Oh! lives there, heaven! beneath thy dread expanse,
   One hopeless, dark idolater of chance,
   Content to feed, with pleasures unrefined,
   The lukewarm passions of a lowly mind;
   Who, mouldering earthward, ’reft of every trust,
   In joyless union wedded to the dust,
   Could all his parting energy dismiss,
   And call this barren world sufficient bliss?

He may not merit the “proud applause,” the “pre-eminence in ill,” of those “lights of the world,” and “demi-gods of fame,” who league reason and science against the hopes of mankind, and busy themselves in throwing the “heaviest stones of melancholy” at the poor wretch shivering over the dregs of life, and tottering towards the grass.  And yet it is certain, that what was written on his own tombstone implied much less the hope of another life, than the gloomy satisfaction of having partners in the darkness and inactivity of death.  The reader will see it in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, where a short account of him is given.—­E.]

Though I dare not assert that these people, to whom the art of writing, and consequently the recording of laws, are utterly unknown, live under a regular form of government, yet a subordination is established among them, that greatly resembles the early state of every nation in Europe under the feudal system, which secured liberty in the most licentious excess to a few, and entailed the most abject slavery upon the rest.[34]

[Footnote 34:  The government of this island, it is most certain, is both monarchical and hereditary in one family.  There is not the smallest reason to think that the Otaheitans, with all their ingenuity and love of freedom, are, any more than other people, exempt from those principles so vigorously depicted by Cowper in his “Task,” as the origin of kingship:—­

   It is the abject property of most,
   That, being parcel of the common mass,
   And destitute of means to raise themselves,
   They sink, and settle, lower than they need. 
   They know not what it is to feel within
   A comprehensive faculty, that grasps
   Great purposes with ease, that turns and wields
   Almost without an effort, plans too vast
   For their conception, which they cannot move. 
   Conscious of impotence, they soon grow drunk
   With gazing, when they see an able man
   Step forth to notice; and besotted thus,
   Build him a pedestal, and say, “Stand there,
   And be our admiration and our praise.”

But at what time this able man stepped forth to monopolise the admiration and the allegiance of his brethren (all sound men and true!), is not in the record.  The Otaheitans, we know, are not historians.  Probably, then, they have been favoured by their priests with some good orthodox doctrine, as to divine appointment on the subject.  Indeed, the case of these islanders is one in which the necessary effect of that consciousness of impotence and self-abasement, is scarcely in any degree counteracted by other principles.  We see it literally exemplifying the description of the poet,—­