THE

REPOSITORY TALES.

Religion is for the man in humble life, and to raise his nature, and to put him in mind of a state in which the privileges of opulence will cease, when he will be equal by nature, and may be more than equal by virtue.

BURKE on the French Revolution.

ADVERTISEMENT.

To improve the habits, and raise the principles of the common people, at a time when their dangers and temptations, moral and political, were multiplied beyond the example of any former period, was the motive which impelled the Author of these volumes to devise and prosecute the institution of the Cheap Repository. This plan was established with an humble wish, not only to counteract vice and profligacy on the one hand, but error, discontent, and false religion, on the other. And as an appetite for reading had, from a variety of causes, been increasing among the inferior ranks in this country, it was judged expedient, at this critical period, to supply such wholesome aliment as might give a new direction to their taste, and abate their relish for those corrupt and inflammatory publications which the consequences of the French revolution have been so fatally pouring in upon us.

The success of the plan exceeded the most sanguine expectation of its projector. Above two millions of the tracts were sold within the first year, besides very large numbers in Ireland; and they continue to be very extensively circulated, in their original form of single pieces, and also in three bound volumes.

As these stories, though principally, are not calculated exclusively for the middle and lower classes of society, the Author has, at the desire of her friends, selected those which were written by herself, and presented them to the public in this collection of her Works, in an enlarged and improved form.

THE HISTORY

OF

MR. FANTOM,

THE

NEW-FASHIONED PHILOSOPHER,

AND

HIS MAN WILLIAM.

MR. FANTOM was a retail trader in the city of London. As he had no turn to any expensive vices, he was reckoned a sober, decent man; but he was covetous and proud, selfish and conceited. As soon as he got forward in the world, his vanity began to display itself, though not in the ordinary method, that of making a figure, and living away; but still he was tormented with a longing desire to draw public notice, and to distinguish himself. He felt a general sense of discontent at what he was, with a general ambition to be something which he was not; but this desire had not yet turned itself to any particular object. It was not by his money he could hope to be distinguished, for half his acquaintance had more; and a man must be rich indeed, to be noted for his riches in London. Mr. Fantom's mind was a prey to vain imaginations. He despised all those little acts of kindness and charity which every man is called to perform every day; and while he was contriving grand schemes, which lay quite out of his reach, he neglected the ordinary duties of life, which lay directly before him. Selfishness was his governing principle. He fancied he was lost in the mass of general society; and the usual means of attaching importance to insignificance occurred to him-that of getting into clubs and societies. To be connected with a party would, at least, make him known to that party, be it ever so low and contemptible; and this local importance it is, which draws off vain minds from those scenes of general usefulness, in which, though they are of more value, they are of less distinction.

1

About this time, he got hold of a famous little book written by the NEW PHILOSOPHER,* whose pestilent doctrines have gone about seeking whom they may destroy: these doctrines found a ready entrance into Mr. Fantom's mind; a mind at ambitious once shallow and inquisitive, speculative and vain, and dissatisfied. As almost every book was new to him, he fell into the common error of those who begin to read late in life, that of thinking that what he did not know himself, was equally new to others; and he was apt to fancy that he and the author he was reading were the only two people in the world who knew any thing. This book led to the grand discovery; he had now found what his heart panted after,— a way to distinguish himself. To start out a full-grown philosopher at once, to be wise without education, to dispute without learning, and to make proselytes without argument, was a short cut to fame, which well suited his vanity and his ignorance. He rejoiced that he had been so clever as to examine for himself, pitied his friends who took things upon trust, and was resolved to assert the freedom of his own mind. To a man fond of bold novelties and daring paradoxes, solid argument would be flat, and truth would be dull, merely because it is not new. Mr. Fantom believed, not in proportion to the strength of the evidence, but to the impudence of the assertion. The trampling on holy ground with dirty shoes, the smearing the sanctuary with filth and mire, the calling prophets and apostles by the most scurrilous names, was new, and dashing, and dazzling. Mr. Fantom, now being set free from the chains of slavery and superstition, was resolved to show his zeal in the usual way, by trying to free others; but it would have hurt his vanity, had he known that he was the convert of a man who had written only for the vulgar, who had invented nothing, no, not even one idea of original wickedness; but who had stooped to rake up out of the kennel of infidelity all the loathsome dregs and offal dirt, which politer unbelievers had thrown away as too gross and offensive for their better-bred reader.

Mr. Fantom, who considered that a philosopher must set up with a little sort of stock in trade, now picked up all the common-place notions against Christianity, which have been answered a hundred times over: these he kept by him ready cut and dried, and brought out in all companies, with a zeal which would have done honor to a better cause, but which the friends to a better cause are not so apt to discover. He

THOMAS PAINE, whose "Rights of Man" and "Age of Reason" were widely circulated at this period, in cheap editions, by missionaries in the emplo of seditious clubs and infidel societies.

soon got a..I the cant of the new school. He prated about narrowness, and ignorance, and bigotry, and prejudice, and priestcraft, on the one hand; and on the other, of public good, the love of mankind, and liberality, and candor, and toleration, and, above all, benevolence. Benevolence, he said, made up the whole of religion, and all the other parts of it were nothing but cant, and jargon, and hypocrisy. By benevolence he understood a gloomy and indefinite anxiety about the happiness of people with whom he was utterly disconnected, and whom Providence had put it out of his reach either to serve or injure. And by the happiness this benevolence was so anxious to promote, he meant an exemption from the power of the laws, and an emancipation from the restraints of religion, conscience, and moral obligation.

Finding, however, that he made little impression on his old club at the Cat and Bagpipes, he grew tired of their company. This club consisted of a few sober citizens, who met of an evening for a little harmless recreation after business: their object was, not to reform parliament, but their own shops; not to correct the abuses of government, but of parish officers; not to cure the excesses of administration, but of their own porters and apprentices; to talk over the news of the day, without aspiring to direct the events of it. They read the papers with that anxiety which every honest man feels in the daily history of his country. But as trade, which they did understand, flourished, they were careful not to reprobate those public measures by which it was protected, and which they did not understand. In such turbulent times, it was a comfort to each to feel he was a tradesman, and not a statesman; that he was not called to responsibility for a trust for which he found he had no talents, while he was at full liberty to employ the talents he really possessed, in fairly amassing a fortune, of which the laws would be the best guardian, and government the best security. Thus a legitimate self-love, regulated by prudence, and restrained by principle, produced peaceable subjects and good citizens; while in Fantom a boundless selfishness and inordinate vanity converted a discontented trader into a turbulent politician.

There was, however, one member of the Cat and Bagpipes, whose society he could not resolve to give up, though they seldom agreed, as, indeed, no two men in the same class and habits of life could less resemble each other. Mr. Trueman was an honest, plain, simple-hearted tradesman, of the good old cut, who feared God, and followed his business: he went to church twice on Sundays, and minded his shop all the week-spent frugally, gave liberally, and saved moderately.