The Proprietors of the North of England Magazine having effected an arrangement with those of Bradshaw's Journal, for carrying on the two periodicals in conjunction, we commence a New Series with the present Number, under a joint title.

We are bound in justice to acknowledge our obligations to the proprietors of the Journal, for their liberality on this occasion, a liberality commensurate to the zeal with which they have advocated the interests of morality and literature. It is such conduct which distinguishes the real lover of knowledge from the mere tradesman.

This union of the two periodicals will not necessitate any very important change in the course we have hitherto pursued. We shall still continue to advocate with unabated zeal the great cause of social and commercial freedom, and we confidently refer to the past as earnest for the future. The subject of Free Trade, we shall perhaps make somewhat less prominent than heretofore; not that our zeal has cooled, but because the truth of our principles being now all but universally acknowledged, elaborate arguments in their favour are rendered less necessary. We adhere to our first declaration. "Our Political Creed is simple. We are uncompromising Free Traders; and, therefore, determined enemies of the present system of Corn Laws, and of

those ill-judged and selfish restrictions upon Commerce, which are now paralysing the energies of the Nation. We are the advocates of all well-considered social and legislative reforms, and deeply attached to the principles of Civil and Religious Liberty. No man, however, shall be attacked by us because his political or religious denomination differs from ours. If our principles be worth anything, they should be defended by sound argument, and not by personalities. The great cause of human improvement is not one of sect or party, and to this cause we are earnestly, we may say exclusively, devoted. Our wish is, to be useful in our generation-to be labourers in the field of Popular Education-to identify ourselves with the many-to guide them in the knowledge of right and wrong, justice and injustice, good and evil-to benefit them in mind and body-and thus work out the principles of practical Christianity."

We repeat, with exultation, our grateful acknowledgments to such men as "Doctors Bowring, Taylor, Shepherd, and Satterthwaite ; Professors Newman and Phillips; Colonel Thompson, Richard Cobden, John Bright, Torrens Mc Cullagh, Hartley Coleridge, S. Robinson, Charles Swain, Samuel Bamford, W. B. Hodgson, Cowden Clarke, W. Weir, R. Hilditch, E. Molineux, P. Merz, Albert Smith, together with others, (including several fair contributors,) whom we are not at liberty to mention. These are names which would grace any Periodical, and such as few if any Magazines can boast of, while struggling in the first months of their existence." We have good hope of securing the assistance also of many of the principal contributors of the "Journal," and of its spirited editor; and have little doubt of being able to carry on the joint periodical with increased prosperity and usefulness.

We commence the present volume with the first of a series of papers by William Cooke Taylor, L.L.D. on the State and Progress of English Society in the Eighteenth Century; and with an historical tale, the scene of which is that interesting though but little known portion of Italy-Calabria,-by the author of the Hero of Vesuvius, and of an article on Dante, which have already graced our pages.

The increased size of our Magazine will enable us, without diminishing the space allotted to the more important subjects, to give a larger supply of light literature, and of notices interesting to the general reader. Some of our readers have complained that our Magazine is very small; it is complimentary to us that they should desire more, but a simple calculation would show them, that in proportion to its price, IT IS ONE of the largest

PUBLISHED.

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NOTES ON THE STATE AND PROGRESS OF ENGLISH SOCIETY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, &c.

INTRODUCTORY SECTION.

BY WILLIAM COOKE TAYLOR, L. L. D.

At the commencement of the eighteenth century, England had wrested from France the military and literary superiority which had thrown a delusive halo of glory round the early part of the reign of Louis XIV. It was said by the wits of the day, that the Augustan age had crossed the channel, and that England was about to enter on a new era of intellectual grandeur and imperial greatness. If we could for a moment place ourselves in the position of the speculative politicians, who tried to penetrate futurity at a time when Addison's poem of the Campaign was believed to be "above all Greek, above all Roman fame," and when it was deemed little short of treason, to doubt that Marlborough would dictate the terms of peace in the halls of the Louvre, or the saloons of Versailles; and then compare the actual results with our anticipations,-the world could not supply a greater contrast between facts and plausible expectations. We have before us Miss Aikin's life of Addison, rich in new and original matter, illustrating the opening of the last century ;* and we have the new correspondence of Walpole, and the letters of George Selwyn and his cotemporaries, describing a march of mind and events which led through the most devious and tortuous paths, to nothing that an uninspired prophet could have predicted, and to every thing which he would have pronounced impossible.

.*

The explanation of the circumstances which produced the peculiar state of English society in the reign of Anne, must be sought so far back as the commencement of the dynasty of the Tudors. During the wars of the Roses, the old feudal and Norman aristocracy of England had been nearly destroyed; the few powerful families that remained were not favourably disposed towards the new dynasty; and it became an object of Tudor policy to create a new aristocracy. To the execution of this task Henry VII was unequal; he was too cold, too prudent, and too penurious; his son and successor was equal to the

* Published by Longman and Co.

Published by Bentley.

innovation, but unfit for its management,-a slave of sensual passion, imprudent almost to the extreme of rashness, and lavish beyond the ordinary bounds of extravagance: the great constitutional change, from which his father had shrunk, he undertook without even bestowing a thought on its result or import. His quarrel with the pope precipitated his measures; all the old families of Norman descent were attached to the ancient creed; and, to counterbalance their opposition to the king's religion, it was necessary to have a king's nobility. Titles, without land or property, would have been supremely ridiculous. Henry VIII was not very scrupulous in the means he employed for endowing his new aristocracy with land, and he did so by converting a legal fiction into a fearful reality.

The property of all land, according to the original Teutonic constitutions, is vested in the nation, and all landholders were bound to certain duties and obligations, the neglect of which was punished by forfeiture of the estate. The feudal system introduced the principle, that these duties and obligations should be rendered personal to the sovereign as the head and representative of the nation. Forfeiture of estate on failure of allegiance was a necessary result of this tenure. Henry VII applied the principle very cautiously, for he saw that too sweeping an enforcement of the law of treason would introduce an uncertainty into the proprietorship of land, very injurious to national tranquillity. Henry VIII was equally temperate in forfeitures of estates; his seizure of the church and monastic lands, on the refusal of the pope to cancel his marriage with Catharine of Arragon, supplied him with a sufficiency of lands to endow a new aristocracy; he granted the abbey lands to his creatures and courtiers with a lavish profusion, proportionate to the disgracefulness of the services for which they were given in payment. Titles and estates were the rewards of those who gratified the sanguinary, the lustful, or the rapacious dispositions of the tyrant; and if the old aristocracy, founded by the Norman William, may be said to have rested on the plunder of a nation for its base, still their wealth and honours were associated with recollections of the battle-field, and their usurpations veiled by the delusive halo of military glory. But the new aristocracy commenced by the Tudors had no claim whatever to the respect of the nation; the bequests of the pious, and the property of the poor had been seized under the least plausible pretences to form their estates; their rank was the reward of servility to vice; their titles were earned by unscrupulous prostitution