Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 102.djvu/425

Rh (absit comparatio!) the general character of the smiling Mephistopheles: Sir Archibald is too serious, and in fact too much of a croaker, to smile much in print at any time, especially when paper currency and protection are his theme. Smollett represents as the most hardy of all Lieutenant Lismahago's crotchets, his position "that commerce would, sooner or later, prove the ruin of any nation where it flourishes to any extent;" that eccentric and gallant countryman of Sir Archibald strenuously asserting, “that the nature of commerce was such, that it could not be fixed or perpetual; but, having flowed to a certain height, would immediately begin to ebb, and so continue, till the channels should be left almost dry,”—while there was no instance of the tide's rising a second time to any considerable influx in the same nation. 'Tis consolatory, when one remembers the date of that gallant officer's prelections, to find that the old British channels are not yet left almost dry; and one cannot but hope that the Scotch baronet of the nineteenth century may be as far out (as to time if not fact) in his proleptical philosophy, as was the Scotch lieutenant of the eighteenth. Goldsmith's Chinese cosmopolite laughed, in his day, at our national propensity to gloomy forebodings, periodically revived, and exposed those professional croakers who, said he,make it their business, at convenient intervals, to denounce ruin both on their contemporaries and their posterity. "England," he adds, “seems to be the very region where spleen delights to dwell: a man not only can give an unbounded scope to the disorder in himself, but may, if he pleases, propagate it over the whole kingdom, with a certainty of success. He has only to cry out, that the government, the government is all wrong, that their schemes are leading to ruin, that Britons are no more; every good member of the commonwealth thinks it his duty, in such a case, to deplore the universal decadence with sympathetic sorrow, and, by fancying the constitution in a decay, absolutely to impair its vigour." Let us hope that since the time when good old Lien Chi Altangi sojourned in London, and consorted with Beau Tibbs and the Man in Black, nous avons changé tout, or a good part of, cela. Meanwhile, there may be expected political monitors of the George Grenville type, to whom Burke applied the linesand of whom a recent essayist has said, that while every sea was covered with our ships, and our language heard on every shore, he was in dismay at the decline of British shipping, and the want of British enterprise; that while great manufacturing cities were starting up on barren heaths, and all parts of England and Scotland were resounding with the busy hum of industry, he, George Grenville, was sighing over the loss of our manufactures, and the increase of imports over exports: "our conquests," he said, "were fallacious; our exports were principally consumed by our own fleets and armies; our carrying trade was entirely engrossed by the neutral nations; the number of our ships was diminishing; our revenues were decreasing; our husbandry was standing still for want of hands; on