1831.] 



Domestic and Foreign. 



563 



the critics into some acquaintance with 

 the times they venture to describe. 

 They are driven to consult books, and 

 get up a few particulars, and are resolved 

 it shall not be labour in vain. It is all 

 poured mercilessly upon the reader, who 

 thus suffers for the importunity of the 

 critic. 



Thoughts on Man, by Wm. Godwin. Mr. 

 Godwin is not a man to give utterance 

 to any thing very foolish, nor to put 

 forth any doctrine without a reason he 

 is always able to give at least some ac- 

 count of the faith that is in him. The 

 sentiments he enforces may not always 

 be of the importance he thinks them, 

 and certainly, in the publication before 

 us, are rarely new, for they were, most 

 of them, his forty years ago ; but they 

 are what he feels the transcripts of a 

 native suggestion ; and his essays may 

 thus be talten not as mere pieces of 

 book -making, but as the best and ripest 

 conclusions of his experience and saga- 

 city. He is a man at once contempla- 

 tive, acute, and honest that cannot be 

 denied ; but, at the same time, we must 

 confess more might reasonably have 

 been expected than the volume presents. 

 The truth is, Mr. G. relies too much 

 upon himself if he does not precisely 

 despise his cotemporaries, he knows but 

 little about them. He keeps too much 

 aloof. He reads, but then it is the 

 books of other times, which themselves 

 require the modifications which the 

 lapse of an age, remarkable, part of it at 

 least, for intellectual activity, must na- 

 turally bring with it. The very perio- 

 dicals, to which he plumes himself upon 

 never having contributed, if he had 

 deigned to glance at them, would have 

 shewn him, that without great care, he 

 would be falling into the rear, and if he 

 continued to write he must bestir him- 

 self and not be perpetually falling back 

 upon his old thoughts. There is scarcely 

 any one paper in the present volume but 

 might well have been written many years 

 ago they bear no marks of freshness ; 

 they are not only stale, but the very ar- 

 guments are such as have been super- 

 seded either by sounder ones, or by 

 more generalizing principles. 



Mr. G. entitles one Essay On the 

 Distribution of Talents in which his 

 object is to shew that talents are very 

 equally distributed not equally for the 

 same purpose, but equally, that is, com- 

 petently for the station every one is des- 

 tined to fill. Every man has a place in 

 society for which he is fit and fittest, and 

 therefore there can be no real occasion 

 for forcibly fitting him to any other. 

 To Mr. G. this is a most encouraging 

 view of human nature, and indeed it is, 

 were it reducible to practice ; but the 

 difficulty apparently an insuperable 



one is for each one to identify the par- 

 ticular niche, for which Nature has ex- 

 pressly framed him, without accompany- 

 ing it with some special indications 

 unless he abandon aD. concern about the 

 matter, and take that into which he ac- 

 cidentally drops as the one his destiny 

 provides. Mr. G. no longer believes, 

 as we think he once did, with Helvetius, 

 that all are born alike on the contrary 

 all are now born with peculiar qualities 

 and the especial business of every man 

 is to apply them appropriately. Were 

 this true to the letter, we take it, supe- 

 rior faculties would have been furnish- 

 ed to aid us in the application. As it is, 

 every man's destiny is for the most part 

 settled by his birth, or before he comes to 

 what are called years of discretion. We are 

 most of us jostled into the places we hold, 

 in this world of ours, with little or no sys- 

 tem or foresight. Looking to the broad 

 facts that stare every man in the face on 

 the realities of life, the case seems to be 

 that there is in every man a rough sort of 

 equality which fits him for the common 

 discharge of any of the common offices 

 of society liberal or mechanical but 

 which he shall practice, depends wholly 

 upon circumstances. The consequence is, 

 that a man is flung, not into what is most 

 fitted for him, but into what is most con- 

 venient or desirable ; and the conse- 

 quence of this again is, that we see 

 places, in every class of life, occupied by 

 those who are manifestly not fitted for 

 them, and in which they never can win 

 distinction. Occasionally a man falls, 

 like a cat upon her legs, into the posi- 

 tion for which he shews a peculiar apti- 

 tude, and his efforts then are usually 

 attended with success but this is of 

 rare occurrence as rare, precisely, as 

 the phenomena of genius. 



Some of Mr. G's. essays are of a more 

 practical cast, and one of them relative 

 to the question of the day the Ballot. 

 But here, as in many cases, he misses 

 the point in question. He disapproves 

 of the Ballot, on the ground of its sneak - 

 ingness. But the matter must be looked 

 at, in company with existing institu- 

 tions ; and with them, a free exercise of 

 suffrage cannot be practised. The very 

 object of the Ballot is to gahrthe power 

 of doing without it. If we are to sneak 

 for a time, it is that we may be frank for 

 ever. It is necessary to enable us to 

 exercise our right of independent suf- 

 frage, expressly to crush domineering 

 influence and thus eventually to face 

 the light of day. We say this on the 

 supposition that the Ballot is likely to 

 be efficient for the object in view. We 

 are not advocates of the Ballot, because 

 we do not believe it would produce the 

 anticipated effect, for we have no notion 

 that English people can keep their own 

 secrets they would betray themselves 

 4 C 2 



