MR. GRENVILLE'S ELEVATION TO THE PEERAGE.

The events of this year on the continent of Europe offer a striking contrast to the repose of England. While the wise and steadfast policy of Mr. Pitt had secured to this country the blessings of peace, now rapidly expanding into a condition of almost unexampled prosperity, France was undergoing the throes of that desolating Revolution which brought the Sovereign to the scaffold, and laid the train of those disasters which finally expelled the Bourbons from the throne. There are few traces of those disturbing circumstances in the correspondence of Lord Buckingham and his brother, which, in consequence of the frequent opportunities they now enjoyed of personal intercourse, had become scanty, and, so far as public affairs were concerned, unimportant. Slight scraps of intelligence, the last rumour from abroad, or matters of purely personal or domestic interest, form the staple of the letters that passed between them at this period.

It was in this year that Edmund Burke, to the infinite surprise of his old allies, published his famous pamphlet on the French Revolution. The impression it made in England may be accepted as an evidence of the soundness of the national judgment, and the devotion of the people to the established institutions of the country. This healthy condition of the public mind was attributable, in a greater degree than we can venture now to estimate, to the spirit of patriotism and union awakened in the kingdom by the firm Administration of Mr. Pitt and his friends. They had restored the general confidence in the justice and stability of the Government, which the weakness and divided councils of former Cabinets had dissipated; they had struck the happy mean between the prerogatives of the Crown and the encroachments of the Legislature; and, above all, in the recent conflicts on the Regency question, they had successfully asserted the doctrine, that the rights of the Sovereign and the rights of the people were founded on a common basis; and, by showing that their interests were identical, they had reconciled those extreme elements in the Constitution which a powerful party had laboured, with great eloquence and considerable effect, to separate on the grounds of a natural antagonism. Their popularity was unbounded, and saved the country. Paine's "Age of Reason" fell innocuous upon the people; the tidings of the Revolution, and of the massacres that tracked its daily steps in blood, excited wonder and horror, but produced no frenzy of imitation such as they inspired elsewhere; and while Europe was convulsed with alarms, England, strong in her liberties and self-reliance, was united and unmoved.

In Ireland, the departure of Lord Buckingham was followed by a revival of the factious intemperance his energy had for a season suppressed. The Parliament opened in disorder, and carried on its debates in a tone of vindictive hostility to the British connection. The opponents of Government had strengthened their hands by the accession of new orators, and by the occasional lapses into their old violence of others who had given in their submissions to the late Viceroy, and who, now that he was gone, affected an independence of their obligations. The Lord Chancellor Fitzgibbon was growing into increasing disfavour with the Opposition, and becoming, by the force of resistance, more English and less popular than before. The invectives in which the wild passions of party found a congenial vent, descended to the fiercest recriminations, and led to the severance of friendships, and personal rencontres. Fitzgibbon and the Ponsonbys, who had hitherto preserved unimpaired, amidst the contentions of the Senate, their intimate relations in private life, were now cast asunder by an explosion of animosity that tempted the Chancellor to declare "that he would never speak to them again;" even the close bonds that united the Ponsonbys and the Beresfords were imperceptibly relaxed; and Mr. Hobart, to use his own expression, was "obliged to fight Mr. Curran," for which he excuses himself to Lord Buckingham by saying that "in any other country in Europe he would not have met him." In no other country, undoubtedly, from a cause so absurd and unwarrantable, could the necessity for such a meeting have arisen. Numerous letters from Ireland conveyed fragments of news of this kind to Lord Buckingham in his retirement, the old supporters of Administration still seeming to look up to him for encouragement and advice. But these letters are not now of sufficient interest to justify their publication.

Such, indeed, is the general character of the correspondence of the year. One letter, however, announces an incident which cannot be so satisfactorily recorded as in the language of the writer. Mr. Grenville was about to receive that recognition of his great talents and important services which few men had earned so worthily or were destined to wear more honourably and usefully. The absence of all exultation at his approaching elevation to the peerage, and his near assumption of the title by which he is best known in the history of the country, is a characteristic of that nobility of mind which conferred dignity upon, rather than derived it from, the station to which he was advanced.

MR. W. W. GRENVILLE TO THE MARQUIS OF BUCKINGHAM.