1829.4 Affairs in General. : 649 
de rose school, and since life is but an illusion at best, be a benefactor to 
a world of fools, and make the illusion as perfect and permanent as 
fools can desire. 
The last month has teemed with suicides; and the habit of “ felo 
de se,” which was once so aristocratic, has strangely gone down into the 
lowest ranks of human absurdity. A footman has just hanged himself 
for the loss of his place. An errand-boy having told a lie, and being 
unable at the moment to invent another to cover it, could find no better 
contrivance than walking into an out-house and strangle himself. A 
crowd of examples of the same courting of death, have lately occurred, 
and the “ king of terrors’ must, on these terms, soon change his old 
designation. To what is this owing? Has the abolition of the cross- 
way burial had any share in it? or is it the east wind that has been 
blowing with such merciless perseverance for the last six months? or is 
it the official lie of the coroner’s inquests, that by bringing in the verdict 
“ insanity” on all occasions, makes those miserable idiots imagine that 
they will take rank with their masters, and die, like them, with the 
honours of madmen? 
In Paris, suicides are perpetual, and the police acknowledge from 
four to five hundred per annum, without counting the murders, whether 
uicidal or otherwise, that take place in the indescribable hovels of 
misery, dissipation, and iniquity, with which Paris abounds. But in 
that gay metropolis, there is an established reason for suicides ; the 
gaming-houses are always in full work; every night, every hour of 
every night witnesses the irreparable ruin of some wretch, who has no 
other resource from famine for the next day, than a plunge into the 
Seine. Thanks to the government of that pious and Popish nation, a 
man may indulge in every vice at the cheapest rate: but there is still 
a time when the indulgence becomes too dear; and the Frenchman 
must be a very different being from his metropolitan countrymen, at 
least, when he can prevail on himself to dispense with those little profli- 
gacies, that make his morning’s meditation and his evening’s employ- 
ment. Those once shut up from him, life is valueless ; his priest has 
_ not taught him that there is any thing beyond ; or if the idea enters into 
his head, sixpence for a mass will ease his anxieties, save him from a 
thousand years of purgatory, and quiet his conscience in the last rattle 
of the dice-box that decides the fate of himself and his last farthing 
together. 
There seems to be some hope, at last, that the duties on French wines 
_ will bein some way or other so far modified, as to bring them within the 
use of the community. Nothing can be more against common sense 
and the palpable will of nature, than that within fifteen miles of the 
British shore, one of the finest products of the earth should be in a 
_ state of cheapness that almost renders its cultivation a loss, while we 
are compelled to be content with the fierce and unwholesome wines of 
Spain and Portugal, brandied into the very materials of fever. Three- 
fourths of the chronic diseases, too, that make such fearful havoc in 
English life, at all times, and which, among the habitual drinkers of 
those fiery wines, regularly make the last ten years of life a wretched 
struggle between the doctor and the distemper, owe their birth to those 
draughts ; and while the light wines of France are the actual sustainers 
of health and animation, and in many instances the curers of disease, 
we daily swallow high-priced poison for the good of Portugal, and the 
M.M. New Series ——Vouw. VII. No. 42. 40 
