And yet what difference is there between this and the arguments used by the clergy? Why must the two ideas of a church and a state be so closely united? For no other reason than that they would have it so. But let them be ever so intimately connected, what evil effects can accrue to the one, by weeding out the corruptions which have overgrown the other. The closer the connection between these two powers, the greater will be the advantage resulting to the one, as the deformity of the other is diminished ;-and then, in plain English, that man who unmasks the artifice by which a churchman screens his ill-deeds, is the true friend of his government, be he of what sect or party, or what rank he will. You, Tim, must see through the juggling trick which makes every thing, now-adays, a political question--and you cannot but despise it. The church has no right to be mixed up with the government-it ought not to be made a political question-it is not one, or I should not be writing to you; for, between ourselves, I hate politics—and so I do cant and humbug, be it in church or state, and will do my best to expose it.

When I sat down to my desk, I had not the slightest idea of keeping you so long to hear my preachings and prosings; but "what is writ, is writ," and you must consider this as a sort of preface, a candid declaration that I have no party-views in directing an arrow, every now and then, towards the pulpit. -My bow is already bent-I may as well speed the shaft" so here goes:

If you put on your spectacles, and look over the advertisements of the first newspaper, or magazine, that falls in your way, you will find the following:

"Ad. Cleros. On fine 4to. writingpaper. £7 10s.

"Sexaginta Conciones (Anglicè scriptæ) nunquam antehac provulgato, lithographicè impressæ, fideliter MSS. imitantes, in usum publicum Verbi Divini Præconum accommodatæ a Presbytero Ecclesiæ Anglicanæ.

"Conciones hæ lithographicæ in commodum Clericorum Sacris Ordinibus novissimè initiatorum, illorumque

sacerdotium, qui affectant, adaptantur. Sis, tamen, uti possunt illi, quibus, propter occupationum, amplitudinem, sæpe auxilii hujus generis opus est. Quod ad fidem spectat orthodoxo sunto ad constructionem vero nitido et diserto."

Now, Tim, in case you may have forgotten your Latin, I will furnish you with a translation:"Sixty Sermons (written in English) and never before published, faithfully lithographed to imitate hand-writing, adapted for the use of the ministers of the divine word, by a member of the Church of England.

"These Sermons are intended for the use of those who have been lately admitted into holy orders, or those who are educating for the church. They may be also useful to those who, from the multiplicity of their occupations, have need of an assistance of this sort. They are orthodox, and written in a neat and elegant style."

This I take to be a clear specimen of clerical tricking and juggling. Why was the advertisement written in Latin? -That the profane might not understand it. This underhand mode of proceeding savours strongly of something not right; otherwise, why not let it be public to all, who have eyes to read, or ears to hear? But no-i it is treason against the state to publish a parson's humbuggery to his flock-men must be kept in ignorance of the tricks by which they are duped, if they wish to be saved. Then, my dear Tim, just observe the wording of the last clause"useful to those who, from the multiplicity of their occupations, have need of an assistance of this sort ;-all this long rigmarole means, those who can't write their own sermons, or it means nothing. For what, in the name of heaven! are a parson's occupations? -fox-hunt-driving stage-coaches? ing? or cramming up smutty tales? -Pretty occupations forsooth!—and well befitting these holy men, who are so pure, that it is impiety to raise your finger against them!-I make no more comments upon it, but leave it for your consideration till you hear from me again. Yours, &c.

--

JEREMY BLINKINSOP.

My Uncle Harry is so enthusiastic an admirer of the inductive logic of Lord Bacon, that he firmly believes nothing can be real or true-not even his own existence-which will not bear to be examined by the standard of the Novum Organum. This way of thinking has often made him appear, to those who do not know him, as a whimsical humourist, though nothing is farther from his character; as he is always serious, earnest, and zealous in the pursuit of truth, and would consider a joke or a piece of humour to be a prodigal waste of our brief and valuable time. With him the admiration of Bacon is not, as it is with some, a mere opinion to hang their common places on; for he spends his whole life, and an odd one it is, in illustrating the doctrine by the most singular and ingenious, though sometimes laughable, experiments. A few of these I carefully noted while the processes were in progress, and, with his permission, I leave them at your disposal.

EXPERIMENT FIRST.

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"What is the cause," said my uncle, who was always cause-hunting, what is the cause that puppies and kittens take delight in running round and round after their tails? I have observed that little thing by the chimney-corner enjoying itself in this way for the whole morning, and I am determined to find out the cause."

This occurred at breakfast, and I was accordingly prepared to expect amusement from the experiments of the day, though an unfortunate appointment prevented me from seeing the commencement of the process. On returning, I found my uncle impransus, as he said, which is interpreted un-dined, and sitting squat on the carpet with the aforesaid kitten gamboling about him. 'Eugnxa, iugnxa, I have found it, I have found it!" he exclaimed, while his old grey eyes sparkled with pleasure; and, without waiting for my question as to what he had found, he got alertly upon his legs. But accustomed as I was to his singularities, I could, with the utmost difficulty, refrain from laughing out, when I perceived that he had constructed for himself an ample tail, which

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LORD BACON.

he began to pursue with great ardour till he became giddy and popped down into the squat position in which he was when I entered the study.

"It is very pleasant-only try it," said he," I do not wonder that these animals take peculiar delight in it. I feel my head just as if I had finished my bottle of claret, or as if I had breathed a bladder full of the nectarine gas. Inductive experiment, my dear Hal,” he continued," is the very soul of truth. Had I not contrived this Galvanic tail for myself, I should have gone to my grave in ignorance of the cause why kittens and puppies pursue their tails. Take a memorandum of it, Hal, lest the important discovery may perish with us."

"The facetious Montaigne," said I, was in doubt when he played with his cat, whether he or she was most amused." But my uncle cut me short by saying, that Montaigne knew nothing of induction, and was no authority on any point; for his wit was idle, and his common-places were all from the ancients, who were wholly ignorant of induction. EXPERIMENT SECOND.

My uncle was as keenly ardent to make discoveries for the benefit of mankind as ever Mr. Owen of Lanark was; and, as he was a professed enemy to speculation and theory, he always appealed to experiment. One of his plans of philanthropy was founded on the great discoveries of Gall and Spurzheim, that our dispositions and propensities arise from parts of the brain pushing out the bone that covers them, till it becomes externally a bump or knob. Now, my uncle argued, that if the bumps of theft, lying, and murder, could in infancy be prevented from shooting out, all these crimes would bona fide be abolished. He accordingly invented an instrument on the principle of the hernial truss, and forcibly applied its two compressing knobs to the organ of murder in the aforesaid kitten. This was, indeed, at the risk of wholly destroying its mousing talents; but the sacrifice of one kitten was a trifle when balanced with the total abolition of the crime of murder! The poor kitten was kept under the torture of the murder-com

press for no less than two months, when my uncle, being impatient to know the result, assembled all his domestics, and several of his neighbours, to see his ameliorated cat refuse, with banian horror, to touch a mouse.

"I hope, my friends," he said with eagerness, "that you shall this day witness the greatest discovery which has yet resulted from the inductive logic of the great Bacon, in the changed disposition of this feline animal, whose race has, in all ages, waged implacable war upon mice. It will be the glory of the age we live in, to have found out the means of preventing for ever the crime of murder and the horrors of war, by simply applying a strong compress behind the ears of our children."

The cat was released, and a mouse was at the same time emancipated from a cage-trap. "Now mark," said my uncle, "how her nature has been changed! She does not, as you perceive, attempt to catch!-Good heavens! She is, indeed, off with it!" he exclaimed, with bitter disappointment, as the gentle cat made a rapid spring-seized her preyand darted out of the room with it in her murderous jaws.

Though foiled in this, however, he continued to contrive other similar experiments, both by compressing the bumps and by fostering their growth. At one time he attempted to make a wise goose, by squeezing its brain forward; and to make a sprightly ass, by fostering the merry bump of an ass-colt. His experiment on a young cuckoo was more arduous, as he wished, by forcing the organs of tune and philoprogenitiveness into extraordinary size, to make it more musical than the nightingale, and more paternal than the pelican; but, unluckily, the experiment was foiled by the cuckoo prematurely dying apoplectic. He was very anxious to have tried his compress on the head of his groom, in order to destroy his amative organ; but Dick could not be persuaded; nor could he induce me to try to become as great a poet as Milton, or as great a philosopher as Newton, by putting on his compress. For himself -he was so well satisfied with his bumps as they were, that he declared he had not the least occasion for the compress.

as heat is a fluid body, which fact I thus prove. Put your hand amongst this pounded ice and you will feel all the flesh and blood of it shrink, and crowd, as it were, more closely together-in a word, become more solid than before. Nay, in a frosty morning, I can distinctly feel the solid cold in the air, and you may sce it also in the thick vapour of the breath. Every one has smelt the cold, particularly during a London fog; and I shall now let you hear that it is an elastic solid. For this purpose I have procured this waggoner's whip, which Dick shall operate with on the cold in the garden." Dick, accordingly, accompanied my uncle and me to the garden, where he begun most scientifically to crack the whip. Now," said my uncle, "mark the sound; the cord of the whip striking the solid body of cold in the air, acts in a similar manner to a drum-stick striking on the head of a drum. This experiment," he continued, "must convince every body who witnesseth it, that cold is a bard solid substance, which may be touched, tasted, smelt, seen, and heard, as distinctly as any other substance in nature, heat and magnetism not excepted. This I esteem, my dear Hal, one of my most important and useful discoveries, save, perhaps, my discovery of the real existence of the fluid of darkness."

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I am sorry that I have mislaid the experiments by which he proved the fluidity of darkness, and also those which proved nothing to be an internal motion of the particles of the air, as they were, in my opinion, superior in ingenuity to those which are usually brought to prove heat to be motion, and light to be fluid. To make some amends for the want of these, I shall give you a laboured and eloquent

ORATORIAL PANEGYRIC ON LORD BACON, BY MY UNCLE.

"Bacon," said my uncle Harry, when he had concluded his experiments, proving darkness to be a fluid, 66 may be considered as the great father of all that is useful in modern philosophy-having most fearlessly and most successfully attacked all the bulwarks of prejudice-having disencumbered himself of the shackles of the grammarians and commentators, whose stupidity and dullness had nearly smothered

all the celestial fire of genius that lived and burned in the works of the Greeks aud Romans, and had portentously threatened to bury the human mind itself under their tomes of unintelligible lore and having trampled on all the useless mass of grammars and comments, and made his way with fearless heroism into the pure atmosphere of nature-Lord Bacon stood alone among the works of God, and looked abroad on their sublimities with all the humbleness with which it becomes an imperfect being to look upon perfection. He felt his ignorance, and felt it strongly, and he looked with contempt, or with pity, on the dull and ignorant grammarian, who, bedecked with his unintelligible jargon of unmeaning terms, strutted amidst his pile of musty volumes with all the insolence of untamed and untamable pride, and thought the works of the Almighty beneath his regard-because he could not so well and easily bepatch them, as he could do the works of man, with the musty cobwebs of the schools. He could not persuade men to talk of the potentiality of the sun, nor make the stars to be cases or moods of the moon; though they suffered him to rack out his dull invention upon Homer and Demosthenes,

and to try to dim with his vile breath the unquenchable light of their genius. All the accumulated rubbish of the grammarians Lord Bacon cleared away from his study, and determined to employ the sublime and unrivalled powers which God had given him, in thinking for himself; and it is to Lord Bacon alone that we owe the whole goodly fabric of modern art and science, as it was he who taught men to experiment and to observe; and to think rather than to fancy and dream; and to invent unmeaning terms to apologise for their stupidity and ignorance, and impose upon the vulgar by a learned array of mysterious and meaningless words. In brief, my dear Hal, it is to Lord Bacon that the world will be indebted for this sublime discovery, which I have now happily completed, of the fluidity of darkness."

My uncle, on concluding his oration, retired to consign himself to the arms of sleep for the night, and to continue his investigations upon dreaming, on which he has also learnedly experimented and profoundly spoken. Sed nunc satis jam in presentia: my uncle himself may, perhaps, send you something better than this scrawl.

A.

Of the several ways of obtaining no`toriety, that of taking up singular opinions, and persisting to defend them with inflexible and head-strong obduracy, seems much easier, and greatly more successful, than any sort of useful and meritorious exertion which is pursued with unobtrusive modesty; and so long as such opinions interfere not with the public welfare and happiness, there seems no good reason why the persons who hold them should not be indulged to talk about them, and write about them, till they reap the gratification of their boyish vanity, in seeing their names capitalized and bandied about in the public prints of the day. The case becomes very different, however, when a person attempts to make himself notorious at the expence of the public, by spreading alarms of vague and undefineable danger, which are but too apt to lay hold of the minds of the peo

ple, and influence their conduct. Mr. Brown, we conceive, is a person of this stamp, and we feel it to be our imperative duty to denounce him as such, and render, as far as our influence goes, his unfounded alarms harmless and nugatory. We have his own assertion that his motives are not selfish and interested, and we verily believe, that his alarms do not rank under the category of productive labour; but he must have motives for coming before the world swaggering and dogmatising so outrageously -he must have proposed to himself some end or aim to be attained-and to us that end seems to be nothing else than the gratification of an idle and culpable vanity. But let that pass-we should not indeed have taken the trouble to disturb his little day-dreams had it centred in the moon or in the depths of the earth; but, assuming as it does a shape so questionable, we wish to

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put the public on their guard against him, though perhaps our admonitions may not, to use his own elegant language, possess perspicuity suflicient to make an impression on the faculties of an idiot, or force sufficient to constrain the resistance of madmen."

What makes Mr. Brown at this moment a very dangerous sort of person, is the known prevalence of small-pox, which, after they had for some years nearly disappeared, have again resumed their ravages in many parts of the country. Now the causes of the reappearance of this terrible disease are obvious enough, and have been clearly traced and stated by gentlemen of the highest professional eminence. They are briefly these: 1. The neglect of vaccination, particularly among the lower orders, who, notwithstanding the facilities held out to them, have been lulled into security and neglect in proportion as smallpox have been lately of rare occurrence. 2. Imperfect vaccination, from not employing Mr. Bryce's test, and from trusting to non-professional vaccinators.* 3. Most of all from continuing the practice of small-pox inoculation, in which Mr. Brown is an avowed delinquent. He talks of prohibiting the cow-pox inoculation by Act of Parliament; but if he, and such as he, had met their deserts by a salutary law of restraint, we hesitate not to declare our opinion, that we should not have now heard of the re-appearance of small-pox. It well becomes Mr. Brown, after doing all in his power to keep the poison of small-pox afloat for several years past, in the healthful air of Musselburgh, by continuing to inoculate all whom he could persuade to submit to the measure-it well be.comes him, we say, to come forward now with alarming accounts of their increase! Why, he himself has been the main cause of the evil, so far as his influence reached, and, we think it would be doing no more than their duty requires, if the magistrates of Musselburgh should set about a serious investigation of his conduct, with a view to adopt coercive measures to restrain such farther assaults on the public health of

But

But let us more closely examine Mr. Brown's proofs, otherwise he will not hesitate to complain of "detraction ;” though on this subject we think it would not be easy to detract him, if we may so use the term. He tells us, that experience has shown that the natural small-pox have made their appearance after complete vaccination-not in the least modified, but in the highest degree confluent and followed by death. the experience of no practitioner in the kingdom bears Mr. Brown out in such round and unblushing assertions, and Dr. Munro has inferred, from a most extended induction, that in the whole "annals of physic there are not above six or eight fatal cases of small-pox after cow-pox; whereas, at an average, one in four hundred dies from the inoculated small-pox; not to mention that this practice often entails the loss of an eye, of a limb, or of general health, which the cow-pox never do.

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But Mr. Brown maintains a determined scepticism with regard to the authority of all who oppose his views, and he premises once for all," which phrase with him means again and again, that, after the various tergiversations [a learned term for lies] of these gentlemen, it is impossible to allow much, if any credit, to the different opinions and