British islands. Crags, woods, and barren land are not included in this statement. Here are 15,000,000 acres, the worst of which is as good as the morass which has been reclaimed near Doncaster, and the far greater part very materially better.

I address myself now to any one of my readers who pays poor rates; but more especially to him who has any part in the disposal of those rates; and most especially to a clergyman, a magistrate, and a member of parliament.

The money which is annually raised for poor rates in England and Wales has for some years amounted to from five to six millions. With all this expenditure, cases are continually occurring of death by starvation, either of hunger or cold, or both together; wretches are carried before the magistrates for the offence of lying in the streets or in unfinished houses, when they have not where to hide their heads; others have been found dead by the side of limekilns or brickkilns, whither they had crept to save themselves from perishing with cold; and untold numbers die of the diseases produced by scanty and unwholesome food.

This money, moreover, is for the most part so applied, that they who have a rightful claim upon it, receive less than in justice, in humanity, and according to the intent of a law wisely and humanely enacted, ought to be their portion; while they who have only a legal claim upon it, that claim arising from an evil usage which has become prescriptive, receive pay where justice, policy, and considerate humanity, and these very laws themselves, if rightly administered, would award restraint or punishment.

Thus it is in those parts of the United Kingdom where a provision for the poor is directly raised by law. In Scotland the proportion of paupers is little less, and the evils attendant upon poverty are felt in an equal or nearly equal degree. In Ireland they exist to a far greater extent, and may truly be called terrible.

Is it fitting that this should be while there are fifteen millions of cultivable acres lying waste? Is it possible to conceive grosser improvidence in a nation, grosser folly, grosser ignorance of its duty and interest, or grosser neglect of both, than are manifested in the continuance, and growth, and increase of this enormous evil, when the means of checking it are so obvious, and that too by a process in which every step must produce direct and tangible good?

But while the government is doing those things which it ought not to have done, and leaves undone those which it ought to do, let parishes and corporations do what is in their power for themselves. And bestir yourselves in this good work, ye who can! The supineness of the government is no excuse for you. It is in the exertions of individuals that all national reformation must begin. Go to work cau

tiously, experimentally, patiently, charitably, and in faith! I am neither so enthusiastic as to suppose, nor so rash as to assert, that a cure may thus be found for the complicated evils arising from the condition of the labouring classes. But it is one of those remedial means by which much misery may be relieved, and much of that profligacy that arises from hopeless wretchedness be prevented. It is one of those means from which present relief may be obtained, and future good expected. It is the readiest way in which useful employment can be provided for the industrious poor. And if the land so appropriated should produce nothing more than is required for the support of those employed in cultivating it, and who must otherwise be partly or wholly supported by the poor rates, such cultivation would even then be profitable to the public. Wherever there is heath, moor, or fenwhich there is in every part of the island-there is work for the spade; employment and subsistence for man is to be found there, and room for him to increase and multiply for generations.

Reader, if you doubt that bog and bad land may be profitably cultivated, go and look at Potteric Carr. (The members of both houses who attend Doncaster races may spare an hour for this at the next meeting.) If you desire to know in what manner the poor who are now helpless may be settled upon such land, so as immediately to earn their own maintenance, and in a short time to repay the first cost of their establishment, read the account of the pauper colonies in Holland; for there the experiment has been tried, and we have the benefit of their experience.

As for the whole race of political economists, our Malthusites, Benthamites, Utilitarians or Futilitarians, they are to the government of this country such counsellors as the magicians were to Pharaoh: whoever listens to them has his heart hardened. But they are no conjurers.

CHAPTER XXXVI. P. I.

REMARKS ON AN OPINION OF MR. CRABBE'S-TOPOGRAPHICAL POETRY DRAYTON.

Do, pious marble, let thy readers know
What they and what their children owe
To Drayton's name, whose sacred dust
We recommend unto thy trust.
Protect his memory, and preserve his story;
Remain a lasting monument of his glory;
And when thy ruins shall disclaim
To be the treasurer of his name,
His name that cannot fade, shall be
An everlasting monument to thee.

Epitaph in Westminster Abbey.

THE poet Crabbe has said that there subsists an utter repugnancy between the studies of topography and poetry. He must have intended by topography, when he said so, the mere definition of boundaries and specification of landmarks, such as are given in the advertisement of an estate for sale; and boys in certain parts of the country are taught to bear in mind by a remembrance in tail when the bounds of a parish are walked by the local authorities. Such topography, indeed, bears as little relation to poetry as a map or chart to a picture.

But if he had any wider meaning, it is evident, by the number of topographical poems, good, bad, and indifferent, with which our language abounds, that Mr. Crabbe's predecessors in verse, and his contemporaries also, have differed greatly from him in opinion upon this point. The Polyolbion, notwithstanding its commonplace personifications and its inartificial transitions, which are as abrupt as those in the Metamorphoses and the Fasti, and not so graceful, is nevertheless a work as much to be valued by the students and lovers of English literature, as by the writers of local history. Drayton himself, whose great talents were deservedly esteemed by the ablest of his contemporaries in the richest age of English poetry, thought he could not be more worthily employed than in what he calls the Herculean task of this topographical poem; and in that belief he was encouraged by his friend and commentator Selden, to whose name the epithet of learned was in old times always and deservedly affixed. With how becoming a sense of its dignity and

variety the poet entered upon his subject, these lines may show:

"Thou powerful god of flames, in verse divinely great,
Touch my invention so with thy true genuine heat,
That high and noble things I slightly may not tell,
Nor light and idle toys my lines may vainly swell;
But as my subject serves so high or low to strain,
And to the varying earth so suit my varying strain,
That nature in my work thou mayst thy power avow;
That as thou first found'st art, and didst her rules allow,
So I, to thine own self that gladly near would be,
May herein do the best in imitating thee.

As thou hast here a hill, a vale there, there a flood,
A mead here, there a heath, and now and then a wood,
These things so in my song I naturally may show ;
Now as the mountain high, then as the valley low;
Here fruitful as the mead; there as the heath be bare,
Then as the gloomy wood I may be rough, though rare."

I would not say of this poet as Kirkpatrick says of him, that when he

but I may say that if, instead of sending his muse to ride over the mountains, and resting contented with her report, he had ridden or walked over them himself, his poem would better have deserved that praise for accuracy which has been bestowed upon it by critics who had themselves no knowledge which could enable them to say whether it was accurate or not. Camden was more diligent: he visited some of the remotest counties of which he wrote.

This is not said with any intention of detracting from Michael Drayton's fame: the most elaborate criticism could neither raise him above the station which he holds in English literature, nor degrade him from it. He is extolled not beyond the just measure of his deserts in his epitaph which has been variously ascribed to Ben Jonson, to Randolph, and to Quarles, but with most probability to the former, who knew, and admired, and loved him.

He was a poet by nature, and carefully improved his talent; one who sedulously laboured to deserve the approbation of such as were capable of appreciating, and cared nothing for the censures which others might pass upon him. "Like me that list," he says,

And though he is not a poet virûm volitare per ora, nor one

of those whose better fortune it is to live in the hearts of their devoted admirers, yet what he deemed his greatest work will be preserved by its subject; some of his minor poems have merit enough in their execution to ensure their preservation, and no one who studies poetry as an art will think his time misspent in perusing the whole-if he have any real love for the art which he is pursuing. The youth who enters upon that pursuit without a feeling of respect and gratitude for those elder poets, who by their labours have prepared the way for him, is not likely to produce anything himself that will be held in remembrance by posterity.

CHAPTER XXXVII. P. I.

ANECDOTES OF PETER HEYLYN AND LIGHTFOOT, EXEMPLIFYING THAT GREAT KNOWLEDGE IS NOT ALWAYS APPLICABLE TO LITTLE THINGS; AND THAT AS CHARITY BEGINS AT HOME, SO IT MAY WITH EQUAL TRUTH SOMETIMES BE SAID THAT KNOWLEDGE ENDS THERE.

A scholar in his study knows the stars,

Their motion and their influence, which are fix'd,
And which are wandering; can decipher seas,
And give each several land his proper bounds;
But set him to the compass, he's to seek,
Where a plain pilot can direct his course
From hence unto both the Indies.

HEYWOOD.

THERE was a poet who wrote a descriptive poem, and then took a journey to see the scenes which he had described. Better late than never, he thought; and thought wisely in so thinking. Drayton was not likely to have acted thus upon after consideration, if in the first conception of his subject he did not feel sufficient ardour for such an undertaking. It would have required indeed a spirit of enterprise as unusual in those days as it is ordinary now. Many a long day's ride must he have taken over rough roads, and in wild countries; and many a weary step would it have cost him, and many a poor lodging must he have put up with at night, where he would have found poor fare, if not cold comfort. So he thought it enough, in many if not most parts, to travel by the map, and believed himself to have been sufficiently "punctual and exact in giving unto every province its peculiar bounds, in laying out their several landmarks, tracing the course of most of the principal rivers, and setting forth the situation and estate of the chiefest towns."