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The Lion.

No. 5. VOL. 2.] LONDON, Friday, August 1, 1828. [PRICE 6d.

PILGRIMAGE TO OAKHAM.

Crown Inn, Oakham, Tuesday morning, July 29, 1828. ON Sunday evening last, under very acute rheumatic pain, which makes my pilgrimage the more efficacious, in the certainty toward salvation, I placed myself on the Leeds mail, to reach Ŏakham. We infidels, are riding pilgrims. Having no sins to rub out at the feet, there could be no good done by my walking barefooted to Oakham, as the more sinful christians would have necessarily done to accomplish their religious purposes. Had I not been free from sin, the jolting of the coach, acting upon my rheumatic hip, would most assuredly have been, in the shape of punishment, satisfaction enough to god or devil.

I had not been five minutes on the box of the mail, before I found, behind me, an elderly gentleman and a younger one near my own age, exchanging, not blows, reader, but their expression of contempt for the religion of this country. I allowed them to proceed far enough to be assured of the reality of their sentiments, and then I did not fail to make up in conversation the rational trinity in unity. The old gentleman, who represented himself as having left his book and his chair rather than sleep in it, had put himself on the mail, for a short ride into the country, and seemed indifferent whether he returned the same night or the next morning; but the agreeableness of the conversation induced him to ride to Barnet, and had it not been for rain, I think he would have come farther on the road. We talked of the Catholics, of O'Connell, of Cobbett, of all the political and theological topics of the day, and our elder traveller was in raptures. Well, said he, I never expected to meet such company on a coach. My dear sir, to me, you are quite a reader. I find you have read every thing. I wish I could have more of your company. As the old

Printed and Published by R. CARLILE, 62, Fleet Street. No. 5.-VOL. 2.

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gentleman left the coach at Barnet, I held out my card to him; but the rain hurried him, and he did not perceive my intention. On mentioning to him that I deemed the present bad system of government strong only in the vices and ignorance of the people, and that it would only fall before a better informed and more virtuous people; that is good, he exclaimed, that is precisely the view of Mandeville. We were entirely agreed, that morality constituted the only good religion; and though my younger fellow traveller was, in toto, a disciple of Cobbett's, which I was not a minute in discovering, I knew the source of all his reasonings so well, as to make him assent to all that was advanced. The younger man came on to Bedford; but we had exhausted our conversation on politics and religion by the time we got to Hatfield. A young soldier, on a furlough from the Guards, got on the coach, and as he had lately been in Portugal, we turned the conversation, so as to make him prominent in it. He quickly acknowledged, that the religion of love knows no sectarianism, and however bitter the Portuguese generally were toward the English heretics, their young women had no objection to the love of an English soldier. Before I reached Bedford, about twelve o'clock, the night being cold, I got inside the Mail and slept, as well as my pains would let me, the remainder of the way to Oakham.

By nine o'clock, on the Monday morning, I had thrown myself on a bed for an hour, shaved, breakfasted, and was on my way to the gaol. Rutland is but the miniature, and a very shabby one, of a county, a county town, and a gaol. In the town, I cannot find a street, or any row of houses that deserves to be called a street. What is called the castle, where the assize and sessions are held, is a mere barn converted into a country theatre, the church is the only building that does not offend the eye of the common traveller, aud 1 grieve to think, that that parish pesthouse should so far impoverish the parish, as to check all improvement in it. The gaol is a low building, presenting nothing of the exterior of a gaol, and until I was shaking hands with Mr. Taylor, I doubted if I had reached the right place. Being somewhat of a connoisseur in gaols, I expected the usual formalities of entering names, of difficulty, of locks, bolts, and bars innumerable, before I reached the reverend prisoner; but I met Mr. Orridge, the gaoler, at the outer gate, and on saying who I wanted to see, I was without a word, other than of consent, shown into Mr. Taylor's parlour. There is confinement within an acre of ground; but this is not a gaol, such as my gacl at Dorchester was to me. Mr. Taylor has never a lock turned upon him, except the outer lock of the building; and that he pledges his honour not to converse with the felons, he is free in the interior of the gaol. With the consent of the gaoler, he took me into every part of the gaol, and I was pleased with the contrast, that, unlike my gaoler Andrews, Mr. Orridge was not afraid to have every person and thing under his care examined. It was forbidden to any prisoner

in Dorchester gaol, to speak or in any way to communicate with me, and it was forbidden to the turnkeys to answer me in any question about the gaol, or that was not connected with my real wants. Mr. Taylor's condition is the very reverse of this. Openness, and a courting of enquiry and examination, seems to be the characteristic of Oakham little gaol with its ten prisoners; I, in Dorchester, was not allowed to step out of my room without an attendant, and I am quite sure, that all that was dreaded was, that I should investigate and expose the abuses of the gaol. Mr. Orridge keeps all his prisoners at a gaoler-like distance, and he is by no means deficient in the necessary behaviour and duties of a gaoler. He respects Mr. Taylor and his apartment, as if he were a private lodger, never intruding upon him, in the very impudent way in which Andrews would enter my room, with an expression in his countenance that said, I am your master, and you have no apartment that is your own here.

Mr. Taylor's countenance and person is an indication that he is happy and at ease. He grows a little corpulent; but not unpleasantly so. In his literary acquirements and productions, he is very industrious, and his journal exhibits a character, that may be at any future time referred to with pleasure.

There is one point in his character, which is worthy of notice, he has become very religious in the gaol! At the head of his journal stands a calendar of saints, festivals and holidays. The saints are his corresponding friends. His fixed festivals are Sundays, the days which complete a quarter, or a third of his imprisonment, his natal day, the natal days of those whose persons or memories he respects, and for some few other reasons. He has the virgin as his holy patroness, whose image pasted on his writing desk, he constantly adores, and to whom he dedicates the pretty seals of all the ladies who may write to him, by hanging them about her person. He has also a series of moveable festivals, which consist of the days on which he is visited by an agreeable friend, the day on which he receives a parcel from London, the day on which he hears any agreeable news, and so forth.

In his libations, he is most devout. To himself, he administers the sacrament every Sunday and on every other festival. Instead of taking it, in nomine patri, filii et spiriti sancti, he bows reverently to his only companion, the decanter, and devoutly pronounces the name and welfare of an absent friend. "His ways are the ways of pleasantness, and all his paths are peace." May they be so for ever. R. CARLILE.

EXPLANATION.

I have been chided for the inference drawn from my last week's article, that I would unmercifully sacrifice the fundholder of this country, and support the aristocracy in their unjust monopoly of the land. Without stopping to discuss whether

my article was entitled to such an inference, I unhesitatingly disclaim it. That the abolition of the parliamentary debt, or of its acknowledgment in taxation for its interest, is a matter of political necessity, I most seriously believe; but that it should be done at the sole expence of the stockholder, is a point from which my mind revolts. This is a case in which I am agreed with Mr. Cobbett, and fall in thus far with what he says about equitable adjustment. There is a vast deal of corporate property in this country, that may be applied to the relief of the fundholder. In addition to this, our lordly landholders, who have sanctioned the growth of the debt, are as much the publie debtors in the affair, as any man can be a debtor in the most ordinary affairs of life. The nation is not the debtor. The debt has not been accumulated for the good of the nation; but for the good of a small portion, who have unjust, unnatural, unsocial, and unnational privileges. It has never been sanctioned by the nation, because there never has been a representation of the nation in parliament assembled, since the existence of the debt. There is a vast deal of waste land in this country, by and through which the fundholder may be relieved. Not one half of the land that admits of cultivation is yet well cultivated, and the multitude starves for the preservation of forests and manorial rights. It is said, in such a parliament as we have, that the game laws are desirable, for the purpose of keeping country gentlemen upon their estates. I should answer, that it is better to have them away from their estates, to have their estates in other hands, where the game laws will not be desired, than that such a mischievous barbarity should longer exist. The game laws have impoverished the land, and driven the labourer from it. To the labourer and small farmer, the birds and beasts of game are the vermin of the land, that eat up his produce, and say to him, you dare not eat, you dare not kill me. The present is a bad state of things, the land is monopolized as the continuation of a conquest. The church is a most expensive, most useless, most mischievous institution, that tithes all produce; and the preservation of these two great evils has produced a third, in what is called the parliamentary debt. The fundholder shall never find injustice from me. He is the cheated rather than the cheater, and is not the creator of the taxation that supports him. The safety of the funds is another question. I do not think them safe for the depositing of property at any time. They afford a facility in the removal of property, and have been hitherto the most certain rent; but still they are not so stable as the land, not so permanently certain as tangible property, such as stock in trade. The funded property is, simply in its substance, imaginary and not real. It is the property of public opinion, which is fickle and changeable, and the more so as it is exposed to expence. But the fundholder has no prospect of release from

his danger, until he is prepared to vote the church useless, and its property properly applicable to the reduction of the parliamentary debt. It must come to this, and without it there can be no equitable adjustment. The future produce of the country cannot go on to support the aristocracy in the possession of the land, the church in its various claims, the interest of the debt which they have created, and the necessary expences of the government. The necessary thing to be done, the inevitable result of the present state of things is then most evident, and let all be wise and prepare for it. R. CARLILE.

REMINISCENCES; OR, THE EARLY LIFe of someBODY.

A POEM, BY 1. W. IMRAY.

AGES pass on in silence, and no trace
Save desolation marks their vast career,
The proudest pile, and lowliest dwelling-place
Crumble alike in ruin; and the tear-
Posterity would shed upon the bier

Of recollected worth; can scarce retain—
Amidst the solitude of things which were,

The dust it fain would honor, and again,
Bathe with the heart's warm tribute, tho' in vain.
Perhaps not all in vain-the unconscious dust
Requires it not, but memory will dwell
Like a fond mother round her darling trust,
And soon forsakes not, that she loves so well,
There is too something indescribable

About the dead; where all things are subdued,

Into a deep felt silence! let him tell,

Whose heart hath paus'd within him as he stood,
For the first time alone, where human dust is strew'd.

I love to muse amid the perishing,

And perish'd altars of man's fallen pride;
From skulls and coffins it is life to wring
The solemn truth, which cannot be denied,
That man is mortal! he that hath applied
His sight to life alone, may be misled,
But for an umpire! let the worm decide,
Since it on many a human brain hath fed,

And where men sought a soul, hath sought itself a bed.

Thus Reader, if by chance an interjection
Escape me as I wind my way along,
Forgive me, as I catch the soft infection,
Assured I would not willingly do wrong,

But then a sigh is sometimes worth a song,

When chill misfortune's breath hath swept the willow,

On which the harp of joy is often hung,

The bubble bursts above its heaving billow,

And sighs will steal forth from affliction's pillow.

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