er remarked, that people who live the most by themselves
reflect the most upon others; and that he who lives surrounded by the
million never thinks of any but the one individual--himself?

Philosophers--moralists-historians, whose thoughts, labours, lives, have
been devoted to the consideration of mankind, or the analysis of public
events, have usually been remarkably attached to solitude and seclusion.
We are indeed so linked to our fellow-beings, that, where we are not
chained to them by action, we are carried to and connected with them by
thought.

I have just quitted the observations of my favourite Bolingbroke upon
history. I cannot agree with him as to its utility. The more I
consider, the more I am convinced that its study has been upon the
whole pernicious to mankind. It is by those details, which are always
as unfair in their inference as they must evidently be doubtful in their
facts, that party animosity and general prejudice are supported and
sustained. There is not one abuse--one intolerance--one remnant of
ancient barbarity and ignorance existing at the present day, which is
not advocated, and actually confirmed, by some vague deduction from the
bigotry of an illiterate chronicler, or the obscurity of an uncertain
legend. It is through the constant appeal to our ancestors that we
transmit wretchedness and wrong to our posterity: we should require,
to corroborate an evil originating in the present day, the clearest and
most satisfactory proof; but the minutest defence is sufficient for an
evil handed down to us by the barbarism of antiquity. We reason from
what even in old tunes was dubious, as if we were adducing what was
certain in those in which we live. And thus we have made no sanction
to abuses so powerful as history, and no enemy to the present like the
past.

FROM THE LADY EMILY MANDEVILLE TO MRS. ST. JOHN.

At last, my dear Julia, I am settled in my beautiful retreat. Mrs.
Dalton and Lady Margaret Leslie are all whom I could prevail upon to
accompany me. Mr. Mandeville is full of the corn-laws. He is
chosen chairman to a select committee in the House. He is murmuring
agricultural distresses in his sleep; and when I asked him occasionally
to come down here to see me, he started from a reverie, and exclaimed,
"--Never, Mr. Speaker, as a landed proprietor; never will I consent to
my own ruin."

My boy, my own, my beautiful companion, is with me. I wish you could see
how fast he can run,