teous reader," like themselves. I could as easily build a ship as write a book.

Having thus bespoken the sympathy of their good fellowship, I proceed to unfold the true nature of my views upon their attention and support; but I do it in the strictest confidence, and I trust to the fidelity of my public. Know then, that I am, in fact, an Agitator,— a Liberal,- -a Radical Reformer: -the Hunt, Cobbett, O'Connell, of the literary world! And, in this capacity, I call upon my suffering public to arise, and shake off the tyranny with which it is held in thrall by the typographical despots of the land. What!-shall Murray be perpetual Dictator of the republic of Letterdom? Shall Colburn and Longman, the Brutus and Cassius of the commonwealth, conspire against the usurpation, and push him from his stool, only that they may fight over his succession? Shall Paternoster-row send forth its bulletins, and Burlington-street issue its ukases, to paralyze the 'trembling readers who groan under their iron sceptre of empire ?-Forbid it, shade of Fust!-Forbid it, ye lettered spectres of Poets' Corner! Once more, I call upon you, my public, to arise! The Philistines are upon us,-Euphrates hath burst its bed!-and rising torrents of ink are about to form one universal deluge,-one filthy blot upon the foolscap face of nature!!

Having duly honoured this burst of oratory with your plaudits,-and the prospective echo of your "Hear! hear!" already warms my very heart!-you will naturally, and according to the most approved precedents, turn round, each to his several neighbours, and demand my meaning and intention. "Arrah! honey, what are we howling for?"

You are, I verily believe, innocently unconscious of the conspiracy which menaces your rights, and violates the ancient Charta of your literary liberty. In the lettered ease of your well-cushioned libraries, clubs, and reading-rooms, ye are little aware of the plot which hath already sapped and mined their foundations. Lost in the lap of hotpressed luxury,-betrayed into libertinism by the meretricious attractions of vellum and morocco,-ye mark not the machinations of the incendiary—ye heed not the incursions of the invader! Philip is at your gates!—and you are reading Sir Walter Scott's last new novel!

Let your first exertions in your own defence be, I implore you, an examination into the political state of the republic of letters. Who,look well into the subject, ere you decide,-who are the real arbiters of the public taste?-"The booksellers!" you reply, with an universal shout. True! the power of criticism itself is secondary to their omniscient fiat. Not the acerb Edinburgh; the pungent Blackwood;-not the attic Quarterly; nor oleaginous New Monthly; not the united cruet of critical condiments, can season the palate of the gaping public, like the ipse dixit of a solitary bookseller. "Let there be fame!" quoth John Murray-and who gainsayeth?

Secondly, my trusty lectors,-not e-lectors, inquire of yourselves what are the claims to which this factitious printing-press renown is conceded?-To bulk,-length,-extent,-to the influence, in short, of the booksellers' sympathetic numbers! He, she, or it, which can draw his, her, or its slow length along with the greatest deliberation, wins this tortoise race of fame. "It was an excellent work, Sir," said a modern bibliopole, speaking of a defunct novel, which had been heralded in

vain by that flourish of trumpets wherewith, like the besieging priests at Jericho, he batters down the walls of our understandings, "A very excellent work!-three volumes, post octavo, four hundred pages each; a more complete production never issued from my press,-yet it failed;-did not pay its advertisements!"

My public! we have borne much at the hands of these wise men of Gotham; but a stroke is meditated against your peace, at the present crisis, which demands self-defence,- resistance,-vengeance *! So long as three remained the sympathetic number of the Row, I bowed unmurmuringly to the yoke of our oppressors. 3 is a classical as well as a constitutional numeral; it is that of the Graces, of the Destinies, of the operative witches in Macbeth, "Thrice the brinded cat hath mewed;"-Cerberus hath three heads, and a Pasha three tails— Great Britain hath three kingdoms,- a bill in parliament three readings, and—a joint stool three legs! Scott, himself, endeared to our hearts the annual arrival of three welcome drab-suited visitants; Cooper flung them at our heads, and we pocketed the volumes and the affront; and we shook hands regretfully with Horace Smith at the close of his twelve hundredth page. But then came the vulgar host of imitators, pushing their elaborate inanity on our forbearance. The fair sex and the foul, the thirds of wives and of widows, overwhelmed our creaking shelves. English in Italy,-India,-Kamschatka ;Voyagers on Sea,-Prosers on shore,-combined against our gross of green spectacles. Mummies, and Last Men, and Sinumbra Men, and such "stupend figments," as old Burton would term them, dared our credulity. Tales were unfolded beyond the tale of reckoning by the re-tail trade, and lex-tal-ionis was the cry of all the rivals of immortal Colburn. "Can these things be,

And overcome us like a summer cloud ?"

Shall our modern Lintots, instead of seeking among

"The mob of gentlemen who write with ease,"

66

style, learning, comment, argument, and pith,—shall they simply demand of the rising aspirants for applause, How many volumes ?— Shall the drivel

how many pages?" and we submit to the result? lings of the diffuse replace the terseness of the concise, and we endure? What is their plea of the expense of their puffing advertisements to us? The book-clubs, say they, will gorge, like a rapacious Boa, any volume of matter we choose to present; new novels they must have, were they in fifty volumes each! But must we suffer for the avidity of our country-cousins †?

"Go to,-I'll not endure it!"

Reading public! let us resist the innovation.

* Our author had here added the word death-we have struck our pen through it, thinking it merited only damnation (in its histrionic sense,)-but we daren't put the word in the text for fear we should be thought profane.

Certainly not; country-cousins have no sort of right to bore us anywhere but in London, and there only for a fortnight in May. This allowance is a great deal too liberal; and if their voracious country-appetite dares to soar from beef to books, and thus induce the bibliopoles to imitate the size of a sirloin in their publications, we shall inexorably cut them the next time they come to town. It is for us to regulate what books and of what size should be published: don't let us hear of their acting the part of the horse-leech's daughter, crying" Give, give!”

But what innovation, I hear you say, and why this outcry of consternation? Turn your Argus eyes upon the columns of the Times or the Chronicle; there shall they read

O'Briens, and O'Flaharties,

Zillah, a Tale of Jerusalem,

The Disowned, by the Author of Pelham, 4 volumes!!! Note ye not the result? Do ye not foresee the yoke that is about to be imposed on your unresisting neck? Consider it well before ye rush into the snare-suspend your hands upon your half-drawn pursestrings. Let not the great names, which, like those of the Royal Family at the head of a subscription, are but the precedents of a rabble rout; let not the names of your favourite writers allure you to destruction. Think of four volumes from the pen of Lady A.—of Mrs. B.— of Miss C.; think of that Master Brook! and resist.*

Again, I say unto you, that the booksellers make not only our books, but our authors. It is well known that during the popularity of Tristram Shandy, nothing was bought, or thought of, but humorous productions. "We want nothing now but humour," said the booksellers, "there is no demand in the trade for any thing else." And they even mortally offended a Durham Prebendary, who came to London to dispose of the MS. of his Discourses, by enquiring whether the reverend gentleman could not contrive to introduce a little humour. In France a Rousseaumanie equally prevailed. "Il nous faut du Rousseau. Hélas! Monsieur le Professeur, que faire de vos manuscrits? tout ça ne vaut rien sans du Rousseau!"

A fourth volume is now the "humour," and the "Rousseau" of the trade; but

"A fourth, alas! were more than we could bear."

What has 4 done in the world to become a sympathetic number? The fourth Henry of France, and the fourth George of England, being illustrious exceptions to its insignificance. The earth, to be sure, has four mighty regions †, and the year four mighty seasons; but who would not dispense with winter ‡, and with Africa, and with a fourth volume?

* Master Brook should even flow against the stream, should it be necessary. + We beg pardon, respected correspondent; you are not doing justice to your own argument. The earth has now five " mighty regions," as the land of convicts and kangaroos can testify. We trust, however, that the worthy Bibliopoles will not take this hint, and cram a fifth quarter down our throats, because the earth has committed the bull of acquiring one.

We beg pardon again. We cannot dispense with winter. Africa we give up with the greatest pleasure. Who cares for Algiers, Senegal, Timbuctoo, or even Fernando Po, where our navigators have named the native who has been the kindest to them, "Cut-throat"? We are quite willing to resign Africa, even including Sierra Leone and its fevers. But Winter! our good, old, cheerful, fire-side, English Winter! Oh, no! We had rather resign the other three seasons of the year, (provided things would promise to grow without them,) than frosty-footed, warmhearted Winter. We wonder at so estimable a person, as the Sympathetic Numeralist manifestly is, should dream of discarding jolly old Winter. But hold, in our eagerness to defend our excellent friend, we shall far out-step the limits of a note. We will write an article in his praise, when the frosts set in, by way of antidote to the only heterodox doctrine we have found in our esteemed correspondent's letter.

To conclude, suffer me, my beloved public, to point out the horrors entailed by your submission in the present instance; let me fore-show the occult mischief of the number 4. Our fore-fathers-ominous sound!—endured this aggregation of volumes until they sank, like Tarpeia, overwhelmed by the load. Think of Clarissa-of Sydney Biddulph-of Grandison*. Think of Clelia, with her seven heavy pieces of ordnance pointed against you! Think of Cyrus the Great"And, lo! an eighth appears."

Think of this; restrict your numeral sympathies; do not let the deuce take the tray; select your favourite authors " by one, by two, and by three.” “Leggiamo tutti tre."

Remember that the true British sceptre is a trident, and by that association regulate your sympathetic numbers †."

FAGGING 1.

THANK Heaven! here is at last a case springing out of the system of fagging, of a degree of flagrant injustice and oppression that must, we think, call public attention to the subject in a manner that will go far to annihilate it altogether. There are a thousand reasons why the barbarities which are committed under this system do not come to light. Those who are in the actual endurance of them, dare not tell, for their lives. A complaint to the master or to their parents would, as experience has before now proved, subject them to a course of treatment quite sufficient to render their lives utterly wretched, without any thing tangible to fix upon. They would be "sent to Coventry" by the whole school, and annoyed in every possible manner which the ingenuity of cruel mischief can contrive. They know this, and they think it better to submit to the disease than to have recourse to so desperate a remedy. But, then it may be said, how is it that boys when they leave school do not make these things known? Simply, because they have for the last year, or two, or three, been the very persons who have carried it on: they will not, very naturally, expose their own misdeeds; to say nothing of the esprit de corps which would prevent their doing what would tend to expose the school at which they have been brought up. It has been somewhere said, that fagging

"We have heard," says the Edinburgh Review,' in an article on Standard Novels and Romances, (Feb. 1815, vol. xxv. p. 331,)" that Sir Charles Grandison was originally written in eight-and-twenty volumes; but we suppose this must be a pleasant exaggeration." We hope so, indeed, especially if we are advancing towards the same issue.

Most cordially do we concur in this recommendation. What are Reviewers to do, if novels take it into their heads to be thus prolific, and come into the world, like a Highland chief, with his tail on? It will drive us to disown the Disowned, and to doubt whether "Zillah's a Lady."

"Some Account of the System of Fagging, at Winchester School; with Remarks and a Correspondence with Dr. Williams, Head Master of that public school, on the late Expulsions thence for resistance to the authority of the Præfects. By Sir ALEXANDER MALET, Bart.: London, Ridgway, 1828.”

makes a boy first a slave, and then a tyrant. It might be added, that a slave makes the worst of tyrants; for, by a sort of practical bull, he revenges himself for what he has suffered upon persons who had nothing at all to say to the infliction; and thus he again breeds another race to go through the same process. When he leaves school, it is from his state of tyrant-and, therefore, he is not likely to expose abominations of the system.

the

But now, at last, we have a case, untinged with informing,―nay, not even in the shape of complaint against intolerable oppression. Resistance was made to that oppression, and expulsion has been the consequence. Upon remonstrance being made by the brother of one of the parties to Dr. Williams, the head master of Winchester, where the circumstance occurred, the doctor has written an answer supporting his conduct. A letter more completely throwing open both that conduct, and the system in general, to the severest reprehension, it would be almost impossible to compose-as, we trust, we shall prove when we come to its more immediate consideration. We shall now proceed to comment first, upon this individual case; and next, upon the general system out of which it has sprung.

The public, we think, ought to be exceedingly obliged to Sir Alexander Malet for his pamphlet; it is written with a degree of temper and moderation which, under the circumstances, it is quite astonishing he should have retained, and which tends to give his representations the same force as if they were made by a wholly disinterested person. We shall extract the statement of the facts from which the expulsions sprang:

"The circumstances which led to the expulsions from Winchester giving rise to the following correspondence were as follows:

"The præfects, or eight senior boys of the school, are in the habit of fagging the juniors; and that they may have a greater command of their services during meal times, they appoint one of the junior boys with the title of course-keeper, whose business it is to take care that whilst the præfects are at breakfast or supper, the juniors sit upon a certain cross bench at the top of the hall*, that they may be forthcoming whenever a præfect requires any thing to be done.

“During that part of the short half-year in which there are no fires kept, a sufficient number of boys for this service was generally furnished from the fourth class, and it was considered that the junior part of the fifth class, which is next in the ascending scale, was exempt from so disagreeable a servitude. It appears, however, that within these few years, there has been a much greater press of boys to enter the school than formerly; the consequence has been, that they have come to it older, and more advanced in their studies than formerly, and the upper departments of the school have received a greater accession of numbers in proportion than the lower classes. The fourth class, therefore, gradually furnishing a smaller number of fags, the præfects issued a mandate, that the junior part of the fifth class should share with the fourth in the duty of going on hall: this was for some time submitted to; but at length one of the boys of this class inten

"This is called, in the language of the school, going on hall.”