peaceful neighbours, and who defended themselves, by force of arms, from the attacks of the steward. At the age of fifteen, the orphan heiress was married to sir A, and from that moment a gradual but rapid revolution commenced. Sir A lost no time in carrying his bride to his new domain. Donald was obliged to give a strict account of his administration to his new master; his statements were compared with testimony and appearances upon the spot; and his true character and conduct were fully comprehended by sir A's enlightened and experienced eye. To obtain impunity he was obliged to surrender the greatest part of the hoard he had been so industriously amassing, and this sum, instead of being forfeited to his superior, was repaid to those from whom it had been unjustly extorted.

He was patron of the five parishes of C, and easily obtained their resignation of their benefices from the present possessors, on securing to them the payment of their salary in money, during the rest of their lives. The number of the future pastors was augmented to ten, and four petty officers were allotted to each church, as organist, sexton, and the like. The rector received three hundred pounds a year, two of his assistants one hundred a piece, and the other two fifty pounds a piece, the whole pay able not as formerly, in kind, nor even by the occupants of house and land, but from the proprietor's own purse.

Persons were selected for this office whose learning, piety, and public spirit made them zealous promoters and coadjutors of all his schemes. New and commodious dwellings were erected for their accommodation, and the old crazy churches were supplanted by temples reared on a chaste, solid, and spacious plan.

The five petty teachers were dismissed to situations more lucrative and more suitable to their capacities. The number of schools was

augmented to ten. Each teacher had four assistants, and all were paid in the same manner, and to the same amount, as the clerical order. Houses were allotted to them, with a good garden annexed to each, and a system of superintendance was carefully established, by which a succession of accomplished teachers, together with proper objects and proper methods of instruction, were effectually secured.

Having thus provided for the regular instruction of the young and the old, and secured the benefits of integrity and knowledge to the rising generation, it remained to rectify the prevalent evils by a due exercise of the power of a landlord. The abuse of spirituous liquors was at once extinguished by recalling all the licences to sell or manufacture the liquor, and by prohibiting the future importation or sale of it...... You may think, perhaps, that to effect this would require a stretch of authority, despotic and illegal; but, in truth, to effect all his purposes, sir A-needed no laws nor penal sanctions; no power of fining, imprisoning, or whipping. The simple prerogative of every landlord to chuse his own tenant, rendered the will of sir A- absolute within the precincts of CThose who disobeyed his commands, or rather those who opposed his wishes, were compelled to withdraw beyond these precincts. Nobody would sell liquor to their neighbours, because sir A refused to let them a house to sell it in, or even to shelter themselves. They could not build a booth or a hovel on land that was not their own, and nobody would harbour the seller or underlet to him, because he would thereby incur an ejectment himself.

This method of proceeding would not receive, in general, the name of punishment; and yet whether we consider its consequences to those subjected to it, or to the community at large, nothing that is called punishment is comparable to this. To the criminal, exile from his friends,

his relatives, and his clan, to be ejected from the vocation to which he was bred up, and from a possession which the wise arrangements of sir A― made daily more eligible, was a punishment severer than imprisonment or death, while the safety of the whole society was far more effectually promoted by lopping off the diseased member in this way, than by the cruelty of executions, or the trouble and expence of imprisonment. To the lord nothing could be more convenient, because it abandoned every offender to his absolute discretion. In judging his people he was bound down by no laws, either written or prescriptive, and to no forms but the simple one of noticing his tenant to quit. He was, by this means, enabled to controul men in those relations in which they are exempted from ordinary laws. A bad master, a bad husband, a bad father, a bad neighbour, an idler, a tippler, a cock fighter, an inveterate sportsman are all exempted from any legal correction; but over these sir A- extended his rod, and by exiling them for ever from his estate, not only freed the rest from actual molestation, and from the evils of a bad example, but gained an opportunity of supplying the place of an unsound member by a sound one. Every vacancy was ready to be filled from the overflow. ing population of his English estate, which furnished not only his fields with husbandmen, but his towns with artisans in abundance. And this will show you by what powerful motives sir Awas influenced to retain his estate wholly in his own hands. By alienating house or land, or even by granting leases of considerable duration, it is evident that the true foundation of his power would be undermined, and the harmony of his system entirely destroy ed.

In so large a property it was impossible to attend to every thing with his own eyes. Great industry, great sagacity, and great order will enable a single man to perform what will vulgarly be deemed impossi

ble; and no man ever surpassed sir A in these qualities. To unfold minutely all the parts and branches of his system would demand a volume: I have found the greatest pleasure in studying this system, but cannot, at this time, pretend to give you more than a very loose and brief sketch.

The power of a steward, on this estate, was, as you have seen, combined with that of a magistrate. To share his power, in some degree, with others was made necessary by the extent of his estate. In the selection of his stewards, therefore, in prescribing and limiting their duties, in superintending their conduct, and guarding against abuses of every kind, his utmost caution and wisdom were requisite. In regulating the receipt and disbursement of so vast an annual sum as forty-seven thousand pounds, there was room and need for the most consummate skill in fiscal affairs.

He had a principal steward, and ten sub-stewards. The former received a salary of five hundred pounds a year, and the latter three hundred pounds a year a piece..... Each steward had two clerks and two messengers attached to his office; a clerk having one hundred pounds a year, and a messenger fifty. Besides these there was a receiver and a payer-general, who, at the same time, performed the office of bankers or cash keepers to the whole society. The expence of this latter office, which we may dignify with the name of treasury, was about one thousand pounds.

These allowances, by no means insignificant in themselves, were rendered very liberal by the general cheapness of provisions in the district; by the frugal modes of living in vogue; and by the privilege of a lodging and garden rent free, a privilege enjoyed by every one in the lord's service.

You will find, by a little calculation, that all the salaries I have enumerated, amount to about twenty thousand pounds; a sum far exceeding the original income of the

estate, though now only two-fifths of his annual revenue; a sum which gave a plentiful subsistence to upwards of one hundred and fifty worthy families, who held this subsistence by no other tenure than their good behaviour, or at the will of one man; a tenure too precarious in all other cases, but rendered certain and immutable by the wisdom of that one in the present case.

I need hardly observe that all these institutions were not adopted at once. On the contrary, the progress of things to the state abovedescribed did no more than keep pace with the progress of population and improvement. To restrain the use of spirituous liquors, to convert the ignorant, idle, and profligate into diligent, and sober, and enlightened, was no work of a day. Sir A's benevolence met with innumerable obstacles, and his energy only surmounted them after the toil and perseverance of thirty years, and when the generation he found alive had almost totally been sup. planted by strangers, or by a new generation. By placing the children in a situation wholly different from that of their parents, and by carefully instructing them in the elements of useful knowledge, the new race were as different in their minds and morals as in their external condition from those who preceded them. Great as this revolution was, and long the period in which it was effected, sir A——— had the happiness of seeing all his schemes accomplished before he had passed the meridian of life, and might entertain a well founded hope of enjoying, for at least another thirty years, the contemplation of a structure which he had been the same number of years in building.

A mind like sir A- -'s, and his habits of activity, would hardly sit down at ease at this point. After paying all his salaries, and disbursing all the money necessary to sustain the system at the point to which raised it, he had a surplus revenue of near thirty thousand pounds.

Sir A was no hoarder of mo

ney. Still less was he likely to bestow his money upon transitory objects, upon gratifications which leave no vestige behind. Fifteen years have elapsed since C—— was put into the condition already described. Sir A― is still alive, and as active and beneficent as ever, but what he has undertaken and completed since that period, though no less meritorious and memorable than his former projects, I shall relate on some future occasion.

For the Literary Magazine.

ON GRATITUDE.

THERE is a species of grateful remorse, which sometimes has been known to operate forcibly on the minds of the most hardened in impudence. Towards the beginning of the last century, an actor, celebrated for mimicry, was to have been employed by a comic author, to take off the person, manner, and singularly awkward delivery of the celebrated Dr. Woodward, who was intended to be introduced on the stage in a laughable character. The mimic dressed himself as a countryman, and waited on the doctor with a long catalogue of aliments, which he said attended on his wife. The physician heard with amazement, diseases and pains of the most opposite nature, repeated and redoubled on the wretched patient. Since the actor's wish was to keep Dr. Woodward in talk as long as possible, that he might make the more observations on his gestures, he loaded his poor imaginary spouse with every infirmity, which had any probable chance of prolonging the interview. At length, being master of his errand, he drew from his purse a guinea, and, with a scrape, made an uncouth offer of it. "Put up thy money, poor fellow," cried the doctor, "put up thy money. Thou hast need of all thy cash and all thy patience too with such a bundle of diseases tied to thy back."

The actor returned to his employer and recounted the whole conversation, with such genuine mimicry, that the author shouted with approbation. His raptures were soon checked, for the mimic told him, with the emphasis of sensibility, that he would sooner die, than prostitute his talents by rendering such genuine humanity a public laughingstock.

A more grotesque instance of the sudden power of gratitude, may be produced in a well attested modern anecdote.

A parson Patten, of Whitstable, in Kent, was well known in his own neighbourhood, as a man of great oddity, great humour, and equally great extravagance. Once, standing in need of a new wig, his old one defying all further assistance from art; he went over to Canterbury, and applied to a barber, young in business, to make him one. The tradesman, who was just going to dinner, begged the honour of his new customer's company at his meal, to which Patten most readily consent. ed. After dinner, a large bowl of punch was produced, and the reverend guest with equal readiness, joined in its demolition. When it was out, the barber was proceeding to business, and began to handle his measure, when Mr. Patten desired him to desist, saying he should not make his wig.

"Why not," exclaimed the astonished host, "have I done any thing to offend you, sir?"

"Not in the least," replied the guest, "but I find you are a very honest, good-natured fellow; so I will take somebody else in. Had you made it, you would never have been paid for it."

For the Literary Magazine.

HERALDIC ENTHUSIASM.

IT is probable that no science on on earth conveys to its votaries a greater degree of enthusiasm than

that of heraldry. One instance, at least, can be brought, unmatched in any other.

The passage is taken from a scarce treatise in quarto, entitled "The Blazon of gentrie," (a book recommended by Peacham in his "Compleat Gentleman," as a book to be bought at any rate), and runs thus: "Christ was a gentleman, as to his flesh, by the part of his mother (as I have read), and might, if he had esteemed of the vayne glorey of this worlde (whereof he often sayde his kingdom was not) have borne coat-armour. The apostles, also (as my author telleth me), were gentlemen of bloud, and manye of them descended from that worthy conqueror, Judas Machabeus, but through the tract of time, and persecution of wars, poverty oppressed the kindred, and they were constrayned to servile workes."p. 97.

In the same book we find the exact arms, properly blazoned, of Semiramis, queen of Babylon.

A sanguine Frenchman had so high an opinion of the pleasures to be enjoyed in the study of heraldry, that he used to lament the hard case of our forefather Adam, who could not possibly amuse himself by investigating that science, nor that of genealogy.

For the Literary Magazine.

ON PUNNING.

THE antiquity of punning is indubitable, and were it not that the ignoble term, a pun, would sound ill when connected with apostolic characters, we could produce authority highly respectable, indeed, in its favour. The Grecian oracles had lost their credit long before their cessation, had not punning stood them in stead. To reckon up ancient punsters would be an endless task. Plautus loved quibbling as much as Shakespeare did. Even the ancient sages of the law could

not refrain from punning; and we have as many quibbles of Cicero, nearly, as orations. He was not unhappy in his choice of puns, and among the rest, "Hoc est, verè, sepulchrum patris, colere," which he said of a man who, through avarice, ploughed up the burying-place of his family, may take rank nearly as a pun.

Almost the whole artillery of those wits, who adorned the centuries before the last, was supplied from the abundant magazine of puns; and the great restorer of Italian poetry, the celebrated Petrarch, not contented with punning on his mistress' name, in almost every one of his hundreds of sonnets, takes that beloved word into pieces, in his fifth, and puns upon every separate syllable; and this not contenting him, he drags in Homer, literally, by the head and shoulders, and puns upon him too.

Punning is treated with an unequalled species of cruelty; it is abhorred even while it amuses; and the very horse laugh which it seldom fails to raise round the convivial board, is almost always accompanied by detractive exclamations of "Oh, oh, this is too bad." "I am ashamed of this," and the like; while the blushing punster, actually shrinking from the mirth which he has created, feels himself hurt at each burst of laughter, and generally takes great pains to convince the company, that he never punned before, nor will ever pun again. Yet a pun never loses a friend, nor, except in aukward hands, tinges the cheek of innocence. No families are set at variance by a pun, no reputations lost, no female honour tainted.

For the Literary Magazine.

MEDICAL ANECDOTES.

THERE was a time, when physicians were bound to a strict atten

tion towards the welfare of their

patients, by somewhat besides the consideration of their own credit and future profit; for, at Dijon, in 1386, a physician was fined, by the bailiff, fifty golden franks, besides being imprisoned, for not having completed the cures of some persons, whose recovery he had undertaken. And the beautiful Austrigilda, consort to Gontran, king of Burgundy, had, in the sixth century, been permitted by her husband, in compliance with her dying request, to have her two physicians slain, and buried with her: whether from attachment to them, or by way of punishment for their ill success in her case, is not said.

The common jocular advice given to persons who are sick from the effects of intoxication, the night before," to take a hair of the same dog," seems to be derived from a ridiculous mode of cure, prescribed to persons bitten by a mad dog, in a French treatise, entitled "La Medecine aisée,” written by "Le Clerc, Conseiller-medecin du Roy," published at Paris, 1719. He tells us, "Pour la cure de la playe, mettez dessus du poil du chien qui a mordu. C'est la remede de Paré."

The art of examining and curing wounds was, by writers of romance, allotted to princesses, and damsels of high birth. In later days, Buchanan writes, that the Scots nobility were remarkably dexterous in the chirurgical art; and he says of James IV of Scotland, "Quod vulnera scientissimé tractaret."

"Are you out of sorts," says the facetious Montaigne, "that your physician has denied you the enjoyment of wine, and of your favourite dishes? Be not uneasy; apply to me, and I engage to find you one of equal credit, who shall put you under a regimen perfectly opposite to that settled by your own adviser."