the unwelcome and even importunate recurrence of pieces of the description alluded to above, when we least expected, and could least tolerate their unnecessary intrusion. We do not take to ourselves the credit of inducing Mr. W. thus virtually to recant his errors; his own good sense most probably made him feel their enormity. Be that however as it may, we rejoice that there is now no drawback in our hearty and entire admiration of one who will leave to our posterity some of the finest monuments of the extent and reach of the: human intellect of our age, and is to us a living document, if such were wanting, that domestic peace, temperance, and religion are essentially requisite towards creating and preserving the tenderness and consistency, the vigour and fire of a great and an enduring poet.

ART. VIII. The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. 12mo. pp. 212. 5s. Taylor and Co. 1822.

THE author of this little volume is a smart, clever person, but is so extremely anxious that the world should think him a genius, that it is really very difficult to distinguish, that part of his book which consists of sober truth, from that which is, perhaps, merely the effect of the large quantities of opium which he had, at one time of his life, been in the habit of taking. Whether the operation of this drug has produced any disease in the more solid parts of the understanding, it may be difficult to determine, from these "Confessions;" though from the strong tendency which all "opium eaters" exhibit, as we are told, to mystify their minds in the fumes of German metaphysics, we imagine that such a conclusion would not be unwarrantable. It is, however clear, if we take this work as the datum of our opinions, that the effects of opium are very fatal to those organs in which the propensity to " self-admiration resides;" converting that pardonable degree of vanity, which is necessary in order to keep a man upon tolerable terms with himself, into a morbid affection, which leads him not merely to exaggerate the importance and extent of the good qualities which he possesses, but to pride himself even upon what Mr. Burke calls "the shameful parts of his constitution;" making him believe, for example, that the dirtiness of his nails, or the holes in his small clothes, are as interesting in his case,

as cleanliness and decency, in the case of others. Except for the diseased state, to which the anonymous author's vanity has been reduced, from the cause we have just mentioned, it is probable the world would have remained in ignorance of the pure, delicate and romantic passion (for such it appears to have been from these Confessions,") which the author formed early in life, for a young person who gained a livelihood by walking up and down Oxford-street of a night. This person the author, (though he never knew any more of her, except that her name was Anne,) still cherishes in his imagination, as the most poetical model of female excellence which his secluded habits of life have hitherto enabled him to behold; and this, though he lives in a cottage on the bank of a lake, with a servant maid to wait upon him, with "Arms like Aurora's, and smiles like Hebe's!"

The long and short of these "Confessions" is, that the subject of them is a person, who in all other respects, is pretty much like many of his neighbours, except that from long habit he had brought himself to such an unnatural state as to be able to take, without any sensible inconvenience, 8000 drops of laudanum in a day; and that by painful and persevering efforts, he has detached himself from the horrible chain in which he was bound. The history which he gives of the progress of the diseased appetite which he had created, and of the symptoms attendant upon his cure, are however detailed with so much genius, and fancy, and poetry, and metaphysics -which things our author seems to consider as the basis of his character,-that we shall forbear from producing any extracts from this part of the work. What the public must wish to be instructed in, are probably some particulars respecting the great unknown himself: and on that subject we suspect no one can speak so eloquently as his own "Confessions." The following passage is of a kind of which there were no examples in our literature, until the present day; when our country is blessed with five or six geniuses of such a superior order, that none except themselves ever pretend to read their works. Magni est ingenii, says Quintilian, it is the part of a great genius, to understand the Iliad.

"For nearly two years I believe that I read no book but one: and I owe it to the author, in discharge of a great debt of gratitude, to mention what that was. The sublimer and more passionate poets I still read, as I have said, by snatches, and occasionally. But my proper vocation, as I well knew, was the exercise of the analytic understanding. Now, for the most part, analytic studies are continuous, and not to be pursued by fits and starts, or fragmen

tary efforts. Mathematics, for instance, intellectual philosophy, &c. were all become insupportable to me; I shrunk from them with a sense of powerless and infantine feebleness that gave me an anguish the greater from remembering the time when I grappled with them to my own hourly delight; and for this further reason, because I had devoted the labour of my whole life, and had dedicated my intellect, blossoms and fruits, to the slow and elaborate toil of constructing one single work, to which I had presumed to give the title of an unfinished work of Spinosa's; viz. De emendatione humani intellectus. This was now lying locked up, as by frost, like any Spanish bridge or aqueduct, begun upon too great a scale for the resources of the architect; and, instead of surviving me as a monument of wishes at least, and aspirations, and a life of labour dedicated to the exaltation of human nature in that way in which God had best fitted me to promote so great an object, it was likely to stand a memorial to my children of hopes defeated, of baffled efforts, of materials uselessly accumulated, of foundations laid that were never to support a superstructure,-of the grief and the ruin of the architect. In this state of imbecility, I had, for amusement, turned my attention to political economy; my understanding, which formerly had been as active and restless as a hyena, could not, I suppose (so long as I lived at all) sink into utter lethargy; and political econony offers this advantage to a person in my state, that though it is eminently an organic science (no part, that is to say, but what acts on the whole, as the whole again reacts on each part), yet the several parts may be detached and contemplated singly. Great as was the prostration of my powers at this time, yet I could not forget my knowledge; and my understanding had been for too many years intimate with severe thinkers, with logic, and the great masters of knowledge, not to be aware of the utter feebleness of the main herd of modern economists. I had been led in 1811 to look into loads of books and pamphlets on many branches of economy; and, at my desire, M. sometimes read to me chapters from more recent works, or parts of parliamentary debates. I saw that these were generally the very dregs and rinsings of the human intellect; and that any man of sound head, and practised in wielding logic with a scholastic adroitness, might take up the whole academy of modern economists, and throttle them between heaven and earth with his finger and thumb, or bray their fungus heads to powder with a lady's fan. At length, in 1819, a friend in Edinburgh sent me down Mr. Ricardo's book: and recurring to my own prophetic anticipation of the advent of some legislator for this science, I said, before I had finished the first chapter, Thou art the man !' Wonder and curiosity were emotions that had long been dead in Yet I wondered once more: I wondered at myself that I could once again be stimulated to the effort of reading: and much more I wondered at the book. Had this profound work been really written in England during the nineteenth century? Was it possible?

me.

I supposed thinking had been extinct in England. Could it be that an Englishman, and he not in academic bowers, but oppressed by mercantile and senatorial cares, had accomplished what all the universities of Europe, and a century of thought, had failed even to advance by one hair's breadth? All other writers had been crushed and overlaid by the enormous weight of facts and documents; Mr. Ricardo had deduced, à priori, from the understanding itself, laws which first gave a ray of light into the unwieldy chaos of materials, and had constructed what had been but a collection of tentative discussions into a science of regular proportions, now first standing on an eternal basis.

6

"Thus did one single work of a profound understanding avail to give me a pleasure and an activity which I had not known for years: -it roused me even to write, or, at least, to dictate, what M. wrote for me. It seemed to me, that some important truths had escaped even the inevitable eye' of Mr. Ricardo: and, as these were, for the most part, of such a nature that I could express or illustrate them more briefly and elegantly by algebraic symbols than in the usual clumsy and loitering diction of economists, the whole would not have filled a pocket book; and being so brief, with M. for my amanuensis, even at this time, incapable as I was of all general exertion, I drew up my Prolegomena to all future Systems of Political Economy. I hope it will not be found redolent of opium; though, indeed, to most people, the subject itself is a sufficient opiate." P. 148.

We cannot conclude our article without expressing, in the name of the public, the anxiety which we feel for the publication (if it be not all a hoax) of the author's "Prolegomena to all future systems;" which work we have purposely curtailed of its title, because we are confident, that when it appears, it will then be seen, that as well might it be attempted to confine a goose in a mouse-trap, as to tie down the mighty intellect, displayed in the above extract, to such a piddling subject as Political Economy.

ART. IX. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, for the Year 1822. Part I.

IN presenting to our readers some account of the contents of the volume just named, we are apprehensive, that from

* The reader must remember what I here mean by thinking: because, else this would be a very presumptuous expression. England, of late, has been rich to excess in fine thinkers, in the departments of creative and combining thought; but there is a sad dearth of masculine thinkers in any analytic path. A Scotchman of eminent name has lately told us, tliat he is obliged to quit even mathemas tics, for want of encouragement.

the number of important communications it contains, we shall be enabled to give but a very inadequate sketch of any of them within the limits to which we are confined. We will therefore, without further preface, proceed to what we have to say respecting the first paper: taking the others in some sort of order according to their subjects, which we consider the most advantageous arrangement.

The subject of Magnetism is brought forward in two.communications, each of great interest, in the present volume.

No I. The Bakerian Lecture, an account of experiments to determine the amount of the Dip of the Magnetic. Needle in London, in August 1821: with remarks on the instruments which are usually employed in such determinations. By Captain E. Sabine, of the Royal Artillery, F.R.S. Whilst the other branches of the science of Magnetism have of late been making the most rapid advances, the methods of investigating the phoenomena of the dip of the needle have received little or no improvement during the last fifty years, and these methods are all liable to great inaccuracies. To obviate these difficulties, the plan adopted by Captain Sabine, and which was proposed by Professor Meyer, proceeds on the principle of separating the centres of motion and gravity in the needle. By this mode a force is given to the needle arising from its own weight to assist that of magnetism in overcoming the inequalities of the axis, and thus cause the needle to return, after oscillation, with more certainty to the same point of the divided limb, than it would do were the centres strictly coincident. The centres of motion and of gravity not coinciding, the position which the needle assumes, when placed in the magnetic meridian, is not that of the dip, but a direction from which the dip by an easy calculation is deducible. The construction by which the condition here alluded to is obtained, consists in attaching a small weight moveable on an arm projecting at right angles on the under side of the needle. A needle of this kind was constructed with great care, the ends of the axis being as truly cylindrical as possible; these rest on agate planes rendered accurately level: observations are then made of the angle formed by the needle with the vertical, reversing it each time; and from the tangents of these ares, that of the dip is deduced by a very simple formula.

The details of a series of observations with a needle of this kind are given, from which the dip results, in London, August 1821, equal to 70°. 02.91 N.

Captain Sabine then proceeds to compare this result with that afforded by a method suggested by Laplace, of observ