the dust and cobwebs of antiquity, and think their ritual none the worse for the tarnish of age. Those of the Catholic communion are willing to take it for granted that every thing is right; the professors of the Reformed religion have a pleasure in believing that every thing is wrong, in order that they may have to set it right. In morals, again, Protestants are more precise than their Catholic brethren. The creed of the latter absolves them of half their duties, of all those that are a clog on their inclinations, atones for all slips, and patches up all deficiencies. But though this may make them less censorious and sour, I am not sure that it renders them less in earnest in the part they do perform. When more is left to freedom of choice, perhaps the service that is voluntary will be purer and more effectual. That which is not so may as well be done by proxy; or if it does not come from the heart, may be suffered to exhale merely from the lips. If less is owing in this case to a dread of vice and fear of shame, more will proceed from the love of virtue, free from the least sinister construction. It is asserted that the Italian women are more gross; I can believe it, and that they are at the same time more refined than others. Their religion is in the same manner more sensual: but is it not to the full as visionary and imaginative as any? I have heard Italian women say things that others would not-it does not therefore follow that they would do them: partly because the knowledge of vice that makes it familiar, renders it indifferent; and because the same masculine tone of thinking that enables them to confront vice may raise them above it into a higher sphere of sentiment. If their senses are more inflammable, their passions (and their love of virtue among the rest) may glow with proportionable ardour. Indeed the truest virtue is that which is least susceptible of contamination from its opposite. I may admire a Raphael, and yet not swoon at the sight of a daub. Why should there not be the same taste in morals as in pictures or poems? Granting that vice has more votaries here, at least it has fewer mercenary ones, and this is no trifling advantage. As to manners, the Catholics must be allowed to carry it all over the world. The better sort not only say nothing to

give you pain; they say nothing of others that it would give them pain to hear repeated. Scandal and tittle-tattle are long banished from good society. After all, to be wise is to be humane. What would our English blue-stockings say to this? The fault and the excellence of Italian society is, that the shocking and disagreeable is not supposed to have existence in the nature of things."*

be so.

On Personal Character. "No one ever changes his character from the time he is two years old; nay, I might say, from the time he is two hours old."-Why not say before he is a minute old, if we are to be thus particular? The importance of speculations like these (and it is a great pity they are not more common) gives them a delicacy beyond delicacy, and with the least address can always make it felt and acknowledged. Mr Hazlitt says, as others have said before him, (but he says it well, and with the usual garnish of good things), that men are but a continued variety of their parents and kindred, and that however appearances may seem otherwise, no character ever changes. This latter assertion it is perhaps impossible to prove. "He who is said to be cured of any glaring infirmity may be suspected," says Mr Hazlitt, "never to have had it." It may He may also be said to be cured of it, and have it still. But who shall say, that among other things inherited from a man's ancestors, the very power to get rid of an infirmity may not be one? Of the inheritance itself we have no doubt, but accidents and circumstance modify even that; and from these propositions conjoined, we would make two deductions beyond what our author seems to have drawn; namely, that there may be an accession of some new quality to a man's character, say from no finer-sounding cause than a fit of the jaundice or the recovery from it, which new quality may so displace another or modify it, that in some respects the man shall not only seem a new man but be so. This we think difficult to disprove, and as reasonably to be asserted as anything else not absolutely proveable. The other deduction is, that circumstances may change whole communities as well as individuals, by acting upon the daily life of men, especially beginning with them from children, as in the communities projected by Mr

"The dirt and comparative want of convenience among Catholics is often attributed to the number of their Saints' days and festivals, which divert them from labour, and give them an idle and disorderly turn of mind."

Owen; and that it is impossible for those who deduce all their conclusions from one state of society, to say how far the consti→ tuent parts of character may not be so modified as to give a purpose and bias to the community different from what Mr. Hazlitt has confined it to, when he describes it as a probable modification of the cant of Jacobins or Loyalists. If a community could be brought to feel their common good as well as talk about it, and could live in a natural and manly reciprocation of good offices; that is to say, if they can ever arrive at that point in legislation at which, even for any moderate length of time, instinct and reason, the natural appetites and our acquired refinement, shall act truly together, may we not believe that the new generation of human beings born and bred under that system would turn out finer than anything we can easily conceive at present; and that the world, not only being happier, but having found out the reason why it is happier, would be both able and willing to continue rolling a sweeter round of existence than ever, as far as we know, it has experienced. "But what of those who have lived before this blessed generation, and been unhappy? Would it be just towards them?" For an answer to this refined question, we must wait till we get into a future state. Meanwhile it is unnecessary to any good purpose, and a hindrance to the best. The world has grave puzzles enough already. Action, and looking forward, are what it requires. Can we not fancy the globe to have been sick? And should it refuse to get well again, because it has once been ill?

On People of Sense. Mr Hazlitt here makes an admirable remark; -that persons of the most formal understandings, when once they get out of the trammels of them, are apt to be carried away by the most extravagant notions and pretensions; whereas poets, and other imaginative persons, throw off their volatile humours en passant, and can more easily resort to their judgment and sound sense in extreme cases. This observation might have led him to qualify the spleen with which he has again been led in this essay, when speaking of his brother reformers. He says in another place, that "Rousseau, by his intense aspirations after good, nearly delivered mankind from the yoke of evil.” (Vol. II. p. 263.) If this had not appeared in the "Plain Speaker" unquoted, it might have

been taken for an observation of a late writer whom Mr Hazlitt has thought it allowable, though unnecessary, to scoff at. That writer differed indeed with Rousseau in some things, and in more with Mr Hazlitt; nor do we think he took pains enough, in the particular work here alluded to, to distinguish his real opinions from the machinery in which he thought it useful to convey reflection. But if intense aspirations after good" are not of necessity to be connected with the best way of putting or distinguishing the good, in order to wake up mankind to a proper sympathy (which is a point, we believe, on which patriots and philosophers have been generally agreed) then certainly there never was an author, whose participation of error Mr Hazlitt might have spared with a better grace in consideration of the virtue, the genius, and the spirit of martyrdom that was in him.

CHAPELLE'S TRIP TO LANGUEDOC AND PROVENCE.

AMONG the lighter compositions, in which the French excel, there is a popular species little known in this country, on account of its local nature. A genuine pearl, however, though of the smaller kind, is welcome in all countries; and had the Trip to Languedoc, which has given rise to numberless other trips, been written in our days instead of those of Louis XIV, it would assuredly have found a translator. The author of this charming trifle, who set almost all the wits, from his time downwards, upon making their journeys, and writing accounts of them in mixed prose and verse, was CLAUDE EMANUEL LUILLIER, surnamed CHAPELLE, from the place of his birth. He had a compagnon de voyage, a gentleman of the name of BACHAUMONT, who took a part in the recital, and is understood in particular to have written the lines beginning "Under this bow'r which Love expressly made ”—

which the critics inform us possess a graver and tenderer colouring, than the pencil of his brother-wit could have furnished. So nice are the discriminations between this miniature Beaumont and Fletcher!

Bachaumont had been concerned in the wars of the Fronde,