selves upon the protection of the magistrates, who immediately came over to Cornwall, investigated the complaint, and now, at length, the attorney, who had known frequent instances of the overseer's tyranny, had frequently rebuked him for them, and had redressed the sufferers, but who still had dared to abuse my confidence so grossly as to continue him in his situation, upon this public exposure thought proper to dismiss him. Yet, while all this was going on-while my negroes were groaning under the iron rod of this petty tyrant-and while the public magistrature was obliged to interfere to protect them from his cruelty-my attorney had the insolence and falsehood to write me letters, filled with assurances of his perpetual vigilance for their welfare of their perfect good treatment and satisfaction; nor, if I had not come myself to Jamaica, in all probability should I ever have had the most distant idea how abominably the poor creatures had been misused. 'I have made it my business to mix as much as possible among the negroes, and have given them every encouragement to repose confidence in me; and I have uniformly found all those, upon whom any reliance can be placed, unite in praising the humanity of their present superintendent. Instantly on his arrival, he took the whole power of punishment into his own hands: he forbade the slightest interference in this respect of any person whatever on the estate, white or black; nor have I been able to find as yet any one negro who has any charge of harsh treatment to bring against him. However, having been already so grossly deceived, I will never again place implicit confidence in any person whatever in a matter of such importance.' In all this we find nothing to wonder at. Absenteeism all the world over is the greatest of evils that can befall a labouring population; and it is impossible not to admit that if the West India proprietors had generally visited their estates in person, and endeared themselves, as Lewis did, to their dependents, it would have been a hard matter indeed for all the fanatics, backed by all the liberals, and all the East India sugar-dealers, to consummate their ruin. These admissions, however, in no respect touch the real national question as to the West Indies. The proprietors there were no worse than many hundreds of the English and Scotch, many thousands of their Irish compeers; and we only hope these latter personages will at length take warning by what has befallen the extravagantly abused, though not guiltless colonists. It is most lamentable to observe the extent to which aristocratical emigration is at this particular time going. We happen to know that the letters of credit granted to English continental travellers by the two principal banking-houses in the west end of London, exceed this year, both in number and value, by more than a half, those of any preceding year! There are so many verses in Mr. Lewis's volume, that we ought not not perhaps to close our article without another specimen of them. Take, then, one of the shortest : < THE HOURS. 'Ne'er were the zephyrs known disclosing Sat four and twenty lovely maids. Those lovely maids were called "the Hours," False Love, how simple souls thou cheatest! An Hour once fled, has fled for ever, And all the rest shall smile no more!'-p. 7. These are graceful stanzas quite equal to any vers de société of our time-but there are more ambitious things included in this volume. There occurs, for example, a complete poem of more than one thousand lines-written in the course of the voyage homeward in 1816, and all in the short space of three days. So hasty a production may be expected to show abundance of errors and inaccuracies; yet The Isle of Devils' appears to us, on the whole, the best poem, of any considerable length, that Mr. Lewis ever wrote, And what is his best? Why, certainly, in poetry, not very much : -pretty conceits airily tricked out in what are called songs; in his more elaborate efforts melodious, skilfully-varied versification, and here and there a line of such happy ease in construction, that it is sure to linger on the ear; but a slender command either of imagery or of passion. As a poet, Lewis is to a Byron what a scene-painter is to a Hobbima. He produces a startling grotesque of outline, and some grand massy contrasts of light and shade; but he has no notion of working in detail-no atmosphere, no middle-tints to satisfy a daylight spectator. The subject of The Isle of Devils' would, in Lord Byron's hands, have at least rivalled the effect of Manfred;' from Lewis it comes only in the shape of a sketchy extravaganza, in which no feeling is seriously grappled with, and a score of magnificent situations are, to all intents and purposes, except that of filling the ear with a succession of delicious sounds, thrown away. The truth is, that though Sir W. Scott talks of the high imagination' of Lewis, it was only in his very first flights that he ever was able to maintain a really enthusiastic elevation-and he did so more successfully in the prose of The Monk' than in the best of his early verses. That vein was a thin one, and soon worked out. Had he lived, in all likelihood, he would have turned in earnest to prose composition; and we think no reader of his West India Journals can doubt that, if he had undertaken a novel of manners in mature age, he would have cast immeasurably into the shade even the happiest efforts of his boyish romance. Mr. Lewis died at sea, on his way home from Jamaica, in 1818; and it may be right to mention that, according to Sir Walter Scott's information, he fell a sacrifice to a very strange whim that of persisting, in spite of all advice, to take daily emetics as a preventive against sea-sickness.' ART. V.-An Inquiry into the State of Slavery amongst the Romans, from the earliest Period till the Establishment of the Lombards in Italy. By William Blair, Esq. Edinburgh. 1833. 12mo. pp. 301. THIS HIS valuable little treatise belongs to a class of no common occurrence in our recent literature: it is an extremely sensible and scholar-like inquiry into a subject of great interest in classical antiquity, or rather in the general history of mankind. The author is as modest in its pretensions, as he has been laborious and intelligent in the execution of his work. Every one knows that in the free states of antiquity a large proportion of the population, the domestic servants, in general the artisans, and in the days of Roman splendour and opulence far the greater part of the agricultural labourers were, in the strictest sense, slaves. On the condition of this part of the community, the working classes, the people, according to the prevailing language-history, essentially aristocratic in its nature, has not condescended to preserve almost any authentic records. More than once indeed, particularly in the great Servile Servile war, this despised and degraded race forced itself with fearful violence upon the general attention, and claimed a place in the sanguinary annals of the civil wars. It is a remarkable illustration of the haughty feelings of these ancient republicans, that for a long time they would hardly stoop to acknowledge the public danger, even though Spartacus, after having revenged on one of the consuls the defeat of his colleague, and having appeased the manes of his slaughtered brethren by the sacrifice of three hundred Romans, threatened Rome itself at the head of a hundred and twenty thousand men! Pride, no doubt, mingled with alarm, when after this disastrous war had lasted for three years, no candidate appeared in the trembling comitia to assume a command, in which victory over runaway slaves and desperate gladiators would confer no triumph, defeat would be attended with tenfold disgrace. Where history thus maintains a disdainful silence, the state of the slave population of Rome can only be laboriously gleaned from incidental notices in the poets, and other writers who have given us an insight into the private and social life of the masters of the world. No native Italian comedy having survived, and, as Mr. Blair has justly observed, Plautus for the most part, and Terence altogether, confining themselves to Grecian manners,-(if indeed their plays are not mere translations from the Greek,)—we are deficient in that branch of literature which is most fertile in information upon the state of slavery in Greece. Even the law would scarcely deign to notice this outcast and pariah class in the Corpus Juris, observes Mr. Blair, there is no title de servis.' This must however be understood with considerable reservation : many regulations and edicts were issued by the emperors relating to the condition of slaves: in the time of Hadrian they were taken under the immediate and paternal protection of the law; and from that period the statutes abound in regulations respecting the sale, the treatment, we must not say the rights, of slaves. The first important question is the proportion of the slave to the free population of Rome. Unfortunately, notwithstanding the learning and sagacity which have been devoted to the subject, from Hume and Wallace to the invaluable researches of Mr. Fynes Clinton on this as well as on other points of classical antiquity, considerable difficulty still prevails as to the class of free citizens comprehended in the different censuses. The number of slaves is a matter of still more obscure and doubtful inference. It does not appear,' says our author, that permanent public registers of slaves were kept; but annual or frequent returns of their slaves, as of other property, were given in the census by all persons liable to taxation." Mr. Blair appears to have forgotten that from the period of the triumph over Perseus, and the subjugation of the Macedonian Macedonian kingdom, the citizens of Rome had been exempt from direct taxation. Slaves, like other personal property, would be liable to the tax on legacies and inheritances, which Augustus extorted from the reluctant senate, and there was an import duty on slaves, as on other foreign commodities; but the Italian subjects of the empire were long free from the burthens either of a land, a capitation, or a property assessment. Mr. Blair calculates, on probable grounds, that in the earlier periods of the republic, from the expulsion of the kings to the capture of Corinth, (B. C. 146,) the proportion might stand at one slave to every free Roman. The increasing opulence and luxury, the foreign wars which were perpetually pouring in thousands of captives into Italy, and, at a later period, an active and enterprising slave-trade, must have raised the proportion most considerably. He would estimate it, from the period of the fall of Corinth to the reign of Alexander Severus, A. D. 222-235, as high as three slaves to one free man. Among the arguments adduced to support this estimate, which greatly exceeds that of Gibbon and most modern writers, our author adduces the following remarkable instances of the more than oriental magnificence of Rome. Some rich individuals are said to have possessed ten thousand, and even twenty thousand, of their fellow-creatures. Pompey's freedman, Demetrius, had a great many-those of Crassus were very numerous, and formed a large part of his fortune; his band of architects and masons alone exceeded five hundred. Scaurus possessed above four thousand domestic, and as many rustic slaves. In the reign of Augustus, a freedman, who had sustained great losses during the civil wars, left four thousand one hundred and sixteen slaves, besides other property. The household of Pedanius Secundus, præfect of Rome under Nero, was, on a melancholy occasion, found to consist of four hundred slaves. When the wife of Apuleius gave up the lesser part of her estate to her son, four hundred slaves formed one of the items surrendered. Slaves always composed a great part of the moveable property of individuals, and were one of the chief signs of opulence: we learn from the laws respecting marriage, that they formed the chief articles of ladies' dowries. A law passed by Augustus against the excessive manumission of slaves by testament, forbidding any one to bequeath liberty to more than one-fifth of all his slaves, fixes the maximum to be so freed, under any circumstances, at one hundred; whence we may reasonably infer, that five hundred was not an extraordinary number of slaves to be held by one owner. It was, at all times, after the introduction of luxury, fashionable to go abroad attended by a great train of slaves. Horace mentions such a troop consisting of two hundred, and considers ten a very small retinue. At the beginning of the empire, the usual number of personal attendants must have been large; for we have a regulation of Augustus to prohibit exiles from carrying with them more than twenty slaves. Besides, the maritime VOL. L. NO. C. 2 D |