He relative sense. For men are not rich or poor in relation to the general amount of their means, but in proportion to their wants and their wishes. who can adjust his expenses within the limits of his income, how small soever that may be, must escape from the temptations which most easily beset indigence; and the rich man, who makes it his business, as it is his duty, to attend to the proper distribution of his wealth, will be equally emancipated from those to which opulence is peculiarly obnoxious.1 This misrepresentation of the different classes in society, is not the only speculative error in which Bage has indulged during these poetic narratives. There is in his novels a dangerous tendency to 1 [" Our author, as we have already seen, betrays the dictates of his better reason in the midst of his apology for Tom Jones; but what importance he really attaches to the influence so undervalued in the passage we have quoted, (See ante, p. 107-8, and note, p. 108-10,) is distinctly proved and abundantly illustrated in his preface to the works of a very inferior novelist, Robert Bage. The writer whose works have thus been recalled from an oblivion which we cannot help thinking they merited, wrote at the period of the French Revolution; and though he had been born and bred among the primitive and virtuous sect of our Quakers, he systematically made his novels the vehicle of all the anti-social, anti-moral, and anti-religious theories that were then but too much in vogue among the half-educated classes in this country. Sir Walter, after exposing with just ridicule the style of gross and senseless caricature in which Mr Bage, the son of a miller, and himself a paper-maker in a little country town, has thought fit to paint the manners of English gentlemen and ladies, proceeds, as follows, to notice the far graver offences of which his pen had been guilty :- This misrepresentation of the different classes in society, &c.'"-Quarterly Review, Sept. 1826.] slacken the reins of discipline upon a point, where, perhaps, of all others, society must be benefited by their curbing restraint. Fielding, Smollett, and other novelists, have, with very indifferent taste, brought forward their heroes as rakes and debauchees, and treated with great lightness those breaches of morals, which are too commonly considered as venial in the male sex; but Bage has extended, in some instances, that license to the female sex, and seems at times even to sport with the ties of marriage, which is at once the institution of civil society most favourable to religion and good order, and that which, in its consequences, forms the most marked distinction between man and the lower animals. All the influence which women enjoy in society,—their right to the exercise of that maternal care which forms the first and most indelible species of education ; the wholesome and mitigating restraint which they possess over the passions of mankind; their power of protecting us when young, and cheering us when old, depend so entirely upon their personal purity, and the charm which it casts around them, that to insinuate a doubt of its real value, is wilfully to remove the broadest corner-stone on which civil society rests, with all its benefits, and with all its comforts. It is true, we can easily conceive that a female like Miss Ross, in Barham Downs, may fall under the arts of a seducer, under circumstances so peculiar as to excite great compassion; nor are we so rigid as to say, that such a person may not be restored to society, when her subsequent conduct shall have effaced recollection of her error. But she must return thither as a humble penitent, and has no title to sue out her pardon as a matter of right, and assume a place among the virtuous of her sex as if she had never fallen from her proper sphere. Her disgrace must not be considered as a trivial stain, which may be communicated by a husband as an exceeding good jest to his friend and correspondent; there must be, not penitence and reformation alone, but humiliation and abasement, in the recollection of her errors. This the laws of society demand even from the unfortunate; and to compromise farther, would open a door to the most unbounded licentiousness. With this fault in principle is connected an indelicacy of expression frequently occurring in Bage's novels, but which, though a gross error in point of taste, we consider as a matter of much less consequence than the former. It is in some degree chastened in the present edition, and where it exists must find such shelter as it can, under the faulty example of earlier novelists. Having adverted to this prominent error in Mr Bage's theory of morals, we are compelled to remark, that his ideas respecting the male sex are not less inaccurate, considered as rules of mental government, than the over-indulgence with which he seems to regard female frailty. Hermsprong, whom he produces as the ideal perfection of humanity, is paraded as a man who, freed from all the nurse and all the priest has taught, steps forward on his path, without any religious or political restraint, as one who derives his own rules of conduct from his own breast, and avoids or resists all temptations of evil passions, because his reason teaches him that they are attended with evil consequences. In the expressive words of our moral poet, Wordsworth, he is "A reasoning self-sufficient thing, An intellectual all-in-all.” But did such a man ever exist? or are we, in the fair construction of humanity, with all its temptations, its passions, and its frailties, entitled to expect such perfection from the mere force of practical philosophy? Let each reader ask his own bosom, whether it were possible for him to hold an unaltered tenor of moral and virtuous conduct, did he suppose that to himself alone he was responsible, and that his own reason, a judge so peculiarly subject to be bribed, blinded, and imposed upon by the sophistry with which the human mind can gloss over those actions to which human passions so strongly impel us, was the ultimate judge of his actions? Let each reader ask the question at his own conscience, and if he can honestly and conscientiously answer in the affirmative, he is either that faultless monster which the world never saw, or he deceives himself as grossly as the poor devotee, who, referring his course of conduct to the action of some supposed internal inspiration, conceives himself, upon a different ground, incapable of crime, even when he is in the very act of committing it. We are not treating this subject theologically; the nature of our present work excludes such serious reasoning. But we would remind, even in these slight sketches, those who stand up for the self-sufficient morality of modern philosophy, or this author seems to be copied from the lesser political Romances of the French school; and if Bage falls short of his prototypes in wit, he must be allowed to exhibit, upon several occasions, a rich and truly English vein of humour, which even Voltaire does not possess. Respecting the tendency and motive of these works, it is not the Editor's purpose to say much. Bage appears, from his peculiar style, to have been educated a Quaker; at least—for we may be wrong in the above inference-he has always painted the individuals of that primitive sect of Christians in amiable colours, when they are introduced as personages into his novels. If this was the case, however, he appears to have wandered from the tenets of the Friends into the wastes of scepticism; and a sectary, who had reasoned himself into an infidel, could be friend neither to the Church of England, nor the doctrines which she teaches. His opinions of state affairs were perhaps a little biassed by the frequent visits of the excisemen, who levied taxes on his commodities, for the purpose of maintaining a war which he disapproved of. It was most natural that a person who considered tax-gatherers as extortioners, and the soldiers, paid by the taxes, as licensed murderers, should conceive the whole existing state of human affairs to be wrong; and if he was conscious of talent, and the power of composition, he might, at the same time, naturally fancy that he was called upon to put it to rights. No opinion was so prevalent in France, and none passed more current among the admirers of French philosophy in Britain, as that the power of framing |