if not much worse; but it was no proof of the depth of the Squire's understanding, at he trusted a fool with a secret-a fool, as Shakspeare

says,

"As gross

As ignorance made drunk.”

The natural consequence would be that it must be too big for his little chest. If the Squire's friends could not have accommodated him with the money, he might have borrowed it from Dunstan, or any other person, as gentlemen in every situation of life find a necessity of doing at some period of their lives; and if he had not said that it was wanted to pay a debt contracted by Mrs. Fitzwaddle-there would have been nothing in it. The publication did the Squire no injury; on the contrary, it might have been of service to him, if it had taught him that he who trusts a fool with a secret, will not be deemed overwise himself. Dunstan exclaimed loudly at the extravagant alterations which were going on at Snarldown-House, at a time when a penny was denied to his necessities; so that it was evident enough that, according to Dunstan's ideas, the Squire's extravagance would

have been no extravagance at all, if he himself had been admitted within its pale. But enough of Dunstan's nonsense! Let us now see when he talks somewhat like sense, be his motives for doing so what they will.

At the end of his publication he addresses a letter to Mrs. Fitzwaddle, which he premises by telling her that he understands she is much offended, and her feelings hurt at the freedom with which he had mentioned her name; and that he should rejoice if his so doing should lead to an alteration in her conduct, and induce her to consult the feelings of others. Dunstan then asks her if she supposes that Mrs. George Gildrig has no feelings-that the gentry of the manor, over whom she, although but a plebeian, arrogantly and insultingly assumed a precedence on every occasion, had no feelings-that the people of moral character had no feelings at seeing their money squandered away upon so unworthy an object, and decorum so openly violated? He concludes his letter by telling her that if she gave but a due consideration to the feelings of all these classes of society, they could not fail of promoting that change in the dis

position of her mind, which would relieve her own painful feelings, and secure her from the furbter contempt of the world.

When Dunstan does not talk upon a foolish subject, that is, of himself, he certainly says something to the purpose.

A bad matter is always rendered worse by stirring it! The Squire thought it beneath his dignity to stoop to pick up the gauntlet of this knight of the silver mountains; but some officious fools (of whom there are swarms ever ready to thrust themselves upon the notice of the great, in hopes of either reward or the celebrity which they could not otherwise acquire) would fight the Squire's battle. Because he was a great man, and wanted no champion, these obliging people would perforce break a lance for his honour.

One of these unfee'd solicitors (in hopes, perhaps, of a fee) exposes the fallacy of Dunstan's arithmetic, and lays open his interested designs, which were primâ facie evident enough to any one who could read his publication; so that he only did the Squire a disservice by keeping up the ball and giving that consequence to the Review, which it did not possess. But this

solicitor (a Mr. Diamond) was like a vicious cow which no sooner gives a full pail of milk than it kicks it down again. He winds up his pamphlet by saying that all that Dunstan has observed of Mrs. Fitzwaddle will never injure her with the liberal part of the public, though the author of it will be despised for an ungentlemanly attack on a worthy and much esteemed lady.

Now either this Mr. Diamond, or ourselves, do not comprehend the signification of the term liberal. We understand it to mean the candid, moral, upright, virtuous, and well-bred (not fashionably bred) part of society; and with such persons, a demirip-an adulteress — an insulter of all the decent regulations of social life, can never be a worthy and much esteemed lady; especially the character in question; who has caused so much heavy expence to an otherwise distressed people; given so many cruel insults and shocks to an amiable and a most virtuous wife, as well as to persons who, in point of rank, fortune, and character, are, beyond all possibility of comparison, her superiors. To bolster up the character of such a woman,

merely on account of her sex, is to lay the axe to the root of decency, and to grub up morality; for sex is no shield against crime or its attendant infamy. If a woman commit murder or any other crime against the divine law, or break any of the statute laws of the land, she suffers for it without distinction of sex, unless she happens to be married, in which case she is very mercifully considered as having acted under the stress or compulsion of her husband. He who would enter the lists to defend the cause of such a wo man is not, as he might delude himself into a belief of being, a knight-errant : no; he is—and so the liberal part of society, in our ideas of the sense of the word liberal, will deem him to be--a knace-arrant.