do him the
injustice to prejudge his qualifications as an historian of his own
countrymen, by the measure of accuracy he may display in that part of
his work which relates to England. It is a part of his work which we
have but slightly perused; our attention has been confined to the
socialists of France.

Amongst these founders of society, and constructors of Mahometan
paradises, Fourier is, we believe, the least known in this country. Some
brief account of him will, we think, be acceptable; more especially as
some of his ideas, leaving the narrow circle of his disciples, have
found partisans amongst men who, in other respects, have a reputation
for sobriety of thought. Our readers need not fear that we shall
overwhelm them with all the institutions, plans, projects,
arrangements--the complete _cosmogony_, in short, of this most laborious
of the tribe. A very little of such matter is quite enough. One may say
with truth that it is such stuff,

"Whereof a little more than a little
Is by much too much."

Nothing is more charming to the imagination than the first general idea
of some new community, where all men are to be happy, every body active,
benevolent, reasonable. But the moment we leave this general idea, enter
upon particulars, and set about the arrangements necessary for this
universally comfortable state of things, there is nothing in the world
more tedious and oppressive. Proposals for new political institutions
are sufficiently wearisome; but proposals for earthly elysiums, which
are to embrace the whole circle of human affairs, become insupportably
dull. It is child's play, played with heavy granite boulders. No; if we
were capable of being seduced for a moment into the belief of some
golden age of equality, where a parental government, presiding over all,
should secure the peace and prosperity of all, we should need no other
argument to recover us from the delusion than simply to _read on_, and
learn how this parental government intends to accomplish its purpose.
When we find that, in order to be relieved from domestic cares, we are
to have _no home at all_; that our parental government, in order to
provide for our children, begins by taking them away from us; when we
picture to ourselves the sort of wooden melancholy figures we must
become, (something like the large painted dolls in a Dutch garden, stuck
here and there without choice or locomotion of their own,) we speedily
lose all inclination