"At Sparta, the poets could not publish any "thing without a license; and all immoral "writings were prohibited. A very wise man* "said he believed, if a man were permitted "to make all the ballads, he need not care who "made the laws of a nation. The ancient legislators did not pretend to reform the manners of the people without the help of the "poets."

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"The grave Romans did not allow a person ❝of character to dance ! It was a saying "among them, no one dances unless he is "drunk or mad."

"In the old English laws, we find punish"ments for wanton behaviour, as touching the "breasts of women, &c.-By the ancient laws "of France, the least indecency of behaviour "to a free woman, as squeezing the hand,

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touching the arm or breast, &c. was punish"able by fire."+ What odd, sour, crabbed notions must have prevailed in those days! Not squeeze a lady's hand! No--a much more agreeable latitude of behaviour is allowed at present we are as much improved in our notions of gallantry as of liberty. The polite

* Fletcher of Saltoun.

† Spelman's Glossary.

reader will not suspect me of a design to hold up the shocking manners of our ancestors as models of imitation in the present day; I only mention them to shew what a wide difference there may be in the notions of decency and propriety at different times!

If a stranger, on entering a large town, London for example, should be struck with that immense number of prostitutes, "who elbow us "aside in all our crowded streets," and not well knowing how to account for this enormous abuse, should apply to a disciple of the modern, school for some explanation of it, he would probably be told with great gravity, That it was a necessary consequence of the progress of popula tion, and the superior power of that principle over the increase in the means of subsistence.If Mr. Malthus, contented to follow in the track of common sense, and not smitten with the love of dangerous novelty, had endeavoured to trace that torrent of vice and dissipation which threatens to bear down every principle of virtue and decency among us to the chief sources pointed out by other writers, to the particular institutions of society, to the prevalence of luxury, the inequality of conditions, the facility of gratifying the passions from the power of

offering temptation, and inducements to accept it, the disproportion between the passions excited in individuals, and their situation in life, to books, to education, the progress of arts, the influence of neighbouring example, &c. these are all causes, which, as they are arbitrary and variable, seem as if they could be counteracted or modified by other causes; they are the work of man, and what is the work of man it seems in the power of man to confirm or alter. We see distinctly the source of the grievance, and try to remedy it: hope remains, the will acts with double energy, the spirit of virtue is not broken. Our vices grow out of other vices, out of our own passions, prejudices, folly, and weakness: there is nothing in this to make us proud of them, or to reconcile us to them; even though we may despair, we are not confounded. We still have the theory of virtue left: we are not obliged to give up the distinction between good and evil even in imagination; there is some little good which we may at least wish to do. Man in this case retains the character of a free agent; he stands chargeable with his own conduct, and a sense of the consequences of his own presumption or blindness may arouse in him feelings that may in some measure counteract their worst effects;

he may regret what he cannot help: the life, the pulse, the spring of morality is not dead in him; his moral sense is not quite extinguished. But our author has chosen to stagger the minds of his readers by representing vice and misery as the necessary consequences of an abstract principle, of a fundamental law of our nature, on which nothing can be effected by the human will. This principle follows us wherever we go; if we fly into the uttermost parts of the earth, it is there: whether we turn to the right or the left, we cannot escape from it. O rather for that warning voice, that once cried aloud, Insensés qui vous plaignez sans cesse de la nature, apprenez que tous vos maux vous viennent de vous! As however I deny the sufficiency of our author's all-pervading principle, I may be required to point out more particularly what I conceive to be the real and determining causes of the decay of manners. I do not know that I can mention any that do not come under the heads already alluded to, but if I must give a short answer, I should say,-Great towns, great schools, dress, and novels. These things are not regulated exactly by the size of the earth, and yet must be allowed to have some influence on manners. To instance only in the two last. Is it to be wondered at that a young raw igno

rant girl, who is sent up from the country as a milliner's or mantua-maker's apprentice, and stowed into a room with eight or ten others, who snatch every moment they can spare from caps and bonnets, and sit up half the night to read all the novels they can get, and as soon they have finished one, send for another, whose heart, in the course of half a year, has been pierced through with twenty beaux on paper, who has been courted, seduced, run away with, married and put to bed under all the fine names that the imagination can invent to as many fine gentlemen, who has sighed and wept with so many heroes and heroines that her tears and sighs have at last caused in her a defluction of the brain, and a palpitation of the heart at the sight of every man, whose fancy is love-sick, and her head quite turned, should be unable to resist the first coxcomb of real flesh and blood, who in shining boots and a velvet collar accosts her in the shape of a lover, but who has no thoughts of marrying her, because if he were to take this imprudent step, he must give up his shining boots and velvet collar, and the respect they procure him in the world? Zaleucus ordained that no woman should dress herself gorgeously, unless she was a prostitute. If I were a law-giver, and chose to meddle in such mat