over you, them; who think their ill-behaviour gives them an air of superiority instead of placing them at your mercy; and who, in fact, in all their overtures of condescending kindness towards you, treat you exactly as if there was no such person in the world. Friendship is with them a mono-drama, in which they play the principal and sole part. They must needs be very imposing or amusing characters to surround themselves with a circle of friends, who find that they are to be mere cyphers. The egotism would in such instances be offensive and intolerable, if its very excess did not render it entertaining. Some individuals carry this hard, unprincipled, reckless unconsciousness of every thing but themselves and their own purposes to such a pitch, that they may be compared to automata, whom you never expect to consult your feelings or alter their movements out of complaisance to others. They are wound up to a certain point, by an internal machinery which you do not very well comprehend; but if they perform their accustomed evolutions so as to excite your wonder of laughter, it is all very well, you do not quarrel with them, but look on at the pantomime of friendship while it lasts or is agreeable. There are (I may add here) a happy few, whose manner is so engaging and delightful, that injure you how they will, they cannot offend you. They rob, ruin, ridicule you, and you cannot find in your heart to say a word against them. The late Mr. Sheridan was a man of this kind. He could not make enemies. If any one came to request the repayment of a loan from him, he borrowed more. A cordial shake of his hand was a receipt in full for all demands. He could "coin his smile for drachmas," cancelled bonds with bon mots, and gave jokes in discharge of a bill. A friend of his said, "If I pull off my hat to him in the street, it costs me fifty pounds, and if he speaks to me, it's a hundred !" Only one other reflection occurs to me on this subject. I used to think better of the world than I do. I thought its great fault, its original sin, was barbarous ignorance and want, which would be cured by the diffusion of civilization and letters. But I find (or fancy I do) that as selfishness is the vice of unlettered periods and nations, envy is the bane of more refined and intellectual ones. Vanity springs out of the grave of sordid self-interest. Men were formerly ready to cut one another's throats about the gross means of subsistence, and now they are ready to do it about reputation. The worst is, you are no better off, if you fail than if you succeed. You are despised if you do not excel others, and hated if you do. Abuse or praise equally weans your friends from you. We cannot bear eminence in our own department or pursuit, and think it an impertinence in any other. Instead of being delighted with the proofs of excellence and the admiration paid to it, we are mortified with it, thrive only by the defeat of others, and live on the carcase of mangled reputation. By being tried by an ideal standard of vanity and affectation, real objects and common people become odious or insipid. Instead of being raised, all is prostituted, degraded, vile. Every thing is reduced to this feverish, importunate, harassing state. I'm heartily sick of it, and I'm sure I have reason if any one has. ON VULGAR ERRORS. "Quod petiit, spernit; repetit, quod nuper omisit, Diruit, ædificat, mutat quadrata rotundis. HORAT. WE hear nothing more frequently than complaints of the multiplicity of periodical publications; yet there is no complaint more wholly divested of a solid foundation. If there be any branch of commerce more closely regulated by the demand than another, it is that of periodical literature. Nor, indeed, can it be otherwise: for the quick succession of the seasons renders the return of printers' bills, and of gratuities to occasional correspondents," so pressing, that if the public does not clear the bookseller's shelves as fast as he loads them, he must very soon find his way into the gazette. An Irish nobleman, lately deceased, being sentenced to three months' imprisonment for having on some occasion administered justice as a magistrate a little à l'Irlandais, in order to shorten his time and avert the tedium of confinement, drew, at the beginning of his incarceration, a bill at ninetyone days; observing, that in the long course of his life he had found no time fly away so rapidly as that which intervened between the passing a bill and the day of its becoming due. If this noble lord had been concerned in a review or magazine, he would not have stood in need of such an expedient: for whether he had been editor or author to collect the matter, or publisher to collect the cash, he would have found the first of the month return quite as soon as was agreeable. No periodical publication, therefore, can keep its ground which is not called for by some considerable class of readers; and its continued existence is proof positive that it is wanted. At the moment in which I write, the supply of periodical literature is still below the demand; and that branch of literary speculation is susceptible of much further developement. For such is the avidity of the public for this sort of ware, and such the capricious variety of its appetite, that scarcely a month passes away without the appearance of a new adventure, calculated for some hitherto neglected description of "gentle reader," who, like the horse-leech's two daughters, cries unceasingly "Give, give." Among the desiderata in this line I would earnestly direct the attention of the "trade" to the getting up a work dedicated exclusively to the consideration of public credulity, and to noting down the changes which take place in popular opinion and in fashion, respecting what is, and what is not, a vulgar error. "Truth is one, but error is multifarious," said a celebrated French preacher (and a most sophistical use, by the by, did he make of this * A really "occasional correspondent," i. e. a gentleman who gives his communication to the Editor gratuitously, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, puts a very just value on his article. Those who possess any thing worth money, soon discover the secret of obtaining money for it, and papers worth reading are rarely imparted without a valuable consideration. There are, it is true, some periodical publications which subsist on eleemosynary donations, but the goods may be known at once by their quality. The vanity which finds its account in seeing itself in print, is seldom allied to high excellence. Those publications, therefore, that pander to the cacoethes scribendi of country parsons, or of half-educated sectarian mechanics, and of village apothecaries, are bought and read by the communicants and their friends, and by-no one else. aphorism): it is not, then, surprising, when we consider the multiplicity of men's caprices, the extent of their ignorance, and the complication of their interests, that their opinions should fluctuate in an unceasing change, and that mankind should still continue discarding and receiving notions, like a loo-player, with a run of ill luck; that is to say without at all improving the hand by the operation. The vulgar errors of to-day are never those of yesterday; and the opinions most in vogue at the passing moment will to-morrow infallibly be as out of date as a stale newspaper. In the present condition of society, in which opinions weigh so much more than facts, when success in life depends so much more on the cut of a man's creed (not only in religion and politics, but in a thousand other nameless particulars) than on his conduct and morals, it would be difficult to point out a work more useful, more indispensable, than a periodical census of current notions, a plain direction of what it is right to think and safe to believe, and an index of what should be utterly repudiated and decried-a sort of "Every Man his own Sense-keeper, or infallible guide to court politics, fashionable religion, and dandy sentiment;" which being got up, in point of type and form, uniformly with the Court Calendar, might be bound up with that useful compendium, and with it would form a complete circle, or encyclopædia of necessary knowledge. A moment's consideration will point out the utility of such a work: for surely it is by no means less essential to know "what," than to be informed of "who" is in, and who out. A mere catalogue of barren names is the least essential part of the lore of life. Of what avail is it to enquire whether Mr. Canning or Mr. Brougham be placed at the helm of affairs, whether the Bishop of Peterborough, or of Norwich, is to be your patron, unless you have at the same time a short method of getting at their opinions, and working upon their frail humanity by flattering their prejudices and echoing their sentiments. Without accurate information on this point, a pliant insinuating rogue is no better off than the most stiff-necked man of independence that rusticity and much reading of the classics ever produced. The most contemptible sycophant that ever wriggled his way to place and to consideration, would, thus unprovided, be as likely to be taken for "black sheep" as Sir Pertinax's squeamish chaplain himself,-and would have quite as little chance of "rising in the Church." There are, it is true, a favoured few, possessed of that intuitive force, that they can catch at a glance the peculiarities of the passing moment; and in arriving at a levee, or a cabinet-dinner, can determine with precision, at the first coup d'œil, the exact shade of cant which will put them in unison with the great man of the society; but this is not every one's lot; and there are thousands of pretty fellows possessed of every other talent pour parvenir, who fail for want of a delicate tact to seize with adroitness the nuance du jour. Nature, which has provided the insect tribe with antennæ to guide their steps in the dark, and to vibrate to the slightest shock of external bodies, has not gifted the human race with any cerebral boss, or protuberance, or directing them intuitively in the labyrinth of opinion, and teaching them "the way they should go." To add also to the mischief, the great are so confoundedly uncertain, that there is no counting on experience. A great man who will at one time almost let you give him the lie without taking offence, will, at another, turn you adrift for ever upon some trifling neglect of etiquette or of assentation. Nay, he will even encourage you to familiarity, and when he has warmed you into a notion of friendship and of admitted equality, he will turn short at a tangent, petrify you with a look, and blight all your hopes of advancement in their bloom, like a frosty night in the month of May. In respect to popular errors there are two ways of going wrong. We may reject a fashionably current opinion, or we may stick to a mistake which it is no longer bon ton to maintain. It is needless to say which of these errors is the most dangerous; for the latter draws on you only the contempt, while the former brings on your head the hatred of society; and it is obviously better to be laughed at than stoned-better to be quizzed by a half-witted pretender, than railed at by an Attorney-general, or preached to death by a sentencing Judge. Who, indeed, ever heard of any one's getting into a scrape for believing too much, except the Irish Catholics; whose chance it has been to get more abused and ill-treated for believing in the "real presence,” than the Jews have for reviling and denying the great object of all Christian veneration? but in this, as in all other earthly matters, il n'y-a que heur et malheur, and luck 's a lord. It must, however, be admitted as not a little hard upon those oldfashioned persons, who still fancy it ill-luck to spill the salt, who tremble at the ticking of a death-watch, object to your sitting cross-legged, or insist upon kicking a thirteenth person out of company, that they should even be treated with the unmeasured contempt to which they are usually exposed. Why should mankind be so hard upon the simplicity which believes an elephant to have no joints, or that a hazel-rod will indicate the presence of metals in the earth? Few persons entertaining these notions so far forget themselves as to set about explaining how such matters come to pass; but contenting themselves with what they take for experience, grope their way quietly in the dark; and the wisest and best do no more. The popular errors, on the contrary, which are now in vogue, are wilful confusions of ideas, the results of false and flimsy reasonings, contradictions in terminis bolstered up by sophisms, and more the creatures of pride and self-interest than of simplicity and ignorance. In strict justice, is not an adorer of legitimacy a much fitter object for contempt than the poor girl who sees a winding-sheet in a tallow-candle? and is not an advocate of corn-laws and anti-combination acts more worthy to be despised, than a washerwoman who looks for a coach and six, or a love-letter, in the bottom of her tea-cup? Besides, the retailers of by-gone errors do not cry out "mad dog" after those who differ from them, and have never been known to keep reviews and Sunday-papers in their pay, for the purpose of reviling and slandering all who are sceptical enough to doubt that a woman has one rib less than a man, or to deny the witch-expelling efficacy of a horse-shoe nailed to the door-sill of the house. Among the many vulgar errors noted in that very curious volume written by Thomas Browne, Doctor of Physicke, there are none more flagrant than his own proposition, that "as for popular errors, they are more nearly founded upon an erroneous inclination of the people, as being the most deceptible part of mankind, and ready with open arms to receive the encroachments of error." For the people, of all the classes of society, are the least prone to mistake concerning those matters which are within the scope of their observation. Within their limited sphere of action, they go more directly to their ends, and make fewer errors in their calculations than the privileged classes. Their perception of the self-contradictions and false colourings of their betters is, indeed, far too acute for the selfish interests of the Corinthian capital. They may be deceived by a false analogy, and think an egg" bad for the bile" because it is yellow; but they can trace the injurious operation of a tax and perceive the mischievous consequences of a bad law, when their superiors in education are quite led astray by the false lights of too much learning. I defy the whole round of popular absurdities to produce a blunder that shall match the parliamentary doctrine of starvation from over-production, or of the abstract merit of time as a cure for national evils; without reference to the manner in which that time shall be expended,-whether its lapse shall be marked by a perseverance in waste, or a return to wholesome and beneficial economies. The errors of the common people, moreover, are the leavings of their instructers; and when the humbler classes fall astray, it is by the misleading of those who look on their mistakes with so much contempt. If a nurse-tender stifles and roasts her patient, does she not derive the practice from that of the physician of the olden time? and is not the water-doctor of the poor the lawful descendant of the court Galens of two centuries back? So likewise the days are not very far distant, when even kings affected with small-pox were wrapped in scarlet cloth, on account of the sympathy of colour between the diseased skin and the clothing. Yet with all this prostration of intellect to the authority of the learned, it may be questioned whether the people, with the same means of forming their judgment that the upper classes possess, would fall incontinently into the belief that Pope was no poet, because some wiseacre or two of note chose to assert it: and they are far too knowing to put their thoughts and tongues implicitly into the keeping of an academy of belles-lettres, and submit their pleasures to be modelled by forty pretending pedants, on the credit of a royal patent for the monopoly of words and sentences. On many accounts, the vulgar errors of the great are by far the most important. I should therefore, strongly recommend the publisher who would embark in my proposed undertaking, to invent a new appellation for his book, and by no means to call it a Review of Vulgar Errors. In the first place it is not good to affront your reader at the moment you solicit his custom; and even a common box-lobby lounger would reject a magazine as "cursedly low," if it bore such a title. After all, in spite of the fraternizing influence of "the Fancy," with its dog-fights and rat-slaughters,-in spite of the narrow minds, coarse feelings, and intellectual vulgarity of some of the "lords of the creation," there is a distinction between the great and the little vulgar; and it is a mere confusion of terms to include the vulgarity of both in one common denomination. The opinions of the little vulgar have no interest save as an object of curiosity for the antiquary and moral philosopher, or as themes for a Scotch novel; and they would form a very subordinate part of the proposed volume. What matter is it to "les gens comme il faut," how the common people think, provided they be properly restrained from printing their thoughts? I grant it would be desirable |