1823.] 
into an instrument of deception, ambition, 
avarice, voluptuousness, or laziness, He 
saw that individuals and whole nations 
can have religion without virtue, and that 
thereby they are made worse: but he also 
saw, that in individuals and whole nations, 
if already virtuous, are made better by 
piety. 
He saw legislation, administration, and 
police, every where full of defects and 
abuses: but he also saw, that men without 
laws, administration, or police, were worse 
and more unhappy. Every where he 
heard abuses censured, and found every 
one desirous that the world should be 
mended: he saw many willing to toil at its 
improvement, and inexhaustible in their 
projects; but not one who was willing to 
begin the amendment on himself. Hence 
he easily conceived why nothing grows 
better. 
He saw men influenced every where 
by two opposite instincts,—the desire of 
equality, and the desire of domineering 
without restraint over others; which con- 
vinced him that, unless this evil can be 
subdued, much may not be expected from 
governmental changes; that man must 
revolve in an eternal circle, from royal 
despotism and aristocratic insolence to 
popular licentiousness and mob-tyranny, 
unless a legislation, deduced from the first 
principles of philosophy, and an education 
corresponding therewith, shall curb in 
most men the animal desire of domineer- 
ing without restraint. 
He saw that every where arts, industry, 
and economy, are followed by riches, 
riches by luxury, luxury by corruption, 
and corruption by the dissolution of the 
state: but he also saw that the arts, under 
the guidance of wisdom, embellish, evolve, 
and ennoble, mankind ; that art is the half 
of our nature, and that man without art is 
the most miserable of animals. 
He saw, through the whole economy of 
society, the limits of the true and false, 
of the good and bad, of the right and 
wrong, imperceptibly melting into each 
other; and he thereby convinced himself 
still more of the necessity of wise laws, 
and of the duty of a good citizen rather 
to trust the law tlian his own precon- 
ceptions. 
All that he had seen confirmed him in 
the opinion, that man, in some respects 
allied to the beasts of the field, in another 
to superior beings, and even to the Deity 
himself, is no less incapable of being a 
mere beast than a mere spirit; that he 
only lives conformably to his nature, when 
he is ever ascending ; that each higher step 
toward wisdom and virtue always in- 
creases his happiness; that wisdom and 
virtue have at all times been the true 
gauge of public and private happiness 
among men; and that this experienced 
truth, which no sceptic can weaken, is 
Visit to France in 1821. 
495 
sufficient to blow away all the sophisms 
of a Hippias, and irreversibly to confirm 
Archytas’s theory of living wisely. 
In a letter to Riedel, dated in 1765, 
Wieland mentions that he had hired a 
garden out of Biberach, having a sum- 
mer-house, which commanded a fine 
rural prospect. ‘‘Here (adds he) I 
pass many afternoons, with no other 
society than the Muses; and, when I 
rise for some minutes from my task, 
I snuff the odour of new-mown hay, or 
see the boys bathe, or watch the ret- 
ters of flax. At a distance I catch the 
church-yard, in whieh the bones of 
my fathers and probably my own will 
one day repose together; or, in the 
rich confusion of the remoter Jand- 
scape, I single out the new white cas- 
tle of Horn, then sit down again—and 
rhime.” 
(To be concluded in our next.) 
—=2—— 
To the Editor of the Monthly Magazine. 
SIR, 
AM a constant reader of your 
agreeable Magazine, and look 
forward to its perusal each month 
with renewed and inereased pleasure. 
Your Number for September present- 
ed to me scenes that have given me 
extreme delight, in the “ Amateur’s 
Trip to Paris;” and the easy style in 
which the paper was written, induced 
me to imagine a few extracts from my 
diary of a year’s residence in that me- 
tropolis might not be unacceptable to 
those who peruse your work for mere 
amusement. Many of my friends have 
solicited this exertion, and it is only 
the idle L should expect to entertain: 
I leave the energetic “to revel in the 
charms” of science, and monopolize 
the attention of the learned. If the 
following letter pleases you, sir, I shall 
consider it an honour to be allowed to 
send you others. 
My dear Brother,—When we part- 
ed in the spring of 1821, each contem- 
plated with great delight the new and 
different scenes we were to explore. 
You have lingered weary months on 
the ‘giant element” that so widely 
Separates us: I but breathed its re- 
freshing airs, and was quickly in the 
land of my destination. ‘Towards the 
close of July we arrived at Dover late 
in the evening: the next morning was 
cloudy and dark,—sympathising with 
my spirits. How inexplicable are the 
human heart and mind—what most I 
wished, distressed me to possess. Now 
that 
