This brings me to page 43, Here you say, that he seduced Mrs. Bonneville from her husband and took her to America with him. This is all a villanous invention. There is not a word of truth in it. What think you of an old man of 65, worn out with drinking brandy enough every day to kill any other man, seducing a woman of fifty and making her cross the Atlantic with him? You say he seduced her two sons too from the father. This is a novelty in the annals of seduction. This is the point on which Mrs. Bonneville obtained damages from Cheetham. So far from her being seduced, she did not leave France with Mr. Paine, nor until a year afterwards, that she was sent out by her husband, who proposed to follow her, on winding up his affairs in France. She seldom dwelt under the same roof with Mr. Paine in America: though, we have the best of proofs, that he generously relieved her while living and left her the bulk of his property when dead. The very virtues of this man, that should have shamed his slanderers, have been distorted into the most odious vices. Mr. and Mrs. Bonneville are both living in Paris, or were about a year ago. I have corresponded with them. This seduced woman is now back with her husband, and both express the highest veneration for the character of Thomas Paine, a veneration that was never exceeded towards any character. Had Cheetham been honest, he might have easily satisfied himself of the facts as it regarded Mrs. Bonneville, for she was in New-York and open to every kind of examination.

I have done quite enough, to shew the vile character of your publication; and, if any thing that I had published could be so handled, I verily think that it would send me out of life. There are other points of refutation to be found in the postscript of my third edition of his memoirs, at sixpence, and, as they have been once copied into "The Republican," I shall not again copy them.

You, a dealer in paper money, have much ground whereon to dread the progress of the principles of Paine. One part of bis warfare was against that system of paper money and funding which has placed or kept you in Blaise Castle You have lived and flourished by making paper money, and Paine sought a revolution in that matter, for the purpose of introducing, or preserving, a metallic currency, that should form no tax upon the people, Your neighbour, Mr. Frederic Jones, has lately given you a shaking upon this subject, and I have not a doubt but that I shall live to see you

kicked out of Blaise Castle by your creditors. You, of course, see nothing monstrous in the system that enables you to issue a thousand or many thousand bits of paper, at the nominal value of many thousand pounds, and either receive an interest for the use of that paper, or real property in exchange; a circumstance which creates so much real property for your consumption and deprives the holders of bits of your of that real or secure property. If paper a note be any way destroyed, by fire or water, by rats or mice, or by friction or filth, its nominal value is to you a clear gain, and a real tax upon the loser. If your bank breaks, every holder of your notes is taxed to the amount of the notes which he holds. And a still greater evil is, that this paper currency, being a debased currency, heightens the price of all the necessaries of life, without heightening the nominal value of labour to correspond with the change. This is the why and the wherefore that you are a member of the Vice Society, and that you clamour for Church, State, Constitution and things as they are. A man, with your gains, cannot reason upon this subject; he who makes no gain by the system, is alone qualitied to reason upon proposed changes. You participate in the robbery produced by the present state of things, and to ask you to reason upon a proposed change, is like asking a priest to reason upon the probable and prudent overthrow of his church. I delight to puzzle a priest by a few plain ques tions; but I tell him before I begin, that I have no idea of making a convert of him. I am never so unreasonable, with men who, like their champion, Paley, cannot afford to keep a conscience.

On getting to the conclusion of this letter, I am informed, that Pritchard's Gang, the Vice Society, shew a disposition to prosecute the publication of my print of your God. I can only promise you, that, if they do we will have some good fun for our pains. I will have out, with all dispatch, a print of this God condescending to shew his back parts to Moses, and several others, as fast as an artist can be found to do them. Your friend, Dr, Stoddart, has refused to print my defence upon the subject; because, forsooth, like all other strong argument upon the subject, of religion it is a blasphemous libel: a convenient shuffle. But I can print, only I cannot get the whole of the Doctor's readers. A silly, genteel Christian has been foul enough to imitate the Jew in breaking the window and destroying the print.

This fellow was seized and dragged into the shop, where he was glad to ask a continuance of a shelter from the indignation of the crowd, who menaced him until he was seen to put down the price of the window and the print. He was lectured into a confession of shame at this conduct, and skulked out of the side door, after the crowd had in some measure dispersed, with feelings which no man could envy.

The subject of the Jew comes in at the end of my first letter to you, and whilst on the subject, I must not forget the joke of Alderman Thompson, in telling the Jew, that he should have laid an information against the publisher of the print, as guilty of an attempt to bring the Christian Religion into contempt that religion which the Jew himself held in the utmost contempt! The Alderman does not want sense in some matters, behaved very well to Mrs. Wright and to Tunbridge while they were prisoners in Newgate, and expressed his dislike of such prosecutions; but, in the chair of the magistrate, I presume, that he felt a sort of necessity of being a fool according to law, in defending the God and the Religion established by law.

With this renewed prospect of hostilities, I must hold myself open to write other letters to you or to some member of the Vice Society. I feel my power, a power which I never felt before, and I am not at all alarmed at the preparations for war; assured, that, as before, I shall come off victorious; and with new laurels,

Bat, in conclusion, I must not forget to remind you, how neatly I have written your memoir, and have shown your real character as a slanderer of Thomas Paine and a suppressor of vice in others! This letter will spread wherever your vile publication has gone, and, I now leave you to enjoy the fruit of your wickedness, until that day of reckoning which will make people wise enongh to demand gold for every rag that you have issued to rob them.

RICHARD CARLILE.

REVEIW.

1. The English Practice: a Statement, showing some of the Evils and Absurdities of the Pracice of the English Common Law, as adopted in several of the United States, and particularly in the State of New-York New York, 1822.

2. A Dissertation on the Nature and extent of the Jurisdiction of the Courts of the United States,

BY PETER S. DUPONCEAU, LL. D. PHILADELPHIA. 1824.

EVERY friend to his country must rejoice to see the spirit of enquiry which has gone abroad, touching the nature and condition of our judical system. The observation of President of Montesquieu, that the jurisprudence of every country lags in the rear of its improvement and civilization in all other respects, is but too well verified with us; and yet if any country should be an exception, it should be ours, where there are no conflicting orders or opposing interests to counteract each other, and where the good of the whole is the only object of the laws, and the will of the people is the law. Yet, much as our revolution has advanced our political constitutions, it cannot be denied that many strange and grievous absurdities still disgrace our laws, and jar with the great and lofty principles, of which they never should lose sight.

The first step towards real improvement is to make truth our guide, and to discard all doubtful, mysterious and equivocating terms. When the intention is honest, the language should be direct, and there is nothing more suspicious than the use of ambiguous phraseology.

The defect and consequent abuse of language, has been the cause of mighty evils and of bitter woes, and is the greatest and the commonest source of error: and therefore good logic requires that every term upon which any argument is predicated, should be so strictly defined as to have an exclusive and appropriate meaning. But with respect to our laws, the very reverse has been the case; and the most important of all the terms that belong to the subject, and without the use of which nothing can be affirmed or denied of it, is, of all others yet known or used, the most vague, viz. the common law. It seems to challenge the prerogative which Ovid attributes to Proteus, when he says,

Sunt quibus in plures jus est transire figuras.

And, as that oracular and slippery son of the ocean was wont to

elude all enquiry, and to baffle sense and reason till he was chained and fettered, so we can never hope to have any rational certainty of what concerns us so vitally, till we can bind down this evanescent and fleeting essence, by some clear and positive definition. We know more of what it is not, than what it is. It is not the civil nor the military law, nor the marine nor the merchant law; nor the natural, the national, nor the ecclesiastical law, nor the law of equity. It is not common sense, unless, as Lord Coke tells us, that it is "artificial common sense; not the sense of any common men, but only to be acquired by long diligence and study"! Touching its origin, we find learning and genius both run mad. Blackstone traces it back to the wilds of Gaul and Germany; but if we believe Lord Coke, we owe it to the fortunate accident of the second rape of Helen. His words are these: " King Brutus, the first King of the land, as soon as he had settled himself in the kingdom, for the safe and peaceable government of his people, wrote a book in the Greek tongue, calling it the law of the Britons; and he collected the same out of the laws of the Trojans. This king, they say, died after the creation of the world 2860 years; before the incarnation of Christ 1103 years; Sumuel being then judge of Israel. I will not," he adds "examine these things in a quo warranto. The ground, I think, was best known to the authors and writers of them; but that these laws of the ancient Britons, their contracts and other instruments, and the records and judical proceedings of the judges, were wrought and sentenced in the Greek tongue, it is plain and evident from proofs luculent and uncontrollable." Now the story of the old chroniclers runs thus: Eneas the son of Venus, flying from the flames of Troy, carried off his father Anchises upon his back; his household gods in one hand, and his boy Ascanius in the other, leaving his wife behind; and after wandering far and wide, jilting poor Dido, killing king Turnus, and marrying his betrothed Lavinia, founded a kingdom, out of which grew that proud city destined to be the mistress of the world; he died leaving his son Ascanius heir of his fortunes. The grandson of this Ascanius was king Brutus, the great father of the common law. He having shot his father Sylvius with an arrow, with like piety as his great grand-father brought away, not household gods, but what was more precious still, the common law; and after much wandering, and many warlike and amorous adventures, he landed at Totness in Devonshire; and finding the country peopled with giants, and governed by their king Gog Magog, he slew both king and giants to make room for the common law, and became the "first king of this land!" by killing the last!

The next inquiry is, how this law came to be called common. From the number of exceptions as shown above, it has little pretensions to universality. It was never known to any other nation except that southern half of the island to which it was reveal