would be replaced by a race of stupid and sequacious slaves, tilling the solitary lands of vast land-holders, who must become selfish and hardened in their natures, from the want of all those claims upon their better sympathies which the more varied state of society at present presents. The question therefore does not merely involve the comforts of the hind, but the welfare and character of the country at large; and I think no man who desires England not merely to maintain its noble reputation, but to advance in social wisdom and benevolence, can wish for the wider spread, or even the continuance, of the Bondage System. I think all must unite with me in saying, let the very name perish from the plains of England, where it sounds like a Siberian word. Let labour be free; and this TRUCK SYSTEM of the agriculturists be abolished, not by Act of Parliament, but by public principle and sound policy. It is a system which wrongs all parties. It wrongs the hind, for it robs his children of comfort and knowledge; it wrongs the farmer, for what he saves in labour he pays in rent, while he gains only the character of a task-master; and it wrongs the land-holder, for it puts his petty pecuniary interest into the balance against his honour and integrity; and causes him to be regarded as a tyrant, in hearts where he might be honoured as a natural protector, and revered as a father.

THE citizen who lives in a compact house in the centre of a great city; whose doors and windows are secured at night by bars, bolts, shutters, locks, and hinges of the most approved and patented construction; who, if he look out of doors, looks upon splendid rows of lamps; upon human habitations all about him; whose house can only be assailed behind by climbing over the tops of other houses; or before, by eluding troops of passengers and watchmen, whom the smallest alarm would hurry to the spot: I say, if such a man could be suddenly set down in one of our many thousand country houses, what a feeling of unprotected solitude would fall upon him. To sit by the fire of many a farm-house, or cottage,

and hear

the unopposed wind come sighing and howling about it; to hear the trees swaying and rustling in the gale, infusing a most forlorn sense of the absence of all neighbouring abodes; to look on the simple casements, and the old-fashioned locks and bolts, and to think what would their resistance be to the determined attack of bold thieves;—I imagine it would give many such worthy citizen a new and not very enviable feeling. But if he were to step out before the door of such a house at nine or ten o'clock of a winter or autumnal night, what a state of naked jeopardy it would seem to stand in! Perhaps all solitary darkness;-nothing to be heard but the sound of neighbouring woods; or the roar of distant waters; or the baying of the ban-dogs at the scattered and faroff farm-houses; the wind coming puffing upon him with a wild freshness, as from the face of vast and solitary moors; or perhaps some gleam of moonlight, or the wild, lurid light which hovers in the horizon of a winter-night sky, revealing to him desolate wastes, or gloomy surrounding woods. In truth, there is many a sweet spot that, in summer weather, and by fair daylight, do seem very paradises; of which we exclaim, in passing, "Ay! there could I live and die, and never desire to leave it!" There are thousands of such sweet places which, when night drops down, assume strange horrors, and make us wish for towers and towns, watchmen, walkers of streets, and gaslight. One seems to have no security in any thing. A single house five or six miles from a neighbour. Mercy! why it is the very place for a murder! What would it Murder might be

avail there to cry help! murder!

perpetrated a dozen times before help could come!

Just one such fancy as that, and what a prison ! a trap! does such a place become to a fearful heart. We look on the walls, and think them slight as cardboard; on the roof, and it becomes in our eyes no better than a layer of rushes. If we were attacked here, it were all over! This gimcrack-tenement would be crushed in before the brawny hand of a thief. And to think of out-of-doors! Yes! of that pleasant out-of-doors, which in the day we glorified ourselves in. Those forest tracts of heath, and gorse, and flowering broom, where the trout hid themselves beneath the overhanging banks of the most transparent streams-ugh! they are now the very lurkingplaces of danger! What admirable concealment for liers-in-wait, are the deep beds of heather. How black do those bushes of broom and gorse look to a suspicious fancy! They are just the very things for lurking assassins to crouch behind. And what is worse, those woods! those woods that come straggling up to the very doors; putting forward a single tree here and there, as advanced guards of picturesque beauty in the glowing summer noon, or in the spring, when their leaves are all delicately new. Beauty! how could we ever think them beautiful, though we saw them stand in their assembled majesty; though they did tower aloft, with their rugged, gashed, and deeply-indented stems, and make a sound as of many waters in their tops, and cast down pleasant shadows on the mossy turf beneath; and though the thrush and the nightingale did sing triumphantly in their thickets. Beautiful! they are horrible! Their blackness of darkness now makes us shudder. Their breezy roar is fearful beyond description. Let day

light, and summer sunshine come, and make them look as pleasant as they will, we would not have a wood henceforward within a mile of us. Why, up to the walls of your house, under your very windows, may evil eyes now be glaring from behind those sturdy boles:-they seem to have grown there just to suit the purposes of robbery and murder. We look now to the dogs and guns for assistance, but they give us but cold comfort: for the guns only remind us that at this moment the muzzle of one may be at that chink in the shutter, at that hole out of which a knot has dropped, and in another moment we are in eternity! And the dogs!—see, they rise! they set up the bristles on their backs! they growl! they bark! our fears are true! the place is beset!

This may seem rather exaggerated, read by good day-light, or by the fire of a city hearth; but this is the natural spirit of the solitary house. It is that which many a one has felt. It has cured many a one of longing to live in a "sweet sequestered cot;" nay, it is a spirit felt by the naturalized inhabitants of such solitary places. I look upon such places to generate fears and superstitions too, in no ordinary degree. The inhabitants of solitary houses are often most arrant cowards; and for this there are many causes. A sense of exposure to danger, if it be not lost by time, is more likely to generate timidity of disposition than courage. Then, the sound of woods and waters; the mysterious sighings and moanings, and lumberings, that winds and other causes occasion amongst the old walls and decayed roofs, and ill-fastened doors and casements of large, old country houses, have a wonderful influence on the minds of