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ing, ordinary abilities seemed unworthy of notice; when compared with his erudition, common attainments were contemptible: yet such is the fault which usually accompanies original thinking and acting, to the names of a Johnson, a Warburton, and a Whitaker, we may add that of a Horseley; in proof that human nature is, in the noblest instances of genius, learning, and virtue, still marked by imperfection.

ART. X. Angelion, or the Wizard in Elis. A Romance, taken from the German, by MARIA DE GEISWEILER. Sherwood and Co., Paternoster Row; Tabart, Piccadilly, 1816. 3 vols. PP. 628.

To those readers who delight in the narration of that class of wonderful events which borders on the supernatural; to those who seek from the pages of romance that feverish excitement of the mind which mere curiosity creates, and which, having once subsided, can never again be produced by the same stimulant; the pages of Angelion may prove a valuable acquisition. In them at least half the attempt of the renowned Mr. Bayes is fully accomplished; since although they may fail to elevate, they do most certainly surprise. We most assuredly consider the work as "passing strange" in its conception, while the execution of it we must own to be "wondrous pitiful." The style bears evident marks of its having been not only taken from the German, as set forth on the title-page, but almost verbally translated from that language. In many of its details, the story follows pretty closely the track of a work which was much in vogue some years ago, under the title of "The Victim of magical Delusion."-We believe we, in some degree, may trace the renewal of the fashion of ghosts, wizards, and sorcerers, to a strange story related by Sir Nathaniel Wraxall, of the reappearance of the chevalier Saxe, at the summons of that arch impostor Schraëpser. That memorable apparition, if we clearly recollect, merely bounced through a bolted door into the midst of an assembly of men, who were all paralyzed by terror, and moved neither hand nor foot to detect the cheat. But in the Wizard in Elis, we find a lady who having been twice murdered, once by decapitation-reappears, after the lapse of twenty or thirty years, to her husband, her

lover, and all the rest of the world, in all the bloom of youth and beauty; eats, drinks, flirts, and philosophizes, and would have passed for an immortal and imperishable being, had she not unluckily died one day, in good earnest, after kindly explaining to the parties concerned, the marvellous appearances which had kept two very wise and sedate persons in consternation and anxiety for several months!

The most interesting part of this production, which is a mere bundle of stories connected by a very flimsy thread of narrative, is the story of Angelion. Some of the scenes are laid in the prisons of the Inquisition, where the anguish of confinement is softened by love,-that bewitching power, so frequently the child of pity and the parent of enterprise. The purest and the tenderest mutual affection tempers the miseries of incarceration; but the horrors of that mock tribunal, where cruelty and injustice profane the sacred name of piety, did we not know the picture to be faithful to admitted and notorious facts, we should look on as a wanton portraiture of vice from the imagination of a fiend. The mind must be, in a manner, rendered callous from custom, before it can lend its belief to such atrocities as are bere detailed. Yet we cannot comfort our wounded feelings of humanity by charging the writer with exaggeration. Even while we write, and shuddering pay this tribute of reprobation, perhaps a fellow-creature now groans in protracted agony upon the rack, till pangs, which nature cannot endure, extort from him a false confession of all the sins of opinion, which malice or bigotry have laid to his charge. The words wrung from him by agony are inscribed upon the fatal tablets; and, mangled and lacerated, he is dragged back to his cell, to await the flames which are to consume him at the next act of faith, while the assembled court of Spain-looks on and smiles!

A second-sighted Swede plays a conspicuous part among the dramatis persona of Angelion. He is at first introduced to us as a very gloomy and alarming personage, much addicted to legerdemain, juggling, and the black art; and while he continues a bachelor, and "hangs loose upon society," plays a number of mischievous pranks, which hold the simple reader in amazement; but on his becoming a family man, we hear no more of his incantations and his predictions. The power of matrimony to dispel the illusions of fancy had been already discovered.

One of the characters in this extraordinary romance is the

grandson of the man in the mask, who beheaded the unfortunate Charles the Fast, of England: this is the third time that, in the course of our desultory wanderings through the paths of fictitious biography, we have fallen in with the supposed progeny of this detestable regicide. An obscure tradition, of which novelists have availed themselves, represents him as a man of noble birth, ferocious passions, and mistaken zeal, who drags on, to a very advanced age, a wretched existence, embittered by frenzy and remorse.-The tender and romantic D'Arnaud has made this wild and improbable story the ground-work of one of his pathetic tales.

A taste for the sublime and beautiful, in those arts which dignify and embellish social life; and that veneration for the previous remains of Grecian sculpture, which we earnestly wish could on a late question have been breathed into a large majority of the House of Commons; elevate the pages of Angelion above the level of a mere love-story, diversified with banditti, dungeons, chains, crafty monks, and tyrannical cadies.

ART. XI.-Minutes of Evidence taken before a select Committee appointed by the House of Commons, to inquire into the State of the Police of the Metropolis. With Notes, Observations, and a Preface, by a Magistrate of the County of Middlesex. London. Sherwood. 1816.

THE preface to this publication states truly, that much praise is due to the Committees of the House of Commons for the protracted laborious researches on various subjects connected with the welfare of the country, into which they have zealously entered; such as, the state of the public jails, of houses for lunatics, of mendicity and vagrancy, with several others; the most generally interesting of which, especially to Londoners, no doubt, is that now under consideration. Nothing can be more laudable than the earnestness of the House and its committees, to effect the important purposes they have in view; nothing more exemplary than their disregard of toil, and their devotion to interests purely national. There are, after all, perverted minds that will not allow the members of the House of Commons to be called the representatives of

the people: they must admit, however, that, if the people's welfare ought to be the principal care of those members, they are the people's watchful guardians, their faithful servants, their firm and valuable friends.

It must be unnecessary to observe, that this book is now noticed-not as a literary peformance, but as a congeries of facts-some of them important to individuals and separate classes of men, others to the public; but all of them, more or less, useful and diverting. It presents us with an excellent picture of vulgar vicious life in several districts of London: and it introduces us to an intimate enough acquaintance with the gentlemen who fill up the space between the promising pick-pocket of seven years old, and the Secretary of State for the Home-Department.

We think the question-Whether the judges or the magistrates of the country are of most importance to it, very futile. If it could be answered with precision, the answer would be of no great value. But a precise answer cannot be given, the functions of the judges being as different from the functions of ordinary magistrates, as are, for the most part, their acquirements and their official dignity, from those of the ordinary magistrates; and these are known to be so very different as hardly to admit of comparison.-We also think the recommendation of the editor of this volume to let the appointment of the police-justices be for life, one that ought not to be listened to.

Is it to please Mr. Bennet, that he desires to see the policemagistrates freed from all inspection and control from the office of the Secretary of State; and at liberty, even in cases of public irritation and commotion, to side with the crown or the crowd, as they think proper? The inquiry before us leads us to think very favourably of the principles and conduct of the far greater part of those respectable gentlemen; but it, at the same time, forces us to own, that there are more than one of them who, now and then, interpret the laws so as to make it very easy to transgress them. The judges of the land are not on the same level with the policemagistrates; and we should approve but little of any act of the legislature by which the latter should be made to hold their offices on any other tenure than that of the durante bene placito.

The scenes in which inordinate profligacy is exhibited are numerous. Of these the spirit-shops, often licensed with so much facility, are the most alarming, as being not merely

places where the vice of drunkenness appears in frightful shapes, but where other vices generally originate. They are distinctly noticed in this report, as by far the most copious source of immorality that is known within the bills of mortality.

Next to the spirit-shops come those brothels to which the magistrates grant wine-licences. The most infamous of them, it is worthy of remark, are usually the nearest to the policeoffices-especially to that in Bow Street. The nearer the church, the farther from goodness.

Then come the ordinary public-houses; and what they call flash-houses, that is, public-houses where not only tippling, but illicit amours, and meetings of thieves, are encouraged, or, as the police-officers express it, "where all trades are carried on. Of these, in the eastern division of London at least, Mr. Hanbury, the brewer, and a Mr. Merceron, a magistrate, are the great patrons and proprietors. And it appears that, for many years past, no publican, in that quarter of the town, let his character have been ever so fair, could either obtain or hold a licence without the goodwill of either of these gentlemen, especially of Mr. Hanbury. Yet there is nothing to criminate, in a direct manner, either the proprietors of public-houses, or the licensing magistrates; for the first have principal clerks who do what is right without consulting them; and the latter commonly have solicitors for their chief clerks, who are good enough not to add to the responsibility of their employers. All these matters are happily on the eve of being put on a more desirable footing; and it is high time they should.

To the practices in gin-shops, brothels, and public-houses, as at once the causes and indications of flagrant vice, we must add the lessons which many of the unfortunate, and all the half-abandoned, learn when in public-jails, in the consequence of the well and ill-disposed being obliged to associate. This evil is so circumstantially detailed, and so well illus trated in the Report, that the legislature cannot help attending duly to it.

The annals of the Old Bailey prove, in a degree at once convincing and mortifying, how lost to virtue and shame vast numbers of the lower order of people of all ages are; of which no stronger proof can be given than that afforded by this volume of the profound and deliberate wickedness of mere boys. It appears that some of not more than fourteen years of age have been taken up, imprisoned, and tried,

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