decennial period a great increase on that which preceded it. Mexico, as producing half the amount derived from America, may be taken as the exponent of the whole; and the coinage of the Mexican mints increased from £10,777,298, for the decennial period ending 1709, to £23,302,633 for that ending 1749, and to £47,142,814 for the ten years ending 1809—with how little effect on prices, we have already seen.

We would urge, in concluding this disquisition on the supply of gold, and history of gold mines, that nothing can be more fallacious than the popular notion that a country is much enriched by additions to its stock of the precious metals.

"Proud swells the tide with loads of freighted ore,

And shouting folly hails it from her shore."

The riches of a community depend on the amount of the mass of commodities which they possess, to which the metallic wealth will always bear but a small proportion. The increase of the latter will only be beneficial in so far as it stimulates industry to an increased production of material wealth; the rise of prices, while in progress, being favourable to production, by adding the increased price to the ordinary rate of profit. When the advance is complete, and prices again become stationary, this effect ceases. There can be a general rise of prices, from abundance of the precious metals, and some commodities may, from various causes, rise in value with respect to the rest; but a general rise of values is impossible, and the increased quantity of gold or silver received for one commodity, must be paid in the increased price of another. Those who produce more than they consume, will find their wealth, measured by the precious metals, increase; and those who consume more than they produce, will find theirs gradually diminish. The majority, who are both consumers and producers, will only gain by the excess of their production over their consumption. Debtors will gain by giving a smaller quantity of produce to obtain the money necessary to discharge a debt contracted before the rise of prices. Creditors will receive the same quantity of gold which they lent, but it will command a smaller quantity of commodities. The amount of the National Debt will bear a smaller proportion to the money value of the material wealth of the country; and, as the interest of it forms the largest portion of the public expenditure, the weight of taxation will be so far lightened, but the Government, in its capacity of a consumer, will pay more for commodities, and on that portion of the public expenditure the burthen of taxation will be increased. The receivers of dividends will find their command of luxuries and necessaries less as prices rise; and since a large majority of fundholders are those whose dividends are less than one

Relative Value of Gold and Silver.

485

hundred pounds per annum, the change will press heavily on a numerous class. Tenant farmers who hold on lease at money rents, will find themselves under easier rents, requiring for their discharge a smaller share of the produce than they contemplated when they hired their farms; and landlords whose estates are let on lease will suffer, unless the rents shall have been reserved in grain. Tenants at will, when their leases expire, will find that they derive no benefit from the advanced prices, because rents will have advanced in equal proportion.

pro

But though there is little reason to expect that the collective produce of gold and silver will materially increase, or that their joint value with respect to commodities will undergo much alteration, it is by no means improbable that a diminished duce of silver, the metal which loses most by abrasion, combined with an increased produce of gold, may restore for a time the old relations of the two metals. Since the discovery of America, the relative value of gold to that of silver has been as fifteen to one; before that event it fluctuated between nine and eleven to one. If there are apparent indications in Holland and France of a depreciation of gold with respect to silver, or appreciation of silver with respect to gold, this may arise in a great measure from the hoarding of small sums, in consequence of the unsettled aspect of the political horizon, in countries where silver forms the largest portion of the circulating medium.

We have no intention of entering in this Article on the interesting and romantic subject of life in California, or of the social state of that region, which, considering the materials of which its population is composed, is better than could have been expected, and reflects credit on the Anglo-American aptitude for extemporising government under conditions that appeared almost hopeless. The Californians also deserve the highest commendation for resisting the temptation to introduce slavery into their new State. Slave labour has hitherto been the invariable accompaniment of mines of the precious metals; and whether we regard the recorded miseries of the slaves in the gold mines. of ancient Egypt, or the condition of the mining population of the Roman Empire, the wrongs inflicted by the Spaniards on the natives of America, or the sufferings of the Negro race transported to the lavras of Brazil; it must be confessed, that the modern form of the auri sacra fames, with all its gambling, robbery, and murder, disregard of the lives of Yellowskins, and shooting-down of natives, is an improvement on that of former

ages.

ART. VII.-Remains in Verse and Prose, of ARTHUR HENRY HALLAM. 1834. Privately printed.

IN the chancel of Clevedon Church, in Somersetshire, are interred the mortal remains of Arthur Henry Hallam, eldest son of our great philosophic historian and critic, and that friend to whom "In Memoriam" is sacred. This place was selected by his father, not only from the connexion of kindred, being the burial place of his maternal grandfather, Sir Abraham Elton, but on account of its still and sequestered situation, on a lone hill that overhangs the Bristol Channel. This lone hill, with its humble old church, its outlook over the waste of waters, where go the ships, were, we doubt not, in Tennyson's mind, or eye, when these words, which contain the burden of that volume in which are enshrined so much of the deepest affection, poetry, philosophy, and godliness, rose into his mind,—

"Break, break, break,

On thy cold gray stones, O sea!

And I would that my tongue could utter

The thoughts that arise in me.

"O well for the fisherman's boy

That he shouts with his sister at play!

O well for the sailor lad,

That he sings in his boat on the bay!

"And the stately ships go on

To their haven under the hill;

But O for the touch of a vanished hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still.

"Break, break, break,

At the foot of thy crags, O sea!

But the tender grace of a day that is dead

Will never come back to me."

Out of these few simple words, deep, and melancholy, and sounding as the sea, as out of a well of the living waters of love, flows forth all "In Memoriam," as a stream flows out of its spring-all is here. "I would that my tongue could utter the thoughts that arise in me,"-" the touch of the vanished handthe sound of the voice that is still," the body and soul of his friend. Rising as it were out of the midst of the gloom of the valley of the shadow of death, "the mountain infant to the sun comes forth like human life from darkness;" and how its waters flow on! carrying life, beauty, magnificence, shadows and happy lights, depths of blackness, depths clear as the very body of heaven.

How it deepens as it goes, involving greater interests, larger views, "thoughts that wander through eternity," wider affections, but retaining its pure living waters, its unforgotten burden of joy and sorrow. How it visits every region! pleasant villages and farms, waste howling wildernesses, grim woods, nemorumque noctem, informed with spiritual fears, where may be seen, if shapes they may be called

"Fear and trembling Hope,

Silence and Foresight; Death the Skeleton,
And Time the Shadow;"

now within hearing of the Minster clock, now of the college bells, and the vague hum of the mighty city. And over head through all its course the heaven with its clouds, its sun, moon, and stars; but always, and in all places, declaring its source; and even when laying its burden of manifold and faithful affection at the feet of the Almighty Father, it still remembers whence it came.

"That friend of mine who lives in God,

That God which ever lives and loves;
One God, one law, one element,
And one far off divine event,

To which the whole creation moves."

It is to that chancel, and to the day, 3d January 1834, that he refers in poem xviii. of " In Memoriam."

""Tis well, 'tis something, we may stand
Where he in English earth is laid,
And from his ashes may be made
The violet of his native land.

""Tis little; but it looks in truth

As if the quiet bones were blest
Among familiar names to rest,
And in the places of his youth."

And again in xix. :

"The Danube to the Severn gave

The darken'd heart that beat no more;
They laid him by the pleasant shore,
And in the hearing of the wave.
"There twice a-day the Severn fills,
The salt sea-water passes by,
And hushes half the babbling Wye,
And makes a silence in the hills."

Here, too, it is, lxv.:

"When on my bed the moonlight falls,
I know that in thy place of rest,
By that broad water of the west;
There comes a glory on the walls:

"Thy marble bright in dark appears,
As slowly steals a silver flame
Along the letters of thy name,

And o'er the number of thy years."

This young man, whose memory his friend has consecrated in the hearts of all who can be touched by such love and beauty, was in no wise unworthy of all this. It is not for us to say, for it was not given to us the sad privilege to know, all that a father's heart buried with his son in that grave, all the hopes of unaccomplished years; nor can we feel in its fulness all that is meant by "Such

A friendship as had mastered Time; "Which masters Time indeed, and is Eternal, separate from fears.

The all-assuming months and years

Can take no part away from this."

But this we may say, we know of nothing in all literature to compare with the volume from which these lines are taken, since David lamented with this lamentation: "The beauty of Israel is slain. Ye mountains of Gilboa, let there be no dew, neither rain upon you. I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan; very pleasant hast thou been unto me; thy love for me was wonderful." We cannot, as some have done, compare it with Shakspeare's sonnets or "Lycidas." In spite of the amazing genius and tenderness, the never wearying, all involving reiteration of passionate attachment, the idolatry of admiring love, the rapturous devotedness, of one of the greatest beings which nature ever produced in the human form, displayed in the sonnets, we cannot but agree with Mr. Hallam in thinking, "that there is a tendency now, especially among young men of poetical tempers, to exaggerate the beauties of these remarkable productions;" and though we would hardly say with him, "that it is impossible not to wish that Shakspeare had never written them," giving us, as they do, and as perhaps nothing else could do, such proof of a power of loving, of an amount of attendrissement, which is not less wonderful than the bodying forth of that myriad-mind, which gave us Hamlet, and Lear, and Cordelia, and Puck, and all the rest, and which indeed explains to us how he could give us all these ;-while we go hardly so far, we entirely agree with his other wise words:" There is a weakness and folly in all misplaced and excessive affection;" which in Shakspeare's case is all the more distressing, when we consider that "Mr. W. H., the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets," was, in all likelihood, William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, a man of noble and gallant character, but always of licentious life.