the stamp of his peculiar manner. His loss will lead to a change of this: in all points of taste and ornament, and in the skill too and prudence of debate, the change may probably be for the better; but it will be long before the people and the constitution are supplied in the House of Commons with a tribune of the same vigilance, assiduity, perseverance and courage, as Samuel Whitbread. The manner of his death quite overwhelmed me, I could think of nothing else for days together; nor do I remember, in our own time, another catastrophe so morally impressive, as the instantaneous failure of all that constancy, and rectitude, and inflexibility of mind, which seemed possessions that could be lost only with life; yet all the while there was a speck morbid in the body, which rendered them as precarious as life itself.

Among the stock questions which agitate Parliament and the country, that of the Corn Laws appears to be the most obdurate and lasting, and of course it occupied the mind of Horner; calling forth from him the most deliberately formed and calmly expressed judgment. He wrote in the following terms to a friend at the period when an effort was made to resist the imposition of these laws:

There is certainly no foundation for the distinction with which I am honoured, it seems, at Edinburgh, of being a convert to the Corn Bill. The more I have read upon the subject, and the more I hear upon it, I get more firmly fixed in my original opinion, that nothing should be done; of course it will be carried with a loud clamour, and with much abuse of all lackland theorists. It wouldbe as absurd to expect men to be reasonable about corn, as to be reasonable in matters of religion. I do not imagine any new discovery is made about the relation of the price of labour to that of grain, or the effects of scarcity or plenty upon wages. The principles upon which all such effects must depend, are obvious to every one who understands the operation of demand and supply upon prices; indeed, they are all an application of that single principle. A great many cases are necessary to be put, in order to distinguish the various effects of scarcity or plenty upon wages, according to the nature of the particular employment in which labour is to be paid for; but even when the effects are the most opposite, it is still the operation of the same principle. All this is stated well enough by Adam Smith, towards the end of his chapter on the Wages of Labour. The most important convert the landholders have got, is Malthus, who has now declared himself in favour of their Bill; and, to be sure, there is not a better or more informed judgment, and it is the single authority which staggers me. But those who have looked closely into his philosophy will admit, that there is always a leaning in favour of the efficacy of laws; and his early bias was for corn laws in particular. It was a great effort of candour, in truth, to suspend his decision upon this particular measure so long. I think I could demonstrate, from his own principles of population, that if this measure is effectual at all, it must be attended with great misery among the manufacturing classes, as well as among the labourers in husbandry; and with a violent forced alteration of that proportion, in this country, between agricultural and manufacturing population and capital, which the freedom of both has

adjusted, and would continue to maintain, better and more lightly for all the people, than can be effected by all the wisdom of all the squires of the island, with the political arithmeticians to boot.

To Mr. Malthus he also sent a letter which contained these weighty views:

You will think me very hardened, but I must own that my old faith is not shaken by your reasonings; on the contrary, I am even so perverse, as to think I have discovered, among your ingenious deductions respecting rent, some fresh and cogent arguments in favour of a free corn trade for this country; by which I always mean, as free a trade as we can secure by our own good sense, however it may be impaired by the deficiency of our neighbours in that qualification. If the consequence of “high farming" and curious cultivation be a progressive rise of the price of produce, an importation of partial supplies from countries, which by a ruder agriculture can furnish it cheaper, seems the provision laid by nature for checking too exclusive an employment of capital upon the land least fit for culture. It would be a palpable sacrifice of the end to the means, if, for the sake of extending our most finished husbandry to every sterile ridge that can be forced to yield something, we must impose upon the whole body of the people extravagant prices for the necessaries of life. Nor do I see, upon your peculiar principles, what other result there would be, if Dartmoor and Blackstone Edge were laid out in terraces of garden-ground, but a population always in some peril of being starved, if their rulers will not let them eat the superfluity of their neighbours.

With regard to the opinion which the agriculturists maintained, that a continuation of low prices would, in spite of a diminution of rents, destroy farming capital, and diminish produce, he answered that those who make this prediction, "speak upon the supposition of the present rents being still to be paid;" also taking generally for granted this fallacy," that with low prices, and continued low prices, all the expenses and out-goings of a farm are still to keep at their present rate." He adds the following doctrines and smart hits:

In considering the influence of a low price of corn upon the condition and comforts of the labourer, you have wholly omitted this consideration, that such a fall will release thousands and tens of thousands from the parochial pauper list, and restore them to the pride of earning their bread by free labour. I could not read without indignation, in the evidence of Mr. Benett, of Pyt House, who seems the very model of a witness for Corn Committees, this cool statement of the rule he makes, and unmakes for the distribution of rations of provender and fodder among the prædial slaves of a whole district of Wiltshire. It is this audacious and presumptuous spirit of regulating, by the wisdom of country squires, the whole economy and partition of national industry and wealth, that makes me more keenly averse to this Corn Bill of theirs than I should have been in earlier days of our time, when the principles of rational government were more widely understood, and were maintained by stronger hands at the head of affairs.

The narrow conceit of managing the happiness of the labouring population and of directing the application of industry, as well as the competition of the market, works in the present day upon a much larger scale than when it busied itself with the peculiar items of the foreign trade.

To dilate in our pages on the loss which the country sustained by the premature decease of such a deep economist, constitutional lawyer, and rising statesman, would serve no good purpose. We only observe that at the moment of his death, and before the world had been made acquainted with the melancholy event, all parties would have been ready to pronounce and predict of him that no public man ever offered more solid or ample grounds for placing reliance in his continued integrity and zeal; just as at this day all must be convinced, that had he lived to a ripe age, he must have lent the most valuable services on such vital questions as Lord Holland alludes to in a letter to Mr. Horner himself, a portion of which we quote. Says his lordship,

I agree with you in most of your points, but not quite in the same degree. Retrenchment and economy, which must include suppression of sinecures in future, and as far as the rights of property (established by legal decision) admit, the reform of those now existing, as well as the reduction of many useless places, miscalled the splendour of the crown, are absolutely necessary to give any party, who wishes to do good, authority and weight with the people. They must go. The community are punished, and severely punished, for their base acquiescence in liberticide wars, by their present distresses. I am not so sorry for that as I ought to be. But let ministers and the court be punished too, and a useful lesson will be inculcated, that rash and unprincipled wars cannot be entered into without (even in the case of success) the people risking their prosperity, ministers their power and influence, and kings and courts a part of their beloved splendour. It is through the unpopularity of the expenditure that we must get at the foreign system of politics, which, in my conscience, I think the cause of it. As to parliamentary reform, the industry of the violent party, and the talents, I must own, of one among them, seem to have made a deep impression; but I do not despair of getting over that difficulty well. There are many of our best friends out of parliament, and many too, who were not our friends till now, who are anxious to support retrenchment, and to change foreign policy, and to dismiss ministers, and yet, though reformers, are no great sticklers for any very violent reform, and are both disgusted and alarmed at the language of Cobbett, Hunt, and Cochrane. They are, I hear, of their own accord, and without any concert with us, to have a great dinner in Westminster, at which their resolutions will be such as we must all approve; though perhaps, on the subject of sinecures, some of them will be a little more peremptory than we could wish; but the fact is, they are eyesores, neither beautiful to the sight nor useful to the body; while they remain, we can make no progress in courting the community, and they must be lopped off.

542.

ART. XIII.-Incidents of Travel in Yucatan. By JOHN L. STEPHENS. 2. vols. Murray.

MR. STEPHENS, the adventurous traveller and liveliest of narrators; Mr. Catherwood, an artist; and Dr. Cabot, a naturalist as well as physician, formed the party that on the present occasion furnish us with so many incidents and interesting descriptions. In our recent notice of Mr. Norman's wanderings and explorations in Yucatan, we spoke in hopeful anticipation of Stephens's promised work and second journey into that teeming world of antiquities, and that still heaves with a nameless multitude and variety of relics of some by-gone age, which have never been by civilized moderns visited, much less examined. Indeed, it is no every-day undertaking to go into the regions in question, even when peace prevails among men; for not to speak of mosquitos and other hateful vermin, nor of the sickness to be encountered at certain seasons, and in the vicinity of stagnant spots where vegetation is so rank and unsubduable, you have to meet with severe obstacles should your object be to seek out the ruined cities and the marvellous monuments that crowd the almost impenetrable forests, were these but in the shape of the briary and matted brushwood that choke up the path to the most interesting of remains that can present themselves to an antiquarian investigation.

Our readers may remember how strongly excited Mr. Stephens was on his first visit to Yucatan, by the antiquities which everywhere abound in that country, and which in some districts appear actually to leave no intervening spaces of barrenness. His second journey had therefore not merely the advantage of preparedness for wonders and endless discoveries, but a considerable amount of experience, together with a high-wrought degree of enthusiasm; so that had he had nothing on this occasion to describe but architectural ruins and strewn sculptures, the volumes by such a picturesque penman would have been engaging and instructive in no ordinary degree. But then there is added, and everywhere interspersed, anecdotes of persons whose manners and customs are far removed from our own, and accounts of incidents of travel, the travellers having a character admirably calculated to create incidents, while the penman cannot be surpassed for vivacity, good nature, or taking with ease whatever may chance to offer itself, however rough or out-of-the way the scene; so that one may be sure that the work is remarkable even among those that are highly esteemed for their mingled amusement and information.

Our readers would not thank us in these circumstances were we to detain them longer at the threshlod from the feast that is here spread out; or do more than link by the shortest ties the extracts for which we have room. Well then, we are off with the trio, and first alight at Merida, where among other charmingly described scenes,

quite apart from the researches which Mr. Stephens had principally in view, we have this of the Daguerréotype copyings and creations:

Having made trials upon ourselves until we were tired of the subjects, and with satisfactory results, we considered ourselves sufficiently advanced to begin; and as we intended to practice for the love of the art, and not for lucre, we held that we had a right to select our subjects. Accordingly, we had but to signify our wishes, and the next morning put our house in order for the reception of our fair visitors. We cleared everything out of the hammock; took the wash hand basin off the chair, and threw odds and ends into one corner; and as the sun was pouring its rays warmly and brightly into our door, it was farther lighted up by the entry of three young ladies, with their respective papas and mammas. We had great difficulty in finding them all seats, and were obliged to put the two mammas into the hammock together. The young ladies were dressed in their prettiest costume, with earrings and chains, and their hair adorned with flowers. All were pretty, and one was much more than pretty; not.in the style of Spanish beauty, with dark eyes and hair, but a delicate and dangerous blonde, simple, natural and unaffected, beautiful without knowing it, and really because she could not help it. Her name, too, was poetry itself. I am bound to single her out, for, late on the evening of our departure from Merida, she sent us a large cake, measuring about three feet in circumference by six inches deep, which by-the-way, everything being packed up, I smothered into a pair of saddle-bags, and spoiled some of my scanty stock of wearing apparel. The ceremonies of the reception over, we made immediate preparations to begin. Much form and circumstance were necessary in settling preliminaries; and as we were in no hurry to get rid of our subjects, we had more formalities than usual to go through with. Our first subject was the lady of the poetical name. It was necessary to hold a consultation upon her costume, whether the colours were pretty and such as would be brought out well or not; whether a scarf around the neck was advisable; whether the hair was well arranged, the rose becoming, and in the best position; then to change it, and consider the effect of the change, and to say and do many other things which may suggest themselves to the reader's imagination, and all which gave rise to many profound remarks in regard to artistical effect, and occupied much time. The lady being arrayed to the best advantage, it was necessary to seat her with reference to a right adjustment of light and shade; to examine carefully the falling of the light upon her face; then to consult whether it was better to take a front or a side view; to look at the face carefully in both positions; and, finally, it was necessary to secure the head in the right position; that it should be neither too high nor too low; too much on one side nor on the other; and as this required great nicety, it was sometimes actually indispensable to turn the beautiful little head with our own hands, whlch, however, was a very innocent way of turning a young lady's head. Next it was necessary to get the young lady into focus-that is, to get her into the box, which, in short, means, to get a reflection of her face on the glass in the camera obscura at that one particular point of view which presented it better than any other; and when this was obtained, the miniature likeness of the object was so faith