o do him justice, he has argued with ability and
clearness against their leading tenets or maxims; but being a man
devoted to a new order of things of some kind or other, he has given
naturally a more than usual attention to this sect, and we think our
readers will hold themselves obliged to us, if we abridge some portion
of his account of St Simon and his disciples.

"The founder of the St Simonian school had been deceased five years when
the revolution of July broke out. He belonged to one of the noblest
houses of France, bearing the name and arms of that famous Duke de St
Simon, the historian of the reign of Louis XIV., and the last of our
veritable _grands seigneurs_. Yet it was the privilege of birth that he
attacked, and the impiety of war that he proclaimed. He was a man of
singular independence of mind, and of extreme moral courage. Convinced
that, before dictating a code for the regulation of human life, it was
necessary to have attentively analysed that life as it actually exists,
he spent the first half of his days in studying society under all its
aspects; recoiling from no experience, practising, in the character of
an observer, even vice as well as virtue; drawing a lesson from his own
frailties, and making a study of his own follies. He dissipated his
fortune in premeditated prodigality, and terminated a studious opulence
in excessive poverty; living on the miserable salary of a copyist, when
in idea he was governing the world. In the estimation of some, a
sage--of others, a madman; at one time sanguine to enthusiasm, at
another discouraged to the point of attempting suicide; reduced at last
to the condition of a mendicant, after having so often united round his
table, in order to observe and judge them, the most celebrated men in
art and literature. Such was St Simon in life and character: it remains
to see what were the intellectual results he arrived at."--(Vol. III. p.
96.)

His first project of a code for human life was sufficiently ridiculous.
In a work entitled _Letters from an Inhabitant of Geneva to his
Contemporaries_, he addressed himself to the learned portion of the
world, inviting them to undertake the government of the human race. The
programme was as follows. A subscription was to be opened before the
tomb of Newton. Every one was called upon to subscribe according to his
means, rich and poor, man and woman; and each subscriber was to have a
voice in the selection of--three mathematicians