which they hold at the command of their insolence, for the bolstering-up of their ideal exaltation; and to such idle arrogance lady Morgan panders. It is a corollary of her argument, that the want of access to what she calls good company is a deficiency meriting social proscription. What an apostle of Almack's have we here! What a preacher of haut ton and exclusion among men! Her essentially Irish logic is simply thistalent, without the accidents of birth or wealth, should be a passport to good company; but if its possessor has not been used to good company, and acquired its signs and tokens, he should peremptorily be chased from good company! Let the aristocracy be as enormous fools as lady Morgan paints them; but it awakens honest anger to see the attempt to give to their most insolent nonsenses the character and sanction of reason. Let not the impositions be extended; let the great be left to make their own laws, and shew the little how to laugh at them. The pleasure of these people does not consist in acting upon their maxims of ton among themselves, but in the effect of them on the inferior world. Dissipate the prestige, and you deprive them of the delight. The envy is at the root of the pleasure. The trifles which ought to be made the world's scoff, such writers as lady Morgan, tend to consecrate in the estimation of the vulgar. Their zeal too is accompanied with some exaggeration, for the apostles are more violent in their frivolities than their masters. Thus lady Morgan, who would slam the door in the face of any woman, who in ignorance of the usages of good company, made a curtsey at it, was herself, at one period, ignorant of the usages of good company, and yet she was not excluded. Perhaps she did not commit the specific enormity of a reverence at the door, but from her own account, she must have been abundantly aukward in divers other respects. In a chapter on her Reviewers (of some pleasant impertinence) the same despicable rule of judgment discovers itself again. She enters Mr. Colburn's study just as one of her critics is flying from it at her approach, and in time to "catch a glimpse of the long leg and ci-devant white stocking of the Reviewer, in his escape by another door." Now it is written in the Book of Ton, that any male who wears apparent white stockings in the morning is accursed; and we have not a particle of doubt, that lady Morgan threw in this article of apparel for the consummation of odium. The white stockings, per se, would have been sufficiently hateful to imaginations polite-hateful as the pepper-and-salt pantaloons of Vivian Grey's ushers-but the antipathy is finely exasperated by the ci-devant whiteness, and also the length of the leg. A long leg cossacked, booted and spurred, is no offence; but a long leg cotton-stocking'd aggravates the iniquity, and merits nothing short of amputation. Having thus well charged the minds of the refined reader with aversion, her ladyship goes merrily on in a strain of extremely vulgar slang remark on the described man of hose. Stockings are things of great import in fashionable and would-be-fashionable eyes. They are criteria of vulgarity in many cases: inferentially so in that of servants, whose cotton at routs is shewn by Mr. Theodore Hook to bespeak the despicableness of their masters. A cotton-stocking'd Reviewer, to argue in lady Morgan's manner, must either be a man of unfashionable addiction to shoes, or who cannot afford to wear boots. In either case he is to be abhorred, whether his poverty, or his will consents. But yet if all the ornaments and graces of literature, the benefactors of the world in arts and science, were to be traced to the clothing of their legs, we suspect that the hose of penury would greatly preponderate over the silk of luxury, together with the cavalier's or modern coxcomb's spurred boot. In sober earnest, are these points on which liberality should dwell? Are they points which intelligence should maintain in the idiotically false importance that frivolity and fashion attach to them? These tendencies constitute the ground of our quarrel with lady Morgan, who is doing more mischief in the field of vanity than she can ever compensate for in that of philosophy, though there we are far from depreciating her efficiency. To teach wisdom is a grand object; but a preliminary labour, essential to its success with the idle world, is to unteach it folly. We must not be doing and undoing —we must not be railing against institutions or customs in the general, and honouring the particular vices which grow out of them. Locality, we observe, according to the fashionists, has much to do with literary consideration. Thus lady Morgan not only imputes to her critic cotton stockings, but attaches to him the damning epithet of Bow Bell—" my Bow Bell Reviewer." We know absolutely nothing of either the writer or the article (one in the Edinburgh Review-the Life of Salvator Rosa) which has kindled the lady's wrath; he may be the ablest and justest of critics, or he may be the most incompetent, and as lady Morgan powerfully puts it, "knowing as much of Salvator and the arts, as he does of the interior of Devonshire-House, or the Vatican." But whatever his qualifications or disqualifications may be, his residence is surely immaterial to them, and propriety of sentiment would forbid its conversion into a reproach. Why are the enemies vilest arms, and the slang of the John Bull, thus adopted by a professor of liberality? What have we to do with the place in which a man writes? Johnson composed in Clerkenwell, and in his days the proximity of Bow was not discovered to be incompatible with learning or talent. When nothing more substantial is urged against a critic than the additions of Bow Bell, Johnny Raw, Journeyman Sawyer, &c., the natural presumption is, that he has performed his task with disagreeable effect to the author's self-love, but withal offering matter for reasonable impeachment. As we have touched on these modes of vituperation, we would suggest the inquiry whether the terms quoted, and many others of a like quality, are proper to the vocabulary of the Boudoir. Spoonies," "top-sawyers,' Johnny Raw," "stirring up with a long pole," are odious slang expressions, the use of which, correct taste, and the habit of decorous speech would forbid in all places. And yet, though lady Morgan can descend to Tom-and-Jerry nick-names, and phrases of the bear-garden, she is furiously scandalized at a deviation from the polite nomenclature in an old friend, and thus records his enormities and her shame: 66 66 'What a horrible thing it is to be ashamed of one's old friends, merely because they are old-fashioned. The other day some English epicures," top-sawyers of London ton, dined with us; when a dropperin, from Connaught, took a place (left vacant by a late apology). I had dined with my provincial guest many years back, and thought it the greatest possible honour to be asked to his Castle Rackrent. He then appeared to me a very fine person, and his table a very fine table. But, horror of horrors! what were my feelings when, uncovering the entrée next him, before the soup was removed, he asked one of the most noted Amphitryons of the day, if he should help him to some of the savories; and when, after calling bouilli, bully-beef! petits-pâtés, mutton-pies! soup, broth! créme-au-pistache, "raspberry crame!” and fondue, "podden!" he ended by sending back his glass of ale, not because he " never touched malt," but, because, as he told the servant, "he preferred his porther out of a pewther-pot, after the ould fashion."--Vol. ii. pp. 131, 132. We cannot understand how a person of good sense, and any justness of feeling, could sit down and note these circumstances upon paper. We can conceive the vexation of a lady at an old friend's committing blunders which exposed him to the ridicule of her finer guests; but the act of chronicling his'slips is to us of incomprehensible meanness. What a passage is here painted from respect to contempt! Her ladyship had thought it the greatest possible honour to dine with this man, and she is made to blush for his friendship, because he mispronounces some words and misdescribes some dishes! Cicero in the treatise de Amicitiâ has overlooked such essentials to friendship. This practice of blushing for unmodish friends is entirely English, and belongs to the fashion-mania. Every thing is referred to the taste of the Exquisites, and "what will or would my fine friends think," is the ruling inquiry in morals as well as in manners. Lady Morgan may start at the word morals, but gratitude, we conceive, to come within that province. Observe on the other hand, how indulgent the same person from the same cause can be to the absurdities of a person of quality, who does not indeed call bouilli' bully," but who commits the more considerable mistake of esteeming a king an usurper, and herself a queen! The countess D'Albany, the widow of the Pretender, calls upon our lady of the Boudoir. "Here was an honour," she exclaims," which none but a Florentine could appreciate. Madame D'Albany never paid visits to private individuals, never left her palace on the Arno, except for the English ambassador's, or the grand duke's,"-or the fact shews lady Morgan's; and after this introduction comes one illustrative anecdote: 'We had received very early letters from London, with the account of the king's death (George III); I was stepping into the carriage, to pay Madame D'Albany a morning visit, when they arrived-and I had them still in my hand, on entering her library on the rez-de-chaussée, where I found her alone, and writing, when I suddenly exclaimed, with a French theatrical air, "Grande Princesse, dont les torts tout un peuple déplore, [Does lady Morgan fancy this to be French poetry ?] "What usurper!" asked madame D'Albany, a little surprised, and not a little amused. "Madame, l'Electeur de Hanovre cesse de vivre!" The mauvaise plaisanterie was taken in good part; for, truth to tell, though the countess D'Albany always spoke in terms of respect and gratitude of the royal family, and felt (or affected), an absolute passion for his present majesty, whose picture she had, she was always well pleased that others should consider her claims to the rank of queen as legitimate, of which she herself entertained no doubts.'-Vol. i. pp. 195, 196. Thus we see the great difference between an old friend's miscalling his beef, and a noble person's mistaking her own character. Shame attaches to the former error, while the other is pampered wit, pandering to the conceit. Lady Morgan styles the term, indeed, a mauvaise plaisanterie, but there was obviously more of sycophancy than of sport in it. We have stated our objection to the tendency of lady Morgan's familiar writings, rather with the design of warning the public, than in the hope of producing any effect upon the authoress, for her condemnation of the fault which possesses her; her railing against aristocratical insolence while adopting or ministering to it; her scorn at subserviency, while holding out the associations of the great as the joy and glory of lifethese contradictions indicate a case which admits of no cure. Clever thoughts she throws out in abundance, but medio de fonte leporum there rises something of the besetting and besotting vice. She scarcely records an event, or alludes to a circumstance, which has not occurred while she was staying with a dear friend a princess, a duchess, a lord, lady, or in a castle, palace, or place of honour of some description. It is thence matter of inference, that if her associations are determined by virtue or talent she has found so much among the great as seldom or never to have been compelled to seek them in her own humbler order. ART. VII.-Archæologia, Vol. XXII, Part II. Vetusta Monumenta, Vol. V. Plates, LI-LX. LITTLE more than two years have elapsed, since the attention of the public was called to the state and labours of the Society of Antiquaries of London, by which the above-named works are published, in an article on the Twenty-first volume of the Archæologia in the Westminster Review. That article was the first attempt which had ever been made to rouse the members of the Society to a sense of its condition; the waste of its funds; the worthlessness of its publications; the absurdity of many of its regulations; and to the manner in which it had been rendered the scene of petty intrigue. The statement produced some immediate and unexpected effects. The subject has since been, from time to time, noticed in the newspapers, and in other periodical works; but, better than all, a few Fellows of the Institution, sensible of the truths which were thus pressed upon them, endeavoured to produce that reformation, which, to all but those interested in the existing state of things, appeared indispensable, if the Society was to enjoy any reputation, or to be attended with any advantage to the objects for which it was incorporated. These struggles on the part of the reforming few, against the too-easily satisfied many, have unfortunately proved nearly useless. They were beaten by an overwhelming majority, and since their defeat, the autocrats of the place have themselves proposed some alterations, but proving by the manner in which they have been made, the justice of the charge that those persons were incapable of managing the |