mound of my fears, swelling every moment, broke forth as a torrent from its long and violent confinement. I was listened to with encouraging kindness, and there was not a doubt in my heart which I did not disclose. Doubts they had, indeed, appeared to me till that moment; but utterance transformed them, all at once, into demonstrations. It would be impossible to describe the fear and trepidation that seized me the moment I parted from my good-natured confidant. The prisons of the Inquisition seemed ready to close their studded gates upon me; and the very hell I had just denied, appeared yawning before my eyes. Yet, a few days elapsed, and no evil had overtaken me. I performed mass with a heart in open rebellion to the Church that enjoined it; but I had now settled with myself to offer it up to my Creator, as I imagine that the enlightened Greeks and Romans must have done their sacrifices. I was, like them, forced to express my thankfulness in an absurd language. "This first taste of mental liberty was more delicious than any feeling I ever experienced; but it was succeeded by a burning thirst for every thing that, by destroying my old mental habits, could strengthen and confirm my unbelief. I gave an exorbitant price for any French irreligious books, which the love of gain induced some Spanish booksellers to import at their peril. The intuitive knowledge of one another, which persecuted principles impart to such as cherish them in common, made me soon acquainted with several members of my own profession, deeply versed in the philosophical school of France. They possessed, and made no difficulty to lend me, all the Anti-christian works, which teemed from the French press. Where there is no liberty, there can be no discrimination. The ravenous appetite raised by a forced abstinence makes the mind gorge itself with all sorts of food. I suspect I have thus imbibed some false, and many crude notions from my French masters. But my circumstances preclude the calm and dispassionate examination which the subject deserves. asperated by the daily necessity of external submission to doctrines and persons I detest and despise, my soul overflows with bitterness. Though I acknowledge the advantages of moderation, none being used towards me, I practically, and in spite of my better judgment, learn to be a fanatic on my own side. Pretending studious retirement, I have fitted up a small room, to which none but my confidential friends find admittance. There lie my prohibited books, in perfect concealment, in a well-contrived nook under a staircase. The Breviary alone, in its black binding, clasps, and gilt leaves, is kept upon the table, to check the doubts of any chance intruder." CANT. "Gratiano says an infinite deal of nothings, More than any man in all Venice."-Merchant of Venice. MR. EDITOR,-Do you wish to know what cant is? "Tis what Hamlet studied, Words, words, words,'-not Wordsworth as a gentleman of my acquaintance would say, who has the gift of making the very worst puns possible), for there is no worth in them. They stand for no ideas, or rather stand for all. They are expressions to let, and are taken into the service of those muddy conceptions, that are beyond the reach of all ordinary language. Were writing and speaking confined to their legitimate ends, there would be no such thing; but where quill and tongue go for the writing and speaking sake, there is no way of getting over the breaks, the puzzles, and the dubiosities, of meaning, without a copious vocabulary of cant. It is like its parent-a many-headed monster; and from the cobbler to the king, each calling hath its stock. With but this difference between the kinds, that the more vulgar are the more expressive-nothing being so dull, so stupid, and utterly fâde, as the cant of high life. The only person free from this habit, and independent of this auxiliary, is the citizen of the world; but he is almost an imaginary being. We are a universe of tradesmen, and all delve at something; there are labourers in the palace, as well as in the vineyard. We are each surrounded with our own little atmosphere, of which the atoms are mighty to us: the objects with which we are there conversant, are ever present to our senses, become a part and parcel of our minds, and when we take distant and more general views of things, we tacitly refer them to, and illustrate them by those lesser objects, which are hourly before our eyes. Hence the expressiveness of the vulgar, who apply the homely and the tangible, where the learned and fashionable use the affected and idcal. Cant with the vulgar is metaphor; with others, conceit -as a term of reproach, indeed, it should be applied only to the latter. Those who lay most claim to be considered citizens of the world, are travellers; yet among this class are to be found the oldest and most egregious of canters-from Sir John Mandeville to Tom Coryatt, and from the much-abused author of the Crudities to any one you please. Travel, I fear, wears out more shoes than prejudices-as the greatest and most startling novelty to the voyager is the language and strange sounds of foreign countries, he catches words first, and leaves ideas to follow at their leisure-often omits them altogether, by particular desire. Much in the same way with all of us, when we travel into life and knowledge: we are taught vocabularies-made to repeat whole dictionaries by rote learn explanations ten times more formidable than what they explain, ignotum per ignotius, and get our ideas of things by the same method that, folks say, lawyers get to heaven. No wonder if we cant and babble nonsense. We are taught dead languages and dead sciences, and are left to catch the living principles, the vital knowledge of humanity, from unmeaning conversation, and from the worthless stray volumes on the subject which may fall into our hands. We are left for all this discipline-this_nurture of the soul, in boyhood and youth to sanguine fancy and untempered passion; and, as years roll on, are compelled to learn from that hard, cold teacher, Experience, the futility of former hopes and old ideas. We are led thus to judge of things that are to be, by the things that were to be: we learn the vanity of hope, but, in learning the harsh lesson, we lose the mental strength, the independent, self-subsisting spirit, which might have enabled us to do without it. Thus cheated of the future, we turn our views upon the past-our reflections upon ourselves. We consider our race of existence as run; and, with the spiritual pride of beings that have fulfilled their period of existence, we turn philosophers, and speculators, and teachers. Our feelings and perceptions, dormant upon one another, lie rankling and rotting into morbidity and corruption. Ever contemplating our own confused minds, and their more confused copies of things, we grow dizzy, as we flatter ourselves we grow wise. A haze spreads itself between us and the world of intellect; yet we talk on, as if the objects were as distinct as ever. The crazed mind, from which has been blotted every idea, clings in vanity and dotage to the words, and the sounds, with which it has been familiar; and in pleasing and happy self-delusion takes sound for sense, and cant for philosophy, -like Lear with his straw sceptre, it is 6 every inch a king. It is often the primates of intellect who are thus visited; but it is some consolation to them, that the world can scarce perceive their aberrations-there is no measure by which they can be meted. If their effusions be unmeaning, a spirit still glows through them, which affrights the vulgar from questioning, and makes them esteem it profane to attempt unveiling the nothingness that is enshrined within. There is generally a slight glimmer throughout that looks like Platonicism, and is more striking from the surrounding darkness. With the vulgar reverence for obscurity, we are at first more inclined to attribute the unintelligibility of a work to our own dulness than to that of the author, till we take up books of philosophy and perspicacity united, which shake our worshipful opinions of the obscure. "The works of Des Cartes," says Le Clerc," were the first books that brought Mr. Locke (so he himself told me) to the study of philosophy: for though he did not assent to the truth of all his notions, he found that he wrote with great clearness, which made him think that it was the fault of the authors, rather than his own, that he had not understood some other philosophical books." If we proceed from hence to poetry, we shall find cant more at home: it is here in its original signification of song, and not inexpressively derived, bearing as it does, even in its most prosaic state, such a resemblance to those popular snatches of tune, which "We whistle as we go, for want of thought." There are many who could no more live without the favourite tune or favourite line of the hour, than they could without the morning newspaper; it is to them just what tobacco is to the poor artizan a soothing employment, a gentle opiate, "To steep the senses in forgetfulness." We are such unspiritual beings that thought requires some mechanical accompaniment; some people, even of intellectual habits, cannot raise an idea while they sit-their minds won't go without their legs. We know an author who regularly destroys a pair of gloves literally eats them-for every song he writes; and another, who always sits down to a lathe, as a preparative for composition. For those whose cogitations do not tend paper-wards, a tune is the simplest spell of the kind, at once soothing and exciting. But we have heard or read somewhere, that medical men look upon a person's having one of these snatches continually in his head, as a symptom of some disorder. I have not had much experience in this line, but I have found, that people thus affected are generally very much inclined to commit verse. The fashionable catch the air from the last opera, and the expression from Boxiana or Cribb's Memorial. The Savoyards have been a national benefit in this way, and have furnished matter for humming to all the boys about town: this humming is at first an accompaniment, and afterwards a substitute for thought. Exactly the same, but without the music, are the thousand species of expressions, adages, and illustrations, which on their first application, no doubt, meant something, but which have long since laid aside the useful property of meaning. Those sweet words are to the author what the favourite tune is to the saunterer-a stop-gap in cogitation and in sentences. A reader may be puzzled to find out the association; but the difficulty is solved, when he learns, that, like the Pax vobiscum of Wamba, it is a passe par-tout. Cant is the epidemic of periodical essayism (we have no doubt of this very page practising what it preaches); but with a "mê ignosco meis vitiis," it is very allowable. Who could be for ever writing sense? or who would, when nonsense will do better? A lively gentleman, with a stock of egotism, and the old dramatists common-placed, will write more popular essays in a week than Bacon and Clarendon excogitated in a year. Cant is current coin, as Langland would say; sense is your heavy ingot, that nobody will carry, or take the trouble of assaying. Wisdom will not be listened to, unless ushered in by nonsense; and the only way to convey instruction is par parenthèse, surrounding it with drollery, like the knowing fellow's mode of passing a bad guinea, "Slip it between two half-pence, and it will pass without challenge." There are some species of cant extremely amusing, from the impudence with which it is endeavoured to pass them for something better: they stare you in the face, like a lawyer of empty bag, with most vacuous importance. Of these the most insignificant are the most barefaced-witness the dash, and the letter I. Of the pages of modern composition they have more than one-half in their own possession, yet the sum of their signification is nothing. How is it that our ancestors were content with colon and semicolon, and yet contrived to be abundantly witty? That the dashless Addison was facetious, elegant, philosophic-all in the way of plain punctuation? But taste is changed: we read, think, and talk hurry-skurry, and should never get to the end of a speech or paragraph without the assistance of, parenthesis, and quo tation: Hail! thou inscrutable prosaic Muse, Where'er thou dwell'st,-in would-be poet's dream, And yet I ween, ne'er did thy wing delay In all thy temples been, and sung the Pacan, Y. |