It is scarcely theoretical to say, that every century has a character of its own. The human mind is essentially progressive in Europe. The accumulations of past knowledge, experience, and impulse, are perpetually preparing changes on the face of society; and we may fairly regard every hundred years as the period maturing those changes into visible form. Thus, the fifteenth century was the age of discovery in the arts, in the powers of nature, and in the great provinces of the globe: the sixteenth exhibited the general mind under the impressions of religion—the Reformation, the German wars for liberty and faith, and the struggles of Protestantism in France. The seventeenth was the brilliant period of scientific advance, of continental literature, and of courtly pomp and power. The eighteenth was the period of politics; every court of Europe was engaged in the game of political rivalry; the European balance became the test, the labour, and the triumph of statesmanship. The negotiator was then the great instrument of public action. Diplomacy assumed a shape, and Europe was governed by despatches. The genius of Frederick the Second restored war to its early rank among the elements of national life; but brilliant as his wars were, they were subservient to the leading feature of the age. They were fought, not, like the battles of the old conquerors, for fame, but for influence—not to leave the king without an enemy, but to leave his ambassadors without an opponent—less to gain triumphs, than to ensure treaties: they all began and ended in diplomacy!

It is remarkable, that this process was exhibited in Europe alone. In the East, comprehending two-thirds of human kind, no change was made since the conquests of Mahomet. That vast convulsion, in which the nervousness of frenzy had given the effeminate spirit of the Oriental the strength of the soldier and the ambition of universal conqueror, had no sooner wrought its purpose than it passed away, leaving the general mind still more exhausted than before. The Saracen warrior sank into the peasant, and the Arab was again lost in his sands; the Turk alone survived, exhibiting splendour without wealth, and pride without power—a decaying image of Despotism, which nothing but the jealousy of the European saved from falling under the first assault. Such is the repressive strength of evil government; progress, the most salient principle of our nature, dies before it. And man, of all beings the most eager for acquirement, and the most restless under all monotony of time, place, and position, becomes like the dog or the mule, and generation after generation lives and dies with no more consciousness of the capacities of his existence, than the root which the animal devours, or the tree under which it was born.

In England, the eighteenth century was wholly political. It was a continual struggle through all the difficulties belonging to a free constitution, exposed to the full discussion of an intellectual people. Without adopting the offensive prejudice, which places the individual ability of the Englishmen in the first rank; or without doubting that nature has distributed nearly an equal share of personal ability among all European nations; we may, not unjustly, place the national mind of England in the very highest rank of general capacity—if that is the most intellectual nation, by which the public intellect is most constantly employed, in which all the great questions of society are most habitually referred to the decision of the intellect, and in which that decision is the most irresistible in its effects, no nation of Europe can stand upon equal ground with the English. For, in what other nation is the public intellect in such unwearied exercise, in such continual demand, and in such unanswerable power?

In what other nation of the world (excepting, within those few years, France; and that most imperfectly) has public opinion ever been appealed to? But, in England, to what else is there any appeal? Or, does not the foreign mind bear some resemblance to the foreign landscape—exhibiting barren though noble elevations, spots of singular though obscure beauty among its recesses, and even in its wildest scenes a capacity of culture?—while, in the mind of England, like its landscape, that culture has already laid its hand upon the soil; has crowned the hill with verdure, and clothed the vale with fertility; has run its ploughshare along the mountain side, and led the stream from its brow; has sought out every finer secret of the scene, and given the last richness of cultivation to the whole.

From the beginning of the reign of Anne, all was a contest of leading statesmen at the head of parties. Those contests exhibit great mental power, singular system, and extraordinary knowledge of the art of making vast bodies of men minister to the personal objects of avarice and ambition. But they do no honour to the moral dignity of England. All revolutions are hazardous to principle. A succession of revolutions have always extinguished even the pretence to principle. The French Revolution is not the only one which made a race of girouettes. The political life of England, from the death of Anne to the reign of George the Third, was a perpetual turning of the weathercock. Whig and Tory were the names of distinction. But their subordinates were of as many varieties of feature as the cargo of a slave-ship; the hue might be the same, but the jargon was that of Babel. It was perhaps fortunate for the imperial power of England, that while she was thus humiliating the national morality, which is the life-blood of nations; her reckless and perpetual enemy beyond the Channel had lost all means of being her antagonist. The French sceptre had fallen into the hands of a prince, who had come to the throne a debauchee; and to whom the throne seemed only a scene for the larger display of his vices. The profligacy of Louis-Quatorze had been palliated by his passion for splendour, among a dissolute people who loved splendour much, and hated profligacy little. But the vices of Louis the Fifteenth were marked by a grossness which degraded them in the eye even of popular indulgence, and prepared the nation for the overthrow of the monarchy. In this period, religion, the great purifier of national council, maintained but a struggling existence. The Puritanism of the preceding century had crushed the Church of England; and the restoration of the monarchy had given the people a saturnalia. Religion had been confounded with hypocrisy, until the people had equally confounded freedom with infidelity. The heads of the church, chosen by freethinking administrations, were chosen more for the suppleness than for the strength of their principles; and while the people were thus taught to regard churchmen as tools, and the ministers to use them as dependents, the cause of truth sank between both. The Scriptures are the life of religion. It can no more subsist in health without them, than the human frame can subsist without food; it may have the dreams of the enthusiast, or the frenzy of the monk; but, for all the substantial and safe purposes of the human heart, its life is gone for ever. It has been justly remarked, that the theological works of that day, including the sermons, might, in general, have been written if Christianity had never existed. The sermons were chiefly essays, of the dreariest kind on the most commonplace topics of morals. The habit of reading these discourses from the pulpit, a habit so fatal to all impression, speedily rendered the preachers as indifferent as their auditory; and if we were to name the period when religion had most fallen into decay in the public mind, we should pronounce it the half century which preceded the reign of George the Third.

On the subject of pulpit eloquence there are some remarks in one of the reviews of the late Sydney Smith, expressed with all the shrewdness, divested of the levity of that writer, who had keenly observed the popular sources of failure.

"The great object of modern sermons is, to hazard nothing. Their characteristic is decent debility; which alike guards their authors from ludicrous errors, and precludes them from striking beauties. Yet it is curious to consider, how a body of men so well educated as the English clergy, can distinguish themselves so little in a species of composition, to which it is their peculiar duty, as well as their ordinary habit, to attend. To solve this difficulty, it should be remembered that the eloquence of the bar and of the senate force themselves into notice, power, and wealth." He then slightly guards against the conception, that eloquence should be the sole source of preferment; or even "a common cause of preferment." But he strongly, and with great appearance of truth, attributes the want of public effect to the want of those means by which that effect is secured in every other instance.

"Pulpit discourses have insensibly dwindled from speaking into reading; a practice of itself sufficient to stifle every germ of eloquence. It is only by the fresh feelings of the heart that mankind can be very powerfully affected. What can be more unfortunate, than an orator delivering stale indignation, and fervour of a week old; turning over whole pages of violent passions, written out in German text; reading the tropes and metaphors into which he is hurried by the ardour of his mind; and so affected, at a preconcerted line and page, that he is unable to proceed any further?"

This criticism was perfectly true of sermons forty years ago, when it was written. Times are changed since, and changed for the better. The pulpit is no longer ashamed of the doctrines of Christianity, as too harsh for the ears of a classic audience, or too familiar for the ears of the people. Still there are no rewards in the Church, for that great faculty, or rather that great combination of faculties, which commands all the honours of the senate and the bar. A clerical Demosthenes might find his triumph in the shillings of a charity sermon, but he must never hope for a Stall.

We now revert to the curious, inquisitive, and gossiping historian of the time. Walpole, fond of French manners, delighting in the easy sarcasm, and almost saucy levity, of French "Memoirs," and adopting, in all its extent, the confession, (then so fashionable on the Continent,) that the perfection of writing was to be formed in their lively persiflage, evidently modelled his "History" on the style of the SevignÉs and St Simons. But he was altogether their superior. If he had been a chamberlain in the court of Louis XV., he might have been as frivolously witty, and as laughingly sarcastic, as any Frenchman who ever sat at the feet of a court mistress, or whoever looked for fame among the sallies of a petit souper. But England was an atmosphere which compelled him to a manlier course. The storms of party were not to be stemmed by a wing of gossamer. The writer had bold facts, strong principles, and the struggles of powerful minds to deal with, and their study gave him a strength not his own.

Walpole was fond of having a hero. In private life, George Selwyn was his Admirable Crichton; in public, Charles Townshend. Charles was unquestionably a man of wit. Yet his wit rather consisted in dexterity of language than in brilliancy of conception. He was also eloquent in Parliament; though his charm evidently consisted more in happiness of phrase, than in richness, variety, or vigour, of thought. On the whole, he seems to have been made to amuse rather than to impress, and to give a high conception of his general faculties than to produce either conviction by his argument, or respect by the solid qualities of his genius. Still, he must have been an extraordinary man. Walpole describes his conduct and powers, as exhibited on one of those days of sharp debate which preceded the tremendous discussions of the American war. The subject was a bill for regulating the dividends of the East India Company—the topic was extremely trite, and apparently trifling. But any perch will answer for the flight of such bird. "It was on that day," says Walpole, "and on that occasion, that Charles Townshend displayed, in a latitude beyond belief, the amazing powers of his capacity, and the no less amazing incongruities of his character." Early in the day he had opened the business, by taking on himself the examination of the Company's conduct, had made a calm speech on the subject, and even went so far as to say, "that he hoped he had atoned for the inconsiderateness of his past life, by the care which he had taken of that business." He then went home to dinner. In his absence a motion was made, which Conway, the secretary of state, not choosing to support alone, it being virtually Townshend's own measure besides, sent to hurry him back to the House. "He returned about eight in the evening, half drunk with champagne," as Walpole says, (which, however, was subsequently denied,) and more intoxicated with spirits. He then instantly rose to speak, without giving himself time to learn any thing, except that the motion had given alarm. He began by vowing that he had not been consulted on the motion—a declaration which astonished every body, there being twelve persons round him at the moment, who had been in consultation with him that very morning, and with his assistance had drawn up the motion on his own table, and who were petrified at his unparalleled effrontery. But before he sat down, he had poured forth, as Walpole says, "a torrent of wit, humour, knowledge, absurdity, vanity, and fiction, heightened by all the graces of comedy, the happiness of quotation, and the buffoonery of farce. To the purpose of the question he said not a syllable. It was a descant on the times, a picture of parties, of their leaders, their hopes, and effects. It was an encomium and a satire on himself; and when he painted the pretensions of birth, riches, connexions, favours, titles, while he effected to praise Lord Rockingham and that faction, he yet insinuated that nothing but parts like his own were qualified to preside. And while he less covertly arraigned the wild incapacity of Lord Chatham, he excited such murmurs of wonder, admiration, applause, laughter, pity, and scorn, that nothing was so true as the sentence with which he concluded—when, speaking of government, he said, that it had become what he himself had often been called—the weathercock."

Walpole exceeds even his usual measure of admiration, in speaking of this masterly piece of extravagance. "Such was the wit, abundance, and impropriety of this speech," says he, "that for some days men could talk or enquire of nothing else. 'Did you hear Charles Townshend's champagne speech,' was the universal question. The bacchanalian enthusiasm of Pindar flowed in torrents less rapid and less eloquent, and inspired less delight, than Townshend's imagery, which conveyed meaning in every sentence. It was Garrick acting extempore scenes of Congreve." He went to supper with Walpole at Conway's afterwards, where, the flood of his gaiety not being exhausted, he kept the table in a roar till two in the morning. A part of this entertainment, however, must have found his auditory in a condition as unfit for criticism as himself. Claret till "two in the morning," might easily disqualify a convivial circle from the exercise of too delicate a perception. And a part of Townshend's facetiousness on that occasion consisted in mimicking his own wife, and a woman of rank with whom he fancied himself in love. He at last gave up from mere bodily lassitude. Walpole happily enough illustrates those talents and their abuse by an allusion to those eastern tales, in which a benevolent genius endows a being with supernatural excellence on some points, while a malignant genius counteracts the gift by some qualification which perpetually baffles and perverts it. The story, however, of Charles Townshend's tipsiness is thus contradicted by a graver authority, Sir George Colebrook, in his Memoirs.

"Mr Townshend loved good living, but had not a strong stomach. He committed therefore frequent excesses, considering his constitution; which would not have been intemperance in another. He was supposed, for instance, to have made a speech in the heat of wine, when that was really not the case. It was a speech in which he treated with great levity, but with wonderful art, the characters of the Duke of Grafton and Lord Shelburne, whom, though his colleagues in office, he entertained a sovereign contempt for, and heartily wished to get rid of. He had a black riband over one of his eyes that day, having tumbled out of bed, probably in a fit of epilepsy; and this added to the impression made on his auditors that he was tipsy. Whereas, it was a speech he had meditated a great while upon, and it was only by accident that it found utterance that day. I write with certainty, because Sir George Yonge and I were the only persons who dined with him, and we had but one bottle of champagne after dinner; General Conway having repeatedly sent messengers to press his return to the House."

This brings the miracle down to the human standard, yet that standard was high, and the man who could excite this admiration, in a House which contained so great a number of eminent speakers, and which could charm the caustic spirit of Walpole into the acknowledgment that his speech "was the most singular pleasure of the kind he had ever tasted," must have been an extraordinary performance, even if his instrument was not of the highest tone of oratory. A note from the Duke of Grafton's manuscript memoirs also contradicts, on Townshend's own authority, his opinion of the "wild incapacity of Lord Chatham." The note says:—

Walpole writes with habitual bitterness of the great Lord Chatham. The recollection of his early opposition to Sir Robert Walpole, seems to have made him an unfaithful historian, wherever this extraordinary man's name comes within his page; but at the period of those discussions, it seems not improbable that the vigour of Chatham's understanding had in some degree given way to the tortures of his disease. He had suffered from gout at an early period of life; and as this is a disease remarkably affected by the mind, the perpetual disturbances of a public life seem to have given it a mastery over the whole frame of the great minister. Walpole talks in unjustifiable language of his "haughty sterility of talents." But there seems to be more truth in his account of the caprices of this powerful understanding in his retirement. Walpole calls it the "reality of Lord Chatham's madness." Still, we cannot see much in those instances, beyond the temper naturally resulting from an agonizing disease. When the Pynsent estate fell to him, he removed to it, and sold his house and grounds at Hayes—"a place on which he had wasted prodigious sums, and which yet retained small traces of expense, great part having been consumed in purchasing contiguous tenements, to free himself from all neighbourhood. Much had gone in doing and undoing, and not a little in planting by torchlight, as his peremptory and impatient habits could brook no delay. Nor were those the sole circumstances which marked his caprice. His children he could not bear under the same roof, nor communications from room to room, nor whatever he thought promoted noise. A winding passage between his house and children was built with the same view. When, at the beginning of his second administration, he fixed at North End by Hampstead, he took four or five houses successively, as fast as Mr Dingley his landlord went into them, still, as he said, to ward off the houses of the neighbourhood."

Walpole relates another anecdote equally inconclusive. At Pynsent, a bleak hill bounded his view. He ordered his gardener to have it planted with evergreens. The man asked "with what sorts." He replied, "With cedars and cypresses." "Bless me, my lord," replied the gardener, "all the nurseries in this county would not furnish a hundredth part." "No matter, send for them from London: and they were brought by land carriage." Certainly, there was not much in this beyond the natural desire of every improver to shut out a disagreeable object, by putting an agreeable one in its place. His general object was the natural one of preventing all noise—a point of importance with every sufferer under a wakeful and miserable disease. His appetite was delicate and fanciful, and a succession of chickens were kept boiling and roasting at every hour, to be ready whenever he should call. He at length grew weary of his residence and, after selling Hayes, took a longing to return there. After considerable negotiation with Mr Thomas Walpole the purchaser, he obtained it again, and we hear no more of his madness.

The session was one of continual intrigues, constant exhibitions of subtlety amongst the leaders of the party, which at this distance of time are only ridiculous, and intricate discussions, which are now among the lumber of debate. Townshend, if he gained nothing else, gained the freedom of the city for his conduct on the East India and Dividend bills, for which, as Walpole says, "he deserved nothing but censure." A contemptuous epigram appeared on the occasion by "somebody a little more sagacious"—that "somebody" probably being Walpole himself:

It is scarcely possible to think that an epigram of this heavy order could have been praised by Walpole, if his criticism had not been tempered by the tenderness of paternity.

We then have a character of a man embalmed in the contempt poured upon him by Junius—the Duke of Grafton. Though less bitter, it is equally scornful. "Hitherto," says Walpole, "he had passed for a man of much obstinacy and firmness, of strict honour, devoid of ambition, and, though reserved, more diffident than designing. He retained so much of this character, as to justify those who had mistaken the rest. If he precipitated himself into the most sudden and inextricable contradictions, at least he pursued the object of the moment with inflexible ardour. If he abandoned himself to total negligence of business, in pursuit of his sports and pleasures, the love of power never quitted him; and, when his will was disputed, no man was more imperiously arbitrary. If his designs were not deeply laid, at least they were conducted in profound silence. He rarely pardoned those who did not guess his inclination. It was necessary to guess, so rare was any instance of his unbosoming himself to either friends or confidants. Why his honour had been so highly rated I can less account, except that he had advertised it, and that obstinate young men are apt to have high notions, before they have practised the world, and essayed their own virtue."

At length, after a vast variety of intrigues, which threw the public life of those days into the most contemptible point of view, the King being made virtually a cipher, while the families of the Hertfords, Buckinghams, and Rockinghams trafficked the high offices of state as children would barter toys; an administration was tardily formed. Walpole, who seemed to take a sort of dilettante pleasure in constructing those intrigues, and making himself wretched at their failure, while nobody suffered him to take advantage of their success; now gave himself a holiday, and went to relax in Paris for six weeks—his relaxation consisting of gossip amongst the literary ladies of the capital. During his absence an event happened which, though it did not break up the ministry, yet must have had considerable effect in its influence on the House of Commons. This was the death of the celebrated Charles Townshend, on the 4th of September 1767, in the forty-second year of his age. The cause of his death was a neglected fever; if even this did not arise from his carelessness of health, and those habits which, if not amounting to intemperance, were certainly trespasses on his constitution. Walpole speaks of him with continual admiration of his genius, and continual contempt of his principles. He also thinks, that he had arrived at his highest fame, or, in his peculiar phrase, "that his genius could have received no accession of brightness, while his faults only promised multiplication." Walpole, with no pretence to rival, probably envied this singular personage; for, whenever he begins by panegyric, he uniformly ends with a sting. One of the Notes gives an extract on Sir George Colebrook's Memoirs, which perhaps places his faculties in a more favourable point of view than the high-coloured eulogium of Burke, or the polished insinuations of Walpole. Sir George tells us, that Townshend's object was to be prime minister, and that he would doubtless have attained that object had he lived to see the Duke of Grafton's resignation. Lord North succeeded him as chancellor of the exchequer, and Townshend would evidently have preceded him as prime minister. "As a private man, his friends were used to say, that they should not see his like again. Though they were often the butts of his wit, they always returned to his company with fresh delight, which they would not have done had there been either malice or rancour in what he said. He loved society, and in his choice of friends preferred those over whom he had a decided superiority of talent. He was satisfied when he had put the table in a roar, and he did not like to see it done by another. When Garrick and Foote were present, he took the lead, and hardly allowed them an opportunity of showing their talents for mimicry, because he could excel them in their own art. He shone particularly in taking off the principal members of the House of Commons. Among the few whom he feared was Mr Selwyn, and at a dinner at Lord Gower's they had a trial of skill, in which Mr Selwyn prevailed. When the company broke up, Mr Townshend, to show that he had no animosity, carried him in his carriage to White's; and, as they parted, Selwyn could not help saying—'Remember, this is the first set-down you have given me to-day.'"

As Townshend lived at a considerable expense, and had little paternal fortune, he speculated occasionally in both the French and English funds. One of the incidents related by Sir George, and without a syllable of censure too, throws on him an imputation of trickery which, in our later day, would utterly destroy any public man. "When he was chancellor of the exchequer, he came in his nightgown to a dinner given by the Duke of Grafton to several of the principal men of the city to settle the loan. After dinner, when the terms were settled, and every body present wished to introduce some friend on the list of subscribers, he pretended to cast up the sums already admitted, said the loan was full, huddled up his papers, got into a chair, and returned home, reserving to himself by this manoeuvre a large share of the loan." An act of this kind exhibits the honesty of the last age in a very equivocal point of view. If proud of nothing else, we may be proud of the public sense of responsibility; in our day, it may be presumed that such an act would be impossible, for it would inevitably involve the ruin of the perpetrator, followed by the ruin of any ministry which would dare to defend him.

At this period died a brother of the king, Edward Duke of York, a man devoted to pleasure, headstrong in his temper, and ignorant in his conceptions. "Immoderate travelling, followed by immoderate balls and entertainments," had long kept his blood in a peculiar state of accessibility to disease. He died of a putrid fever. Walpole makes a panegyric on the Duke of Gloucester, his brother; of which a part may be supposed due to the Duke's marriage with Lady Waldegrave, a marriage which provoked the indignation of the King, and which once threatened political evils of a formidable nature. Henry, the Duke of Cumberland, was also an unfortunate specimen of the blood royal. He is described as having the babbling loquacity of the Duke of York, without his talents; as at once arrogant and low; presuming on his rank as a prince, and degrading himself by an association with low company. Still, we are to remember Walpole's propensity to sarcasm, the enjoyment which he seems to have felt in shooting his brilliant missiles at all ranks superior to his own; and his especial hostility to George the Third, one of the honestest monarchs that ever sat upon a throne.

In those days the composition of ministries depended altogether upon the high families.—The peerage settled every thing amongst themselves. A few of their dependents were occasionally taken into office; but all the great places were distributed among a little clique, who thus constituted themselves the real masters of the empire. Walpole's work has its value, in letting us into the secrets of a conclave, which at once shows us the singular emptiness of its constituent parts, and the equally singular authority with which they seem to have disposed of both the king and the people. We give a scene from the Historian, which would make an admirable fragment of the Rehearsal, and which wanted only the genius of Sheridan to be an admirable pendant to Mr Puff's play in the Critic. "On the 20th a meeting was held at the Duke of Newcastle's, of Lord Rockingham, the Duke of Richmond, and of Dowdeswell, with Newcastle himself on one part, and of the Duke of Bedford, Lord Weymouth, and Rigby on the other. The Duke of Bedford had powers from Grenville to act for him; but did not seem to like Lord Buckingham's taking on himself to name to places. On the latter's asking what friends they wished to prefer, Rigby said, with his cavalier bluntness—Take the Court Calendar and give them one, two, three thousand pounds a-year! Bedford observed—They had said nothing on measures. Mr Grenville would insist on the sovereignty of this country over America being asserted. Lord Rockingham replied—He would never allow it to be a question whether he had given up this country—he never had. The Duke insisted on a declaration. The Duke of Richmond said—We may as well demand one from you, that you will never disturb that country again. Neither would yield. However, though they could not agree on measures; as the distribution of place was more the object of their thoughts and of their meeting, they reverted to that topic. Lord Rockingham named Mr Conway. Bedford started; said he had no notion of Conway; had thought he was to return to the military line. The Duke of Richmond said it was true, Mr Conway did not desire a civil place; did not know whether he would be persuaded to accept one; but they were so bound to him for his resignation, and thought him so able, they must insist. The Duke of Bedford said—Conway was an officer sans tache, but not a minister sans tache. Rigby said—Not one of the present cabinet should be saved. Dowdeswell asked—'What! not one?' 'No.' 'What! not Charles Townshend.' 'Oh!' said Rigby, 'that is different. Besides, he has been in opposition.' 'So has Conway,' said Dowdeswell. 'He has voted twice against the court, Townshend but once.' 'But,' said Rigby, 'Conway is Bute's man.' 'Pray,' said Dowdeswell, 'is not Charles Townshend Bute's?' 'Ah! but Conway is governed by his brother Hertford, who is Bute's.' 'But Lady Ailesbury is a Scotchwoman.' 'So is Lady Dalkeith.' Those ladies had been widows and were now married, (the former to Conway, the latter to Townshend.) From this dialogue the assembly fell to wrangling, and broke up quarrelling. So high did the heats go, that the Conways ran about the town publishing the issue of the conference, and taxing the Bedfords with treachery."

Notwithstanding this collision, at once so significant, and so trifling—at once a burlesque on the gravity of public affairs, and a satire on the selfishness of public men—on the same evening, the Duke of Bedford sent to desire another interview, to which Lord Rockingham yielded, but the Duke of Bedford refused to be present. So much, however, were the minds on both sides ulcerated by former and recent disputes, and so incompatible were their views, that the second meeting broke up in a final quarrel, and Lord Rockingham released the other party from all their engagements. The Duke of Bedford desired they might still continue friends, or at least to agree to oppose together. Lord Rockingham said no, "they were broken for ever."

It was at this meeting that the Duke of Newcastle appeared for the last time in a political light. Age and feebleness had at length worn out that busy passion for intrigue, which power had not been able to satiate, nor disgrace correct. He languished above a year longer, but was heard of no more on the scene of affairs. (He died in November 1768.)

A remarkable circumstance in all those arrangements is, that we hear nothing of either the king or the people. The king is of course applied to to sign and seal, but simply as a head clerk. The people are occasionally mentioned at the end of every seven years; but in the interim all was settled in the parlours of the peerage! The scene which we have just given was absolutely puerile, if it were not scandalous; and, without laying ourselves open to the charge of superstition on such subjects, we might almost regard the preservation of the empire as directly miraculous, while power was in the hands of such men as the Butes and Newcastles, the Bedfords and Rockinghams, of the last century. It is not even difficult to trace to this intolerable system, alike the foreign calamities and the internal convulsions during this period. Whether America could, by any possibility of arrangement, have continued a British colony up to the present time, may be rationally doubted. A vast country, rapidly increasing in wealth and population, would have been an incumbrance, rather than an addition, to the power of England. If the patronage of her offices continued in the hands of ministers, it must have supplied them with the means of buying up every man who was to be bought in England. It would have been the largest fund of corruption ever known in the world. Or, if the connexion continued, with the population of America doubling in every five-and-twenty years, the question must in time have arisen, whether England or America ought to be the true seat of government. The probable consequence, however, would have been separation; and as this could scarcely be effected by amicable means, the result might have been a war of a much more extensive, wasteful, and formidable nature, than that which divided the two countries sixty-five years ago.

But all the blunders of the American war, nay the war itself, may be still almost directly traceable to the arrogance of the oligarchy. Too much accustomed to regard government as a natural appendage to their birth, they utterly forgot the true element of national power—the force of public opinion. Inflated with a sense of their personal superiority, they looked with easy indifference or studied contempt on every thing that was said or done by men whose genealogy was not registered in the red book. Of America—a nation of Englishmen—and of its proceedings, they talked, as a Russian lord might talk of his serfs. Some of them thought, that a Stamp act would frighten the sturdy free-holders of the Western World into submission! others talked of reducing them to obedience by laying a tax on their tea! others prescribed a regimen of writs and constables! evidently regarding the American farmers as they regarded the poachers and paupers on their own demesnes. All this arose from stupendous ignorance; but it was ignorance engendered by pride, by exclusiveness of rank, and by the arrogance of caste. So excessive was this exclusiveness, that Burke, though the most extraordinary man of his time, and one of the most memorable of any time, could never obtain a seat in the cabinet; where such triflers as Newcastle, such figures of patrician pedantry as Buckingham, such shallow intriguers as the Bedfords, and such notorious characters as the Sandwiches, played with power, like children with the cups and balls of their nursery. Lord North, with all his wit, his industry, and his eloquence, owed his admission into the cabinet, to his being the son of the Earl of Guilford. Charles Fox, though marked by nature, from his first entrance into public life, for the highest eminence of the senate, would never have been received into the government class, but for his casual connexion with the House of Richmond. Thus, they knew nothing of the real powers of that infinite multitude, which, however below the peerage, forms the country. They thought that a few frowns from Downing Street could extinguish the resistance of millions, three thousand miles off, with muskets in their hands, inflamed by a sense of wrong, whether fancied or true, and insensible to the gatherings of a brow however coroneted and antique.

This haughty exclusiveness equally accounts for the contests with Wilkes. They felt themselves affronted, much more than resisted; they were much more stung by the defiance of a private individual to themselves, than they were urged to the collision by any conceivable sense of hazard to the Monarchy. No man, out of bedlam, could conceive, that Wilkes had either the power or the intention to subvert the state. But Mr Wilkes, an obscure man, whose name was not known to the calendar of the government fabricators, had actually dared to call their privilege of power into question; had defied them in the courts of law; had rebuked them in the senate; had shaken their influence in the elections; and had, in fact, compelled them to know, what they were so reluctant to learn, that they were but human beings after all! The acquisition of this knowledge cost them half a dozen years of convulsions, the most ruinous to themselves, and the most hazardous to the constitution. Wilkes' profligacy alone, perhaps, saved the constitution from a shock, which might have changed the whole system of the empire. If he had not been sunk by his personal character, at the first moment when the populace grew cool, he might have availed himself of the temper of the times to commit mischiefs the most irreparable. If his personal character had been as free from public offence as his spirit was daring, he might have led the people much further than the government ever had the foresight to contemplate. The conduct of the successive cabinets had covered the King with unpopularity, not the less fierce, that it was wholly undeserved. Junius, the ablest political writer that England has ever seen, or probably ever will see, in the art of assailing a ministry, had pilloried every leading man of his time except Chatham, in the imperishable virulence of his page. The popular mind was furious with indignation at the conduct of all cabinets; in despair of all improvement in the system; irritated by the rash severity which alternated with the equally rash pusillanimity of ministers; and beginning to regard government less as a protection, than as an encroachment on the natural privileges of a nation of freemen.

They soon had a growing temptation before them in the successful revolt of America.

We do not now enter into that question; it is too long past. But we shall never allude to it without paying that homage to truth, which pronounces, that the American revolt was a rebellion, wholly unjustifiable by the provocation; utterly rejecting all explanation, or atonement for casual injuries; and made in the spirit of a determination to throw off the allegiance to the mother country. But, if Wilkes could have sustained his opposition but a few years longer, and with any character but one so shattered as his own, he might have carried it on through life, and even bequeathed it as a legacy to his party; until the French Revolution had joined flame to flame across the Channel, and England had rivalled even the frenzy of France in the rapidity and ruin of her Reform.

Fortunately, the empire was rescued from this most fatal of all catastrophes. A great English minister appeared, on whom were to devolve the defence of England and the restoration of Europe. The sagacity of Pitt saw where the evil lay; his intrepidity instantly struck at its source, and his unrivalled ability completed the saving operation. He broke down the cabinet monopoly. No man less humiliated himself to the populace, but no man better understood the people. No man paid more practical respect to the peerage, but no man more thoroughly extinguished their exclusive possession of power. He formed his cabinet from men of all ranks, in the peerage and out of the peerage. The great peers chiefly went over to the opposition. He resisted them there, with as much daring, and with as successful a result, as he had expelled them from the stronghold of government. He made new peers. He left his haughty antagonists to graze on the barren field of opposition for successive years; and finally saw almost the whole herd come over for shelter to the ministerial fold.

At this period a remarkable man was brought into public life—the celebrated Dunning, appointed solicitor-general. Walpole calls this "an extraordinary promotion," as Dunning was connected with Lord Shelburne. It was like every thing else, obviously an intrigue; and Dunning would have lost the appointment, but for his remarkable reputation in the courts; Wedderburne being the man of the Bedfords. Walpole's opinion of Dunning in the House, shows, how much even the highest abilities may be influenced by circumstances. He says, "that Dunning immediately and utterly lost character as a speaker, although he had acquired the very highest distinctions as a pleader;" so different, says he, is the oratory of the bar and of parliament. Mansfield and Camden retained an equal rank in both. Wedderburne was most successful in the House. Norton had at first disappointed the expectations that were conceived of him when he came into parliament; yet his strong sense, that glowed through all the coarseness of his language and brutality of his manner, recovered his weight, and he was much distinguished. While Sir Dudley Ryder, attorney-general in the preceding reign, the soundest lawyer, and Charles Yorke, one of the most distinguished pleaders, soon talked themselves out of all consideration in parliament; the former by laying too great a stress on every part of his diffusive knowledge, and the latter by the sterility of his intelligence.

An intelligent Note, however, vindicates the reputation of Dunning. It is observed, that Dunning's having been counsel for Wilkes, and the intimate of Lord Shelburne, it could not be expected that he should take a prominent part in any of the debates which were so largely occupied with Wilkes' misdemeanours. Lord North, too, was hostile to Dunning. Under such conditions it was impossible that any man should exhibit his powers to advantage; but at a later period, when he had got rid of those trammels, his singular abilities vindicated themselves. He became one of the leaders of the opposition, even when that honour was to be shared with Burke. We have heard, that such was the pungency of Dunning's expressions, and the happy dexterity of his conceptions, that when he spoke, (his voice being feeble, and unable to make itself heard at any great distance,) the members used to throng around the bench on which he spoke. Wraxall panegyrizes him, and yet with a tautology of terms, which must have been the very reverse of Dunning's style. Thus, he tells us that when Dunning spoke, "every murmur was hushed, and every ear attentive," two sentences which amount to the same thing. Hannah More is also introduced as one of the panegyrists; for poor Hannah seems to have been one of the most bustling persons possible; to have run every where, and to have given her opinion of every body, however much above her comprehension. She was one of the spectators on the Duchess of Kingston's trial, (a most extraordinary scene for the choice of such a purist;) but Hannah was not at that time quite so sublime as she became afterwards. Hannah describes Dunning's manner as "insufferably bad, coughing and spitting at every word; but his sense and expression pointed to the last degree." But the character which the annotator gives as a model of panegyric, pleases us least of all. It is by Sir William Jones, and consists of one long antithesis. It is a studied toil of language, expressing ideas, a commonplace succession, substituting words for thoughts, and at once leaving the ear palled, and the understanding dissatisfied. What, for instance, could be made of such a passage as this? Sir William is speaking of Dunning's wit. "This," says he, "relieved the weary, calmed the resentful, and animated the drowsy. This drew smiles even from such as were the object of it, and scattered flowers over a desert, and, like sunbeams sparkling on a lake, gave spirit and vivacity to the dullest and least interesting cause." And this mangling of metaphor is to teach us the qualities of a profound and practical mind. What follows, is the perfection of see-saw. "He was endued with an intellect sedate yet penetrating, clear yet profound, subtle yet strong. His knowledge, too, was equal to his imagination, and his memory to his knowledge." He might have equally added, that the capacity of his boots was equal to the size of his legs, and the length of his purse to the extent of his generosity. This reminds us of one of Sydney Smith's burlesques on the balancing of epithets by that most pedantic of pedants, the late Dr Parr—"profundity without obscurity, perspicuity without prolixity, ornament without glare, terseness without barrenness, penetration without subtlety, comprehensiveness without digression, and a great number of other things without a great number of other things."

Little tricks, or rather large ones, now and then diversify the narrative. On the same day that Conway resigned the seals, Lord Weymouth was declared secretary of state. At the same time, Lord Hilsborough kissed hands for the American department, but nominally retaining the post-office, the salary of which he paid to Lord Sandwich, till the elections should be over; there being so strict a disqualifying clause in the bill for prohibiting the postmasters for interfering in elections, which Sandwich was determined to do to the utmost, that he did not dare to accept the office in his own name, till he had incurred the guilt. Another trick of a very dishonourable nature, though ultimately defeated, may supply a moral for our share-trafficking days in high quarters. Lord Bottetort, one of the bedchamber, and a kind of second-hand favourite, had engaged in an adventure with a company of copper-workers at Warmley. They broke, and his lordship, in order to cover his estate from the creditors, begged a privy seal to incorporate the company, by which means private estates would not be answerable. The king ignorantly granted the request; but Lord Chatham, aware of the deception, refused to affix the seal to the patent, pleading that he was not able. Lord Bottetort, outrageous at the disappointment, threatened to petition the lords to remove Lord Chatham, on the ground of inability. The annotator justly observes, that the proposal was absolutely monstrous, being nothing but a gross fraud on his lordship's creditors. It, however, does not seem to have attracted the attention of the attorney-general, or the home-office; but, for some cause or other, the patent did not pass, the result being, that Lord Bottetort, unable to retrieve his losses, obtained the government of Virginia in the following summer, where he subsequently died.

A curious instance of parliamentary corruption next attracted the notice of the public. It came out, that the city of Oxford had offered their representation to two gentlemen, if they would pay £7500 towards the debts of the corporation. They refused the bargain, and Oxford sold itself to the Duke of Marlborough and Lord Abingdon. The matter was brought before the House, and the mayor of Oxford and ten of the corporation appeared at the bar, confessing their crime, and asking pardon. It ended with committing them to prison for five days. A note describes the whole affair as being treated with great ridicule, (there being probably not a few who looked upon things of this nature as a matter of course;) and the story being, that the aldermen completed their bargain with the Duke of Marlborough, during their imprisonment in Newgate.

On the 11th of March 1768, the parliament was dissolved. Walpole says, "that its only characteristic was servility to the government; while our ancestors, we presume, from the shamelessness of its servility, might have called it the Impudent Parliament."

After wearying himself in the dusty field of politics, Walpole retired, like Homer's gods from Troy, to rest in the more flowery region of literature. His habits led him to the enjoyment of bitter political poetry, which, in fact, is not poetry at all; while they evidently disqualified him from feeling the power and beauty of the imaginative, the only poetry that deserves the name. Thus, he describes Goldsmith as the "correct author of The Traveller," one of the most beautiful poems in the language; while he panegyrizes, with a whole catalogue of plaudits, Anstey's Bath Guide—a very scandalous, though undoubtedly a lively and ingenious, caricature of the habits of the time. An ultra-heavy poem by Bentley, the son of the critic, enjoys a similar panegyric. We give, as an evidence of its dulness, a fragment of its praise of Lord Bute:—

The rest is equally intolerable.

But Bentley was lucky in his patrons, if not in his poetry; as, in addition to a Commissionership of Lotteries, he received a pension for the lives of himself and his wife of £500 a-year! Though thus undeservedly successful in attracting the notice of the government, his more honest efforts failed with the public. He wrote two plays, both of which failed. Walpole next describes Robertson the historian in these high-coloured terms, "as sagacious and penetrating as Tacitus, with a perspicuity of Livy:" qualities which every one else knows to be directly the reverse of those which characterize Robertson. That very impudent woman, Catharine Macaulay, seems also to have been one of the objects of his literary admiration. He describes her, as being as partial in the cause of liberty as bigots to the church and royalists to tyranny, and as exerting manly strength with the gravity of a philosopher.

But Walpole is aways amusing when he gives anecdotes of passing things. The famous Brentford election finds in him its most graphic historian. The most singular carelessness was exhibited by the government on this most perilous occasion—a carelessness obviously arising from that contempt which the higher ranks of the nobility in those days were weak enough to feel for the opinion of those below them. On the very verge of an election, within five miles of London, and which must bring to a point all the exasperation of years; Camden, the chancellor, went down to Bath, and the Duke of Grafton, the prime minister, who was a great horse-racer, drove off to Newmarket. Mansfield, whom Walpole seems to have hated, and whom he represents as at "once resentful, timorous, and subtle," the three worst qualities of the heart, the nerves, and the understanding, pretended that it was the office of the chancellor to bring the outlaw (Wilkes) to justice, and did nothing. The consequence was, that the multitude were left masters of the field.

On the morning of the election; while the irresolution of the court, and the negligence of the prime minister, caused a neglect of all precautions; the populace took possession of all the turnpikes and avenues leading to the hustings by break of day, and would suffer no man to pass who did not wear in his hat a blue cockade, with "Wilkes and Number 45," on a written paper. Riots took place in the streets, and the carriage of Sir William Proctor, the opposing candidate, was demolished. The first day's poll for Wilkes was 1200, for Proctor 700, for Cooke 300. It must be remembered, that in these times the elections were capable of being prolonged from week to week, and that the first day was regarded as scarcely more than a formality. At night the West-end was in an uproar. It was not safe to pass through Piccadilly. Every house was compelled to illuminate; the windows of all which did not exhibit lights were broken; the coach-glasses of such as did not huzza for "Wilkes and liberty" were broken; and the panels of the carriages were scratched with 45! Lord Weymouth, the secretary of state, wrote to Justice Fielding for constables. Fielding answered, that they were all gone to Brentford. On this, the guards were drawn out. The mob then attacked Lord Bute's house and Lord Egmont's, but without being able to force an entrance. They compelled the Duke of Northumberland to give them liquor to drink Wilkes's health. Ladies of rank were taken out of their sedan-chairs, and ordered to join the popular cry. The lord-mayor was an anti-Wilkite—the mob attacked the Mansion-house, and broke the windows. He ordered out the trained bands; they had no effect. Six thousand weavers had risen under the Wilkite banner, and defied all resistance. Even some of the regimental drummers beat their drums for Wilkes! His force at the election was evidently to be resisted no longer. The ministerial candidate was beaten, Wilkes threw in his remaining votes for Cooke, and they came in together. The election was thus over on the second day, but the mob paraded the metropolis at night, insisting on a general illumination. The handsome Duchess of Hamilton, one of the Gunnings, who had now become quite a Butite, was determined not to illuminate. The result was, that the mob grew outrageous, broke down the outward gates with iron-crows, tore up the pavement of the street, and battered the doors and shutters for three hours; fortunately without being able to get in. The Count de Sollein, the Austrian ambassador, the most stately and ceremonious of men, was taken out of his coach by the mob, who chalked 45 on the sole of his shoe! He complained in form of the insult. Walpole says, fairly enough, "it was as difficult for the ministers to help laughing as to give him redress."

Walpole frequently alludes to the two Gunnings as the two handsomest sisters of their time. They were Irish-women, fresh-coloured, lively, and well formed, but obviously more indebted to nature than to education. Lady Coventry died young, and had the misfortune, even in her grave, of being made the subject of an epitaph by Mason, one of the most listless and languid poems of an unpoetic time. The Duchess of Hamilton survived to a considerable age, and was loaded with matrimonial honours. She first married the Duke of Hamilton. On his death, she married the Marquis of Lorn, eldest son of the Duke of Argyll, whom he succeeded in the title—thus becoming mother of the heirs of the two great rival houses of Hamilton and Argyll. While in her widowhood, she had been proposed for by the Duke of Bridgewater. Lady Coventry seems to have realized Pope's verses of a dying belle—

"Till within a few days of her death, she lay on a couch with a looking-glass in her hand. When she found her beauty, which she idolized, was quite gone, she took to her bed, and would be seen by nobody, not even by her nurse, suffering only the light of a lamp in her room."

Walpole's description of the ministry adds strikingly to the contemptuous feeling, naturally generated by their singular ill success. We must also observe, as much to the discredit of the past age as to the honour of the present; that the leading men of the day exhibited or affected a depravity of morals, which would be the ruin of any public character at the present time. Many of the scenes in high life would have been fitter for the court of Charles II., and many of the actors in those scenes ought to have been cashiered from public employment. Personal profligacy seems actually to have been regarded as a species of ornamental appendage to public character; and, except where its exposure sharpened the sting of an epigram, or gave an additional flourish to the periods of a political writer, no one seems to have conceived that the grossest offences against morality were of the nature of crime. Another scandal seems to have been frequent—intemperance in wine. Hard drinking was common in England at that period, and was even regarded as the sign of a generous spirit; but nearly all the leading politicians who died early, are described as owing their deaths to excess. Those are fortunate distinctions for the days which have followed; and the country may justly congratulate itself on the abandonment of habits, which, deeply tending to corrupt private character, render political baseness the almost inevitable result among public men.

Walpole promptly declares, that half the success of Wilkes was owing to the supineness of the ministers. He might have gone further, and fixed his charge on higher grounds. He ought to have said, that the whole was owing to the mingled treachery and profligacy which made the nation loathe the characters of public parties and public men. Walpole says, in support of his assertion—"that Lord Chatham would take no part in business; that the Duke of Grafton neglected every thing, and whenever pressed to be active threatened to resign; that the Chancellor Camden, placed between two such intractable friends, with whom he was equally discontented, avoided dipping himself further; that Conway, no longer in the Duke's confidence, and more hurt with neglect than pleased with power, stood in the same predicament; that Lord Gower thought of nothing but ingratiating himself at St James's; and though what little business was done was executed by Lord Weymouth, it required all Wood's, the secretary's, animosity to Wilkes, to stir him up to any activity. Wood even said, "that if the King should pardon Wilkes, Lord Weymouth would not sign the pardon." The chief magistrate of the city, consulting the chancellor on what he should do if Wilkes should stand for the city, and being answered that he "must consult the recorder," Harley sharply replied, "I consulted your lordship as a minister, I don't want to be told my duty."

Some of the most interesting portions of these volumes are the notes, giving brief biographical sketches of the leading men. The politics have comparatively passed away, but the characters remain; and no slight instruction is still to be derived from the progressive steps by which the individuals rose from private life to public distinction. The editor, Sir Denis la Marchant, deserves no slight credit for his efforts to give authenticity to those notices. He seems to have collected his authorities from every available source; and what he has compiled with the diligence of an editor, he has expressed with the good taste of a gentleman.

The commencement of a parliament is always looked to with curiosity, as the debut of new members. All the expectations which have been formed by favouritism, family, or faction, are then brought to the test. Parliament is an unerring tribunal, and no charlatanry can cheat its searching eye. College reputations are extinguished in a moment, the common-places of the hustings can avail no more, and the pamperings of party only hurry its favourites to more rapid decay.

Mr Phipps, the son of Lord Mulgrave, now commenced his career. By an extraordinary taste, though bred a seaman, he was so fond of quoting law, that he got the sobriquet of the "marine lawyer." His knowledge of the science (as the annotator observes) could not have been very deep, for he was then but twenty-two. But he was an evidence of the effect of indefatigable exertion. Though a dull debater, he took a share in every debate, and he appears to have taken the pains of revising his speeches for the press. Yet even under his nursing, they exhibit no traces of eloquence. His manner was inanimate, and his large and heavy figure gained him the luckless appellation of Ursa Major, (to distinguish him from his brother, who was also a member.) As if to complete the amount of his deficiencies, his voice was particularly inharmonious, or rather it was two distinct voices, the one strong and hoarse, the other weak and querulous; both of which he frequently used. On this was constructed the waggish story—that one night, having fallen into a ditch, and calling out in his shrill voice, a countryman was coming up to assist him; when Phipps calling out again in his hoarse tone, the man exclaimed—"If there are two of you in the ditch, you may help each other out!"

One of his qualities seems to have been a total insensibility to his own defects; which therefore suffered him to encounter any man, and every man, whatever might be their superiority. Thus, in his early day, his dulness constantly encountered Lord North, the most dexterous wit of his time. Thus, too, in his maturer age, he constantly thrust himself forward to meet the indignant eloquence of Fox; and seems to have been equally unconscious that he was ridiculed by the sarcastic pleasantry of the one, or blasted by the lofty contempt of the other. Yet, such is the value of perseverance, that this man was gradually regarded as important in the debates, that he wrought out for himself an influence in the House, and obtained finally the office of joint paymaster, one of the most lucrative under government, and a British peerage. And all this toil was undertaken by a man who had no children.

At his death, he was succeeded in his Irish title by his brother Henry, who became first lord of the admiralty, and also obtained an English peerage. The present Marquis of Normandy is his eldest son.

Parliamentary history sometimes gives valuable lessons, in exhibiting the infinite folly of parliamentary prediction. It will scarcely be believed in a day like ours, which has seen and survived the French Revolution, that the chief theme of the period, and especial terror of the opposition, was the conquest of Corsica by the French! Ministers seem to have been deterred from a war with the French monarchy, solely by the dislocated state of the cabinet; while the opposition declared, that the possession of Corsica by the French, would be "the death-blow to our influence in the Mediterranean." With Corsica in French hands, it was boldly pronounced that "France would receive an accession of power which nothing could shake; and they scarcely hesitated to say, that upon the independence of Corsica rested not merely the supremacy but the safety of England." Yet the French conquered Corsica (at a waste of money ten times worth its value to their nation, and at a criminal waste of life, both French and Corsican) without producing the slightest addition to the power of the monarchy, and with no slight disgrace to the honour of its arms. For, the Corsicans, the most savage race of the Italian blood, and accustomed to the use of weapons from their childhood, fought with the boldness of all men fighting for their property, and routed the troops of France in many a successive and desperate encounter. Still, the combat was too unequal; the whole force of a great monarchy was obviously too strong for the hope of successful resistance, and Corsica, after many a severe struggle, became a French territory. But, beyond this barren honour the war produced no fruit, except a deeper consciousness of the unsparing ambition of the monarchy, and of the recklessness with which it sacrificed all considerations of humanity and justice, to the tinsel of a military name. One fatal gift, however, Corsica made, in return to France. From it came, within a few years, the man who sealed the banishment of the Bourbons! and, tempting France by the ambition of military success, inflicted upon her the heaviest mortality, and the deepest shame known in any kingdom, since the fall of the Roman empire. Whether this were that direct retribution for innocent blood, which Providence has so often inflicted upon guilty nations; or whether it were merely one of those extraordinary casualties which circumstances make so impressive; there can be no question, that the man came from Corsica who inflicted on France the heaviest calamities that she had ever known; who, after leading her armies over Europe, to conquests which only aroused the hatred of all nations, and after wasting the blood of hundreds of thousands of her people in victories totally unproductive but of havoc; saw France twice invaded, and brought the nation under the ban of the civilized world!

France is at this moment pursuing the same course in Algiers, which was the pride of her politicians in Corsica. She is pouring out her gigantic force, to overwhelm the resistance of peasants who have no defence but their naked bravery. She will probably subdue the resistance; for what can be done by a peasantry against the disciplined force and vast resources of a great European power, applied to this single object of success? But, barbarian as the Moor and the Arab are, and comparatively helpless in the struggle, the avenger may yet come, to teach the throne of France, that there is a power higher than all thrones; a tribunal to which the blood cries out of the ground.

The death of Secker, Archbishop of Canterbury, excites a few touches of Walpole's sarcastic pen. He says, "that his early life had shown his versatility, his latter his ambition. But hypocrisy not being parts, he rose in the church without ever making a figure in the state." So much for antithesis. There is no reason why a clergyman should make a figure in the state under any circumstances; and the less figure he made in the state, as it was then constituted, the more likely he was to be fitted for the church. But the true censure on Secker would have been, that he rose, without making a figure in any thing; that he had never produced any work worthy of notice as a divine; that he had neither eloquence in the pulpit, nor vigour with the pen; that he seems to have been at all times a man of extreme mediocrity; that his qualifications with the ministry were, his being a neutral on all the great questions of the day; and his merits with posterity were, that he possessed power without giving offence. A hundred such men might have held the highest positions of the church, without producing the slightest effect on the public mind; or might have been left in the lowest, without being entitled to accuse the injustice of fortune. His successor was Cornwallis, Bishop of Lichfield, raised to the primacy by the Duke of Grafton, who, as Walpole says, "had a friendship for the bishop's nephew, Earl Cornwallis." This seems not altogether the most sufficient reason for placing a man at the head of the Church of England, but we must take the reason such as we find it. Walpole adds, that the nomination had, however, the merit of disappointing a more unsuitable candidate, Ternet of London, whom he describes as "the most time-serving of the clergy, and sorely chagrined at missing the archiepiscopal mitre."

It was rather unlucky for the public estimate of royalty, that, at this moment of popular irritation, the young King of Denmark should have arrived in England. He had married the King's youngest sister, and making a sort of tour of Europe, he determined to visit the family of his wife. His proposal was waived by the King, who excused himself by the national confusions. But the young Dane, scarcely more than a giddy boy, and singularly self-willed, was not to be repelled; and he came. Nothing could be colder than his reception; not a royal carriage, not an officer of the court, was sent to meet him. He arrived at St James's even in a hired carriage. Neither King nor Queen was there. The only mark of attention paid to him was giving him an apartment, and supplying him and his suite with a table. Walpole observes, that this sullen treatment was as impolitic as it was inhospitable; that the Dane was then actually a pensioner of France, and, of course, it would have been wise to win him out of its hands. But the Danish king seems to have been little better than a fool; and between his frolics and his follies, he finally produced a species of revolution in his own country. All power fell into the hands of his queen, who, though of a bolder nature, seems to have been scarcely less frantic than himself. On the visit of her mother, the Princess of Wales, to Denmark, the Queen met her, at the head of a regiment, dressed in full uniform, and wearing buckskin breeches. She must have been an extraordinary figure altogether, for she had grown immensely corpulent. Court favouritism was the fashion in Denmark, and the King and Queen were equally ruled by favourites. But, in a short period, a young physician of the household managed both, obtaining peculiarly the confidence of the Queen. Scandal was not idle on this occasion, and Germany and England rang with stories of the court of Denmark. The physician was soon created a noble, and figured for a while as the prime minister, or rather sovereign of the kingdom, by the well-known title of Count Struensee. A party was formed against him by the Queen-mother, at the head of some of the nobility. The Queen was made prisoner, and died in prison. Struensee was tried as traitor, and beheaded. The King was finally incapacitated from reigning, and his son was raised to the regency. This melancholy transaction formed one of the tragedies of Europe; but it had the additional misfortune of occurring at a time when royalty had begun to sink under the incessant attacks of the revolutionists, and France, the leader of public opinion on the Continent, was filled with opinions contemptuous of all thrones.

The year 1768 exhibited France in her most humiliating position before Europe. The Duc de Choiseul was the minister—a man of wit, elegance, and accomplishment; but too frivolous to follow, if he had not been too ignorant to discover, the true sources of national greatness. His foreign policy was intrigue, and his domestic policy the favouritism of the court by administering to its vices. He raised a war between the Russians and Turks, and had the mortification of seeing his protÉgÉ the Turk trampled by the armies of his rival the Czarina. Even the Corsicans had degraded the military name of France. But he had a new peril at home. Old Marshal Richelieu—who, as Walpole sarcastically observes, "had retained none of his faculties, but that last talent of a decayed Frenchman, a spirit of back-stairs intrigue"—had provided old Louis XV. with a new mistress. Of all the persons of this character who had made French royal life scandalous in the eyes of Europe, this connexion was the most scandalous. It scandalized even France. This mistress was the famous Countess du Barri—a wretched creature, originally of the very lowest condition; whose vices would have stained the very highest; and who, in the convulsions of the reign that followed, was butchered by the guillotine.

In November of this year died the Duke of Newcastle, at the age of seventy-five. He had been struck with palsy some months before, and then for the first time withdrew from public life. Walpole observes, that his life had been a proof that, "even in a free country, great abilities are not necessary to govern it." Industry, perseverance, and intrigue, gave him that duration of power "which shining talents, and the favour of the crown, could not secure to Lord Granville, nor the first rank in eloquence, or the most brilliant services, to Lord Chatham. Rashness overset Lord Granville's parts, and presumptuous impracticability Lord Chatham; while adventitious cunning repaired Newcastle's folly." Such is the explanation of one of the most curious phenomena of the time, by one of its most ingenious lookers-on. But the explanation is not sufficient. It is impossible to conceive, how mere cunning could have sustained any man for a quarter of a century in the highest ministerial rank; while that rank was contested from day to day by men of every order of ability. Since the days of Bolingbroke, there have been no examples of ministerial talent, equal to those exhibited, in both Houses, in the day of the Duke of Newcastle. Chatham was as ambitious as any man that ever lived, and full of the faculties that make ambition successful. The Butes, the Bedfords, the Hollands, the Shelburnes, exhibited every shape and shade of cabinet dexterity, of court cabal, of popular influence, and of political knowledge and reckless intrigue. Yet the Duke of Newcastle, with remarkable personal disadvantages—a ridiculous manner, an ungainly address, speech without the slightest pretension to eloquence, and the character of extreme ignorance on general subjects—preserved his power almost to the extreme verge of life; and to the last was regarded as playing a most important part in the counsels of the country. Unless we believe in magic, we must believe that this man, with all his oddity of manner, possessed some remarkable faculty, by which he saw his way clearly through difficulties impervious to more showy minds. He must have deeply discovered the means of attaching the monarch, of acting upon the legislature, and of controlling the captiousness of the people. He must have had practical qualities of a remarkable kind; and his is not the first instance, in which such qualities, in the struggles of government, bear away the prize. Thus, in later times, we have seen Lord Liverpool minister for eleven years, and holding power with a firm, yet quiet grasp to the last; with the whole strength of Lord Grey and the Whigs struggling for it in front, and George Canning, a still more dangerous enemy, watching for it in the rear.

In one of the Notes referring to the appointment of Earl Cornwallis to the vice-treasuryship of Ireland, the editor makes a remark which ought not to pass without strong reprehension. Earl Cornwallis, towards the close of the Irish rebellion in 1798, had been made chief governor of Ireland, at the head of a large army, for the purpose of extinguishing the remnants of the rebellion, and restoring the country to the habits of peace. The task was no longer difficult, but he performed his part with dignity and moderation. He had been sent expressly for the purpose of pacifying the country, an object which would have been altogether inconsistent with measures of violence; but the editor, in telling us that his conduct exhibited sagacity and benevolence, hazards the extraordinary assertion, that "he was one of the few statesmen who inculcated the necessity of forbearance and concession in the misgoverned country!" Nothing can be more erroneous than this statement in point of principle, or more ignorant in point of fact. For the last hundred years and upwards, dating from the cessation of the war with James II., Ireland had been the object of perpetual concessions, and, if misgoverned at all, it has been such by the excess of those concessions. It is to be remembered, that in the reign of William I. the Roman Catholics were in actual alliance with France, and in actual arms against England. They were next beaten in the field, and it was the business of the conquerors to prevent their taking arms again. From this arose the penal laws. To those laws we are not friendly; because we are not friendly to any attempt at the suppression even of religious error by the force of the state. It was a political blunder, and an offence to Christian principle, at the same time; but the Papist is the last man in the world who has a right to object to penal laws; for he is the very man who would have enacted them himself against the Protestant—who always enacts them where he has the power—and, from the spirit of whose laws, the British legislature were in fact only borrowing at the moment. Yet from the time when James II. and his family began to sink into insignificance, the legislature began to relax the penal laws. Within the course of half a century, they had wholly disappeared; and thus the editor's flippant assertion, that Earl Cornwallis was one of the few statesmen who inculcated the necessity of forbearance and concession, exhibits nothing but his Whiggish ignorance on the subject. The misgovernment of Ireland, if such existed, was to be laid to the charge of neither the English minister nor the English people. The editor probably forgets, that during that whole period she was governed by her own parliament; while her progress during the second half of the 18th century was memorably rapid, and prosperous in the highest degree, through the bounties, privileges, and encouragements of every kind, which were constantly held out to her by the British government. And that so early as the year 1780, she was rich enough to raise, equip, and support a volunteer army of nearly a hundred thousand men—a measure unexampled in Europe, and which would probably task the strength of some of the most powerful kingdoms even at this day. And all this was previous to the existence of what is called the "patriot constitution."

Walpole has the art of painting historic characters to the life; but he sadly extinguishes the romance with which our fancy so often enrobes them. We have been in the habit of hearing Pascal Paoli, the chief of the Corsicans, described as the model of a republican hero; and there can be no question, that the early resistance of the Corsicans cost the French a serious expenditure of men and money. But Walpole charges Paoli with want of military skill, and even with want of that personal intrepidity so essential to a national leader. At length, Corsican resistance being overpowered by the constant accumulation of French force, Paoli gave way, and, as Walpole classically observes, "not having fallen like Leonidas, did not despair like Cato." Paoli had been so panegyrized by Boswell's work, that he was received with almost romantic applause. The Opposition adopted him for the sake of popularity, but ministers took him out of their hands by a pension of £1000 a-year. "I saw him," says Walpole, "soon after his arrival, dangling at court. He was a man of decent deportment, and so void of any thing remarkable in his aspect, that, being asked if I knew who he was, I judged him a Scotch officer—for he was sandy complexioned and in regimentals—who was cautiously awaiting the moment of promotion." All this is in Walpole's style of fashionable impertinence; but there can be no doubt that Paoli was a brave man, and an able commander. He gave the French several severe defeats, but the contest was soon too unequal, and Paoli withdrew to this country; which was so soon after to be a shelter to the aristocracy of the country which had stained his mountains with blood.

By a singular fate, on his return to France in an early period of the Revolution, he was received with a sort of national triumph, and actually appointed lieutenant-general of Corsica by the nation which had driven him into exile. In the war which followed, Paoli, disgusted by the tyranny of French republicanism, and alarmed by the violence of the native factions, proposed to put his country under the protection of the English government. A naval and military force was sent to Corsica, and the island was annexed to the British crown. But the possession was not maintained with rational vigour. The feeble armament was found unequal to resist the popular passion for republicanism. And, from this expenditure of troops, and probably still more from the discovery that the island would be wholly useless, the force was altogether withdrawn. Paoli returned to England, where he died, having attained the advanced age of eighty. His red hair and sandy complexion are probably fatal to his character as an Italian chieftain. But if his locks were not black, his heart was bold; and if his lip wanted mustaches, his mind wanted neither sagacity nor determination.

Walpole was born for a cynic philosopher. He treats men of all ranks with equal scorn. From Wilkes to George III., he brands them all. Ministers meet no mercy at his hands. He ranges them, as the Sultan used to range heads on the spikes of the seraglio, for marks for his arrows. His history is a species of moveable panorama; the scene constantly shifting, and every scene a burlesque of the one that went before; or perhaps the more faithful similitude would be found in a volume of HB.'s ingenious caricatures, where all the likenesses are preserved, though perverted, and all the dexterity of an accomplished pencil is employed only in making its subjects ridiculous. He thus tells us:—"The Duke of Grafton was the fourth prime minister in seven years, who fell by his own fault. Lord Bute was seized with a panic, and ran away from his own victory. Grenville was undone by his insolence, by joining in the insult on the princess, and by his persecution of Lord Bute and Mackenzie. Lord Rockingham's incapacity overturned him; and now the Duke of Grafton destroyed a power which it had depended on himself to make as permanent as he could desire." But rash and rapid as those changes were, what were the grave intrigues of the English cabinet to the boudoir ministries of France? Walpole is never so much in his element, as when he is sporting in the fussy frivolities of the Faubourg St Germain. He was much more a Frenchman than an Englishman; his love of gossip, his passion for haunting the society of talkative old women, and his delight at finding himself revelling in a region of petite soupers, court gallantries, and the faded indiscretions of court beauties in the wane, would have made him a rival to the courtiers of Louis XIV.

Perhaps, the world never saw, since the days of Sardanapalus, a court so corrupt, wealth so profligate, and a state of society so utterly contemptuous of even the decent affectation of virtue, as the closing years of the reign of Louis XV. A succession of profligate women ruled the king, a similar succession ruled the cabinet; lower life was a sink of corruption; the whole a romance of the most scandalous order. Madame de Pompadour, a woman whose vice had long survived her beauty, and who ruled the decrepit heart of a debauched king, had made Choiseul minister. Choiseul was the beau-ideal of a French noble of the old rÉgime. His ambition was boundless, his insolence ungoverned, his caprice unrestrained, and his love of pleasure predominant even over his love of power. "He was an open enemy, but a generous one; and had more pleasure in attaching an enemy, than in punishing him. Whether from gaiety or presumption, he was never dismayed; his vanity made him always depend on the success of his plans, and his spirits made him soon forget the miscarriage of them."

At length appeared on the tapis the memorable Madame du Barri! For three months, all the faculties of the court were absorbed in the question of her public presentation. Indulgent as the courtiers were to the habits of royal life, the notoriety of Madame du Barri's early career, startled even their flexible sense of etiquette. The ladies of the court, most of whom would have been proud to have taken her place, determined "that they would not appear at court if she should be received there." The King's daughters (who had borne the ascendant of Madame du Pompadour in their mother's life) grew outrageous at the new favourite; and the relatives of Choiseul insisted upon it, that he should resign rather than consent to the presentation. Choiseul resisted, yielded, was insulted for his resistance, and was scoffed at for his submission. He finally retired, and was ridiculed for his retirement. Du Barri triumphed. Epigrams and calembours blazed through Paris. Every one was a wit for the time, and every wit was a rebel. The infidel faction looked on at the general dissolution of morals with delight, as the omen of general overthrow. The Jesuits rejoiced in the hope of getting the old King into their hands, and terrifying him, if not into a proselyte, at least into a tool. Even Du Barri herself was probably not beyond their hopes; for the established career of a King's mistress was, to turn dÉvote on the decay of her personal attractions.

Among Choiseul's intentions was that of making war on England. There was not the slightest ground for a war. But it is a part of the etiquette of a Frenchman's life, that he must be a warrior, or must promote a war, or must dream of a war. M. Guizot is the solitary exception in our age, as M. Fleury was the solitary exception in the last; but Fleury was an ecclesiastic, and was eighty years old besides—two strong disqualifications for a conqueror. But the King was then growing old, too; his belligerent propensities were absorbed in quarrels with his provincial parliaments; his administrative faculties found sufficient employment in managing the morals of his mistresses; his private hours were occupied in pelting Du Barri with sugar-plums; and thus his days wore away without that supreme glory of the old rÉgime—a general war in Europe.

The calamities of the French noblesse at the period of the Revolution, excited universal regret; and the sight of so many persons, of graceful manners and high birth, flung into the very depths of destitution in foreign lands, or destroyed by the guillotine at home, justified the sympathy of mankind. But, the secret history of that noblesse was a fearful stigma, not only on France, but on human nature. Vice may have existed to a high degree of criminality in other lands; but in no other country of Europe, or the earth, ever was vice so public, so ostentatiously forced upon the eyes of man, so completely formed into an established and essential portion of fashionable and courtly life. It was even the etiquette, that the King of France should have a mistress. She was as much a part of the royal establishment as a prime minister was of the royal councils; and, as if for the purpose of offering a still more contemptuous defiance to the common decencies of life, the etiquette was, that this mistress should be a married woman! Yet in that country the whole ritual of Popery was performed with scrupulous exactness. A vast and powerful clergy filled France; and the ceremonials of the national religion were performed continually before the court, with the most rigid formality. The King had his confessor, and, so far as we can discover, the mistress had her confessor too; the nobles attended the royal chapel, and also had their confessors. The confessional was never without royal and noble solicitors of monthly, or, at the furthest, quarterly absolution. Still, from the whole body of ecclesiastics, France heard no remonstrance against those public abominations. Their sermons, few and feeble, sometimes declaimed on the vices of the beggars of Paris, or the riots among the peasantry; but no sense of scriptural responsibility, and no natural feeling of duty, ever ventured to deprecate the vices of the nobles and the scandals of the throne.

We must give but a fragment, from Walpole's catalogue raisonnÉ, of this Court of Paphos. It had been the King's object to make some women of rank introduce Madame du Barri at court; and he had found considerable difficulty in this matter, not from her being a woman of no character, but on her being a woman of no birth, and whose earlier life had been spent in the lowest condition of vice. The King at last succeeded—and these are the chaperons. "There was Madame de l'HÔpital, an ancient mistress of the Prince de Soubize! The Comtesse Valentinois, of the highest birth, very rich, but very foolish; and as far from a Lucretia as Madame du Barri herself! Madame de Flavacourt was another, a suitable companion to both in virtue and understanding. She was sister to three of the King's earliest mistresses, and had aimed at succeeding them! The MarÉchale Duchesse de Mirpoix was the last, and a very important acquisition." Of her, Walpole simply mentions that all her talents were "drowned in such an overwhelming passion for play, that though she had long and singular credit with the King, she reduced her favour to an endless solicitation for money to pay her debts." He adds, in his keen and amusing style—"That, to obtain the post of dame d'honneur to the Queen, she had left off red (wearing rouge,) and acted dÉvotion; and the very next day was seen riding with Madame de Pompadour (the King's mistress) in the latter's coach!" The editor settles the question of her morality, too.—"She was a woman of extraordinary wit and cleverness, but totally without character." She had her morals by inheritance; for she was the daughter of the mistress of the Duke of Lorraine, who married her to Monsieur de Beauvan, a poor noble, and whom the duke got made a prince of the empire, by the title of De Craon. Now, all those were females of the highest rank in France, ladies of fashion, the stars of court life, and the models of national manners. Can we wonder at the retribution which cast them out into the highways of Europe? Can we wonder at the ruin of the corrupted nobility? Can we wonder at the massacre of the worldly church, which stood looking on at those vilenesses, and yet never uttered a syllable against them, if it did not even share in their excesses? The true cause for astonishment is, not in the depth of their fall, but in its delay; not in the severity of the national judgment, but in that long-suffering which held back the thunderbolt for a hundred years, and even then did not extinguish the generation at a blow!