Indies being, in 1828, 198,400 tons; in 1829, 195,230; and in 1830, 185,660. It should also be recollected, that it is no easy matter for a planter to turn his capital and industry into new channels. The registry acts oppose a serious obstacle to this. They hinder the transfer of slaves from one island to another, or to the continent; so that, though a planter might be able to employ his slaves profitably in Demerara or Berbice, while in Tortola, and some of the islands, he is hardly able to employ them at all, he is not permitted to carry them to the place where their labour is in demand. There is no such regulation in the United States; and it is difficult to discover any good grounds for its rigid enforcement. Should it, however, be relaxed, care should be taken to enact such provisions as may be deemed proper for promoting the interests of the slaves; and, supposing these provisions not so onerous upon the master as to defeat the purpose of the relaxation, or to hinder transferences entirely, they might be made a means of accelerating the period of emancipation; while, as it would be optional to the masters either to transfer their slaves or not, they could not object to the grant of the liberty to transfer being accompanied by any reasonable conditions.

The planters are naturally extremely anxious that the importation of fresh negroes into Cuba, Brazil, and the foreign states, should, if possible, be put an end to. Their anxiety in this respect is not greater, certainly, than that of the government; but we are not entitled to dictate to other countries, and if we are to succeed, we must proceed by negotiation. It is, however, to be hoped, that more accurate and enlarged views of their own interest will, at no distant period, induce all foreign nations to abolish this infamous traffic in fact as well as in name, by mutually conceding the right of search, and treating those engaged in it as pirates. Nothing short of this will be found effectual; and we trust that a measure of this sort may be universally agreed to.

On the whole, therefore, it is abundantly certain, that the distresses of the West Indians may be effectually relieved; and that this relief may be accomplished, not only without imposing any fresh burdens on the people of England-which we should be the first to oppose-but with a material diminution of those now existing. Let the West Indians be treated justly and impartially; let them enjoy what cannot be withheld from them without injustice and oppression-the power to supply themselves with whatever they require, in the cheapest markets; let the exorbitant duties that now attach to articles of West India produce brought to England, be adequately reduced; and

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let fixed and judicious rules be established for guiding the gress of emancipation to a safe termination. Let these things be done, and we venture to say, that the distresses of the West Indians will speedily cease to be heard of; and while the people of England will gain by the reduction of the duties, they will also gain by the reduced expenditure that will henceforth be required for the protection and government of the islands. At all events, nothing whatever can be lost, while much will most probably be gained, by adopting the measures now suggestedmeasures which have been sanctioned by all our greatest statesmen, and which are founded on the obvious principles of impartial justice. If opposition is to be made to these measures, it must proceed, either directly or indirectly, from a small minority of the shipowners, and the Canada merchants; and these gentlemen would do well to recollect, that forbearance has its limits. They have achieved a pretty considerable triumph in compelling us, for their sakes, to innoculate our ships and houses with dry-rot, and to pay L.1,500,000 a-year of enhanced price, for a comparatively worthless article. But though John Bull be good-natured enough to tolerate this inroad on his own pockets, we hardly think that his love of justice will allow the same freedom to be used with the pockets of the West Indians.

ART. IV.-1. An Essay on the Origin and Prospects of Man. By THOMAS HOPE. 3 vols. 8vo. London: 1831. 2. Philosophische Vorlesungen, insbesondere über Philosophie der Sprache und des Wortes. Geschrieben und vorgetragen zu Dresden im December 1828, und in den ersten Tagen des Januars 1829. (Philosophical Lectures, especially on the Philosophy of Language and the Gift of Speech. Written and delivered at Dresden in December 1828, and the early days of January 1829.) By FRIEDRICH VON SCHLEGEL. 8vo. Vienna:

1830.

THE THE healthy know not of their health, but only the sick this is the Physician's Aphorism; and applicable in a far wider sense than he gives it. We may say, it holds no less in moral, intellectual, political, poetical, than in merely corporeal therapeutics; that wherever, or in what shape soever, powers of the sort which can be named vital are at work, herein lies the test of their working right or working wrong..

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In the Body, for example, as all doctors are agreed, the first condition of complete health is, that each organ perform its function unconsciously, unheeded; let but any organ announce its separate existence, were it even boastfully, and for pleasure, not for pain, then already has one of those unfortunate false 'centres of sensibility' established itself, already is derangement there. The perfection of bodily wellbeing is, that the collective bodily activities seem one; and be manifested, moreover, not in themselves, but in the action they accomplish. If a Dr Kitchener boast that his system is in high order, Dietetic Philosophy may indeed take credit; but the true Peptician was that Countryman who answered that, for his part, he had no system.' In fact, unity, agreement, is always silent, or softvoiced; it is only discord that loudly proclaims itself. So long forth as the several elements of Life, all fitly adjusted, can pour their movement like harmonious tuned strings, it is a melody and unison; Life, from its mysterious fountains, flows out as in celestial music and diapason,-which also, like that other music of the spheres, even because it is perennial and complete, without interruption and without imperfection, might be fabled to the ear. Thus, too, in some languages, is the state of escape health well denoted by a term expressing unity; when we feel ourselves as we wish to be, we say that we are whole.

Few mortals, it is to be feared, are permanently blessed with that felicity of having no system:' nevertheless, most of us, looking back on young years, may remember seasons of a light, aerial translucency and elasticity, and perfect freedom; the body had not yet become the prison-house of the soul, but was its vehicle and implement, like a creature of the thought, and altogether pliant to its bidding. We knew not that we had limbs, we only lifted, hurled, and leapt; through eye and ear, and all avenues of sense, came clear unimpeded tidings from without, and from within issued clear victorious force; we stood as in the centre of Nature, giving and receiving, in harmony with it all; unlike Virgil's Husbandmen, too happy because we did not 'know our blessedness.' In those days, health and sickness were foreign traditions that did not concern us; our whole being was as yet One, the whole man like an incorporated Will. Such, were Rest or ever-successful Labour the human lot, might our life continue to be a pure, perpetual, unregarded music; a beam of perfect white light, rendering all things visible, but itself unseen, even because it was of that perfect whiteness, and no irregular obstruction had yet broken it into colours. The beginning of Inquiry is Disease: all Science, if we consider well, as it must

have originated in the feeling of something being wrong, so it is and continues to be but Division, Dismemberment, and partial healing of the wrong. Thus, as was of old written, the Tree of Knowledge springs from a root of evil, and bears fruits of good and evil. Had Adam remained in Paradise, there had been no Anatomy and no Metaphysics.

But, alas, as the Philosopher declares, 'Life itself is a disease; a working incited by suffering;' action from passion! The memory of that first state of Freedom and paradisiac Unconsciousness has faded away into an ideal poetic dream. We stand here too conscious of many things: with Knowledge, the symptom of Derangement, we must even do our best to restore a little Order. Life is, in few instances, and at rare intervals, the diapason of a heavenly melody; oftenest the fierce jar of disruptions and convulsions, which, do what we will, there is no disregarding. Nevertheless such is still the wish of Nature on our behalf; in all vital action, her manifest purpose and effort is, that we should be unconscious of it, and, like the peptic Countryman, never know that we have a system.' For indeed vital action every where is emphatically a means, not an end; Life is not given us for the mere sake of Living, but always with an ulterior external Aim neither is it on the process, on the means, but rather on the result, that Nature, in any of her doings, is wont to intrust us with insight and volition. Boundless as is the domain of man, it is but a small fractional proportion of it that he rules with Consciousness and by Forethought: what he can contrive, nay, what he can altogether know and comprehend, is essentially the mechanical, small; the great is ever, in one sense or other, the vital, it is essentially the mysterious, and only the surface of it can be understood. But Nature, it might seem, strives, like a kind mother, to hide from us even this, that she is a mystery: she will have us rest on her beautiful and awful bosom as if it were our secure home; on the bottomless boundless Deep, whereon all human things fearfully and wonderfully swim, she will have us walk and build, as if the film which supported us there (which any scratch of a bare bodkin will rend asunder, any sputter of a pistol-shot instantaneously burn up) were no film, but a solid rock-foundation. For ever in the neighbourhood of an inevitable Death, man can forget that he is born to die; of his Life, which, strictly meditated, contains in it an Immensity and an Eternity, he can conceive lightly, as of a simple implement wherewith to do day-labour and earn wages. So cunningly does Nature, the mother of all highest Art, which only apes her from afar, body forth the Finite from the Infinite;' and guide

man safe on his wondrous path, not more by endowing him with vision, than, at the right place, with blindness! Under all her works, chiefly under her noblest work, Life, lies a basis of Darkness, which she benignantly conceals; in Life, too, the roots and inward circulations which stretch down fearfully to the regions of Death and Night, shall not hint of their existence, and only the fair stem with its leaves and flowers, shone on by the fair sun, disclose itself, and joyfully grow.

However, without venturing into the abstruse, or too eagerly asking Why and How, in things where our answer must needs prove, in great part, an echo of the question, let us be content to remark farther, in the merely historical way, how that Aphorism of the bodily Physician holds good in quite other departments. Of the Soul, with her activities, we shall find it no less true than of the Body: nay, cry the Spiritualists, is not that very division of the unity, Man, into a dualism of Soul and Body, itself the symptom of disease; as, perhaps, your frightful theory of Materialism, of his being but a Body, and therefore, at least, once more a unity, may be the paroxysm which was critical, and the beginning of cure! But omitting this, we observe, with confidence enough, that the truly strong mind, view it as Intellect, as Morality, or under any other aspect, is nowise the mind acquainted with its strength; that here as before the sign of health is Unconsciousness. In our inward, as in our outward world, what is mechanical lies open to us; not what is dynamical and has vitality. Of our Thinking, we might say, it is but the mere upper surface that we shape into articulate Thoughts;-underneath the region of argument and conscious discourse, lies the region of meditation; here, in its quiet mysterious depths, dwells what vital force is in us; here, if aught is to be created, and not merely manufactured and communicated, must the work go on. Manufacture is intelligible, but trivial; Creation is great, and cannot be understood. Thus, if the Debater and Demonstrator, whom we may rank as the lowest of true thinkers, knows what he has done, and how he did it, the Artist, whom we rank as the highest, knows not; must speak of Inspiration, and in one or the other dialect, call his work the gift of a divinity.

But, on the whole, genius is ever a secret to itself;' of this old truth we have, on all sides, daily evidence. The Shakspeare takes no airs for writing Hamlet and the Tempest, understands not that it is any thing surprising: Milton, again, is more conscious of his faculty, which accordingly is an inferior one. On the other hand, what cackling and strutting must we not often