name, and another professorship has been established at Oxford by one of them. The money-lenders expected to increase their influence by the Reform of Parliament, and laboured hard by personal exertions as well as pecuniary contributions; but they owe their influence principally to their success in rendering the aristocracy blind to their interests and rights as landowners; the result is, that some of the finest estates of staunch adherents of Lord Liverpool have been transferred to the money lenders. Have the friends of Lord Grey been more fortunate? A simple narrative of facts is able fully to controvert the false maxims which, under the specious title of political economy, form a part of public and general education. By this means I have compelled Professor Senior to abandon one of the Liverpool maxims, which formed the basis of his articles in the Quarterly Review, hostile to the agricultural interest. I have made him acknowledge in his Drummond Lectures the true principle of agricultural prosperity, the increase in the value of labour.

It was by augmenting the demand for labour, our small-note currency increased the consumption and raised the price of corn. The truth of this the majority of the labourers throughout the greater part of England are able to testify. This digression I considered necessary to point out the importance of the purpose for which this narrative is undertaken. Facts are the proper weapons to oppose to argument founded on ambiguous abstract maxims. It is therefore necessary to mention that Queen Elizabeth did make a charge for the workmanship of the shillings which constituted her pound sterling. She issued only sixty shilings in exchange for the 12 ounces of silver, which she coined into sixty-two shillings. Charles II. the founder of the Royal Society, abandoned this seignorage, probably at the instigation of some of his brother philosophers; and the value of the shillings which, until the year 1816, continued to constitute the pound sterling, had ceased to be increased by the stamp when the charge for it was discontinued.

This may be considered as an alteration of the standard of our measures of value; the cost price of our money

in ballion, which is the only principle whereby the uniformity of its value can be strictly maintained, was lessened to the extent of one-thirtieth part, by the abandonment of the seignorage. But if the value of our money ceased to be raised by the stamp, it continued to be sustained by it; this fact, which completely refutes his maxim, was acknowledged by Mr. Huskisson to be true with our gold coin, which did not cease to be a legal tender until it had undergone a dimunition of one per cent. Upon the same principle, a light shilling was always worth as much as a heavy one us coin, as long as it was a legal tender-this did not escape the notice of Mr. Locke. It was necessary for Mr. Huskisson to consider our gold coin as bullion, or merchandise, whose workmanship had no value, and, without any regard to truth, to call it our sole legal measure; because, if the shilling was a legal measure, the pound note was not depreciated so long as twenty shillings could be obtained for it, which was the case during the whole period of the Bank Restriction Act.

At the time of its commencement, our light silver coin was a legal tender in all payments, as the Act of 1774, which restricted the use of it to payments not exceeding 25l., had been allowed to expire in 1783. The noble author of the Letters on the Coins seems to have recommended that measure, and wished to have it considered as an acknowledgment that the standard of our currency had been transferred from silver to gold, a delusion he strained to establish by the most futile reasoning. This alteration never was established by law until an act was passed in 1816, making gold our sole legal tender in all payments exceeding forty shillings, and until finally the circulation of all notes payable in silver was prohibited. The abolition of our ancient standard measure of value, is one of the grossest impositions that was ever practised by any minister upon the credulity of a nation. It is surprising that the falsehoods which were asserted for the purpose, should not have been immediately and generally perceived; it is mortifying to hear those falsehoods repeated for the purpose of silencing every remonstrance, and rejecting every petition. By as

senting to his assumptions, Lord Western and Mr. Attwood justified the personal abuse with which Mr. Huskisson represented them, as recommending robbery when they asked redress for the real wrongs of their constituents. They calumniated Mr. Pitt's measure, while they asked for a renewal of it; and attributed to your bill, which brought it to a termination, all the evils occasioned by Lord Liverpool's alteration of the standard. The coinage act of 1816, was the keystone of the edifice to make room for which Lord Liverpool laboured so assiduously to demolish the chief pillar of Mr. Pitt's reputation as a financier; it was the principal means of making our paper currency appear to be excessive, after it had carried us safely through the war.

All the diminution in the value of property which ensued, appears to Lord Liverpool to be only the evanescence of fallacious wealth acquired under a fraudulent system. The increase of our population, cultivation, and commerce, he called over-population, overproduction, and overtrading; these terms supplied him with a ready answer to all complaints. The alteration of the standard was particularly assisted by Mr. Huskisson's asserting that the act of 1798 made gold our sole legal tender; he said (p. 6), " I assume as admitted, that in Great Britain gold is the scale to which all prices are referred; and since the 39th of the King, the sole legal tender, except for payments below 251." He afterwards spoke of it as being in force when the restriction commenced, saying, "It made no alteration in the 39th of the King." The fact is, that in 1798, by means of a great increase in our exportation of merchandise, to which an abundant paper currency had materially contributed, as Mr. Pitt foretold it would, the value of our money in exchange with that of other countries, had risen above par, because they purchased, and had to pay for a greater amount of our goods than we purchased of their goods: the difference which we had to receive beyond what we had to pay, was sent us in bullion, which became a cheaper remittance 6

than bills of exchange on London, when they were selling at more than five per cent. above the par value of our money. Therefore the large importation of silver made it fall to the mint price, and 62 of our shillings, worn down below the weight of 10 ounces, became equal in value to 12 ounces of silver of equal fineness. This was a proper opportunity for a re-coinage. But Lord Liverpool, who was Chairman of the Committee, mixed up with his report a recommendation of the mischievous transfer of our standard, which was afterwards accomplished by his son in 1816, in conformity with a crude suggestion of Adam Smith. This whim, together with his animadversions on our paper currency, caused his report to be rejected.

In the mean time, as a preliminary for the re-coinage, the act of 1774 was revived; but the avowed object of it, imprest on the title, was only to prevent the importation of light silver coin; it imposed no limitation on the use or circulation of full-weight silver. It declared a pound troy to be the proper weight of 62 shillings, and they were not to circulate at a less weight for payments exceeding 251. This restraint upon silver coin was not so severe as that to which gold was subject. How then can it be said it gave a preference to the latter, and made it our standard or principal measure? It was necessary to check the importation and circulation of light silver, because government would have to give full-weight coin for it after the recoinage. By this practice, the government had constantly sustained the value of the shilling as coin, and maintained the par of our exchange with foreign countries, in which 62 shillings were always computed as equal in value to a pound of bullion, because this was the cost price below which their quantity could not be increased. Sixtytwo shillings could not be obtained at the Mint for less than 12 ounces of silver; accordingly this became their value in bullion, whenever it was necessary for other countries to purchase them with bullion, as was the case in the year 1798.

Brook-street,

MR. URBAN, A COPY of a Letter of mine, to the Archbishop of Canterbury, having found its way, without my knowledge, into your Magazine, I owe it to the gentleman," the Editor of Lowth," as he calls himself, as well as to myself, to notice the observations which he has made respecting those "facts which involve,' he says, more or less directly every statement of importance in that letter."

I have stated that the copy of my letter was sent to you without my permission, because the second head of the Editor's complaint may well have arisen, in part, from the word "swear" having been printed in capital letters. This would not have been the case had the copy been furnished by me. For neither in the original letter, nor in the copy which any gentleman received from me, was that word, or any part of the sentence to which it belongs, scored under, or distinguished any way to show that peculiar stress was laid upon it: for the truth is, I designed only to convey the impressions which I had from the various statements of the Editor, both in writing and in print, that he felt perfect confidence in his own opinion respecting the Bishop's handwriting. I had not before me at the time the sentence quoted by the Editor: and 1 readily admit that I ought to have used the word "speak" instead of "swear;" and with this substitution of that one word for the other, my statement will be quite correct. I must add, that I said the words in no invidious sense; and the Editor is undoubtedly entitled to any benefit that he can derive from this correction of my statement.

On the other four heads of complaint I cannot give the Editor the same satisfaction; and the statement which he compels me to make will be painful to me, considering the station he holds as a Minister of the Church of England, and not very pleasant to him.

1. He complains that I informed the Archbishop that he had asserted in print, that from twenty-five to thirty volumes of MS. annotations had been sold by auction by the Bishop's representatives. He should, to quote me accurately, have stated, that I reGENT. MAG. VOL. III.

presented him as "having asserted (to me) as he has since done in print." I am further accused of representing him as having said, "that these two MS. volumes of Sermons might have been amongst them." He then refers to a printed letter, to show that "the number specified by him was eight lots, and that no mention was made of the two (vols. of) Sermons, as supposed to have existed among them; on the contrary, they are distinctly described as composed exclusively of "annotations and remarks." I will now state my authority for having so informed the Archbishop; and lest it should appear incredible that an Editor should so soon have forgotten what he has written as well as printed, I have shown to the printer of your miscellany, the passage in the Editor's letter, which I am about to quote. On the 22d of April, 1834, the Editor sent to me a letter, containing the following statement:

"You say you know that nothing would have tempted the Bishop's descendants to have parted with such documents. Here, again, I can by no means coincide with your belief. Why else did the Bishop's family submit by public auction at Mr. Evans's, in the year 1823, not only the general library of their ancestor, but his own copies of his own publications, &c.; and what is most of all to the purpose, from twenty to thirty volumes of MS. annotations and re

marks, drawn up in the course of his reading, in the handwriting of the Bishop himself. Mr. Thorpe's Catalogue for the following year was full of the spoils, printed and MS. collected from that sale, and others were dispersed among other booksellers. Does this look like that tenacious regard for the Bishop's remains of which you speak? Does it not rather afford by no means an improbable surmise, that the Sermons in question may have escaped from the hands of the Bishop's family not altogether without their consent?"

So much for what the Editor has written to me. What has he stated in print? Why, in the second page of the Memoir, he says, in a note: "It is a circumstance much to be regretted, that a variety of unpublished MSS. (not MS. annotations) both of the Bishop and his father were sold by auction, together with the family library, in 1823." He 3 D

further states, in the printed letter to which he himself refers, that these MS. annotations consisted of eight lots. Can any man doubt, who reads these MS. and printed statements of the Editor, that they relate to the same MS. annotations and MSS., and to the same sale? If I had charged the Editor with a discrepancy between his written and printed statement, the one describing volumes, the other lots, should I not have been told that I was guilty of a most unworthy quibble; for that the larger number of volumes might well have been comprised, as is usual, in the smaller number of lots? Am I then to be charged with asserting falsely that the number stated by the Reverend Editor to be sold, was from twenty-five to thirty volumes of MS. annotations? And even his assertions in writing and in print confined "exclusively to annotations and remarks?" And is it true that these two MS. volumes of Sermons were not mentioned? But to show how well founded was this surmise of the Editor, that these MS. Sermons might "have escaped not altogether without the consent of the family," he has made it necessary for me to expose the following statement of his in the same letter to me. He says, "The Sermons in question were offered for public sale by auction at Mr. Sotheby's, in 1830 or 1831." It is scarcely credible, but I have been informed and believe, that each of these assertions is an error, arising, no doubt, from some strange misinformation; that they were not sold by public auction, but privately; nor at Mr. Sotheby's, but at Mr. Baynes's; nor in 1830 or 1831, but in the year 1819. It is this last error which alone is of importance, because that year preceded by four years the sale of any one volume of the Bishop's books, his son being then living, and destroys altogether the Editor's invidious surmise; and it shows the looseness of this gentleman's assertions, when casting imputations on others. I have also been told, and believe, that the price put by Mr. Baynes on these MS. volumes of Sermons, was ten times less than he would have required of a purchaser, if he had concurred with the Editor in thinking them the Sermons of Bishop Lowth.

3. With respect to the third comlaint, I find, by the Editor 's own

showing, that I have nothing to correct. I presume I am not to be called to account for what he is pleased to denominate a "typographical oversight." For he asserts, with a boldness that must surprise those who possess his volume, that the titles are not cancelled. And to prove this assertion, he refers to the text of his Memoir in page 2, in which it is narrated, neither in the form nor character of a title, that, of the ten Sermons, the former six were delivered at St. James's church, London; the latter four in that of St. Martin's-in-theFields; a statement with the omission of which I never charged the Editor. The title prefixed to the MS. Sermons is admitted to be "Sermons preached at St. Martin's-in-the-Fields (or St. James's) by Robert Lowth, D.D., 1767." But the title prefixed to the Ten Sermons in the usual place, the blank page which precedes them, is "Ten Sermons of Bishop Lowth, now first printed from the original Manuscripts," omitting altogether the date 1767, and the other suspicious circumstances attending such a designation of a bishop. I used therefore the word cancelled, I conceive, quite correctly. And I should feel myself justified in repeating my assertion as far as respects any copy of the volume which I have yet seen. Indeed, I called at the respectable publishers of this volume, desiring to see a copy, and telling my reason; and the copy produced was, like every other I have seen, without the correction of this strange "typographical oversight," which is of so much importance with respect to the genuineness of these Sermons.

But the Rev. Editor thinks it important to his case to represent me as incompetent to form a judgment on comparative handwriting, because the title-pages to these MS. volumes are quite evidently written by a different person. Now I do not pretend to any particular skill in this respectfortunately it was not required in this case-but I have no where asserted that the title and the rest of the MSS. were written by the same person, or that all the pages of the MSS. were written by the same hand; but what I have maintained and still maintain successfully, as 1 know, is, that not one word in those volumes was written by Bishop Lowth. And is it the

Editor who reproaches me with not seeing the dissimilarity of writing in these volumes, when I have it under his own hand that they" were prepared for the press by the Bishop's own hand," and when, neither in writing nor in print, has he alluded to any difference of writing in different parts of the MSS.? And was it quite correct, after being aware of this circumstance, not to state plainly that the assertion that the Sermons were preached any where by Bishop Lowth, was not in his handwriting?

4. In his fourth complaint the Editor states, that I represent him as having first suppressed the date, and then assigned the period of the Sermons to Bishop Lowth's possession of the See of London." The words first and then are used not correctly, and I know not for what purpose. A reference to my letter will show that I narrated the substance of what had passed between the Editor and myself, and laid stress on his assertion, that the Sermons were preached by the Bishop while in the See of London. And this assertion I made first (if that is of any consequence), and before I referred at all to the date or the omission of it. I then contrasted the assertion of the MSS. that the Sermons were preached in 1767, when the Bishop held the See of Oxford, with the Editor's assertion to me, which was as follows, in a letter written on the 14th April, 1834: "With respect to the portion now first printed, it consists of ten Sermons, preached by the Bishop while in the See of London, at two of the principal churches of the metropolis." These two statements appeared to me then, as they do now, quite irreconcileable with each other; and either the one or the other could not be true. But the Editor has, it seems, now contradicted in print his own assertion to me in writing, by adding to the correction of his " typographical oversight" the words" while his Lordship held the See of Oxford." So he now compels me to state, that the contradiction is no longer between his assertions and those of the MSS., but between the Editor's letter to me and his corrected statement to the public. Can both his own assertions be true? Are either of them so?

5. The Editor lastly complains, that

a

I" inform His Grace that the Rev. Peter Hall has represented himself to be a sounder theologian than Bishop Lowth." I have made no such statement. In this case again the Editor does not choose to quote me accurately. My statement was, and is, not that he " represented himself,” but that he " evidently supposes himself to be." Whether this be or be not a fair inference, I leave others to judge; but when a gentleman, Theologian by profession, pronounces judgment, and in the tone assumed by this comparatively young divine, on another, almost as eminent as himself, as deficient both in theology and in faith, can it be supposed that he thinks himself equally deficient in either? I find the Editor's work in so few hands, that I think it necessary, in consequence of this last complaint, to give a specimen to those who may not see his volume, of the Christian humility with which this Rev. Gentleman "judges another man's servant." In the same page in which he professes" to do tardy justice to the memory of one of the most famous of the sons of Wykeham, by rescuing his forgotten relics," he uses the following words: “Of the fundamental doctrine of Christian faith, the glory of God, manifested in the salvation of his people by the blood of Christ, we hear but too little, even in his best and latest sermons!" Is it credible that this should be stated by a Divine who has never seen one more of his Sermons than the eight which he has re-published, and which were all delivered on occasions of Charities, Visitations, Assizes, the 30th of January, and Ash-Wednesday; though he has published, as the Bishop's, ten spurious sermons, from which he deduces the same heavy imputations. He immediately follows the passage last quoted, by the ensuing words. "A profound veneration for the sublimity of the Word of God, especially the mysterious and solemn language of prophecy, may be sometimes found to exalt the capacities of the mind, without either purifying the corruptions of human will, or softening the asperities of human temper.” 1 say nothing of this most extraordinary opinion, but I must observe that this

asperity of temper" is thus insi