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enquiry to be made of himself by a mutual friend; and the result is, from Mr. Jackson's own mouth, that he has indeed been making use of the water, and still does so, but that he is unable to say that he has derived any benefit; and, within the last fortnight, has suffered as much agony from the stone as ever he did in his life. It will be useless, therefore, for any person to remove to Kingston, to put himself under the faculty there, in expectation of being relieved, under their advice, by the well of Coomb Farm.

Whoever is in the least acquainted with the nature of the urinary calculi, and how seldom they yield to the most powerful solvents that can with safety be introduced into the bladder, by the stomach or by the urethra, will not very readily believe that water, so "refined and filtered by the hand of Nature" as this is said to be, can be productive of even the smallest benefit.

St. James's.

M.

To the Editor of the Monthly Magazine.

SIR,

AVING frequently observed the

tion likely to improve the condition of the poor, I am induced to offer the following remarks for insertion (should you deem them worthy,) in your valuable Magazine. I have often thought that the plan generally pursued by overseers, select vestries, and guardian boards, towards the poor who are able to work, so far from being beneficial to the parish, is extremely injurious; for, instead of supporting them, and enabling them to contend against the attempts of their employers to reduce their wages to such a scale as will scarcely afford them a bare subsistence, they generally make common cause with the latter; and, by this means, not only reduce the labourer to the brink of destruction, but bring the price of labour so low, that every man who has a family dependant upon his bodily exertions alone, is quite unable to support them without assistance from the poor's rate.

The evil of this system was exhibited in a strong light at the end of last month, by the application of five men from Woodstock, in Kent, where they all had families, to L. B. Allen, esq. the magistrate at Union Hall, requesting that he would interfere in their behalf, as they were reduced to the greatest

some

distress by an arrangement between the overseers and farmers, which had thrown every labouring man out of employ who did not obtain a ticket from an overseer, appointing him, for a certain number of days, to work with a particular fariner. It appeared that, when any one applied to the overseers for relief, instead of giving money they handed a ticket, directed to farmer in league with them, desiring him to employ the bearer for the number of days specified, and at a rate of wages also mentioned on the ticket, the amount of which would be de. ducted from his poor rate.* The rate of wages never exceeded one shilling and eight pence per day for men with the largest families, one shilling and four-pence was the general rate for married men whose families were not considered large by the overseer. These men had applied to Mr. Forbes, the magistrate in their neighbourhood, who said he could not interfere, although he thought they were very ill used. Mr. Allen regretted his inability to redress their grievance, but recommended them to apply to the magistrates at the next sessions for the

to bear their expenses home again.

Thus it appears that the overseers, in conjunction with the farmers, possess a power of fixing the price of agricultural labour; and, as the prosperity of the country in great measure depends upon the proper use of this power, as no kingdom can flourish where the labouring classes are so reduced and degraded as they must be by a perseverance in such a system, it becomes every one, who has the least regard for the welfare of his country, to look to such combinations with a suspicious and scrutinizing eye.

Every reflecting overseer, however he may be blinded or misled for the moment, must see that it never can be for the permanent interest of his parish to reduce the price of labour; it is by the produce of their labour alone that the poor are kept from the workhouse;

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and, in proportion as that is diminished, the number of paupers will be increased; and, however the overseers may congratulate themselves on the apparent saving in giving an order for a few days' labour instead of a few shillings, they will find, in the end, that they have gained nothing by the contrivance, for the families of the labourers must be supported; and, as the rate of wages they have fixed is insufficient for that purpose, who but the overseers will ultimately be called upon to make up that deficiency? They will have even to do more, because a man will make the greatest exertions, and suffer the greatest privations, to prevent himself and family from becoming chargeable; but, when once the barrier is broken down, as it must be in numerous instances by a reduction in wages, he is invariably found to relax bis own efforts, and rely more upon the parish.

The effect of this system is more evident when applied to agricultural labourers, but the evil is equally great when it is acted upon in large towns: how often do parish-officers, on complaint of the master, act with harshness to men who have refused an offer of work at 10s. or 12s. per week, when the average wages have been from twenty to five-and-twenty shillings; declaring that, if they had accepted the offer, they (the overseers) would willingly have assisted them with something more to enable them to support their families, without considering that, whenever a man obtains employment on such terms, some other man on full pay must be thrown out of it, and that the masters will never employ any others while they can obtain those to whom the parish will pay a portion of their wages.

It will no doubt appear unreasonable to many, that individuals, able to work, should be supported in the workhouse without being called upon to do any thing in order to reduce the expense; but, let it be recollected, that their being there is a proof that the demand for labour has decreased, or, what is virtually the same thing, that the increase of labourers has overstocked the market; and that, if those who cannot find employment elsewhere are taken into the house, and the produce of their labour carried into the market, it makes matters still worse, particularly as it is always sold below the fair market price; whereas, if all who were

unable to support themselves, were taken into the workhouse, and not allowed or assisted by the overseers to underwork their neighbours, the rate of wages would be immediately increased; and, in a short time, the demand for labour also, those who wanted labourers either for the production of agricultural stock, or manufactures, would take them from the workhouse at fair wages, and charge this increase to the consumers, who, as they derive all the benefit, certainly ought to bear the whole expense; by these means, the poor would be protected, and enabled to support themselves creditably, while the burthen to the rate-payers would be diminished. The office of overseer of the poor is in some measure similar to that of the Roman tribune of the people; and, as the latter supported the plebeians against the nobility, so should the former protect and support the poor when they are no longer able to support themselves, nor to contend with success against the difficulties opposed to them by the rules, regulations, and restrictions, of society, constituted as it is at present. S. E.

For the Monthly Magazine. THE GERMAN STUDENT.

W

NO. XXVI. WIELAND continued. HAT circumstances prepared the separation of Wieland and Bodmer, have not been clearly ascer tained. Whether Bodmer availed himself of Wieland's pen too encroachingly, for some have affected to trace the style of the latter in "Sir Percival," and other poems, circulated as Bodmer's; whether already Wieland's admiration of "the White Bull" of Voltaire, and of various infidel works of the French, began to give offence to an old man, who had much of the intolerance of faith; whether his moral austerity restrained the young man inconveniently ;-in 1754 Wieland had quitted his host, bad taken separate lodgings, and gave lessons in Greek to some pupils of family. He translated, for the manager of the theatre at Zurich, Rowe's "Lady Jane Gray," which was successfully performed as an original; and he composed a less popular tragedy on the story of Clementina of Poretta. In 1758 Wieland accompanied these players to Bern, where he accepted a preceptorship in the house of M. Sinner. At Bern he

became

became acquainted with Dr. Zimmerman, the author of a well-known work on Solitude; and he visited there at the lodgings of the accomplished acquaintance of Rousseau, Julia Bondeli, whose declining charms had, however, the reputation of inspiring Wieland with a more than friendly attachment.

From Bern, Wieland was suddenly recalled, in the year 1760, to his native city; the town-clerkship having become vacant, and the corporation of Biberach having nominated him to the office without any solicitation on his part. The confidence of fellow-citizens is peculiarly flattering, because it reposes on long familiarity; and, as the situation offered, if not a liberal, yet an honourable independance, Wieland accepted the place, and undertook its laborious duties. His return to Biberach was, however, not free from disappointment: Sophia, to whose hand he might now have aspired, having become the wife of M. Laroche, a secretary of Count Stadion.

A translation of Shakspeare was at this time the employment of Wieland's leisure; and, between the years 1762 and 1766, he published in eight volumes the twenty-two principal plays. He seems to have used Pope's edition, and often leaves out the feebler passages, there placed between commas, as supposed interpolations of the players. Of the bookseller he received two dollars per sheet for the job.

Wieland was not long in discovering that the necessary duties of his office made grievous inroads on his leisure; and the inglorious comforts of competency seemed ill exchanged for the precarious earnings of literary publicity. In a letter, dated 1763, he compares his Biberach with San Marino; describes the triviality of those legal records which formed his morning task, and of those quadrille parties which his patrons expected him to join in the afternoon. He laments that he is as much without society as Milton's Adam among the beasts of Paradise; and adds, that his only tolerable hours are those which he can snatch from business and from company to devote to composition. In one respect, however, this situation was of moral use; having no one on whom to lean, he gradually acquired an upright and self-propped character; hitherto, with the suppleness of a cameleon, he had

too much imitated the hues of his acquaintance, and had cultivated the arts of ingratiation with some sacrifice of the dignity of independence: he now first became himself, and his native tinge was slowly perceived to be very different from that which he reflected or assumed in the circle of his Swiss connexions.

At Warthausen, about three miles from Biberach, on an eminence, which overlooks a valley stretching toward the Danube, stands a stately mansion belonging to the noble family of Stadion; and hither the old Count Frederic, now a widower, who had been Austrian ambassador at the court of George the Second, came, in his seventieth year, at the close of 1763, to reside. With him dwelt his former secretary Laroche, to whom the stewardship of the Suabian manors was now intrusted; and Laroche was of course accompanied by his wife, the Sophia of Wieland. Indeed they almost supplied the place of a son and daughter to the old Count, and were the companions of his table, and the helpmates of his infirmity.

Through the friendship of Sophia, Wieland was induced to visit often at Warthausen; and, finding her happy in the protection of a man of merit, and surrounded by amiable children, the fruits of a marriage of seven years, he soon acquiesced in that brotherly feeling, which fate and nature (their grandmothers had been sisters,) seemed to have predestined for the quality of their attachment. He was also made welcome by the old Count, who felt the value, in a rural solitude, of so accomplished a guest. An experienced courtier, who had long moved in the first circles of Europe, this nobleman was formed, by exquisite politeness, by his ready talent and fund of anecdote, by his penetrating observation, and by those luxurious appendages which decorate the exterior of opulence, to make a strong and progressive impression on the young poet, to whom his conversation revealed a new and higher world. Still this impression had at first more of admiration than complacence. Wieland's scheming philanthropy was often thwarted and chilled by the practical mistrust and sarcastic good sense of the Count, and of Laroche; his sentimental enthusiasm was made to collapse by many mortifying sneers; and he incurred something of that

unwelcome

unwelcome flinch, which the cold touch of egotism inflicts on benevolence.

Under other names, Wieland has painted the change which at this time his own mind was silently undergoing: as, where Agathon unwillingly discovers a sister in his beloved Psyche; and where the religious tenets in which he had been educated are combated by the arguments of an Epi. curean. Count Stadion was sitting to him for Hippias. In this circle Wieland first acquired that tone of the great world, and that art of saying bold things with urbanity, which enabled him to become the classic of the gentlemen of Germany, and to lift up in courts the voice of freedom.

Count Stadion's library included the select literature of Europe, especially its modern philosophy; and he had himself deeply imbibed the spirit of an age intent on the overthrow of prejudice. In the fashionable world, laxity of principle is often professed for the sake of living among the licentious, without alarming their selflove; and so Wieland perceived in this family. The moral tolerance proclaimed to others was not needed as a personal apology; egotism was but the pretext for a luxury, which acted as the handmaid of beneficence; morality was practised without moroseness; and the kind affections were indulged within the limits of the beautiful and the good.

The married daughters of Count Stadion came occasionally to visit at Warthausen: at these times the Muses redoubled their efforts to enliven the family circle. Poems of Wieland, yet in manuscript, were read aloud for their amusement; and the story of Diana and Endymion is mentioned as one of the pieces so rehearsed. It contains passages to which English ladies would hesitate to listen; but probably the poet knew where to skip, or perhaps in southern countries the married women affect less severity. At a time when the court of France gave the tone to Europe, and received it from Madame de Pompadour, a loose cast prevailed in the literature of the times, which Wieland could adopt in his "Comic Tales," without forfeiting the suffrage of the genteel world. The ladies at Warthausen not only fancied poetry, but were remarkably fond of fairy tales, and gave occasion to those studies, which excited the composition of "Don

Silvio of Rosalva," a novel printed by Wieland in 1764.

66

The year 1765 was allotted to the composition and completion of “ Agathon," the earliest work of Wieland, to which he himself assigns a classical rank: it appeared in 1766. His previous productions he considers as juvenile efforts, made while his mind was yet in the progress of education, and while he had prejudices to lose, as well as principles to acquire: but in the "Agathon" his philosophy already appears systematised and mature, and his peculiar talent for psychological observation is advantageously displayed. As the latest edition contains a chapter not yet extant at the time, when Mr. Richardson, of Eworth, near York, published his excellent translation of "Agathon,” we shall transcribe it here as a welcome supplement.

Agathon departed with few prejudices, and returned from his travels without those few. During his philosophic pilgrimage he remained a mere spectator of the stage of things, and was the more at leisure to judge of the performance.

His observations on others completed what his own reflection and experience had begun. They convinced him that men on the average are what Hippias paints them, although they should be what Archytas exhibits.

He saw every where what may yet be seen, that they are not so good as they might be if they were wiser: but he also saw, that they cannot become better until they are wiser; and they cannot become wiser unless fathers, mothers, nurses, teachers, and priests, with their other overlookers, from the constable to the king, shall have become as wise as it be longs to cach in his relative situation to be, in order to do his duty, and to be truly useful to the human race.

vourable to moral improvement is the only He saw, therefore, that information faground on which the hope of better times, that is of better men, can rationally he founded. He saw that all nations, the wildest barbarian as well as the most refined Greek, honour virtue; and that no society, not even a horde of Arabian robbers, can subsist without some degree of virtue. He found every town, every province, every nation, so much happier, the better the morals of the inhabitants were;

and, without exception, he saw most corruption amid extreme poverty or extreme

wealth.

He found, among all the nations whom he visited, religion muffled up in superstition, abused to the injury of society, and converted by hypocrisy, or open force,

into

into an instrument of deception, ambition, avarice, voluptuousness, or laziness. He saw that individuals and whole nations can have religion without virtue, and that thereby they are made worse: but he also saw, that in individuals and whole nations, if already virtuous, are made better by piety.

He saw legislation, administration, and police, every where full of defects and abuses: but he also saw, that men without laws, administration, or police, were worse and more unhappy. Every where he heard abuses censured, and found every one desirous that the world should be mended: he saw many willing to toil at its improvement, and inexhaustible in their projects; but not one who was willing to begin the amendment on himself. Hence he easily conceived why nothing grows better.

He saw men influenced every where by two opposite instincts, the desire of equality, and the desire of domineering without restraint over others; which convinced him that, unless this evil can be subdued, much may not be expected from governmental changes; that man must

revolve in an eternal circle, from royal

despotism and aristocratic insolence to popular licentiousness and mob-tyranny, unless a legislation, deduced from the first principles of philosophy, and an education corresponding therewith, shall curb in most men the animal desire of domineering without restraint.

He saw that every where arts, industry, and economy, are followed by riches, riches by luxury, luxury by corruption, and corruption by the dissolution of the state: but he also saw that the arts, under the guidance of wisdom, embellish, evolve, and ennoble, mankind; that art is the half of our nature, and that man without art is the most miserable of animals.

He saw, through the whole economy of society, the limits of the true and false, of the good and bad, of the right and wrong, imperceptibly melting into each other; and he thereby convinced himself still more of the necessity of wise laws, and of the duty of a good citizen rather to trust the law than his own preconceptions.

All that he had seen confirmed him in the opinion, that man, in some respects allied to the beasts of the field, in another to superior beings, and even to the Deity himself, is no less incapable of being a mere beast than a mere spirit; that he only lives conformably to his nature, when he is ever ascending; that each higher step toward wisdom and virtue always increases his happiness; that wisdom and virtue have at all times been the true gange of public and private happiness among men; and that this experienced trath, which no sceptic can weaken, is

sufficient to blow away all the sophisms of a Hippias, and irreversibly to confirm Archytas's theory of living wisely.

In a letter to Riedel, dated in 1765, Wieland mentions that he had hired a garden out of Biberach, having a summer-house, which commanded a fine rural prospect. "Here (adds he) I pass many afternoons, with no other society than the Muses; and, when I rise for some minutes from my task, I snuff the odour of new-mown hay, or see the boys bathe, or watch the retters of flax. At a distance I catch the church-yard, in which the bones of my fathers and probably my own will one day repose together; or, in the rich confusion of the remoter landscape, I single out the new white castle of Horn, then sit down again-and rhime."

(To be concluded in our next.)

To the Editor of the Monthly Magazine. SIR,

I AM a constant reader of your

agreeable Magazine, and look with renewed and increased pleasure. forward to its perusal each month Your Number for September presented to me scenes that have given me extreme delight, in the " Amateur's Trip to Paris;" and the easy style in which the paper was written, induced me to imagine a few extracts from my diary of a year's residence in that metropolis might not be unacceptable to those who peruse your work for mere amusement. Many of my friends have solicited this exertion, and it is only the idle I should expect to entertain: I leave the energetic "to revel in the charms" of science, and monopolize the attention of the learned. If the following letter pleases you, sir, I shall consider it an honour to be allowed to send you others.

My dear Brother,-When we parted in the spring of 1821, each contemplated with great delight the new and different scenes we were to explore. You have lingered weary months on the "giant element" that so widely separates us: I but breathed its refreshing airs, and was quickly in the land of my destination. Towards the close of July we arrived at Dover late in the evening: the next morning was cloudy and dark,-sympathising with my spirits. How explicable are the human heart and mind-what most I wished, distressed me to possess. Now

that

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