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for that deficiency of employment so grievously distressing at present, and fully adequate to account for it without having recourse to any other. Besides, be it observed, that it is but a notionary cause, a mere opinion, that would ascribe to machinery the effect of the diminished demand for labourers; whereas the one to which I allude, is matter of fact, and within the view and scope of every man's experience. I allude to the revulsion from a state of war to a state of peace; to the suspension of the labour employed in the fabrication of the weapons of war ;to the suspension in the demand for soldiers and sailors;-to the consequences of disbanding the navy and army, whereby so many thousands of the most athletic of the labouring class were sent in quest of employment; to the entire reduction of the transport service, with all its ships and crews, and tradesmen of every description, agents, and clerks, and artizans; to the diminished number of the labourers in the dock-yards ;—to the dispersion in search of other work of the thousands employed in the minuter operations of the public service as connected with the war ;-to the diminished incomes of public officers, whose household establishments in servants have, in consequence, been reduced; to the frugality induced by the reduction of so many officers to halfpay, by which the profits of their shopkeepers and tradespeople have been curtailed ;-to the abridged transactions between these retailers and the wholesale dealers, and to the consequent

diminution in the transactions of the wholesale dealer with the farmer, the foreign market, and the manufacturer; all which, I do contend, constitute an aggregate cause quite sufficient to account for all that want of employment which it is attempted, or proposed, to obviate, by reducing the means of employment more and more. Already has the diminished expenditure of government thrown so much capital idle, that the value of money has fallen 20 per cent; and yet, with this fact staring them in the face, the Country Gentlemen think it possible, by legislative regulations, to keep up their rental at the war rate; and they think also, in common with the Radicals, that for their particular behoof and advantage, all the rest of the community should make sacrifices. In one brief sentence, instigated by "an ignorant impatience of taxation," they have endeavoured to force government from one act of injustice to another, against the most active and intelligent part of the community,—the merchants, the manufac turers, and all those connected with the management of the public stock, until they may so derange the existing admirable order of things in this country-a country, which has done so much more than any other for the benefit of man, and of the worldthat a faction may be strengthened, which will not scruple, not only to investigate their sinecures, but to sweep them from their possessions, like chaff in the whirlwind.

Glasgow, Oct. 15, 1822.

BANDANA.

[We have given this article a place, in the hope that some of our old friends among the De-Coverleys will return the hard hits of this Glasgow manufacturer. The looms versus the plough is sport worth following up; besides, it will be a fine thing to see in what manner the Country Gentlemen can defend themselves from the accusation of being practically in league with the Radicals. We anticipate, that all the brave fellows on half-pay, together with the reduced clerks, and discharged supernumeraries, will, to a man, back the manufacturer. The odds at present are in his favour-But nous verrons.

C. N.]

3Q

VOL. XII.

THE KING'S VISIT.

BY A LONDONER, BUT NO COCKNEY. (Continued.)

Edinburgh, Friday, August 23.

THE Review of the Cavalry quartered in the neighbourhood, and of the Yeomanry of some of the adjoining counties, took place to-day. The novelty of an exhibition of this order, and the allowable passion of the ladies to see their gallant and rustic lords and lovers, relinquishing the habiliments of common life, and flourishing in scarlet and glory, produced an immense crowd. The Review was a simple parade. The Cavalry were ranged in a long line on the sea-shore; and, after having been rode through by the King and his plumed and prancing suite, passed him in troops, and thus closed a day memorable to that pretty miniature of Brighton, Portobello.

"Such day of mirth ne'er cheered their clan,

Since in the cleuch the buck was ta'en."

The Yeomanry, as they came in valour, volunteering, in some instances, to a man, as their journals with becoming pride expressed it, returned in triumph, covered with military dust, and riding their beleaguered way through the returning rout of vehicles, with a conscious look of danger nobly encountered, and patriotism not in vain.

It has often struck me that the lower creation have a strong sense of ridicule. Man has been presumed to be the only laughing animal, but a jest is not the less genuine for its being made with undisturbed muscles, and I will pledge all my penetration, that I saw among those gallant Centaurs, the large meek eye of many a Dobbin cast back, half wonder and half pleasantry, at the strange panoply of his awkward and excellent master.

At the close of the Review, which, from the fineness of the day, and the position of the troops, backed by a fine sweep of blue sea, was a striking spectacle, the King came up to the detachments of the Clans, drawn up a little apart, with the Duke of Argyle, the Earl of Fife, General Stirling, Sir Evan Macgregor, Lord Gwydyr, &c., paid them some handsome compliments and no man knows how to do those things better-and drove off in a blaze of artillery.

There has been some lively controversy here on the privilege of the High

landers to eclipse all other Scotchmen; and bitter and bold things have been said both for and against the kilt. The result will probably be a compromise between the respective gloryings of hill and plain.

Yet the secret of the rivalry is in the Highland costume. Let modern meanness talk as it will, there is a moral effect in dress. The physiognomist tells us, that no man can put his features into the expression of a passion without involuntarily exciting it, in some degree, within himself. Dress is the physiognomy of the form; squalid clothing makes the mind squalid. The Turk, in his magnificent costume, looks a magnificent being; his turban and robe are made for supremacy; he is an imperial thing. The impression that strikes all eyes must strike his own, and actually raise and invigorate his martial and stately spirit.

The Knight of the tenth century in his plumes, and steel flourished and inlaid with precious ornament, looked, and was the emblem of all courtesy and gallantry. How much of the high breeding of the French and Spanish courts of the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries may not have been connected with the noble costume of the time? We English do clever things by land and sea, stinted, strained, and scarped as we are. But the English mind is like no other. It is a sturdy, stern, ridicule-dreading, unimaginative ENS, inaccessible to the brilliant excitement that plays round an impassioned people. Yet the plumed hat, the embroidered cloak, the ruff, the Vandyke collar, might work their wonders with us still. We might see the race of the Sydneys and Raleighs starting up among our youth, now consigned by the efficacy of Belcher handkerchiefs, and other brutalities of equipment, to the look and the manners of coachmen.

We live in the midst of a revived homage for the genius of antiquity, for the recollections of our ancestors, the poetry, the ornaments, even the feeble and trivial efforts of obscure times towards modern invention. Yet by a strange conspiracy against grace and good sense, every nation is abandoning its original costume, and cutting, paring, and deforming, down to

the lowest profound of degraded modern sutorship. Place a cavalier of Charles I. beside a fashionable of our day, and we see the burlesque at once. The national dress of every people is noble. Among the thousand investitures of the human form, from the Himmala to the Andes, and from the days of Abraham to our own, there is not one that, unperverted, does not add to the dignity or the beauty of man.

I will make a pilgrimage of taste, a crusade of costume. I will go to the President of Hayti, and remind him of the splendours of Africa, the jewelled caps, the shawls, the silken flowered tunics, the tiger skins, the gilded diamond-hilted weapons; strip every cocked hat and check breeches off his sable heroes, and shew them forth the Children of the Sun! I will go westward still, and call up a vision of Montezuma and Guatimozin before Iturbide, dazzle him with the golden breastplate and the feathered crown, the robe striped with azure, and the sandals bound with jaguar heads of gems. I will then shape my way accross the waters of the Atlantic, and, full of authority and triumph, convert England, rend away its miserable cravats, pantaloons, swallow-tailed coats, and round hats, and restore the taste of the Henrys and Charles; and first of the first, shew them their King relieved from the unhappy succession of coats of all services, that make him one day a Seaman and the next a Soldier, the next a Privy Counsellor, and the next all but a Bishop. The close and consummation of my triumphs will be to see him invested in the costume of royalty, a costume unshared with every captain of horse, foot, and marines, in his royal pay; a costume that consulting grace, shall consult dignity, and exhibit him every inch a King.

In the meantime, let the Celtic Society go on and prosper. Let them preserve the Highlander in his original stuffs, and proselyte the Lowlander to the adoption of any dress that will extinguish the indescribable miscellany now worn by the generation of the Saxon.

I am not among the rapturous admirers of the plaid: Worn by the peasant, it is rude, awkward, and unpicturesque; but worn, as it is, by the Highland regiments, it is the very garb of soldiership. Loose, and light; free to the limbs, and showy to the eye,

the plumed cap, the flowing plaid, and the claymore, look the emblems of heroism, and may often have made heroes. But a hero, in the uniform of the English line, that specimen of how far the force of docking and beggary can go that cramping of the limbs, and curtailing of the proportions of man-that grotesque contrivance to scrape the human figure down to the shape and smoothness of a carrot-is impossible. The result may be, a soldier, a sturdy serf, killing, or being killed, according to orders.

The Highlanders here have carried off all the admiration from the whole various multitude of scarlet and feathers. There are but about three hundred, under different chiefs; fifty Sutherlands, commanded by Lord Francis Gower, armed only with the claymore; thirty Drummonds, from the empire of Lady Gwydyr, as heiress of Perth, with claymore and targe; twelve Macdonell gentlemen, with their gillies, armed with claymore, targe, and long forest guns, headed by Glengarry; thirty Macgregors, under Sir Evan Macgregor; fifty Breadalbanes, under their Lord. The Strathfillan and Celtic Societies swelled the number of the men with the kilt. But those were amateur Highlanders; their legs were white, their cuticle was sensitive, their Erse was bastard, and their cannibalism was doubtful.

The site of the Review was near Prestonpans. Just seventy-seven years ago, the fathers of these bold fellows had on this spot struck the first blow against the Brunswicks. All nations are absurd. The Scotch, even the sober and sharpwitted sons of this frigid land, are proud of the expedition in 1745, as if it were not conceived in folly, and brought forth in blindness; as if the fragments of the British army that they dispersed were worthy of the name of opposition; or as if their highest success would not have been to load the throne with a contemptible hypocrite, at once a tyrant, and a slave, domineering over the liberties of England and Scotland, and kneeling at the footstool of France and Rome.

Seventy-seven years ago, I should have seen these plumes, now bending with such emulous loyalty, stiffened up in rebellion. Those pipes now screaming "God save great George," swelling with triumphant shrieks to James; and those iron visages, now smooth with

smiling allegiance, turning up their grim features to the Southern air, and smelling their quarry in the beeves and bullion of London; the Vathalla of the northern imagination, a glorious dream of combined slaughter and festivity, citizens swept before the claymore, and Lord Mayor's feasts every day in the year.

"Sit meæ sedes, utinam, senectæ :
Sit modus lasso maris, et viarum
Militiæque."

Still the Highlanders are worth preserving, as a curious specimen of the past. The true Caledonian breed, and to the full as useful and honourable a stock as sheep or bullocks. They are the last remnant and the finest of a military peasantry; and their spirit, intelligence, and manliness, their bold fictions, and their wild poetry, altogether form a race made to be the masters in field and by fireside. The clay-brained diligence of the English, and the blundering ambition of those sons of frolic and ill-luck the Irish, are made to be outwitted, outworked, and trampled down before them, and will be trampled down so forth and for ever.

But I will not allow the inordinate precedence in personal intrepidity, claimed for them by their lovers, and the lovers of romance. The kilt is at the bottom of this. The plaid plays its prestige before our eyes, and even the great living poet of Scotland has suffered his intelligent eye to be so bandaged by the tartan, as to pronounce them, par excellence, the brave. This is whim, fondness, fantasy. The material of courage, like the material of whisky, exists in every nation alike. The difference is in the form. Some prefer their corn in the shape of ardent spirits. Some like to send it in quietly through the system, and swallow it as bread. All nations have the same average intrepidity. The fire sometimes perishes to the eye; and the national ashes are tramplsd on by every heel but it is not dead, but sleepeth. Let the true summons come; let the wind of heaven once descend, and we shall have the blaze that consumes the trampler, and illustrates human nature for a time. When was oppression safe? The Spaniard, Lord of the World, in his petulance, trod down the Dutchman; the misty, groundeyed, mud-fed Dutchman bowed the

head patiently for a season. But nature was at last roused. His amphibiousness, with no more of resistance apparent about him than in the flounders of his native ditches, suddenly warmed; the water in his veins grew sanguineous; he rose out of his duckweed, and in fair fight, smote hip and thigh, the brilliant, hook-nosed, chivalric Spaniard. My conviction of this universal subsistence of national courage is so strong, that I doubt, on principle, the every-day outcry of foreign oppression. I hate slavery. But I feel, with the force of an instinct, that no nation, with virtue enough to desire honest freedom, will ever be suffered to linger in hopeless chains. There is a provision against it in the providence that makes generation crowd on generation. Thirty years change the face of society; the terrors of the Conquest are obliterated; the conquerors are dead; the chasm in the population has been ten times filled up; the place of the slaughter, and the tomb, is levelled by the steps of new millions. The enormous numerical strength of nations is a defence invincible. What would be the army of any European potentate, locked up in the midst of the population of Italy or England? Napoleon, in his last legacy of fraud and falsehood, has asserted, that with his two hundred thousand men, he could have reached London. He could not have reached ten miles from the spot where he planted his foot on the sand. The men of England in arms, ready to meet invasion, were 800,000; and these would have been reinforced to the last man of England, on the first sounding of an enemy's trumpet ; and those would have died to the last man, before Napoleon should have been their master.

When a true cause stirs a nation, even weakness becomes sudden strength, and strength weakness; some great interposition, which we, in our blindness, call accident, changes the tide of evil; a way is made through the waters, and the Oppressor, with all his chivalry, is cast out for the wolves and the vultures. Without some impulse worthy of uniting a people, some noble necessity, whole nations will not thus rise; and where they do not, there is demonstration that the cause is not worth the labour. I am thus convinced, that the Italians have not yet suffered oppression that deserves

the name; that the Irish are altogether doubtful of the reported connection between the English Cabinet and the late rotting of their potatoes; and that our fettered and swarthy slaves of Indostan, are happy in their assured muslin and rice. The sound of Slavonic, and the possibility of walking the streets of Milan without being poniarded, may be torture to the Italian, enamoured by the silver tongue and the atrocious customs of his country, but I will prove it, on the testimony of the most vivid and indignant Liberal among our freshest returns, that as much vermicelli is devoured; as many operas adored; as many gambling-tables crowded; and as many fiddlers trained, as in the freest and bloodiest times of the land.It is true there is an interdict on some national privileges. The Senate of

Venice cannot torture; the little republics cannot cut each other's throats; Pisa cannot starve Sienna; nor Lucca roast the municipality of Modena alive.

True injuries will make their cure. Fantastic injuries must not disturb the world by insurrection. It is wisdom to be inexorably deaf to the sorrows of professional Revolution. This is the head and front of the offendings of the age-the hypocrisy that deals in blood. I would grasp those manufacturers of mischief, domestic and foreign; those speculators in regicide; those insolent and subtle snuffers up of rebellion round the world; and pack them up in bales, and despatch them in the first ship bound for the Mediterranean, for the eternal use of the Emperor of Morocco.

Saturday, August 24.

The Grand Banquet was given today in the Parliament House. The hall is made for princely feasting; large, lofty, and with that ponderous antiquity of look, which belongs to the days,

"When men wore armour, and in crested helms

Sat at the Baron's board."

The three long tables that extended down the hall, were covered with plate, towering candelabra, viands inexhaustible, and all the high appurtenances of royal revelry. The King arrived at half past six, and entered the hall under an universal acclamation, and surrounded by a crowd of the chief of the feast. Then commenced the general assault on the luxuries that lay embattled before them, in more various lines than ever "Saracen or Christian knew." and for the first half hour, all homage was forgotten in the most imperious indulgence of our nature. At length the tumult was partially appeased, and men had time to look upon their Monarch, who, from his commanding position at the head of the hall, had a perfect and pleasant view of this vigorous melèe. His table was a crescent, heaped with urns, pillars, and other ornamental plate, and nobly surrounded by the Scottish nobility, and the principal law officers, &c. Their location will yet be a matter of dispute among antiquaries; but let me record it, dubious as it will be. On the right

of the King, sat in succession the Lord Provost, the Duke of Hamilton, the Duke of Argyle, the Marquis of Tweddale, the Lord Register, the Lord Advocate, the Duke of Dorset, Lord F. Conyngham; on his left, Lord Errol, as High Constable, the Duke of Atholl, the Marquis of Queensberry, the Earl of Morton, Lord Melville, the Lord President, the Lord Justice Clerk, Sir John Beresford, Sir Thomas Bradford, and Earl Cathcart. After dinner, the Lord Provost proposed the King's health, in a few words, well conceived, and impressively delivered. The whole assembly rose and drank the toast with a grand roar. A signal had been made to the Castle, and as his Majesty rose to return thanks, the salute began. The effect was incom. parably fine. The words of sovereignty are not trivial things, let them be spoken when they may. But here they were uttered in the midst of magnificent associations. Wherever the eye was turned, it fell upon splendour and dignity, upon memorable men in all the pompous diversities of official cos. tume; great magistrates, powerful nobles, and distinguished generals; every sight and sound conspiring to fill the mind with superb images, and in the midst of all stood a KING, uttering lofty and cheering words, followed at every pause by a peal of cannon, like the answer of distant thunder.

The King's speech was but of a few sentences, but those were kind, digni

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