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 C. K. OGDEN 
 
 
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 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 HILLSDON COI
 
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 3, St. James's Square, August 1, 1836. 
 
 SIR EGERTOM BRYDGES' EDTIION OF MILTON, 
 Illustkated by J. M. W. Turner, Esq., R.A. 
 
 NOW COMPLETED, 
 
 in Six Vols, superbly bound and embossed, price only Five 
 Shillings each, 
 
 THE 
 
 POETICAL WORKS 
 
 OP 
 
 JOHN MILTON, 
 
 WITH HIS LIFE, 
 
 AND STANDARD CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL NOTES 
 AND INTRODUCTIONS, 
 
 ORIGINAL AND SELECT. 
 
 By Sir Egerton Brydges, Bart. K.J. etc. 
 
 Illustrated with exquisite Imaginative Vignettes, by 
 J. M, W. Turner, R. A. etc. 
 
 ENGRAVED BY GOODALL, MILLER, COUSEN, BRANDARD, 
 GRAVES, BACON, &c. 
 
 ' By the publication of this work both Editor and Publisher 
 have faithfully and ably fulfilled their pledge on commencing the 
 undertaking, and completed an edition of our sublime Bard in a 
 manner worthy of him and of his fame. The critical remarks we 
 have already quoted with strong terms of admiration, and the em- 
 bellishments furnished by the Fine Arts have met our unqualified 
 praise. - What more, then, can we say, but repeat that this copy 
 of Milton is eminently deserving of general i^.vo\xxV— Literary 
 Gazette.
 
 11 POETICAL WORKS OF MILTON. 
 
 ' When the work is completed it will form the best, the cheap- 
 est, and the most elegant edition of Milton's poems that has yet 
 appeared. And if Sir Egerton judiciously executes his inten- 
 tion of rejecting from the prose writings all temporary and merely 
 controversial matter, retaining only such parts as possess a more 
 general and enduring interest, he will, for popular purposes, 
 have presented the public with a complete edition of Milton's 
 Works, — an undertaking which it is the duty as it ought to be the 
 pleasure of every lover of English literature to support.' — Spectator. 
 
 ' The concluding volume of this elegant edition is before us; 
 and in its completion justifies the prediction we hazarded on its 
 iirst appearance, so far as the poetry of Milton is concerned. The 
 text is all that a critical bibliographer could desire ; and the notes 
 appear to contain all that is worth preserving in previous com- 
 mentators and critics. 'J'he introductions and the notes which 
 Sir Egerton has himself supplied, are distinguished for a poetical 
 enthusiasm ; and if lie is occasionally deficient in the severe im- 
 partiality which should characterize the critic, he redeems the 
 fault by rarer qualities — a mind so deeply imbued with the spirit 
 of his author as to seem akin to it, a richness of diction and pro- 
 priety of epithet not often met with, and something of a Miltonic 
 march in prose. * * * Jn taking our leave of this edition, we 
 may reiterate our previous recommendation. Of all the embel- 
 lished reprints it is by far the most worthy of public or indeed of 
 national patronage.'— .Spectator. — (Second Notice.) 
 
 'This edition of the great Poet has proceeded steadily to its 
 close, and realized all that it promised. It is due to the spirit 
 and liberality which have characterized the undertaking, to ob- 
 serve that it would be scarcely possible to have produced a more 
 beautiful series of volumes.' — Examiner. 
 
 ' We were well pleased to receive this volume from the hand of 
 one who, though differing widely from the Iconoclast in many im- 
 portant opinions and principles, was sure to approach the sub- 
 ject humbly and reverently, with love and admiration. Sir Eger- 
 ton Brydges was certainly not the man we should have chosen as 
 the editor of Milton's prose writings ; but we know not, at this 
 present moment, that there is any one to whom the task of 
 collating and commenting upon his Poems could have been 
 more worthily confided. 'Ihe result, as far as is yet appa- 
 rent, is a pleasant critical biography, which all may read with 
 pleasure, and most with instruction. We ourselves were never 
 more strongly impressed, than in our progress through this work, 
 with the gigantic power of Milton's mind — the studious and 
 patient labour with which he perfected and enlarged its power — 
 and the heroic devotedness with which he condescended to the 
 ungracious and mechanical duties of life. We have only to ob- 
 serve that the volume is got up in a very handsome manner. The 
 vignette from Turner's matchless pencil is positively sublime. — 
 Athenepum,
 
 ^ 
 
 ::^e3*^. Z,:^^^ ^ ^"^ 
 
 <^>^^ 4ir>^: 
 
 ^-.^^^ 
 
 LETTERS OF RUNNYMEDE-'y jTSl^
 
 P R I N T K U BY A . J . V A t P Yj 
 HED LION CUUKT, FLEET STREET.
 
 THE LETTERS 
 
 OF 
 
 RUNNYMEDE 
 
 Neither for shame nor fear this mask he wore. 
 That, like a vizor in the battle-field. 
 But shrouds a manly and a daring brow." 
 
 LONDON : 
 JOHN MACRONE, ST. JAMES'S SQUARE. 
 
 MDCCCXXXVI.
 
 -IN 
 
 B35X 
 
 DEDICATION. 
 
 TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE 
 SIR ROBERT PEEL, BARONET, M.P. 
 
 Sir, 
 
 I HAVE the honour to dedicate to you 
 a volume illustrative of Whigs and Whig- 
 GisM. It has been my object to delineate 
 within its pages not only the present cha- 
 racters and recent exploits of the most 
 active of the partizans, but also the essen- 
 
 1 nf?/i^Af?n
 
 VI DEDICATIO.X. 
 
 tial and permanent spirit of the party. It 
 appeared to me that it might be advan- 
 tageous to connect the criticism on the 
 character of the hour with some researches 
 into the factious idiosyncrasy of centuries. 
 Political parties are not so inconsistent as 
 the superficial imagine ; and, in my opinion, 
 the Whig of a century back does not differ 
 so materially as some would represent from 
 the Whig of the present day. I hope, 
 therefore, that this volume may conduce, 
 not only to the amusement, but to the in- 
 struction, of my countrymen. 
 
 It is now. Sir, some six months past
 
 DEDICATION. Vll 
 
 since I seized the occasion of addressing 
 you another letter, written under very dif- 
 ferent auspices. The session of Parlia- 
 ment was then about to commence ; it is 
 now about to close. These six months have 
 not been uneventful in results. If they 
 have not witnessed any legislative enact- 
 ment eminently tending to our social wel- 
 fare, they have developed much political 
 conduct for which our posterity may be 
 grateful : for this session. Sir, has at least 
 been memorable for one great event, — an 
 event not inferior, in my estimation, in its 
 beneficial influence on the fortunes of the 
 country, to Magna Charta itself, — I mean
 
 Till DEDICATIOX. 
 
 the rally of the English Constitution ; I 
 might use a stronger phrase, I might say 
 its triumph. 
 
 And it has triumphed because it has 
 become understood. The more its prin* 
 ciples have been examined, the more the 
 intention of its various parts has been in- 
 vestigated, and its general scope com- 
 prehended, the more beneficent and pro- 
 found has appeared the polity of our 
 fathers. The public mind of late has been 
 cleared of a vast amount of error in con- 
 stitutional learning. Scarcely a hired 
 writer v^ould have the front at this day to
 
 DEDICATION. IX 
 
 pretend that a difference of opinion be- 
 tween the two Houses of Parliament is a 
 collision between the Peers and the People. 
 That phrase *Uhe People" is a little 
 better comprehended now than it used to 
 be : it will not serve for the stalking-horse 
 of faction, as it did. We know very well 
 that the House of Commons is not the 
 House of " the People ; " we know very 
 well that "• the People" is a body not in- 
 telligible in a political sense ; we know 
 very well that the Lords and the Commons 
 are both sections of the Nation, and both 
 alike and equally representative of that 
 great community. And we know very well
 
 DEDICATION. 
 
 that if the contrary propositions to all 
 these were maintained, the government of 
 this English empire might at this moment 
 be the pastime and plunder of some score 
 of Irish adventurers. 
 
 When, Sir, you quitted Drayton in 
 February, the vagabond delegate of a 
 foreign priesthood was stirring up rebel- 
 lion against the Peers of England, with 
 the implied, if not the definite, sanction 
 of his Majesty's Ministers. Where is that 
 hired disturber now ? Like base coin de- 
 tected by the very consequences of its 
 currency, and finally nailed against the
 
 DEDICATION. XI 
 
 counter it has deceived, so this bad po- 
 litician, like a bad shilling, has worn off 
 his edge by his very restlessness. Par- 
 liament met, and the King's Ministers ex- 
 hibited w^ith a flourish their emblazoned 
 catalogue of oligarchical coups- d'etat^ by 
 which they were to entrench themselves 
 in power under the plea of ameliorating 
 our society. Not one of these measures 
 has been carried. Yet we were told that 
 their success was certain, and by a simple 
 process — by the close and incontestable 
 union between all true reformers. The 
 union between all true reformers has ter- 
 minated in the mutiny of Downing Street.
 
 Xll DEDICATION. 
 
 I believe that I have commemorated in 
 this volume that celebrated harangue, 
 v^hich the Chancellor of the Exchequer, 
 at the commencement of the session, ad- 
 dressed at a dinner to his constituents. 
 You may perhaps remember. Sir, the 
 glowing promises of that. Right Hon- 
 ourable Gentleman : they seemed almost 
 to announce the advent of a political mil- 
 lennium. '' First and foremost," announced 
 the Right Honourable Chancellor, ** we 
 shall proceed in our great work of the 
 reform of the Court of Equity;" — the 
 opus magnum of the gifted Cottenham ! It 
 seems the course of nature was reversed
 
 DEDICATION. XUI 
 
 here, and the butterfly turned into a grub. 
 " Our earnest attention will then be di- 
 rected," quoth Mr. Rice, '* to the entire 
 and complete relief of our Dissenting 
 brethren and fellow-subjects." How libe- 
 ral, how condescending, and how sincere ! 
 The Dissenters are absolutely our fellow- 
 subjects. None but a Whig, a statesman 
 almost eructating with the plenary in- 
 spiration of the spirit of the age, could 
 have been capable of making so philoso- 
 phical an admission. In the mean time six 
 months have passed, and nothing has been 
 done for our unhappy ''fellow-subjects," 
 while the Dissenting organs denounce even
 
 XIV DEDICATION. 
 
 the projected alleviation as a miserable 
 insult. To justice to Ireland, Mr. Rice of 
 course was pledged, and most determined 
 to obtain it ; but his bills have been dis- 
 honoured nevertheless. And the settle- 
 ment of the Irish Tithe, and the Reform 
 of the Irish Corporations, are about as 
 much advanced by this great Whig Go- 
 vernment, as the Relief of the Dissenters 
 and the Reform of the Court of Chancery. 
 What have they done then ? What pledge 
 have they redeemed ? The Ecclesiastical 
 Courts remain unpurged. Even the Stamp 
 Act, through the medium of w^hich the 
 Whigs, as usual, have levelled a blow at
 
 DEDICATION. XV 
 
 the liberty of the press, has not passed yet, 
 and in its present inquisitorial form can 
 never become a law. What, then, I re- 
 peat, have they done? They promised 
 indeed to break open the prisons like 
 Jack Cade; but as yet the grates are 
 barred ; the pensions are still paid, and 
 the soldiers still flogged. Oh ! ye Scribes 
 of the Treasury, and Pharisees of Downing 
 Street ! 
 
 Supported in the House of Lords by 
 a body inferior in number to the Peers 
 created by the Whigs during the last five 
 years; upheld in the House of Commons
 
 XVI DEDICATION. 
 
 by a majority of twenty-six, Lord Mel- 
 bourne still clings to his mulish and unge- 
 nerative position of place without power ; 
 and with a degree of modest frankness and 
 constitutional propriety, equally admirable, 
 pledges himself before his country, that, 
 as long as he is supported by a majority of 
 the House of Commons, he will remain 
 Minister. I apprehend the ratification 
 of a Ministry is as necessary by one 
 House of Parliament as by the other ; 
 but I stop not to discuss this. The 
 choice of Ministers was once entrusted 
 to a different authority than that of 
 either Lords or Commons. But this is
 
 DEDICATION. XVll 
 
 an old almanack ; and I leave Lord Vis- 
 count Melbourne to shake its dust off at 
 his next interview with his projected Doge 
 of Windsor. 
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 
 
 July 27, 1836.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 LETTERS OF RUNNYMEDE. 
 
 I'AGE 
 
 I. To Viscount Melbourne, . . 1 
 
 II. To Sir John Campbell, . . \) 
 
 III. To Mr. Thomas Attwood, M.P. . 17 
 
 IV. To Lord Brougham, ... 28 
 
 V. To Sir Robert Peel, ... 35 
 
 VI. To THE Chancellor of the Exchequer, 45 
 
 VII. To Lord John Russell, . . 54 
 
 VIII. To the People, .... 65 
 
 IX. To Lord Stanley, . . . . 76
 
 XX CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 X. To Lord William Bentinck, . . 8*5 
 
 XI. To Viscount Palmerston, . . 99 
 
 XII. To Sir John Hobhouse, . . 109 
 
 XIII. To Lord Glenelg, .... 116 
 XIY. To THE Right Hon. Edward Ellice, 1-23 
 
 XV. To Viscount Melbourne, , . 131 
 
 XVI. To the House of Lords, . . 137 
 
 XVII. To the House of Lords, . . 148 
 
 XVIII. To the Lord Chancellor, . . 156 
 
 XIX. To Viscount Melbourne, . . 165 
 
 THE SPIRIT OF WHIGGISM. 
 
 Chapters I. to VI. ..... 175 
 
 ^iielivioT^u 23 S
 
 TtlE 
 
 LETTERS OF RUNNYMEDE,
 
 THE 
 
 LETTERS OF RUNNYMEDE. 
 
 LETTER I. 
 
 VISCOUNT MELBOURNE. 
 
 My Lord, 
 The Marquis of Halifax was wont to say of his 
 Royal Master, that, ** after all, his favorite Sultana 
 Queen was Sauntering." It is, perhaps, hopeless 
 that your Lordship should rouse yourself from 
 the embraces of that Siren Desidia, to whose 
 fatal influence you are not less a slave than our 
 second Charles, and that you should cease to 
 saunter over the destinies of a nation, and lounge 
 away the glory of an empire. Yet the swift 
 shadows of coming events are assuredly suffi- 
 
 A
 
 LETTERS OF 
 
 ciently dark and ominous to startle from its in- 
 dolence even 
 
 " The sleekest swine in Epicurus' sty." 
 
 When I recall to my bewildered memory the 
 perplexing circumstance that William Lamb is 
 Prime Minister of England, it seems to me that I 
 recollect with labour the crowning incident of 
 some grotesque dream^ or that in some pastime of 
 the season you have drawn for the amusement of 
 a nation a temporary character^ ludicrously ap- 
 propriate only from the total want of connexion 
 and fitness between the festive part and the 
 individual by whom it is sustained. Previous 
 to the passing of the famous Act of 1832, for the 
 amendment of popular representation, your re- 
 putation, I beheve, principally depended upon 
 your talent for prologue writing. No one was 
 held to introduce with more grace and spirit the 
 performances of an amateur society. With the 
 exception of an annual oration against parlia- 
 mentary reform, your career in the House of 
 Commons was never remarkably distinguished.
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 3 
 
 Your Cabinet, indeed, appears to have been con- 
 structed from the materials of your old dramatic 
 company. The domestic policy of the country 
 is entrusted to the celebrated author of Don 
 Carlos; the Fletcher of this Beaumont, the 
 author of the Siege of Constantinople (an idea 
 apparently borrowed from your Russian allies), 
 is the guardian of the lives and properties of the 
 Irish clergy, under the charitable supervision of 
 that " first tragedy man," the Lord of Mulgrave ; 
 Lord Glenelg admirably personifies a sleepy 
 audience ; while your Chancellor of the Ex- 
 chequer beats Mr. Power ; and your Secretary 
 for Foreign Affairs, in his mimetic sympathy with 
 French manners and intimate acquaintance with 
 French character, is scarcely inferior to the late 
 ingenious Charles Mathews. That general 
 adapter from the Spanish, Lord Holland, gives 
 you all the advantage, in the affairs of the Penin- 
 sula, of his early studies of Lope de Vega, and, 
 indeed, with his skilful assistance you appear, by 
 all accounts, to have woven a plot absurd and 
 complicated enough, even for the grave humour
 
 4 LETTERS OF 
 
 of Madrid, or the gay fancy of Seville. For your- 
 self is still reserved a monopoly of your peculiar 
 talent, and doubtless on the fourth of February 
 you will open your house with an introductory 
 composition worthy of your previous reputation. 
 
 I remember some years ago listening to one of 
 these elegant productions from the practised pen 
 of the present Prime Minister of Great Britain, 
 if not of Ireland. I think it was on that occasion 
 that you annunciated to your audience the great 
 moral discovery that the characteristic of the 
 public mind of the present day was 
 
 *' A taste for evil." 
 
 Our taste for evil does not seem to be on the 
 wane, since it has permitted this great empire to 
 be governed by the Whigs, and has induced even 
 those Whigs to be governed by an Irish rebel. 
 Your prologue, my Lord, was quite prophetic. 
 
 If your Royal Master's speech at the opening 
 of his parliament may share its inspiration, it 
 will tell to the people of England some terrible 
 truths.
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 
 
 It will announce, in the first place, that the 
 policy of your theatrical Cabinet has at length 
 succeeded in dividing the people of England into 
 two hostile camps, in which numbers are arrayed 
 against property, ignorance against knowledge, 
 and sects against institutions. 
 
 It will announce to us, that your theatrical 
 Cabinet has also been not less fortunate in ma- 
 turing the passive resistance of the enemy in 
 Ireland into active hostility, and that you have ob- 
 tained the civil war from which the Duke of Wel- 
 lington shrank, without acquiring the political 
 security which might have been its consequence. 
 
 It will announce to us, that in foreign affairs 
 you and your company have finally succeeded in 
 destroying all our old alliances, without substi- 
 tuting any new ones ; and that, after having 
 sacrificed every principle of British policy to 
 secure an intimate alliance with France, the 
 Cabinet of the Tuileries has even had the airy 
 audacity to refuse its co-operation in that very 
 treaty in which its promises alone involved you ; 
 and that^ while the British minister can with
 
 lETTERS OF 
 
 extreme difficulty obtain an audience at St. 
 Petersburg, the ambassador of France passes 
 with a polite smile of gay recognition the luckless 
 representative of William IV., who is lounging in 
 an ante-chamber in the enjoyment of an indolence 
 which even your lordship might envy. 
 
 It will announce to us, that in our colonial 
 empire the most important results may speedily 
 be anticipated from the discreet selection of Lord 
 Auckland as a successor to our Clives and our 
 Hastings ; that the progressive improvement of 
 the French in the manufacture of beet-root may 
 compensate for the approaching destruction of our 
 West Indian plantations ; and that, although 
 Canada is not yet independent, the final triumph 
 of liberal principles, under the immediate patron- 
 age of the government, may eventually console us 
 for the loss of the glory of Chatham, and the 
 conquests of Wolfe. 
 
 At home or abroad, indeed, an agreeable pro° 
 spect on every side surrounds you. Your Lord- 
 ship may exclaim with Hannibal — ^' Behind us 
 are the Alps, before us is Eridanus !" And who
 
 RL'XNYMEDE. 
 
 are your assistants to stem the profound and im- 
 petuous current of this awful futurity ? At an 
 unconstitutional expenditure of four coronets, 
 which may some day figure as an article in an 
 impeachment, the Whigs have at length obtained 
 a Lord Chancellor — as a lawyer not illustrious, as 
 a statesman a nonentity. The seals of the princi- 
 pal office of the state are entrusted to an indivi- 
 dual, who, on the principle that good vinegar i3 
 the corruption of bad wine, has been metamor- 
 phosed from an incapable author into an emi- 
 nent pohtician. His brother secretaries remind 
 me of two battered female sinners; one frivolous, 
 the other exhausted ; one taking refuge from 
 conscious scorn in rouge and the affected giggle 
 of fluttering folly, and the other in strong waters 
 and devotion. Then Mr. Spring Rice waves a 
 switch, which he would fain persuade you is a 
 shillalagh ; while the Rienzi of Westminster smiles 
 with marvelling complacency at the strange chap- 
 ter of accidents which has converted a man whose 
 friends pelted George Lamb with a cabbage-stalk, 
 into a main prop of William Lamb's Cabinet.
 
 8 
 
 LETTERS OP 
 
 \ 
 
 Some yet remain — the acute intelligence of Lans- 
 dovvne, the polished mind of Thompson, Howick's 
 calm maturity, and the youthful energy of Hol- 
 land, 
 
 And this is the Cabinet that controls the des- 
 tinies of a far vaster population than owned the 
 sway of Rome in the palmiest hour of its imperial 
 fame ! Scarron or Butler should celebrate its 
 political freaks, and the shifting expedients of its 
 ignoble statecraft. But while I watch you in 
 your ludicrous councils, an awful shade rises 
 from behind the chair of my Lord President. 
 Slaves ! it is your master ; it is Eblis with 
 Captain Rock's bloody cap shadowing his atro- 
 cious countenance. In one hand he waves a torch, 
 and in the other clutches a skull. He gazes 
 on his victims with a leer of fiendish triumph. 
 Contemptible as you are, it is this dark connexion 
 that involves your fate with even an epic dignity, 
 and makes the impending story of your retributive 
 fortunes assume almost a Dantesque sublimity. 
 
 Jan. 18, 1836.
 
 EUXNYMEDE. 
 
 LETTER IL 
 
 SIR JOHN CAMPBELL. 
 
 SiR, 
 
 I HAVE always been of opinion, an opinion I ini* 
 bibed early in life from great authorities, that the 
 Attorney and Solicitor-General were not more 
 tlie guardians of the honour and the interests of 
 the Crown than of the honour and the interests of 
 the Bar. It appears to me that you have failed in 
 your duty as representative of this once illustrious 
 body, and therefore it is that I address to you this 
 letter. 
 
 Although your political opponent, I trust I am 
 not incapable of acknowledging and appreciating 
 your abihties and acquirements. They are sound,
 
 10 LETTERS OF 
 
 but they are not splendid. You have mastered 
 considerable legal reading, you are gifted with no 
 ordinary shrewdness, you have enjoyed great prac- 
 tice, and you have gained great experience ; you 
 possess undaunted perseverance and invincible in- 
 dustry. But you can advance no claim to the refined 
 subtlety of an Eldon, and still less to the luminous 
 precision, the quick perception, the varied know- 
 ledge and accomplished eloquence of a Lyndhurst. 
 In profound learning you cannot cope for a mo- 
 ment with Sir Edward Sugden; as an advocate, 
 you can endure no competition with your eminent 
 father-in-law, or with ¥4*4*- Sir Wilham FoUett, or, 
 for I am not writing as a partisan, with Mr. Ser- 
 jeant Wilde. As a pleader I beheve you were dis- 
 tinguished, though there are many who, even in 
 this humble province, have deemed that you might 
 yield the palm to Mr. Baron Parke and Mr. Jus- 
 tice Littledale. 
 
 But, whatever be your merits or defects, you are 
 still the King's Attorney-General, and as the 
 King's Attorney-General you have a prescriptive, 
 if not a positive, right to claim any seat upon the
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 11 
 
 judgment bench which becomes vacant during 
 your official tenure. This prescriptive right has 
 never been doubted in the profession. It has been 
 understood and acted upon by members of the bar, 
 of all parties, and at all times. In recent days, 
 Sir Robert GifFord, though a common law lawyer, 
 succeeded to the equity tribunal of Sir Thomas 
 Plomer. It is true that Sir Robert GifFord, for a very 
 short time previous to his accession, had practised 
 in the Court of Chancery, but the right of the At- 
 torney-General to succeed under any circumstances 
 was again recognised by Lord Eldon, when Sir John 
 Copley, who had never been in an equity court in 
 his life, became Master of the Rolls. On this 
 occasion it is well known that Leach, the Vice- 
 Chancellor, was anxious to succeed Lord Gilford, 
 but his request was not for a moment listened to 
 in preference to the claim of the Attorney- 
 General. 
 
 In allowing a judge, who a very short time 
 back was your inferior officer, to become Lord 
 Chancellor of England, and in permitting a bar- 
 rister, who had not even filled the office of Solici-
 
 12 
 
 LETTERS OF 
 
 tor-General, to be elevated over your head into the 
 seat of the Master of the Rolls, either you must 
 have esteemed yourself absolutely incompetent to 
 the discharge of those great offices, or you must 
 have been painfully conscious of your marked in- 
 feriority to both the individuals who were promoted 
 in your teeth ; or last, and bitterest alternative, 
 you must have claimed your right, and been de- 
 nied its enjoyment. In the first instance, you 
 virtually declared that you were equally unfit for 
 the office you at present hold, and what should 
 have been your consequent conduct is obvious; 
 in the second, you betrayed the interests of the 
 bar ; and in the third, you betrayed not only the 
 interests of the bar, but its honour also. 
 
 Without imputing to Sir John Campbell any 
 marvellous degree of arrogance, I cannnot bring 
 myself to believe that he holds himself absolutely 
 unfit for the discharge of the offices in question ; 
 I will not even credit that he has yielded to his 
 unfeigned sense of his marked inferiority to the 
 supernatural wisdom and miraculous acquirements 
 of my Lord Cottenham, or that his downcast
 
 RLTNNYMEDE. 
 
 13 
 
 vision has been dazzled by the wide-extended 
 celebrity that surrounds with a halo the name of 
 Bickersteth ! No, Sir, we will not trench upon 
 the manorial right of modesty, which is the mono- 
 poly of your colleague, Sir Monsey Rolfe, that 
 public man on the lucus a non lucendo principle, 
 that shadowy entity which all have heard of, few 
 seen — an individual, it would appear, of a rare 
 humihty and admirable patience, and born, as it 
 were, to exemplify the beauty of resignation. 
 
 I believe, therefore, that you claimed the office 
 — that you claimed your right, and that you were 
 refused it. That must have been a bitter moment, 
 Sir John Campbell— a moment which might have 
 made you recollect, perhaps even repeat, the 
 Johnsonian definition of a Whig. You have not 
 hitherto been held a man deficient in spirit, or 
 altogether uninfluenced by that nobler ambition 
 which spurs us on to great careers, and renders 
 the esteem of our fellow-countrymen not the least 
 valuable reward of our exertions. When therefore 
 you were thus insulted, why did you not resent the 
 insult? When your fair ambition was thus scur-
 
 14 LETTERS OF 
 
 vily balked, why not have gratified it by proving 
 to a sympathizing nation that you were at least 
 worthy of the high post to which you aspired ? 
 He who aims to be the guardian of the honour of 
 the Crown should at least prove that he is compe- 
 tent to protect his own. You ought not to have 
 quitted the minister's ante-chamber, the King's 
 Attorney-General. 
 
 Why did you then ? Because, as you inform us, 
 your lady is to be ennobled. Is it the carnival, that 
 such jests pass current? Is it part of the code of 
 etiquette in this saturnalia of Whig manners, that 
 the honour of a man is to be vindicated by a com- 
 pliment to a woman ? One cannot refrain from ad- 
 miring, too, the consistent propriety of the whole 
 arrangement. A gentleman, whom his friends an- 
 nounce as a resolved republican, and to whom, but 
 for this slight circumstance, they assert would have 
 been entrusted the custody of the Great Seal, is to 
 be hoisted up into the House of Lords in the mas- 
 querade of a baron ; while yourself, whose deli- 
 cate and gracious panegyric of the Peers of Eng- 
 land is still echoing from the movement benches
 
 nUNNYMEDE. 15 
 
 of the House of Commons to the reeking cellars 
 of the Cowgate, find the only consolation for your 
 wounded honour in your son inscribing his name 
 in the libro d'oro of our hereditary legislators. 
 Why, if Mr. O'Connell were but simultaneously 
 called up by the title of Baron Rathcormac, in 
 honour of his victory, the batch would be quite 
 complete. 
 
 What compensation is it for the injured inte- 
 rests, and what consolation to the outraged 
 honour, of the bar, that your amiable lady is to 
 become a peeress ? On the contrary, you have 
 inflicted a fresh stigma on the body of which you 
 are the chief. You have shown to the world that 
 the leading advocate of the day, the King's 
 Attorney- General, will accept a bribe ! Nay ! 
 start not. For the honour of human nature, for 
 the honour of your high profession, of which I am 
 the friend, I will believe that in the moment of 
 overwhelming mortification you did not thus esti- 
 mate that glittering solace, but such, believe me, 
 the English nation will ever esteem the coronet of 
 Strath-Eden.
 
 6 
 
 LETTERS OF 
 
 Was the grisly spectre of Sir William Home 
 the blooming Eve that tempted you to pluck this 
 fatal fruit ? Was it the conviction that a rebel- 
 lious Attorney-General might be shelved, that 
 daunted the hereditary courage of the Campbell ? 
 What, could you condescend to be treated by the 
 minister hke a froward child — the parental Vis- 
 count shaking in one hand a rod, and in the other 
 waving a toy ? 
 
 I have long been of opinion, that, among other 
 perfected and projected mischief, there has been 
 on the part of the Whigs a systematic attempt to 
 corrupt the EngHsh bar. 1 shall avail myself of 
 another and early opportunity to discuss this im- 
 portant subject. At present I will only observe, 
 that whether they do or do not obtain their result, 
 your conduct has anticipated the consequence of 
 their machinations : the Whigs may corrupt the 
 bar of England, but you, Sir, have degraded it. 
 
 January 19, 1836.
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 17 
 
 LETTER III 
 
 TO 
 
 MR. THOMAS ATTVVOOD, M.P. 
 
 Sir, 
 You may be surprised at this letter bein^ ad* 
 dressed to you ; you may be more surprised when 
 I inform you that this address is not occasioned 
 by any conviction of your poHtical importance. 
 I deem you a harmless, and I do not believe you 
 to be an ill-meaning, individual. You are a pro- 
 vincial banker labouring under a financial mono- 
 mania. Bnt amid the seditious fanfaronade which 
 your unhappy distemper occasions you periodi- 
 cally to vomit forth, there are fragments of good 
 old feelings which show you are not utterly dena- 
 tionalized in spite of being " the friend of all
 
 18 
 
 LETIERS OP 
 
 mankind/' and contrast with the philanthropic 
 yerbiage of your revolutionary rhetoric, like the 
 odds and ends of ancient art which occasionally 
 jut forth from the modern rubbish of an edifice in 
 a classic land — symptoms of better days, and 
 evidences of happier intellect. 
 
 The reason that I have inscribed this letter to 
 your consideration is, that you are a fair re- 
 presentative of a considerable class of your 
 countrymen — the class who talk political non- 
 sense ; and it is these with whom, through your 
 medium, I would now communicate. 
 
 I met recently with an observation which ra- 
 ther amused me. It was a distinction drawn in 
 some journal between high nonsense and low 
 nonsense. I thought that distinction was rather 
 happily illustrated at the recent meeting of your 
 Union, which, by-the-bye, differs from its old 
 state as the drivellings of idiotism from the frenzy 
 of insanity. When your chairman, who, like 
 yourself, is *' the friend of all mankind," called 
 Sir Robert Peel " an ass," I thought that Spartan 
 description might fairly range under the head
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 
 
 19 
 
 of low nonsense ; but when you yourself, as if 
 in contemptuous and triumphant rivalry with his 
 plebeian folly, announced to us that at the sound 
 of your blatant voice 100,000 armed men would 
 instantly rise in Birmingham, it occurred to me 
 that Nat Lee himself could scarcely compete with 
 you in your claim to the more patrician privilege 
 of uttering high nonsense. If indeed you produce 
 such marvels, the name of Attwood will be 
 handed down to posterity in heroic emulation with 
 that of Cadmus ; he produced armed men by a 
 process almost as simple, but the teeth of the 
 Theban king must yield to the jaw of the Bir- 
 mingham delegate ; though I doubt not the same 
 destiny would await both batches of warriors. 
 
 But these 100,000 armed men are only the 
 advanced guard, the imperial guard of Brum- 
 magem, the heralds of a mightier host. Nay, 
 compared with the impending legions, can only 
 count as pioneers, or humble sappers at the best. 
 Twenty millions of men are to annihilate the 
 Tories. By the last census, I believe the adult 
 male population of Great Britain was computed
 
 20 LETTERS OF 
 
 at less than 4,000,000. Whence the subsidiary 
 levies are to be obtained, we may perhaps be 
 informed the next time some brainless Cleon, 
 at the pitch of his voice, bawls forth his rampant 
 folly at the top of New Hall Hill. 
 
 Superficial critics have sometimes viewed, in 
 a spirit of narrow-minded scepticism, those tradi- 
 tionary accounts of armed hosts which startle 
 us in the credulous or the glowing page of rude 
 or ancient annals. But what was the Great 
 King on the heights of Salamis or in the straits 
 of Issus, what was Gengis Khan, what Ta- 
 merlane, compared with Mr. Thomas Attwood 
 of Birmingham ! The leader of such an army 
 may well be *^ the friend of all mankind," if 
 only to recruit his forces from his extensive con- 
 nexions. 
 
 The truth is, Xerxes and Darius, and the 
 vahant leaders of the Tartars and the Mongols, 
 were ignorant of the mystical, yet expeditious, 
 means by which 20,000,000 of men are brought 
 into the field by a modern demagogue, to change 
 a constitution or to subvert an empire. \Vhen
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 21 
 
 they hoisted their standard, their chieftains ralHed 
 round it, bringing to the array all that popula- 
 tion of the country who were not required to 
 remain at home to maintain its order or civiliza- 
 tion. The peasant quitted his plough and the 
 pastor his flock, and the artisan without employ 
 hurried from the pauperism of Babylon, or the 
 idleness of Samarcand. But these great leaders, 
 with their diminutive forces which astounded the 
 Lilliputian experience of our ancestors, had no 
 conception, with their limited imaginations, of 
 the inexhaustible source whence the ranks of 
 a popular leader may be swollen ; they had no 
 idea of ** the people." It is '* the people" 
 that is to supply their great successor with his 
 millions. 
 
 As in private life we are accustomed to as- 
 sociate tlie circle of our acquaintance with the 
 phrase *' the w orld," so in public I have 
 invariably observed that "the people" of 
 the politician is the circle of his interests. The 
 *• people " of the Whigs are the ten-pounders 
 who vote in their favour. At present the mu-
 
 22 LETTERS OF 
 
 nicipal constituencies are almost considered by 
 Lords Melbourne and John Russell as, in some 
 instances, to have afforded legitimate claims of 
 being deemed part and parcel of the nation ; but 
 I very much fear that the course of events will 
 degrade these bodies from any lengthened par- 
 ticipation in this ennobling quality. It is quite 
 clear that the electors of Northamptonshire have 
 forfeited all right to be held portion of 'Uhe 
 people," since their return of Mr. Maunsell. 
 The people of Birmingham are doubtless those 
 of the inhabitants who huzza the grandiloquence 
 of Mr. Attwood ; and the people of England, 
 perchance, those discerning individuals, who, if 
 he were to make a provincial tour of oratory, 
 might club together in the different towns to 
 give him a dinner. I hardly think that, all 
 together, these quite amount to 20,000,000. 
 
 Yourself, and the school to which you belong, 
 are apt to describe the present struggle as one 
 between the Conservatives and the people — these 
 Conservatives consisting merely of 300 or 400 
 Peers, and their retainers. You tell us in the
 
 RUNNYMEDK. 23 
 
 same breath, with admirable consistency, that 
 you possess the name, but not the heart, of 
 the King ; that the Court is secretly, and the 
 Peerage openly, opposed to you : the Church 
 you announce as even beholding you with pious 
 terror. The Universities, and all chartered bodies, 
 come under your ban. The Bar is so hostile, 
 that you have been obliged to put the Great 
 Seal in commission for a year, and have finally, 
 and from sheer necessity, entrusted it to the 
 custody of an individual whom by that very 
 tripartite trusteeship you had previously declared 
 unfit for its sole guardianship. The gentlemen 
 of England are against you to a man, because 
 of their corn-monopoly ; the yeomanry from 
 sheer bigotry, the cultivators of the soil because 
 they are the slaves of the owners, and the 
 peasantry because they are the slaves of the cul- 
 tivators. The freemen of the towns are a2:ainst 
 you, because they are corrupt ; the inhabitants 
 of rural towns, because they are compelled ; and 
 the press is against you because it is not free. 
 It must be confessed that you and your party
 
 24 LETTERS OF 
 
 can give excellent reasons for any chance op- 
 position which you may happen to experience. 
 You are equally felicitous in accounting for the 
 suspicious glance which the fundholder shoots 
 at you ; nor can I sufficiently admire the ad- 
 mirable candour with which the prime organ of 
 your faction has recently confessed that every 
 man who possesses £500 per annum is necessarily 
 your opponent. After this, it is superfluous to 
 remark that the merchants, bankers, and ship- 
 owners of this great commercial and financial 
 country are not to be found in your ranks ; and 
 the sneers at our national glory and imperial 
 sway, which ever play on the patriotic lips of 
 Whigs, both high and low, only retaliate the 
 undisguised scorn with which their anti-national 
 machinations are viewed by the heroes of Wa- 
 terloo and the conquerors of Trafalgar. Deduct 
 these elements of a nation, deduct all this power, 
 all this authority, all this skill, and all this 
 courage, all this learning, all this wealth, and 
 all these numbers, and all the proud and noble 
 and national feelings which are their con-
 
 nUNNYMEDE, 25 
 
 sequence, and what becomes of your *' peo- 
 ple ? " It subsides into an empty phrase, a 
 juggle as pernicious and as ridiculous as your 
 paper currency ! 
 
 But if you and your friends, ** the friends of 
 all roankina," have, as indeed I believe you have 
 not, the brute force and the numerical superiority 
 of the population of this realm marshalled under 
 your banners, do not delude yourselves into 
 believing for a moment that you are in any degree 
 more entitled from that circumstance to count 
 yourselves the leaders of the English people. 
 A nation is not a mere mass of bipeds with no 
 strength but their animal vigour, and no collective 
 grandeur but that of their numbers. There is 
 required to constitute that great creation, u 
 people, some higher endowments and some rarer 
 qualities — honour, and faith, and justice; a 
 national spirit fostered by national exploits; a 
 solemn creed expounded by a pure and learned 
 priesthood ; a jurisprudence which is the ag- 
 gregate wisdom of ages ; the spirit of chivalry, 
 the inspiration of religion, the supremacy of law ; 
 
 B
 
 26 LETTERS OF 
 
 , that free order and that natural gradation of 
 \ ranks, which are but a type and image of the 
 economy of the universe ; a love of home and 
 country, fostered by traditionary manners, and 
 consecrated by customs that embalm ancestral 
 deeds ; learned establishments, the institutions 
 of charity, a skill in refined and useful arts, 
 the discipline of fleets and armies ; and, above 
 all, a national character, serious and yet free ; 
 a character neither selfish nor conceited, but 
 which is conscious that as it owes much to its 
 ancestors, so also it will not stand acquitted if 
 it neglect its posterity : — these are some of the 
 incidents and qualities of a great nation like the 
 people of England. Whether these are to be 
 found in " the people," who assemble at the 
 meetings of your Union, or whether they ma 
 be more successfully sought for among their 
 20,000,000 of brethren at hand, I leave you, 
 Sir, to decide. I shall only observe, that if I 
 be correct in my estimate of the constituent 
 elements of the EngUsh people, I am persuaded 
 that, in spite of all the arts of plundering fac-
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 27 
 
 tions and mercenary demagogues, they will re- 
 cognise, with a grateful loyalty, the venerable 
 cause of their welfare in the august fabric of 
 their ancient constitution. 
 
 January 21, 183G.
 
 28 LETTERS OF 
 
 LETTER IV. 
 
 LORD BROUGHAM, 
 
 My Lord, 
 In your elaborate mimickry of Lord Bacon, your 
 most implacable enemies must confess that, at 
 least in one respect, you have rivalled your great 
 original — you have contrived to get disgraced. In 
 your Treatise on Hydrostatics you may not have 
 completely equalled the fine and profound re- 
 searches of *' the Lord Chancellor of Nature ;" 
 your most ardent admirers may hesitate in pre- 
 ferring the Penny Magazine to the Novum Or- 
 ganon; even the musings of Jenkins and the 
 meditations of Tomkins may not be deemed to 
 come quite as much home '*to men's business and
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 29 
 
 bosoms " as the immortal Essays ; but no one can 
 deny, neither friend nor foe, that you are as much 
 shunned as their author — almost as much de- 
 spised. 
 
 Whether the fame of his philosophical disco- 
 veries, and the celebrity of his literary exploits, 
 may console the late Lord Chancellor of William 
 IV, in the solitude of his political annihilation, as 
 they brought balm to the bruised spirit of the late 
 Lord Chancellor of James L in the loneliness of 
 his sublime degradation, he best can decide who 
 may witness the writhings of your tortured me- 
 mory, and the restless expedients of your irritable 
 imagination. At present, I am informed that your 
 Lordship is occupied in a translation of your Trea- 
 tise of Natural Theology into German on the 
 Hamiltonian system. The translation of a work on 
 a subject of which you know little, into a tongue 
 of which you know nothing, seems the climax 
 of those fantastic freaks of ambitious superficiaHty 
 which our lively neighbours describe by a finer 
 term than quackery. But if the perturbed spirit
 
 30 LETTERS OF 
 
 can only be prevented from preying on itself by 
 literary occupation, let me suggest to you, in pre- 
 ference, the propriety of dedicating the days of 
 your salutary retirement to a production of more 
 general interest, and, if properly treated, of more 
 general utiUty. A memoir of the late years of 
 your career might afford your fellow-countrymen 
 that of which at present they are much in want 
 — a great moral lesson. In its instructive pages 
 we might perhaps learn how a great empire has 
 nearly been sacrificed to the aggrandizement of a 
 rapacious faction ; how, under the specious garb 
 of patriotism, a band of intriguing politicians, 
 connected by no community of purpose or of feel- 
 ing but the gratification of their own base interests, 
 forfeited all the pledges of their previous careers, 
 or violated all the principles of their practised 
 systems ; how, at length, in some degree palled 
 with plundering the nation, according to the usual 
 course they began plundering themselves ; how 
 the weakest, and probably the least impure, were 
 sacrificed to those who were more bold and bad :
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 
 
 31 
 
 and, finally, how your Lordship, especially, would 
 have shrouded yourself in the. mantle, while yon 
 kicked away the prophet. 
 
 If your Lordship would have but the courageous 
 candour to proceed in this great production, you 
 might, perhaps, favour us with a graphic narra- 
 tive of that memorable interview between yourself 
 and the present Premier, when, with that easy 
 elocution and unembarrassed manner which cha- 
 racterize the former favourite of Castlereagh, the 
 present First Lord of the Treasury, robbing you 
 of the fruit after you had plundered the orchard, 
 broke to your startled vision and incredulous ear 
 the unforeseen circumstance that your Lordship 
 was destined to be the scapegoat of Whiggism, 
 and to be hurried into the wilderness with all the 
 curses of the nation and all the sins of your com- 
 panions. This animated sketch would form an 
 admirable accompaniment to the still richer pic- 
 ture when you offered your congratulatory con- 
 dolence to Earl Grey on his long-meditated retire- 
 ment from the onerous service of a country as 
 grateful as his colleagues.
 
 32 
 
 LETTERS OF 
 
 Your Lordship, who is well-informed of what 
 passes in the Cabinet, must have been scarcely- 
 less astonished than the public at the late legal 
 arrangements. Every post, till of late, must have 
 brought you from the metropolis intelligence 
 which must have filled you with anxiety almost 
 maturing into hope. But the lion was suddenly- 
 reported to be sick, and the jackals as suddenly 
 grew bold. The Prime Minister consulted Sir 
 Benjamin ; the sergeant-surgeon shook his head, 
 and they passed in trembhng precipitation the 
 paltry Rubicon of their spite. When we remem- 
 ber that one voice alone decided your fate, and 
 that voice issued from the son of Lord Grey, we 
 seem to be recalled to the days of the Greek drama. 
 Your Lordship, although an universalist, I be- 
 lieve, has nat yet tried your hand at a tragedy : 
 let me recommend this fresh illustration of the 
 sublime destiny of the ancients. You have de- 
 served a bitter fate, but not a degrading one. 
 Though Achilles caused the destruction ofTroy^ 
 we deplore his ignoble end from the unequal 
 progeny of Priam.
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 33 
 
 And is it possible — are you indeed the man 
 whose scathing voice, but a small lustre gone, 
 passed like the lightning in that great assembly 
 where Canning grew pale before your terrible de- 
 nunciation, and where even Peel still remembers 
 your awful reply ? Is this indeed the lord of 
 sarcasm, the mighty master of invective ? Is this, 
 indeed, the identical man who took the offer of 
 the Attorney-Generalship, and held it up to the 
 scorn of the assembled Commons of England, and 
 tore it, and trampled upon it, and spat upon it in 
 their sympathizing sight, and lived to offer the 
 cold-blooded aristocrat, who had dared to insult 
 genius, the consoling compensation of the Privy 
 Seal? 
 
 For your Lordship has a genius ; good or bad, 
 it marks you out from the slaves who crouch to an 
 O'Connell, and insult a Brougham. Napoleon 
 marched from Elba — you, too, may have your 
 hundred days. What, though they think you are 
 dying — what, though your health is quaffed in 
 ironical bumpers in the craven secrecy of their 
 political orgies — what if, after all, throwing Brodie
 
 34 
 
 LETTERS OF 
 
 on one side, and your Teutonic studies on the 
 other, your spectre appear in the House of Lords 
 on the fourth of February ! Conceive the con- 
 fusion ! I can see the unaccustomed robes trem- 
 ble on the dignified form of the lordly Cottenham, 
 and his spick and span coronet fall from the ob- 
 stetric brow of the baronial Bickersteth, Lans- 
 downe taking refuge in philosophical silence, and 
 Melbourne gulpins; courage in the goblets of 
 Sion I 
 
 January 23, 1836.
 
 RUNNYMEDE, 
 
 35 
 
 LETTER V. 
 
 SIR ROBERT PEEL. 
 
 Sir, 
 Before you receive this letter you will, in all pro- 
 bability, have quitted the halls and bowers of 
 Drayton ; those gardens and that library where 
 you have realized the romance of Verulam, and 
 where you enjoy " the lettered leisure " that Tem- 
 ple loved. Your present progress to the metro- 
 polis may not be as picturesque as that which you 
 experienced twelve months back, when the confi- 
 dence of your Sovereign, and the hopes of your 
 country, summoned you from the galleries of the 
 Vatican and the city of the Caesars. It may not 
 be as picturesque, but it is not less proud — it 
 will be more triumphant.
 
 36 LETTERS OF 
 
 You are summoned now, like the knight of 
 Rhodes, in Schiller's heroic ballad, as the only 
 hope of a suffering island. The mighty dragon is 
 again abroad, depopulating our fields, wasting our 
 pleasant places, poisoning our fountains, menacing 
 our civilization. To-day he gorges on Liverpool^ 
 to-morrow he riots at Birmingham : as he ad- 
 vances nearer the metropolis, terror and disgust 
 proportionately increase. Already we hear hi& 
 bellow, more awful than hyaenas; already our 
 atmosphere is tainted with the venomous expira- 
 tions of his malignant lungs; yet a little while and 
 his incendiary crest will flame on our horizon, 
 and we shall mark the horrors of his insatiable 
 jaws, and the scaly volume of his atrocious tail ! 
 
 In your chivalry alone is our hope. Clad in the 
 panoply of your splendid talents and your spotless 
 character, we feel assured that you will subdue 
 this unnatural and unnational monster ; and that 
 we may yet see sedition, and treason, and rapine, 
 rampant as they may have of late figured, quail 
 before your power and prowess. 
 
 You are about to renew the combat under the
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 37 
 
 most favourable auspices. When, a year ago, 
 with that devotion to your country which is your 
 great characteristic, scorning all those refined de- 
 lights of fortune which are your inheritance, and 
 which no one is more capable of appreciating, and 
 resigning all those pure charms of social and do- 
 mestic life to which no one is naturally more 
 attached, you threw yourself in the breach of the 
 battered and beleaguered citadel of the Constitu- 
 tion ; you undertook the heroic enterprise with 
 every disadvantage. The national party were as 
 little prepared for the summons of their eminent 
 leader by their Sovereign as you yourself could 
 have been when gazing on the frescoes of Michael 
 Angelo. They had little organization, less sy- 
 stem i their hopes weak, their chieftains scattered ; 
 no communication, no correspondence. Yet they 
 made a gallant rally ; and, if their numerical force 
 in the House of Commons were not equal, Sir, to 
 your moral energy, the return of Lord Melbourne, 
 at the best, was but a Pyrrhic triumph ; nor per- 
 haps were your powers ever sufficiently appreciated 
 by your countrymen until you were defeated.
 
 38 LETTERS OF 
 
 Your abandonment of office was worthy of the mo- 
 tives which induced you originally to accept power. 
 It was not petty pique ; it was not a miserable 
 sentiment of personal mortification, that led you 
 to decide upon that step. You retained your post 
 until you found you were endangering the King's 
 prerogative, to support which you had alone ac- 
 cepted his Majesty's confidence. What a con- 
 trast does your administration as Prime Minister 
 aftbrd to that of one of your recent predecessors ! 
 No selfish views, no family aggrandizement, no 
 family jobs, no nepotism. It cannot be said that 
 during your administration the public service was 
 surfeited with the incapable offspring of the Pre- 
 mier ; nor, after having nearly brought about a 
 revolution for power which he degraded, and 
 lucre which degraded him, can it be said that you 
 slunk into an undignified retirement with a whim- 
 pering Jeremiad over ** the pressure from without." 
 Contrast the serene retirement of Drayton, and the 
 repentant solitude of Howick; contrast the states- 
 man, cheered after his factious defeat by the sym- 
 pathy of a nation, with the coroneted Necker, the
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 39 
 
 worn-out Machiavel, wringing his helpless hands 
 over his hearth in remorseful despair, and looking 
 up with a sigh at his scowling ancestors ! 
 
 But affairs are in a very different position now 
 from what they were in ^Yovember, 1835. You 
 have an addition to the scutcheon of your fame in 
 the emblazoned memory of your brief but masterly 
 premiership. They cannot taunt you now with 
 your vague promises of amelioration : you can 
 appeal to the deeds of your Cabinet, and the plans 
 which the applause of a nation sanctioned, and the 
 execution of which the intrigues of a faction alone 
 postponed. Never, too, since the peace of Paris, 
 has the great national party of this realm been so 
 united as at the present moment. It is no exagge- 
 ration to say, that among its leaders not the 
 slightest difference of opinion exists upon any por- 
 tion of their intended policy. Pitt himself, in the 
 plenitude of his power, never enjoyed more cordial 
 confidence than that which is now extended to you 
 by every alleged section of the Conservative ranks ; 
 all private opinions, all particular theories, have 
 merged in the resolute determination to maintain
 
 40 LETTERS OF 
 
 the English constitution in spite of Irish rebels, 
 and to support, without cavil and criticism, its 
 eminent champion in that great course of conduct 
 which you have expounded to them. 
 
 That this admirable concord, a just subject of 
 congratulation to the suffering people of this realm, 
 has been, in some degree, the result of salutary 
 conferences and frank explanations, I pretend not 
 to deny ; nor do I wish to conceal a circumstance 
 in which I rejoice, that at no period have you dis- 
 played talents more calculated for the successful 
 conduct of a great party than at the present; but, 
 above all, this admirable concord is to be attributed 
 to the reason, that, however individuals of the 
 Conservative party may have occasionally differed 
 as to the means, they have at all times inva- 
 riably agreed as to the end of their system, and 
 that end is the glory of the empire and the pros- 
 perity of the people. 
 
 But it is not only among the leaders in the two 
 houses of Parliament that this spirit of union 
 flourishes ; it pervades the country. England has 
 at length been completely organized j the battle
 
 HUNNYMEDE. 
 
 41 
 
 which you told us must be fought in the registry 
 courts has been fought; and, in spite of the fan- 
 faronade of the enemy, we know it has been won. 
 Every parhamentary election that has of late oc- 
 curred, in county or in town, has proved the dis- 
 ciplined power of the national party. It is not 
 that they have merely exceeded their opponents 
 on the poll, and often by vast majorities ; but they 
 have hastened to that poll with an enthusiasm which 
 shows that they are animated with a very different 
 spirit to that which impels their shamefaced rivals. 
 Contrast these important triumphs with the guerilla 
 warfare of the Government party on town-clerks 
 and aldermen, and be convinced how important 
 have been our efforts in the registry courts by their 
 feeble yet feverish attempts at what they style 
 Reform Associations. 
 
 If we contrast, also, this fiaithful picture of the 
 state and spirit of the party of which you are the 
 leader, with the situation of your opponents, the 
 difference will be striking. Between the Opposi- 
 tion and the Government party there is this differ-
 
 42 LETTERS OF 
 
 ence ; that, however certain sections of the Oppo- 
 sition may occasionally have differed as to mea- 
 sures, their end has always been the same ; 
 whereas the several sections of the Ministerial 
 party, while, for obvious reasons, they agree as to 
 measures, avowedly adopt them because they tend 
 to different ends. The oligarchical Whigs, the 
 English Radicals, the Irish Repealers — the patrons 
 of rich livings, the enemies of Church and State — 
 hereditary magistrates, professors of county reform 
 — ^the sons of the nobles, the enemies of the peer- 
 age — the landed proprietors, the advocates of free 
 corn — can only be united in a perverted sense. 
 Their union, then, is this : to a certain point they 
 all wish to destroy ; but the Whigs only wish to 
 destroy the Tories, the Radicals the constitution, 
 and the Repealers the empire. The seeds of con- 
 stant jealousy and inevitable separation are here, 
 then, prodigally sown. 
 
 What are to be the tactics of this heterogeneous 
 band, time will soon develope. Dark rumours are 
 about, which intimate conduct too infamous, some
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 43 
 
 would fain think, even for the Whigs. Bat as for 
 myself, history and personal observation have long 
 convinced me that there is no public crime of 
 which the Whigs are not capable, and no public 
 shame, which, for a sufficient consideration, their 
 oligarchical nerves would not endure. But whe- 
 ther they are going to betray their anti-national 
 adherents, or only to bribe them, do you. Sir, pro- 
 ceed in your great course, free and undaunted. At 
 the head of the most powerful and the most united 
 opposition that ever mustered on the benches op- 
 posite a trembling minister, conscious that by re- 
 turning you to your constituents he can only in- 
 crease and consolidate your strength, what have 
 you to apprehend ? We look to you, therefore, 
 with hope and with confidence. You have a 
 noble duty to fulfil — let it be nobly done. You 
 have a great task to execute — achieve it with a 
 great spirit. Rescue your sovereign from an un- 
 constitutional thraldom, — rescue an august senate, 
 which has already fought the battle of the people, 
 — rescue our national church, which your oppo-
 
 44 LETTERS OP 
 
 nents hate — our venerable constitution, at which 
 they scofF; but, above all, rescue that mighty 
 body, of which all these great classes and institu- 
 tions are but some of the constituent and essential 
 parts — rescue the iSation. 
 
 January 26, 1836.
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 45 
 
 LETTER VI. 
 
 TO 
 
 THE CHANCELLOR OF THE 
 EXCHEQUER. 
 
 Sir, 
 I REALLY think that your celebrated compatriot, 
 Daniel O'Rourke, when, soaring on the back of an 
 eagle, he entered into a conversation with the man m 
 the moon, could scarcely be more amazed than Mr. 
 Spring Rice must be when he finds himself as 
 Chancellor of the Exchequer holding a conference 
 with the First Lord of the Treasury. Your col- 
 leagues, who, to do them justice, are perpetually 
 apologizing for your rapid promotion, account for 
 your rocket-like rise by the unanswerable reason of 
 your being ** a man of business." I doubt not 
 this is a capital recommendation to those who 
 are not men of business; and, indeed, shrewd 
 without being sagacious, bustling without method,
 
 46 LETTERS OP 
 
 loquacious without eloquence, ever prompt though 
 always superficial, and ever active though always 
 blundering, you are exactly the sort of fussy busy- 
 body who would impose upon and render himself 
 indispensable to indolent and ill-informed men of 
 strong ambition and weak minds. Cumberland, 
 who, in spite of the courtly compliments of his 
 polished Memoirs, could be racy and significant 
 enough in his conversation, once characterized in 
 my presence a countryman of yours as '* a talking 
 potato." The race of talking potatoes is not ex- 
 tinct. 
 
 Your recent harangue at Cambridge was quite 
 worthy of your reputation, and of those to whom 
 it was addressed. Full of popular common-places 
 and ministerial propriety, alike the devoted dele- 
 gate of ^' the people," and the trusty servant of 
 the Crown, glorying in your pledges, but remind- 
 ing your audience that they were voluntary, chuck- 
 ling in your '^ political triumph," but impressing 
 on your friends that their *^ new power" must not 
 be used for party purposes, I can see you with 
 Irish humour winking your eye on one side of your
 
 nUNNYMEDE. 47 
 
 face as you hazard a sneer at " the Lords," and eulo- 
 gizing with solemn hypocrisy with the other half 
 of your countenance our *' blessed constitution." 
 How choice was the style in which you propounded 
 the future measures of the Cabinet ! What 
 heartfelt ejaculations of '^ Good God, Sir!" min- 
 gled with rare jargon about ** hoping and trust- 
 ing!" You even ventured upon a tawdry simile, 
 borrowed for the occasion from Mr. Sheil, who, 
 compared with his bolder and more lawless col- 
 league, always reminds me of the fustian lieutenant, 
 Jack Bunce, in Sir Walter's tale of the Pirate, 
 contrasted with his master, the bloody bucanier. 
 Captain Cleveland. 
 
 You commenced your address with a due recol- 
 lection of the advice of the great Athenian orator, 
 for your action was quite striking. You clasped the 
 horny hand of the astonished Mayor, and, full of 
 your punch-bowl orgies, aptly alluded to your 
 */ elevated feehngs." As for the exquisite raillery 
 in which your graceful fancy indulged about Tory 
 port and W^hig sherry, you might perhaps have 
 recollected that if *' old Tory port affects to be a
 
 48 LETTERS OF 
 
 new mixture, is ashamed of its colours, and calls 
 itself Conservative," that the Whig sherry has dis- 
 appeared altogether, and that its place has been 
 deleteriously supplied by Irish whisky from an 
 ilHcit still, and English blue ruin. Your profound 
 metaphysics, however, may amply compensate 
 for this infelicitous flash of jocularity. A senator, 
 and a minister, and a cabinet minister, who gravely 
 informs us that " the political history of our times 
 has shown us that there is something in human 
 motive that pervades and extends itself to human 
 action," must have an eye, I suspect, to the re- 
 presentation of the University. This is, indeed, 
 *'a learned Theban." That human motives have 
 some slight connexion with human conduct, is a 
 principle which will, no doubt, figure as an era in 
 metaphysical discovery. The continental imputa- 
 tions of our shallowness in psychological investi- 
 gation must certainly now be removed for ever. 
 Neither Kant nor Helvetius can enter the arena 
 with our rare Chancellor of the Exchequer. The 
 fall of an apple was sufficient to reveal the secret of 
 celestial mechanics to the musing eye of Newton ;
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 49 
 
 but Mr. Spring Rice for his more abstruse revela- 
 tions requires a revolution or a Reform Bill. It is 
 ** the political history of our times" that has 
 proved the connexion between motives and ac- 
 tions. The Chancellor of the Exchequer must have 
 arrived at this discovery by the recollection of the 
 very dignified and honourable conduct to which 
 the motives of power and place have recently im- 
 pelled himself and his friends. I cannot help fan- 
 cying that this display of yours at Cambridge 
 may hereafter be adduced as irrefutable evidence 
 that there is at least one portion of the Irish 
 Protestant population which has not received 
 ** adequate instruction." 
 
 It seems that you and your Katerfelto crew are 
 going to introduce some very wonderful measures 
 to the notice of the impending Parhament. And, 
 first of all, you are about to " remedy the still 
 existing grievances to which the great dissenting 
 bodies are subject." *' Good God ! Sir," as you 
 would say, are you driven to this ? The still existing 
 grievances of the Dissenters ! Do you and your 
 beggarly Cabinet yet live upon these sores ? Dis- 
 c
 
 50 LETTERS OF 
 
 senting grievances are like Stilton cheeses and 
 Damascus sabres, never found in the places them- 
 selves, though there is always some bustling 
 huckster or other who will insure you a supply, 
 **The still existing grievances of the Dissenters," 
 if they exist at all, exist only because, after four 
 years of incapacity, you and your clumsy co- 
 adjutors could not contrive to remove and remedy 
 what Sir Robert Peel would have achieved, but for 
 your faction, in four days. 
 
 Then we are to proceed in *' our great work of 
 the reform of the Courts of Equity." I *^ hope 
 and trust" not. What ! — after creating the Court 
 of Review, the laughing-stock of the profession ; 
 after having at length succeeded in obtaining a 
 second-rate Lord Chancellor at the expense of 
 four coronets, whose services might have been 
 secured without the waste of one ; after having 
 caused more delay, more expense, more mortifica- 
 tion and ruin in eight months of reform than the 
 annals of the Court can offer in a similar period 
 in the worst days of its management — still must 
 you amend ! Spare us, good Sir ; be content with
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 51 
 
 your last achievements of law reform ; be content 
 with having, by your corporation magistrates, 
 made, for the first time in England since the days 
 of Charles II., the administration of justice a 
 matter of party. Will not even this satisfy tlie 
 Whig lechery for mischief? 
 
 Then *' Ireland must be tranquillized." So 1 
 tliink. Feed the poor ; hang the agitators. That 
 will do it. But that 's not your way. It is the 
 destruction of the English and Protestant interest 
 that is the Whig specific for Irish tranquillity. 
 And do you really flatter yourself, because an 
 eccentric course of circumstances has metamor- 
 phosed an Irish adventurer into the Chancellor of 
 the English Exchequer, that the spirited people 
 of this island will allow you to proceed with im- 
 punity in your projected machinations ? Rest 
 assured, Sir, your career draws rapidly to a close. 
 Providence, that for our sins and the arrogance of 
 our flush prosperity has visited this once great 
 and glorious empire with five years of Whig- 
 government, is not implacable. Our God is a 
 God of mercy as well as justice. We may have
 
 52 LETTERS OF 
 
 erred, but we have been chastened. And Athens^ 
 when ruled by a Disdar Aga, who was the deputy 
 of the chief of the eunuchs at Constantinople, was 
 not so contemptible as England governed by a 
 Limerick lawyer — the deputy of an Irish rebel ! 
 
 Prepare, then, for your speedy and merited dis- 
 missal. It is amusing to fancy what may be the 
 resources of your Cabinet in their permanent re- 
 tirement. The First Lord of the Treasury, in all 
 probability, will betake himself to Brocket, and 
 compose an epilogue for the drama just closed. 
 Your Lord Chancellor may retire to his native 
 village, like a returned cheese. Lord John, per- 
 haps, will take down his dusty lyre, and console 
 us for having starved Coleridge by pouring forth 
 a monody to his memory. As for the polished 
 Palmerston and the pious "Grant, and the other 
 trading statesmen of easy virtue — for them it 
 would be advisable, I think, at once to erect a 
 poHtical Magdalen Hospital. Solitude and spare 
 diet, and some salutary treatises of the English 
 constitution, may, after a considerable interval, 
 capacitate them for re-entering public life, and
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 53 
 
 even filling with an approximation to obscure re- 
 spectability some of the lowlier offices of the 
 state. But, Sir, for yourself, with your " busi- 
 ness-like talents," which must not be hid under a 
 bushel, it appears to me that it would be both the 
 wisest and the kindest course to entrust to your 
 charge and instruction a class of beings who, in 
 their accomplishments and indefatigableness, alike 
 in their physical and moral qualities, not a little 
 resemble you — the industrious fleas. 
 
 Jan. 28, 1836.
 
 54 LETTERS OF 
 
 LETTER VII. 
 
 LORD JOHN RUSSELL 
 
 My Lord, 
 Your name will descend to posterity — you have 
 burnt your Ephesian temple. But great deeds 
 are not always achieved by great men. Your 
 character is a curious one ; events have proved 
 that it has been imperfectly comprehended, even 
 by your own party. Long and, for a period, 
 intimate opportunities of observing you, will en- 
 able me, if I mistake not, to enter into its just 
 analysis. 
 
 Yon were bom with a strong ambition and a 
 feeble intellect. It is an union not uncommon, 
 and in the majority of cases only tends to convert
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 55 
 
 an aspiring youth into a querulous and discon- 
 tented manhood. But under some circumstances, 
 — when combined, for instance, with great sta- 
 tion, and consequent opportunities of action, — it 
 is an union which often leads to the develop- 
 ment of a peculiar talent — the talent of pohtical 
 mischief. 
 
 When you returned from Spain, the solitary 
 life of travel, and the inspiration of a romantic 
 country, acting upon your ambition, had per- 
 suaded you that you were a great poet ; your in- 
 tellect, in consequence, produced the feeblest 
 tragedy in our language. The reception of *' Don 
 Carlos" only convinced your ambition that your 
 imaginative powers had been improperly directed. 
 Your ambition sought from prose-fiction the fame 
 which had been denied to your lyre ; and your in- 
 tellect in consequence produced the feeblest ro- 
 mance in our literature. Not deterred by the 
 unhappy catastrophe of the fair maid of Arouca, 
 your ambition sought consolation in the notoriety 
 of political literature, and your intellect in due 
 time produced the feeblest political essay on
 
 66 LETTERS OF 
 
 record. Your defence of close boroughs, how- 
 ever, made this volume somewhat popular with 
 the Whigs, and flushed with the compliments of 
 Holland House, where hitherto you had been 
 treated with more affection than respect, your 
 ambition resolved on rivalling the fame of Hume 
 and Gibbon. Your Memoirs of the Affairs of 
 Europe, published with pompous parade in suc- 
 cessive quarto volumes, retailed in frigid sen- 
 tences a feeble compilation from the gossip of 
 those pocket tomes of small talk which abound in 
 French literature. Busied with the tattle of 
 valets and waiting-maids, you accidentally omit- 
 ted in your Memoirs of the Affairs of Europe all 
 notice of its most vast and most rising empire. 
 This luckless production closed your literary 
 career; you flung down your futile pen in inca- 
 pable despair ; and, your feeble intellect having 
 failed in literature, your strong ambition took 
 refuge in politics. 
 
 You had entered the House of Commons with 
 every adventitious advantage — an illustrious birth, 
 and the support of an ancient and haughty party.
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 37 
 
 I was one of the audience who assisted at your 
 first appearance, and I remember the cheering 
 attention that was extended to you. Cold, in- 
 animate, with a weak voice, and a mincing manner, 
 the failure of your intellect was complete ; but 
 your ambition wrestled for a time with the indif- 
 ference of your opponents and the ill-concealed 
 contempt of your friends. 
 
 Having, then, failed alike in both those careers 
 which in this still free country are open to genius, 
 you subsided for some years into a state of listless 
 moroseness, which was even pitiable. Hitherto 
 your political opinions had been mild and mo- 
 derate, and, if partial, at least constitutional ; but, 
 as is ever the case with persons of your tempera- 
 ment, despairing of yourself, you began to de- 
 spair of your country. This was the period when 
 among your intimates you talked of retiring from 
 that public life in which you had not succeeded 
 in making yourself public, when you paced, like 
 a feeble Catiline, the avenues of Holland House ; 
 and when the most brilliant poet of the day, 
 flattered by your friendship, addressed you a
 
 58 
 
 LETTERS OF 
 
 remonstrance in which your pique figured as 
 patriotism, and your ambition was elevated into 
 genius. 
 
 Your friends — I speak of the circle in which 
 you lived — superficial judges of human character 
 as well as of every thing else, always treated you 
 with a species of contempt, which doubtless 
 originated in their remembrance of your failure, 
 and their conviction of your feebleness. Lord 
 Grey, only five years ago, would not even con- 
 descend to offer you a seat in the Cabinet, and 
 affected to state that, in according you a respect- 
 able office, he had been as much influenced by the 
 state of your finances as of your capacity. Virtual 
 Prime Minister of England at this moment, you 
 have repaid Lord Grey for his flattering estimate 
 and his friendly services, and have afforded him, in 
 your present career, some curious meditations for 
 his uneasy solitude, where he wanders, like the 
 dethroned Caliph in the halls of Ebhs, with his 
 quivering hand pressed upon his aching heart. 
 
 A finer observer of human nature than that for- 
 lorn statesman might have recognised at this crisis
 
 RUXNYMEDE. Oif 
 
 in a noble with an historic name and no fortune, a 
 vast ambition and a balked career, and soured, not 
 to say malignant, from disappointment, some 
 prime materials for the leader of a revolutionary 
 faction. Those materials have worked well. 
 You have already banished your great leader ; 
 you have struck down the solemn idol which you 
 yourself assisted in setting up for the worship of 
 a deluded people ; you have exiled from the Ca- 
 binet, by your dark and dishonourable intrigues, 
 every man of talent who could have held you in 
 check ; and, placing in the seat of nominal leader- 
 ship an indolent epicurean, you rule this country 
 by a coalition with an Irish rebel, and with a 
 council of colleagues in vvhich you have united 
 the most inefficient members of your own party 
 with the Palmerstons and Grants, the Swiss states- 
 men, the condottieri of the political world, the 
 ** British legion" of public life. 
 
 A miniature Mokanna, you are now exhaling 
 upon the constitution of your country, which you 
 once eulogized, and its great fortunes, of vvhich 
 you once were proud, all that long-hoarded venom
 
 60 LETTERS OF 
 
 and all those distempered humours that have for 
 years accumulated in your petty heart, and tainted 
 the current of your mortified life. Your aim is to 
 reduce every thing to your own mean level — to 
 degrade every thing to your malignant standard. 
 Partially you have succeeded. You have re- 
 venged yourself upon the House of Commons by 
 becoming its leader. You have remodelled the 
 assembly which would not listen to you ; and the 
 plebeian rout now hangs upon the imbecile accents 
 that struggle for sound in the chamber echoing 
 but a few years back with the glowing periods of 
 Canning. You have revenged yourself upon the 
 House of Lords, the only obstacle to your dege- 
 nerating schemes, by denouncing with a frigid 
 conceit, worthy of *^ Don Carlos," its solemn suf- 
 frage as ** the whisper of a faction," and halloo- 
 ing on, in a flimsy treble, your Scotch and Irish 
 desperadoes to assail its august independence. 
 You have revenged yourself upon the Sovereign, 
 who recoiled from your touch, by kissing, in spite 
 of his royal soul, his outraged hand. Notwith- 
 standing your base power, and your father's fagot
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 61 
 
 votes, the gentlemen of England inflicted upon 
 you an indelible brand, and expelled you from 
 your own county ; and you have revenged yourself 
 upon their indignant patriotism by depriving them 
 of their noblest and most useful privileges, and 
 making, for the first time since the reign of 
 Charles II., the administration of justice the busi- 
 ness of faction. In all your conduct it is not diffi- 
 cult to detect the workings of a mean and long- 
 mortified spirit suddenly invested with power, — 
 the struggles of a strong ambition attempting, by 
 a wanton exercise of authority, to revenge the dis- 
 grace of a feeble intellect. 
 
 But, my Lord, rest assured that yours is a mind 
 which, if it succeeded in originating, is not de- 
 stined to direct, a revolution. Whatever may be the 
 issue of the great struggle now carrying on in this 
 country, whether we may be permitted to be again 
 great, glorious, and free, or whether we be doomed 
 to sink beneath the ignoble tyranny which your 
 machinations are preparing for us, your part in the 
 mighty drama must soon close. To suppose that, 
 with all your efforts and all your desperation, to
 
 62 LETTERS OF 
 
 suppose that with all the struggles of your am- 
 bition to supply the deficiency of your intellect, 
 your Lordship, in those heroic hours when empires 
 are destroyed or saved, is fated to be any thing 
 else than an instrument, is to suppose that which 
 contradicts all the records of history and all our 
 experience of human nature. 
 
 I think it is Macrobius who tells a story of a 
 young Greek, who, having heard much of the 
 wealth and wisdom of Egypt, determined on visit- 
 ing that celebrated land. When he beheld the 
 pyramids of Memphis and the gates of Thebes, 
 he exclaimed, '* O wonderful men ! what must 
 be your gods !" Full of the memory of the glo- 
 rious divinities of his own poetic land, the bloom- 
 ing Apollo and the bright Diana, the awful beauty 
 of the Olympian Jove and the sublime grace of 
 the blue-eyed Athena, he entered the temples of 
 the Pharaohs. But what was his mingled as- 
 tonishment and disgust when he found a nation 
 prostrate before the most contemptible and the 
 most odious of created beings ! The gods of 
 Egypt are the Ministers of England.
 
 RUNNrMEDE. 63 
 
 I can picture to myself an intelligent foreigner, 
 attracted by the fame of our country, and visiting 
 it for the first time. I can picture to myself his 
 admiration when he beholds our great public 
 works ; our roads, our docks, our canals ; our un- 
 rivalled manufactories, our matchless agriculture. 
 That admiration would not be diminished when he 
 learnt that we were free ; when he became ac- 
 quainted with our social comfort and our still 
 equal laws. ** O ! wonderful men," he would 
 exclaim, ** what must be your governors !" But 
 conceive him now entered into our poHtical tem- 
 ple ; conceive his appalled astonishment as he 
 gazes on the ox-like form of the Lansdowne Apis. 
 On one side he beholds an altar raised to an ape, 
 on the other incense is burned before a cat-like 
 colleague. Here, placed on the highest obelisks, 
 he beholds in the shapes of Palmerston and Grant, 
 the worship of two sleek and long-tailed rats ; 
 and then learns with amazement that the Lord 
 Chancellor of this great land is an onion or a 
 cheese. Towering above all, and resting on a 
 lurid shrine bedewed with blood, and encircled
 
 64 LETTERS OF 
 
 with flame, with distended jaws and colossal tail, 
 is the grim figure of the O'Connell crocodile. 
 But, my Lord, how thunderstruck must be our 
 visitor when he is told to recognise a Secretary of 
 State in an infinitely small scarabseus ; — yes, my 
 Lord, when he learns, that you are the leader of 
 the English House of Commons, our traveller may 
 begin to comprehend how the Egyptians wor- 
 shipped — AN INSECT. 
 
 January 30, 1836.
 
 RUJSNYMEDE. 65 
 
 LETTER VIII. 
 
 THE PEOPLE. 
 
 This is the first direct address that has ever been 
 made to the real people of England. For the last 
 few years, a gang of scribblers, in the pay of a des- 
 perate faction, have cloaked every incendiary ap- 
 peal that they have vomited forth to any section of 
 your numbers, however slight, or however op- 
 posed to the honour and happiness of the nation, 
 by elevating the object of their solicitude into that 
 imposing aggregate, the People. Thus have they 
 played, for their ulterior purposes, dissenting sects 
 against the national church, manufacturing towns 
 against agricultural districts, the House of Com-
 
 66 
 
 LETTERS OF 
 
 mons against the House of Lords, new burgesses 
 against ancient freemen, and, finally, the Papists 
 against the Protestants. With scarcely an excep- 
 tion, yow niay invariably observe, that in advoca- 
 ting the cause of '^ the people," these writers have 
 ever stimulated the anti-national passions of the 
 minority. But, in addressing you now, I address 
 myself in very truth to the English people — to all 
 orders and conditions of men that form that vast 
 society, from the merchant to the mechanic, and 
 from the peer to the peasant. 
 
 You are still a great people. You are still in 
 the possession and enjoyment of the great results 
 of civilization, in spite of those who would destroy 
 your internal prosperity. Your flag still floats 
 triumphant in every division of the globe, in spite 
 of the menaces of dismemberment that threaten 
 your empire from every quarter. Neither domes- 
 tic nor foreign agitation has yet succeeded in up- 
 rooting your supremacy. But how long this im- 
 perial integrity may subsist, when it is the object 
 of a faction in your own land to array great classes 
 o( your population in hostile colhsion, and when,
 
 flUNNVMEDE. 67 
 
 from the Castle of Dublin to the Castle of Quebec, 
 your honour is tampered with by the deputies of 
 your sovereign, is a question which well deserves 
 your quick and earnest consideration. 
 
 In the mesh of unparalleled difficulties in which 
 your affairs are now entangled, who are your 
 guides? Are they men in whose wisdom and expe- 
 rience, in whose virtue and talents, principle and 
 resolution, in whose acknowledged authority and 
 unblemished honour, and deserved celebrity, you 
 are justified in reposing your hopes and entrusting 
 your confidence ? Lucian once amused the ancients 
 with an auction of their gods. Let us see what Mr. 
 George Robins might make of an auction of your 
 ministers. The catalogue may soon be run over. 
 
 A Prime Minister, in an easy chair, reading a 
 French novel. What think you of that lot ? 
 Three Secretaries of State, one odious, another 
 contemptible, the third both. They have their 
 price, yet I would not be their purchaser. A new 
 Lord Chancellor, like a new cheese, crude and 
 flavourless ; second-rate as a lawyer, as a states- 
 man a nonentity ; bought in by his own party
 
 6S 
 
 LETTERS OF 
 
 from sheer necessity. A President of the India 
 Board recovering from the silence of years im- 
 posed upon him by Canning, by the inspiration of 
 that eloquent man's chair, which he now fills. 
 As we are still a naval nation, our First Lord 
 of the Admiralty should be worth something ; 
 but, unfortunately, nobody knows his name. 
 The President of the Council has always indicated 
 a tendency to join any government, and there- 
 fore should be a marketable article enough. In 
 Egypt, where their favourite food are pumpkins 
 that have run to seed, such a solid and mature 
 intelligence might be worth exporting to the 
 Divan. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, being 
 *' a man of business," would doubtless fetch a 
 ** long figure ;" refer for character to the mer- 
 cantile deputations who leave the Treasury, after 
 an interview, bursting with laughter, from sheer 
 admiration of his knowledge and capacity. Lord 
 Howick, who is a minister on the same principle 
 that the son of an old partner is retained in the 
 firm to keep together the connexion, might com- 
 mand a price on this score, were it not notorious
 
 / 
 
 RUNNTMEDE. 69 
 
 that his parent has withdrawn with his person, his 
 capital, and confidence. The remainder may be 
 thrown into one lot, and the auction concluded 
 with the item on the Dutch system. 
 
 Were the destinies of a great people ever yet 
 entrusted to such a grotesque and Hudibrastic 
 crew ? Why, we want no candid confessions or 
 triumphant revelations from Mr. Shiel ; we want 
 no audacious apostacy of a whole party to teach 
 us how such a truckling rout governs England. 
 They govern England, as the mock dynasties 
 governed Europe in the time of the Revolution, by 
 a process as sure and as simple, as desperate and 
 as degrading — by being the delegates of an anti- 
 national power. And what is this power, beneath 
 whose sirocco breath the fame of England is fast 
 withering? Were it the dominion of another con- j 
 
 queror, another bold bastard with his belted sword, 
 we might gnaw the fetter which we could not 
 burst : were it the genius of Napoleon with which 
 we were again struggling, we might trust the issue 
 to the god of battles with a sainted confidence in 
 our good cause and our national energies : but we
 
 70 LETTERS OF 
 
 are sinking beneath a power, before which the 
 proudest conquerors have grown pale, and by 
 which the nations most devoted to freedom have 
 become enslaved — the power of a foreign priest- 
 hood. 
 
 The Pope may be an old man, or an old woman, 
 once the case, but the Papacy is independent of 
 the Pope. The insignificance of the Pope is ad- 
 duced by your enemies as evidence of the insig- 
 nificance of the Papacy. 'Tis the fatal fallacy by 
 which they mean to ride roughshod over England. 
 Is the Pope less regarded now than when Bour- 
 bon sacked Rome ? Yet that exploit prece- 
 ded the massacre of St. Bartholomew and the 
 revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The Constable 
 , of Bourbon lived before Sir Phelim O'Neale. The 
 i Papacy is as rampant now in Ireland as it was in 
 ' Europe in the time of Gregory; and all its energies 
 are directed to your humiliation. 
 : Who is this man whose name is ever on your 
 ; lips I — who is this O'Connell ? He is the feed ad- 
 ' vocate of the Irish priesthood ; he is the hired in- 
 strument of the Papacy. That is his precise position.
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 71 
 
 Your enemies, that wretched anti-national faction 
 who wish to retain power, or creep into place, by 
 clinging to the skirts of this foreign rebel, taunt 
 those who would expose his destructive arts, and 
 unmask the purpose of his desperate principals, 
 with the wretched sdofF, that we make him of im- 
 portance by our notice. He cannot be of more 
 importance than he is. Demoralized in character, 
 desperate in fortunes, infinitely over-estimated in 
 talents, he is the most powerful individual in the 
 world, because he is entrusted with the delegated 
 influence of the greatest power in existence. But 
 because an individual exercises a great power, it 
 does not follow that he is a great man. O'Con- 
 nell is not as yet as great as Robespierre, although 
 he resembles that terrific agitator in every thing 
 except his disinterestedness. Robespierre pre- 
 sided over public safety as O'Connell over Re- 
 form. A precious foster-dam ! Would it have 
 been any answer to those who would have strug- 
 gled against the great insurer of public security, 
 that his intended victims made him of importance 
 by their notice ? Would it have been endured
 
 LETTERS OP 
 
 ^, 
 
 that these deprecators of resistance should have 
 urged, '' He is not a Csesar, he is not an Alexan- 
 der, he has no amplitude of mind, he is not a 
 great genius ; let him go on murdering, you make 
 him of importance by noticing his career of blood 
 and havoc?" 
 
 This man, O'Connell, is the hired instrument of 
 1 the Papacy ) as such, his mission is to destroy 
 your Protestant Society, and, as such, he is a 
 more terrible enemy to England than Napoleon, 
 with all his inspiration. Your empire and your 
 liberties are in more danger at this moment than 
 when the army of invasion was encamped at 
 Boulogne. 
 
 Now we have a precise idea of the political 
 character of O'Connell. And I have often mar- 
 velled when I have Hstened to those who have 
 denounced his hypocrisy or admired his skill, 
 when they have read of the triumphant dema- 
 gogue humbling himself in the mud before a sim- 
 ple priest. There was no hypocrisy in this, no 
 craft. The agent recognised his principal, the 
 slave bowed before his lord ; and when he pressed
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 73 
 
 to his lips those sacred robes, reeking with whisky 
 and redolent of incense, I doubt not that his soul 
 was filled at the same time with unaffected awe 
 and devout gratitude. 
 
 If we have correctly fixed his political charac- 
 ter, let us see whether we can as accurately es- 
 timate his intellectual capacity and his moral 
 qualities. The hired writers would persuade you 
 that he is a great man. He has not a single 
 quality of a great man. In proportion as he was 
 so gifted, he would be less fitted for the part 
 which he has to perform. There is a sublime 
 sentiment in genius, even when uncontrolled by 
 principle, that would make it recoil with nausea 
 from what this man has to undergo. He is 
 shrewd, vigorous, versatile ; with great know- 
 ledge of character, little of human nature ; with 
 that reckless dexterity which confounds weak 
 minds, and that superficial readiness that masters 
 vulgar passions ; energetic from the certainty of 
 his own desperate means, and from the strong 
 stimulus of his provisional remuneration ; inex- 
 haustible in unprincipled expedients, and auda- 
 
 D
 
 74 LETTERS OF 
 
 cious in irresponsible power; a Nisi Prius lawyer, 
 with the soul of a demaoooue. That is the man. 
 He is as little a great orator as a great man. He 
 has not a single quality of a great orator except a 
 good voice. I defy his creatures to produce a 
 single passage from any speech he ever delivered 
 illumined by a single flash of genius, or tinctured 
 with the slightest evidence of taste, or thought, or 
 study. Learning, he lias none ; little reading. 
 His style in speaking, as in writing, is ragged, 
 bald, halting, disjointed. He has no wit, though 
 he may claim his fair portion of that Milesian 
 humour which every one inherits who bears a 
 hod. His pathos is the stage sentiment of a 
 barn ; his invective is slang. When he aspires 
 to the higher style of rhetoric, he is even ludi- 
 crous. He snatches up a bit of tinsel, a tawdry 
 riband, or an artificial flower, and mixes it with 
 his sinewy common-place, and his habitual soot, 
 like a chimney-sweeper on May-day. 
 
 Of his moral character it might be enough to 
 say, that he is a systematic liar and a beggarly 
 cheat, a swindler, and a poltroon. But of
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 
 
 75 
 
 O'Connell you can even say more. His public 
 and his private life are equally profligate ; he has 
 committed every crime that does not require 
 courage : the man who plunders the peasant can 
 also starve his child. He has denounced your 
 national character, and insulted your national 
 honour. He has said that all your men are 
 cowards, and air your women wantons. He has 
 reviled your illustrious Princes — he has sneered 
 at your pure religion — he has assailed your na- 
 tional Church. He has endeavoured to stir up 
 rebellion against your august Senate, and has de- 
 scribed your House of Commons, even when 
 reformed, as an assembly of " six hundred scoun- 
 drels." Every thing which is established comes 
 under his ban, because every thing which is esta- 
 blished is an obstacle to the purpose for which he 
 is paid — the destruction of every thing which is 
 English. | 
 
 Feb. 2, 1836.
 
 76 LETTERS OF 
 
 LETTER IX. 
 
 TO 
 
 LORD STANLEY. 
 
 My Lord, 
 The classical historian of our country said of 
 your great ancestor, that *' the Countess of Derby 
 had the glory of being the last person in the 
 three kingdoms, and in all their dependent do- 
 minions, who submitted to the victorious rebels." 
 Charlotte de la Trimouille was a woman who might 
 have shamed the degenerate men of the present 
 day ; but your Lordship may claim, with a slight 
 although significant alteration, the eulogium of 
 that illustrious princess. The rebels are again 
 victorious, and, to your Lordship's lasting honour.
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 77 
 
 you have been the first to resist their treasonable 
 authority. 
 
 Never has a statesman yet been placed in a 
 position so difficult and so trying as the present 
 heir of the house of Derby : never has a states- 
 man under similar circumstances yet conducted 
 himself with more discretion and more courage. 
 When the acerbities of faction have passed away, 
 posterity will do justice to your disinterestedness 
 and devotion, and the future historian of England 
 will record, with sympathising admiration, the 
 greatness of your sacrifice. 
 
 If the gratification of your ambition had been 
 your only object, your course was clear. Less 
 than three years ago the Whigs, and loudest 
 among them my Lord Melbourne, announced you 
 as the future Prime Minister of England. Young, 
 of high lineage, of illustrious station, and of 
 immaculate character, and unquestionably their 
 ablest orator, — among your own party you had 
 no rival. They looked upon you as the only 
 man who could at the same time maintain their 
 power and effectually resist the machinations of
 
 78 LETTERS OF 
 
 those who would equally destroy the constitution 
 and dismember the empire. With what enthu- 
 siastic cheers did they not greet the winged 
 words with which you assailed the anti-national 
 enemy, when you rose in the House like a young 
 eagle, and dashed back his treason in the baffled 
 countenance of the priestly delegate ! Who 
 could believe that the same men who cheered 
 you in the House, and chuckled over your tri- 
 umphs in their coteries, should now be the 
 truckling slaves of the sacerdotal power from 
 whose dark influence they then shrank with 
 disoust and terror? Who could beheve that the 
 
 I 
 i 
 
 I projected treason of these very men should have 
 
 driven you and your high-minded colleagues from 
 the contagion of their councils ? Who could 
 beheve that the famous '* Reform Ministry,'* that 
 packed a parliament by bellowing ** gratitude to 
 Lord Grey " throughout the empire, should 
 finally have expelled that same Lord Grey from 
 his seat, under circumstances of revolting insult — 
 that the very Lord Melbourne who had always 
 indicated yourself as Lord Grey's successor.
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 79 
 
 should himself have slid into that now sullied 
 seat, where he maintains himself in indolent 
 dependence, by a foul alliance with the very man 
 whom he had previously denounced as a traitor? 
 Can the records of public life, can the secret 
 archives of private profligacy, afford a parallel 
 instance of conduct so base, so completely de- 
 grading, so thoroughly demoralized ? 
 
 You, my Lord, preferred your honour to your 
 interest, the prosperity of your native land to the 
 gratification of your ambition. You sacrificed 
 without a pang the proudest station in your 
 country, to prove to your countrymen that public 
 principle was not yet a jest. You did well. The 
 pulse of our national character was beating low. 
 We required some great example to re-brace the 
 energies of our honour. From the moment that 
 you denounced the disgusting thraldom and the 
 base expedients of your chicaning colleagues, 
 a better feeling pervaded England, and animated 
 Enghshmen. In this sharp exigency you did 
 not forget your duty to yourself as well as to 
 your country. Yours was no Coriolanus part;
 
 80 LETTERS OF 
 
 neither the taunts of the recent supporters who 
 had betrayed you, nor the ready comphments of 
 your former adversaries, tempted you to swerve 
 for a moment from the onward path of a severe 
 and peremptory principle. When Sir Robert Peel 
 was summoned to the helm, in the autumn of 
 1834, your position was indeed most painful. 
 Your honour and your duty seemed at conflict. 
 You reconciled them. You supported the policy, 
 while you declined the power. 
 
 These, my Lord, are great deeds. They will 
 live. The defence of Lathom was not more 
 heroic. They will Uve in the admiration and 
 the gratitude of an ancient and honourable na- 
 tion, ever ready to sympathize with the pure 
 and noble, and prompt to recognise a natural 
 leader in blood that is mingled with all the 
 
 , traditionary glories of their race. 
 
 ^ You had now placed your character above 
 suspicion. The most virulent of the hired writers 
 of the faction did not dare to impugn the purity 
 of your motives. You had satisfied the most 
 morbid claims of an honour which the worldly
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 81 
 
 only might deem too chivalrous. When, there- 
 fore, I find you at length avowedly united with 
 that eminent man, on whom the hopes of his 
 country rest with a deserving and discerning con- 
 fidence, and w^ho, in his parhamentary talents, 
 his proud station, and his unsullied fame, is 
 worthy of your aUiance, I was rejoiced, but 
 not surprised. It is a fit season to ''stand to- 
 gether in your chivalry." The time is ripe for 
 union and fair for concord. When, some days 
 back, in my letter to Sir Robert Peel — a letter, 
 let me observe in passing, written by one whose 
 name, in spite of the audacious license of frantic 
 conjecture, has never yet been even intimated, \ 
 can never be discovered, and will never be 1 
 revealed — I announced the fact that the great , 
 Conservative party was at length completely 
 united, it was a declaration equivalent to England 
 being saved. The debates upon the address 
 have proved the accuracy of my information. 
 The hired writers and the place-hunting depen- 
 dents of the priestly junta triumph over the 
 division in the Commons ; they might have read
 
 82 
 
 LETTERS OF 
 
 tlieir knell in the voice of the tellers. They 
 assure us, with solemn or with sparkling counte- 
 nance, that they did not reckon upon a moiety 
 of such a majority. And do they indeed think 
 that the people of England care one jot whether 
 there be ten or twenty traitors more or less in the 
 House of Commons ? It is not a miserable 
 majority in that assembly, either way, that will 
 destroy or preserve the empire. That every de- 
 bate, my Lord, over the result of which these 
 short-sighted desperadoes affect to triumph, seal- 
 ed the doom of the faction, and announced the 
 salvation of the country. It will fill every loyal 
 and discerning heart throughout England with 
 more than hope. Whatever the hired writers and 
 the expectant runners may bawl or scribble, that 
 division numbered the days of the present Ca- 
 binet. And they know it. The sacerdotal de- 
 legates know full well that the moment the Con- 
 servatives are united, the priestly plot is baffled. 
 
 When the present First Lord of the Treasury 
 was re-installed in the office which he won by 
 so patriotic a process, and which he fills with
 
 ftUNNYMEDE. 83 
 
 such diligent ability, shrinking from the con- 
 tamination of O'Connell, the very mention of 
 whose name in his private circle makes him even 
 now tremble with compmictious rage, he declared 
 that affairs might be carried on without ** the vic- 
 torious rebels," from the mere disunion of the 
 Conservative camp. No one was more com- 
 pletely aware than his Lordship that the moment 
 that disunion ceased, his authority must tremble. 
 To perpetuate distrust, and to excite division, 
 among the different sections of the Conservative 
 party, all the energies of the anti-English cabal 
 have of late been directed. The Municipal Bill 
 filled them with fluttering hope ; a severance 
 between the Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert 
 Peel was announced as inevitable. To-day a 
 great commoner and a learned lord no longer 
 meet ; to-morrow the appropriation clause is to 
 be got rid of by some new juggle, and your 
 Lordship and your fellovv-seceders are to return 
 to the tainted benches of the Treasury. Now 
 the conferences at Drayton hang fire : then mid- 
 night visits from illustrious Princes bode spHts
 
 84 
 
 LETTERS OF 
 
 and schisms. We have scarcely recovered from 
 the effect of a suspicious dinner, when our at- 
 tention is promptly directed to a mysterious call. 
 The debates on the address have laid for ever 
 these restless spectres of the disordered imagina- 
 tion of a daunted yet desperate faction. In a 
 Peel, a Stanley, a Wellington, and a Lyndhurst, 
 the people of England recognise their fitting 
 leaders. Let the priestly party oppose to these 
 the acrid feebleness of a Russell, and the puerile 
 common-place of a Howick, Melboum's experi- 
 enced energy, and Lansdowne's lucid perception ! 
 
 February 6, 1836.
 
 RUNKYMEDE. 85 
 
 LETTER X. 
 
 TO 
 
 LORD WILLIAM BENTINCK. 
 
 My Lord, 
 I have just read your Lordship's Address to the 
 Electors of the City of Glasgow ; and, when I re- 
 member that the author of this production has 
 been entrusted for no inconsiderable period with 
 the government of 100,000,000 of human beings, 
 I tremble. I say not this with reference to the 
 measures of which you have there announced 
 yourself the advocate, but to the manner in which 
 that announcement is expressed. It implies, in my 
 opinion, at the same time, a want of honesty and 
 a want of sense. 
 
 This address to the electors of the city of Glas- 
 gow is made by an individual who has been em-
 
 86 . LETTERS OF 
 
 ployed for more than a quarter of a century by his 
 Sovereign in foreign service of the utmost import- 
 ance, ascending at last even to the Viceregal 
 throne of India ; he is a member of a family of the 
 highest rank and consideration ; and some very 
 persevering paragraphs in the Government jour- 
 nals have of late sedulously indicated him as a fit 
 and future member of Lord Melbourne's Cabinet. 
 Your Lordship, therefore, is a very considerable 
 personage ; the public are familiar with your 
 name, if not with your career : they are instructed 
 to believe you an individual of great mark and 
 likelihood, of great promise as well as of great per- 
 formance ; as one who is not unwilling to devote 
 to their interests at home all those talents which 
 have been so long exercised, and all that experience 
 which has been so laboriously obtained, in their ser- 
 vice in other and distant lands. 'Tis distance lends 
 enchantment to the view, sings a bard of that city 
 which your Lordship is to represent : 'tis distance 
 which has invested your Lordship with the haze of 
 celebrity ; but I doubt whether the shadowy illu- 
 sion will be long proof against that nearer inspec-.
 
 HUNNYMEDE. 87 
 
 tion and more familiar experience of your judg- 
 ment and capacity, which your Lordship has 
 favoured us with in your Address to the Electors 
 of the City of Glasgow.* 
 
 * The following is the Address alluded to : — 
 
 TO THE ELECTORS OF THE CITY OF GLASGOW. 
 
 Gentlemen, — It is only in consequence of the very nume- 
 rous requisition which I have had the honour to receive that 
 I could have ventured to aspire to the high distinction of re- 
 presenting you in Parliament. Encouraged by this invitation, 
 I shall at once proceed to state frankly and explicitly my 
 opinion upon the various topics and measures that are likely 
 to be brought before Parliament in the ensuing session, with 
 a confident hope that in this exposition nothing will be found 
 at variance with those principles which for many years of my 
 life I have professed and practised ; and upon which alone, 
 and to no particular competency of my own, I can found a 
 claim to your suffrages. 
 
 Permit me then, in the outset, to give my adherence to the 
 now happily established conviction among all Reformers, that 
 by firm union, by the abandonment of all separate and minor 
 views, and by a steady support of Lord Melbourne's ministry, 
 the present and future cause of reform can alone be supported. 
 
 With respect to expected measures, I should decidedly sup-
 
 68 
 
 LETTERS OP 
 
 There are some, indeed, who affirm — and those, 
 too, persons of no mean authority — that this Ad- 
 dress may even be considered a manifesto of the 
 least constitutional portion of the Cabinet to whom 
 
 port the ministerial plan of Irish Church Reform, imperfect 
 and insufficient as I must consider that measure to be. 
 
 I, of course, am a decided friend to a complete reform of the 
 Irish Municipal Corporations. 
 
 I am favourable to the shortening of the duration of Parlia- 
 ments ; but, without having had occasion seriously to consider 
 this subject, I should prefer, as a present measure, the quin- 
 quennial to the triennial term. 
 
 With respect to the extension of the suffrage, into the details 
 of which I have never entered, I can only generally state 
 my firm belief that the broader the admission of all the intelli- 
 gent classes to the government of the country, the greater will 
 be the security of our existing institutions, 
 
 I am opposed to the vote by ballot ; I consider it a com- 
 plete illusion. It will not destroy the exercise of undue influ- 
 ence, but it will give rise to another influence still more per- 
 nicious — that of money and corruption, against which there is 
 no security but in publicity. At the same time, as the vote by 
 ballot affects no existing right, I should willingly acquiesce in 
 the general wishes of my constituents to vote for it as an expe- 
 rimental ahd temporary measure.
 
 RUNNYMEDE. W 
 
 your Lordship and my Lord Durham are speedily 
 to afford all the weight of your influence and all 
 the advantage of your wisdom. How this may be, 
 events will prove ; the effusion is certainly sufii- 
 
 I am profoundly penetrated with the indispensable necessi- 
 ty that the two branches of the Legislature should be brought 
 into harmony with each other ; and I am of opinion that the 
 result may be advantageously accomplished through the con- 
 stitutional exercise of the prerogative of the Crown, without any 
 organic change. 
 
 I need not promise my support to all measures regarding 
 freedom of trade, and economy and retrenchment in every de- 
 partment of the State, consistently, of course, with efficiency 
 and safety. 
 
 The Corn Laws are a difficult question. I am for their abo- 
 lition. If railways, as I believe, may become necessary in the 
 race of competition that we have to run with other countries, 
 the prices of subsistence must in a still greater degree contri- 
 bute to success. I should hope that an equitable compromise 
 between tlie agricultural and manufacturing interests might not 
 be found impracticable. 
 
 I shall advert, in the last place, to the application for a grant 
 of £10,000 towards the endowment of additional chapels and 
 places of worship for the established church of Scotland. I
 
 90 
 
 LETTERS OF 
 
 ciently marked by the great characteristic of the. 
 Whig-Radical school ; a reckless readiness to 
 adopt measures, of the details and consequences 
 of which they are obviously, and often avowedly, 
 
 Ignorant. 
 
 am entirely averse to this grant. The event, of all others, that, 
 in my humble judgment, would best establish peace, and good 
 will, and concord among all classes of men, would be a perfect 
 equality of civil and religious rights. 
 
 But as this cannot at present be, at least let us be careful not 
 to aggravate an obnoxious distinction. Let the established 
 churches retain what they possess, but let nothing more be 
 taken from the public funds. The same religious zeal which 
 exclusively maintains all the places of worship and the minis- 
 ters of Dissenters cannot fail to supply those additional aids of 
 which the established churches of England and Scotland may 
 stand in need. 
 
 I will now conclude with the expression of my very deep 
 regret that the effects of the very long and severe illness which 
 drove me from India will not allow me, without positive risk, 
 to appear at the election. But if I am so fortunate as to obtain 
 the honour to which I aspire, I shall take the earliest opportu- 
 nity, after the session, of visiting Glasgow ; and, should it then 
 be the opinion of the majority of my constituents that the gene-
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 
 
 91 
 
 The Address it?elf consists of fourteen para- 
 graphs. Ill the first your Lordship informs us 
 that you come forward in consequence of " sl very 
 numerous requisition." What ** a very numerous 
 requisition," by the bye, may be, I pretend not to 
 decypher. It may be Hindostanee ; it may be 
 Sanscrit ; it is not English. With a modesty natu- 
 ral to an Oriental Viceroy, the late master of th6 
 Great Mogul, you then make your salaam to the 
 electors, assuring them that but for this very nu- 
 merous requisition you ^' could not have ventured 
 to aspire to the high distinction of representing 
 Glasgow in Parliament " — of representing Glas- 
 gow after having ruled Calcutta ! 
 
 Your Lordship then proceeds to state, '^frankly 
 and explicitly," your political creed, ^' with a con- 
 fident hope," which seems, however, but a some- 
 
 rous confidence which they have been pleased to place in me 
 has been in any degree disappointed, I shall be most ready to 
 resign the trust confided to me. 
 
 I have the honour to be, Gentlemen, 
 
 Your most obedient servant, 
 London, Feb. 4, 1836. W. Bentinck..
 
 92 LETTERS OF 
 
 what hesitating and trembUng trust, that *' nothing 
 will be found at variance with those principles 
 which for many years of your life you have pro- 
 fessed and practised." How many years, my 
 Lord William ? 
 
 After eulogizing " union among all Reformers," 
 but of course in favour of Lord Melbourne's 
 Government, and the abandonment of *' all sepa- 
 rate and minor views," you immediately declare, 
 with admirable consistency, that the Ministerial 
 plan of Irish Church Reform does not go far 
 enough, but is '' imperfect and insufficient." This 
 is certainly a very felicitous method of maintaining 
 union among all Reformers. There is no doubt 
 with what section of that rebellious camp your 
 Lordship will herd, you who are, '' of course, a 
 decided friend to a complete reform in the Irish 
 municipal corporations." 
 
 Your Lordship, it appears, is also '^ favourable 
 to the shortening of the duration of Parliaments," 
 although you ingenuously allow that you " have 
 had no occasion seriously to consider the subject," 
 and that you are partial to the *' extension of the
 
 RUNNfMEDE. 93 
 
 suffrage, into the details of which, however," you 
 candidly admit you *' have never entered.'' Ad- 
 mirable specimen of the cautious profundity of 
 Whig-Radicalism ! Inimitable statesman, who, 
 busied with concocting constitutions for Sicily, 
 and destroying empires in India, can naturally 
 spare but few hours to the consideration of the 
 unimportant topics of domestic policy. 
 
 Your decisive judgment, however, on the subject 
 of the ballot will clear your Lordship in a moment 
 from any silly suspicion of superficiality. This 
 paragraph is so rich and rare, that it merits the 
 dangerous honour of a quotation : — 
 
 " I am opposed to the vote by ballot ; I consider it a com- 
 plete illusion. It will not destroy the exercise of undue influ- 
 ence, but it will give rise to another influence still more perni- 
 cious, that of money and corruption, against which there is no 
 security but in publicity. At the same time, as the vote by 
 ballot affects no existing right, I should willingly acquiesce in 
 the general wishes of my constituents, to vote for it as an 
 experimental and temporary measure." 
 
 Without stopping to admire your refined distinc- 
 tion between an influence which is undue and
 
 94 LETTERS OF 
 
 " another influence " which is pernicious, one can- 
 not too ardently applaud the breathless rapidity 
 with which your Lordship hurries to assure your 
 future constituents that you will willingly support 
 an illusion and a pest. 
 
 The ninth paragraph of this memorable produc- 
 tion informs us that your Lordship is ** profoundly 
 penetrated" with an idea. Pardon my scepticism, 
 my Lord ; whatever other claims you may have to 
 the epithet, I doubt whether your Lordship's ideas 
 are Radical. I am indeed mistaken if their roots 
 have ever " profoundly penetrated" your cultured 
 intellect. Was it this ** profound penetration " 
 that prompted the brother of the Duke of Port- 
 land to declare his conviction of " the indispens- 
 able necessity of bringing the two branches of the 
 Legislature into harmony with each other, by the 
 constitutional exercise of the prerogative of the 
 Crown?" Your Lordship may settle this point 
 with his Grace. 
 
 The tenth paragraph is only remarkable for the 
 felicity of its diction. The honourable member 
 for Middlesex has at length found in the future
 
 RUNNYMEDE. ^5 
 
 member for Glasgow a rival in the elegance of his 
 language and the precision of his ideas. 
 
 But now for your masterpiece ! *' The Corn 
 Laws are a difficult question ; I am for their 
 abolition." How exquisitely does this sentence 
 paint your weak and puzzled mind, and your base 
 and grovelling spirit ! Confessing at the same 
 time your inability to form an opinion, yet gulping 
 down the measure to gain the seat. Space alone 
 prevents me from following the noble candidate 
 for Glasgow through the remainder of his Address, 
 admirably characteristic as it is of the same mix- 
 ture of a perplexed intellect and a profligate 
 ambition. 
 
 My Lord, I have not the honour of your ac- 
 quaintance ; I bear you no personal ill-will. I 
 stop not here to inquire into the proceedings of 
 your former life — of your Sicilian freaks or of 
 your Spanish exploits, or of your once-impending 
 catastrophe in India. I form my opinion of your 
 character from your last public act, and believing, 
 as I do, that there is a conspiracy on foot to palm 
 you off on the nation as a great man, in order
 
 96 LETTERS OP 
 
 that your less hacknied name may prolong the 
 degrading rule of a desperate faction, I was re- 
 solved to chalk your character on your back 
 before you entered that House where you are 
 doomed to be silent or absurd. There are some 
 of your acquaintances who would represent you 
 as by no means an ill-intentioned man ; they 
 speak of you as a sort of dull Quixote. For my- 
 self, I beheve you to be without any political 
 principle, but that you are unprincipled from the 
 weakness of your head, not from the badness of 
 your heart. Your great connexions have thrust 
 you into great places. You have been haunted 
 with a restless conviction that you ought not to 
 be a nonentity, and, like bustling men without 
 talents, you have always committed great blun- 
 ders. To avoid the Scylla of passive impotence, 
 you have sailed into the Charybdis of active in- 
 capacity. 
 
 But you are, or you will be, member for 
 Glasgow. The author of such an Address meets, 
 of course, with ** no opposition." Discriminating 
 electors of Glasgow I Send up your noble member
 
 RUNXYMEDE. 97 
 
 to the House, where the Government newspapers 
 assure us, he will soon be a Minister. His difFer- 
 ence with the present Cabinet is trifling. He 
 only deems the Irish church reform *' imperfect 
 and insufficient/' He is, ** of course," for a com- 
 plete reform of the Irish corporations. He is for 
 short parliaments, he is for the ballot, he is for 
 extension of the suffrage, he is for the abolition of 
 the corn laws, the virtual annihilation of the 
 House of Lords, and the gradual destruction of 
 all alliance between the Church and the State. 
 What more can you require ? His Sicilian con- 
 stitution ? 
 
 It would, however, be disingenuous to conceal 
 that there is at the conclusion of your Lordship's 
 address a sentence which almost leads one to 
 impute its production to other causes than the 
 impulse of a party, or the original weakness of 
 your character. It appears that *' a long and 
 severe illness drove you from India," and even 
 now incapacitates you from personally soliciting 
 the suffrages of your choice constituents. Have, 
 then, the republican electors of Glasgow, eager to 
 
 £
 
 98 LETTERS OF 
 
 be represented by a Lord, selected for their cham- 
 pion in the Senate one of those mere lees of de- 
 bilitated humanity and exhausted nature which 
 the winds of India and the waves of the Atlantic 
 periodically waft to the hopeless breezes of their 
 native cliffs ? The Address is ominous ; and per- 
 haps, ere the excitement of a session may have 
 passed, congenial Cheltenham will receive from 
 now glorious Glasgow the antiquated Governor 
 and the drivelling Nabob ! 
 
 Feb. 11, 1836.
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 
 
 99 
 
 LETTER XI 
 
 TO 
 
 VISCOUNT PALMERSTON. 
 
 My Lord, 
 The Minister who maintains himself in power in 
 spite of the contempt of a whole nation must be 
 gifted with no ordinary capacity. Your Lordship's 
 talents have never had j ustice done to them . Permit 
 me to approach you in the spirit of eulogy ; if 
 novelty have charms, this encomium must gratify 
 you. Our language commands no expression of 
 scorn which has not been exhausted in the cele- 
 bration of your character ; there is no conceivable 
 idea of degradation which has not been, at some 
 period or another, associated with your career.
 
 100 LETTERS OF 
 
 Yet the seven Prime Ministers, all of whom you 
 have served with equal fideUty, might suffice, one 
 would think, with their united certificates to vamp 
 up the first ; and as for your conduct, so dis- 
 tinguished an orator as your Lordship has recently 
 turned out, can never want a medium for its 
 triumphant vindication, even if it were denied the 
 columns of that favoured journal where we occa- 
 sionally trace the finished flippancy of your Lord- 
 ship's airy pen. 
 
 The bigoted Tories, under whose auspices your 
 Lordship entered public hfe, had always, if I mis- 
 take not, some narrow-minded misgivings of your 
 honesty as well as your talents, and with charac- 
 teristic illiberahty doomed you to official insigni- 
 ficance. It was generally understood that under 
 no circumstances was your Lordship ever to be 
 permitted to enter the Cabinet. Had you been 
 an anticipated Aislabie, you could not have been 
 more rigidly excluded from that select society ; 
 you were rapidly advanced to a position which, 
 though eminent, was also impassable ; and, having
 
 RUNXYMEDE. 
 
 lol 
 
 attained this acme of second-rate statesmanship, 
 you remained fixed on your pedestal for years, 
 the great Apollo of aspiring understrappers. 
 
 When the ambition of Mr. Canning deprived 
 him of the ablest of his colleagues, your Lordship, 
 with that dexterity which has never deserted you, 
 and which seems a happy compound of the smart- 
 ness of an attorney's clerk and the intrigue of a 
 Greek of the lower empire, wriggled yourself into 
 the vacant Cabinet. The Minister who was forced 
 to solicit the co-operation of a Lansdowne might be 
 pardoned for accepting the proffer of a Palmerston ; 
 but, even in his extreme distress, Mr. Canning 
 was careful not to promote you from your subor- 
 dinate office ; nor can I conceive a countenance of 
 more blank dismay, if that brilliant rhetorician, 
 while wandering in the Elysian fields, were to 
 learn that his favourite portfolio was now in your 
 Lordship's protocolic custody. 
 
 A member of Mr. Canning's Cabinet by neces- 
 sity, you became a member of the Duke of Wel- 
 lington's by sufferance. You were expelled from 
 your office for playing a third-rate part in a third-
 
 102 
 
 LETTERS OF 
 
 rate intrigue. Your Lordship was piqued, and re- 
 venged yourself on your country by becoming a 
 Whig. I remember when, in old days, you ad- 
 dressed the Speaker on our side of the House, your 
 oratorical displays were accompanied not only by 
 the blushes, but even the hesitation, of youth. 
 These might have been esteemed the not-unplea- 
 sing characteristics of an ingenuous modesty, had 
 they not been associated with a callous confidence 
 of tone and an offensive flippancy of language, 
 which proved that they were rather the conse- 
 quence of a want of breeding than of a deficiency 
 of self-esteem. The leader of the Whig Opposi- 
 tion was wont to say, in return perhaps for some of 
 those pasquinades with which you were then in 
 the habit of squibbing your present friends, that 
 your Lordship reminded him of a favourite foot- 
 man on easy terms with his mistress. But no 
 sooner had you changed your party than all 
 Brookes's announced you as an orator. You made 
 a speech about windmills and Don Quixote, and 
 your initiation into liberalism was hailed com- 
 plete. Your Lordship, indeed, was quite steeped
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 
 
 103 
 
 in the spirit of the age. You were a new-born 
 babe of that political millennium which gave 
 England at the same time a Reform Bill and your 
 Lordship for a Secretary of State. I can fancy 
 Mr. Charles Grant assisting at your adult baptism, 
 and witnessing your regeneration in pious ecstasy. 
 The intellectual poverty of that ancient faction 
 who headed a revolution with which they did not 
 sympathize, in order to possess themselves of a 
 power which they cannot wield, was never more 
 singularly manifested than when they delivered the 
 seals of the most important office in the state to a 
 Tory underling. You owe the Whigs great gra- 
 titude, my Lord, and therefore I think you will 
 betray them. Their imbecility in offering you 
 those seals was only equalled by your audacity in 
 accepting them. Yet that acceptance was rather 
 impudent than rash. You were justly conscious 
 that the Cabinet, of which you formed so ludicrous 
 a member, was about to carve out measures of 
 such absorbing interest in our domestic policy, 
 that little time could be spared by the nation to a 
 criticism of your Lordship's labours. During the
 
 104 LETTERS OF 
 
 agitation of Parliamentary Reform your career re- 
 sembled the last American war in the midst of the 
 revolutions of Europe : it was very disgraceful, 
 but never heard of. Occasionally, indeed, ru- 
 mours reached the ear of the nation of the Rus- 
 sians being at Constantinople, or the French in 
 Italy and Flanders. Sometimes we were favoured 
 with a report of the effective blockade of our an- 
 cient allies, the Dutch ; occasionally of the civil 
 wars you had successfully excited in the Penin- 
 sula, which we once delivered from a foreign 
 enemy. But when life and property were both at 
 stake, when the Trades' Unions were marching 
 through the streets of the metropolis in battle- 
 array, and Bristol was burning, your countrymen 
 might be excused for generally believing that 
 your Lordship's career was as insignificant as 
 your intellect. 
 
 But your Saturnalia of undetected scrapes and 
 unpunished blunders is now over. The affairs of 
 the Continent obtrude themselves upon our con- 
 sideration like an importunate creditor who will 
 no longer be denied. There is no party-cry at
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 105 
 
 home to screen your foreign exploits from critical 
 attention. The author of the Xety WJiig Guide 
 may scribble silly articles in newspapers about 
 justice to Ireland, but he will not succeed in di- 
 verting public notice from the painful consequences 
 of his injustice in Europe. To-night, as we are 
 informed, some results of your Lordship's system 
 of non-interference in the affairs of Spain are to 
 be brought under the consideration of the House 
 of Commons. I am not in the confidence of the 
 Hon. Gentleman who will introduce that subject 
 to the notice of the assembly of which, in spite of 
 the electors of Hampshire, your Lordship has some- 
 how or other contrived to become a member. But 
 I speak of circumstances with which I am well ac- 
 quainted, and for the accuracy of which I stake 
 my credit as a public writer, when I declare that 
 of the 10,000 or 12,000 of your fellow-countrymen 
 whom your crimping Lordship inveigled into a 
 participation in the civil wars of Spain for no other 
 purpose than to extricate yourself from the con- 
 sequences of your blundering policy, not 3000 
 effective men are now in the field ; such have been
 
 106 LETTERS OF 
 
 the fatal results of the climate and the cat-o'-nine- 
 tails, of ignoble slaughter, and of fruitless hard- 
 ship. Your Lordship may affect to smile, and 
 settle your cravat, as if your were arranging your 
 conscience; you may even prompt the most ill- 
 informed man in his Majesty's dominions — I 
 mean, of course, the First Lord of his Majesty's 
 Treasury — to announce in the Upper House that 
 the career of the British legion has been a pro- 
 gress of triumph, and that its present situation is 
 a state of comparative comfort ; but I repeat my 
 statement, and I declare most solemnly, before 
 God and my country, that I am prepared to sub- 
 stantiate it. When the most impudent and the 
 vilest of your Lordship's supporters next amuses 
 the House with his clap-trap appeals to the tears 
 of the widow and the sighs of the orphan, your 
 Lordship may perhaps remember the responsibility 
 you have yourself incurred, and, sick as the nation 
 may be of this inglorious destruction, there is one 
 silly head, I believe, that it would grieve no one 
 to see added to the heap. It would atone for the 
 havoc, it would extenuate the slaughter, and the
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 
 
 107 
 
 member for Westminster, who is a patriot in two 
 countries, would be hailed on his return as the 
 means of having rid both England and Spain of an 
 intolerable nuisance. 
 
 For the last five years a mysterious dimness 
 seems to have been stealing over the gems of our 
 imperial diadem. The standard of England droops 
 fitfully upon its staff. He must indeed be an in- 
 experienced mariner who does not mark the 
 ground swell of the coming tempest. If there be 
 a war in Europe to-morrow, it will be a war against 
 English supremacy, and we have no allies. Xone 
 but your Lordship can suppose that the Cabinet 
 of the Tuileries is not acting in concert with the 
 Court of the Kremlin. Austria, our natural friend 
 on the continent of Europe, shrinks from the con- 
 tamination of our political propagandism. If there 
 be an European war, it will be one of those con- 
 tests wherein a great state requires for its guidance 
 all the resources of a master mind : it would be 
 a crisis which would justify the presence of a 
 Richelieu, a Pombal, or a Pitt. O my country ! 
 fortunate, thrice fortunate England ! with your
 
 108 
 
 LETTERS OF 
 
 destinies at such a moment entrusted to the Lord 
 Fanny of diplomacy ! Methinks I can see your 
 Lordship, the Sporus of politics, cajoling France 
 with an airy compliment, and menacing Russia 
 with a perfumed cane I 
 
 February 22, 1836.
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 109 
 
 LETTER XII. 
 
 SIR JOHN HOBHOUSE. 
 
 Sir, 
 Yo u R metamorphosis into a Whig and a Cabinet 
 Minister has always appeared to me even less 
 marvellous than your transformation into a wit 
 and a leader, after having passed the most im- 
 petuous years of life in what might have appeared 
 to the inexperienced the less ambitious capacity of a 
 dull dependent. In literature and in politics, until 
 within a very short period, you have always shone 
 with the doubtful lustre of reflected light. You 
 have gained notoriety by associating yourself with 
 another's fame. The commentator of Byron, you
 
 110 LETTERS OF 
 
 naturally became in due season '^ Sir Francis 
 Burdett's man," as Mr. Canning styled you, to 
 your confusion, in the House of Commons ; and to 
 which sneer, after having taken a week to arrange 
 your impromptu, you replied in an elaborate imi- 
 tation of Chatham, admitted by your friends to be 
 the greatest failure in parliamentary memory. At 
 college, your dignified respect for the peerage 
 scarcely prepared us for your subsequent sneers at 
 the order. Your readiness to bear the burden of the 
 scrapes of those you honoured by your intimacy, 
 announced the amiability of your temper. Yet, 
 whether you were sacrificing yourself on the altar 
 of friendship, or concocting notes upon the pas- 
 quinades which others scribbled, there was always 
 '* something too ponderous about your genius for 
 a joke ;" and when those words fell from your 
 lips on Friday night, to me they seemed to fiow 
 with all the practised grace of a tu quoquey 
 and to be not so much the inspiration of the 
 moment as the reaiiniscence of some of those 
 quips and cranks of Mathews and Scrope Davies,
 
 RUNNYMEDE. Ill 
 
 of which you were the constant, and often the un- 
 conscious, victim. 
 
 It may be the prejudice of party, perhaps the 
 force of old associations, but to me your new 
 character seems bat thinly to veil your ancient 
 reputation. There is a massy poise, even in your 
 airiest flights, that reminds one rather of the vul- 
 ture than the eagle ; and your lightest movements 
 are pervaded with a sort of elephantine grace, 
 which forces us to admire rather the painful tutor- 
 age of art than nature's happier impulse. Bus- 
 tling at the university, blustering on the hustings, 
 dangling the seals of office — a humble friend, a 
 demagogue, or a placeman — your idiosyncracy 
 still prevails, and in your case, *' piddling Theo- 
 balds" has, at the best, but turned into *' slashing 
 Bentley." 
 
 Allow me to congratulate you on your plaintive 
 confession, amid the roars of the House, that ^* cir- 
 cumstances have brought you and your noble 
 friend, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, 
 to2:ether on the same bench." The honour of
 
 112 LETTEKS OP 
 
 sharing the same seat with that individual might, 
 \ in another's estimation, have sufficed, without the 
 \ additional disgrace of calling attention to the 
 'stigma. There is something so contaminating in 
 ja connexion with that man, that when you volun- 
 { tarily avowed it, we might be excused for admiring 
 / your valour rather than your discretion. It is, in 
 truth, a rare conjunction ; and Circumstance, *'that 
 unspiritual god." as your illustrious companion, 
 Lord Byron, has happily styled the common-place 
 divinity, has seldom had to answer for a more de- 
 grading combination. You have met, indeed, 
 like the puritan and the prostitute on the banks of 
 Lethe, in Garrick's farce, with an equally conve- 
 nient oblivion of the characteristic incidents of 
 your previous careers ; you giving up your an- 
 nual parliaments and universal suffrage, he cast- 
 ing to the winds his close corporations and 
 borough nominees ; you whispering conservatism 
 on the hustings, once braying with your revolu- 
 tionary uproar, he spouting reform in the still re- 
 cesses of the dust of Downing-street ; the one
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 113 
 
 reeking from a Newgate cell, the other redolent of 
 the boudoirs of Mayfair ; yet both of them, alike 
 the Tory underling and the Radical demagogue, 
 closing the ludicrous contrast with one grand dia- 
 pason of harmonious inconsistency — both merging 
 in the Whig Minister. 
 
 That a politician may at different periods of his 
 life, and under very different aspects of public 
 affairs, conscientiously entertain varying opinions 
 upon the same measure, is a principle which no 
 member of the present House of Commons is in- 
 titled to question. I would not deny you. Sir, 
 the benefit of the charity of society ; but when 
 every change of opinion in a man's career is inva- 
 riably attended by a corresponding and advan- 
 tageous change in his position, his motives are not 
 merely open to suspicion — his conduct is liable to 
 conviction. Yet there is one revolution in your 
 sentiments on which I may be permitted particu- 
 larly to congratulate you, and that country which 
 you assist in misgoverning. Your sympathy on 
 Friday night with the success of the British arms
 
 14 
 
 LETTERS OF 
 
 came with a consoling grace and a compensatory 
 retribution from the man who has recorded in 
 a solemn quarto his bitter regret that his coun- 
 trymen were victorious at Waterloo. I always ad- 
 mired the Whig felicity of your appointment as 
 Secretary at War. 
 
 Pardon, Sir, the freedom with which I venture 
 to address you. My candour may, at least, be 
 as salutary as the cabbage-stalks of your late con- 
 stituents. There are some indeed, who, as I am 
 informed, have murmured at this method of com- 
 municating to them my opinion of their characters 
 and careers. Yet I can conceive an individual so 
 circumstanced, that he would scarcely be entitled 
 to indulge in such querulous sensitiveness. He 
 should be one who had himself published letters 
 without the ratification of his name, and then sup- 
 pressed them ; he should be one who had sat in 
 trembling silence in the House when he was dared 
 to repeat the statement which he had circulated 
 by the press ; he should be one to whom it had 
 been asserted in his teeth that he was *^a liar
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 115 
 
 and a scoundrel, and only wanted courage to be 
 an assassin." It does not appear to me that such 
 an individual could complain with any justice of 
 the frankness of 
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 
 
 February 27, 1836.
 
 116 LETTERS OF 
 
 LETTER XIII. 
 
 TO 
 
 LORD GLENELG. 
 
 My Lord, 
 Let me not disturb your slumbers too rudely : 
 I will address you in a whisper, and on tiptoe. 
 At length I have succeeded in penetrating the 
 recesses of your enchanted abode. The Knight 
 who roused the Sleeping Beauty could not have 
 witnessed stranger marvels in his progress than 
 he who has at last contrived to obtain an inter- 
 view with the sleeping secretary. 
 
 The moment that I had passed the Foreign 
 Office an air of profound repose seemed to pervade 
 Downing-street, and as I approached the portal of 
 your department, it was with difficulty I could
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 117 
 
 resist the narcotic influence of the atmosphere. 
 Your porter is no Argus. *' His cahn, broad, 
 thoughtless aspect breathed repose/' and when 
 he ^' slow from his bench arose, and swollen with 
 sleep," I almost imagined that, like his celebrated 
 predecessor in the Castle of Indolence, he was 
 about to furnish me with a nightcap, slippers, 
 and a robe de chamhre. I found your clerks 
 yawning, and your under- secretaries just waking 
 from a dream. A dozy, drowsy, drony hum, the 
 faint rustling of some papers Hke the leaves of 
 autumn, and a few noiseless apparitions gliding: 
 like ghosts, just assured me that the business of 
 the nation was not neglected. Every personage 
 and every incident gradually prepared me for the 
 quiescent presence of the master mind, until, 
 adroitly stepping over your private secretary, 
 nodding and recumbent at your threshold, I 
 found myself before your Lordship, the guardian 
 of our colonial empire, stretched on an easy couch 
 in luxurious listlessness, with all the prim volup- 
 tuousness of a puritanical Sardanapalus. 
 
 I forget who was the wild theorist who enun-
 
 118 LETTERS OF 
 
 ciated the absurd doctrine that '' ships, colonies, 
 and commerce," were the surest foundation of 
 empire. What an infinitely ridiculous idea ! But 
 the march of intellect and the spirit of the age 
 have cleansed our brains of this perilous stuff. 
 Had it not been for the invention of ships, the 
 great malady of sea-sickness, so distressing to an 
 indolent minister, would be unknown ; colonies, 
 like country-houses, we have long recognised to 
 be sources only of continual expense, and to be 
 kept up merely from a puerile love of show : as 
 for commerce, it is a vulgarism, and fit only for 
 low people. What have such dainty nobles as 
 yourself and Lord Palmerston to do with cottons 
 and indigoes ? Such coarse details you fitly 
 leave to Mr. Poulett Thompson, whose practical 
 acquaintance with tallow is the only blot on 
 the scutcheon of your refined and aristocratic 
 Cabinet. 
 
 Although a grateful nation has seized every 
 opportunity of expressing their confidence in your 
 Lordship and your colleagues, and although 
 myself, among more distinguished writers, have
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 
 
 119 
 
 omitted no occasion of celebrating your inex- 
 haustible panegyric, it appears to me, I confess, 
 that scant justice has hitherto been done to the 
 grand system of our present Administration, and 
 which they are putting in practice with felicitous 
 rapidity and their habitual success. This grand 
 system, it would seem, consists of a plan to govern 
 the country without having any thing to do. 
 
 The meritorious and unceasing labours of the 
 noble Secretary for Foreign Affairs for the de- 
 struction of English influence on the continent 
 will soon permit his Lordship to receive his 
 salary without any necessary attendance at his 
 office. Lord Morpeth has nearly got rid of 
 Ireland. The selection of your Lordship to regu- 
 late the destinies of our colonies insures the 
 speediest and the most favourable results in 
 effecting their emancipation from, what one of 
 your principal supporters styles, " the unjust 
 domination of the mother country ;" and we are 
 already promised a Lord Chancellor who is not ta 
 preside over the Chancery. The recent govern- 
 ment of Lord William Bentinck will, I fear, rob
 
 120 I.ETTERS OF 
 
 Sir John Hobhouse of half the glory of losing 
 India; and the municipal corporations, if they 
 work as well as you anticipate, may in due sea- 
 son permit Lord John Russell to resume his re- 
 linquished lyre. Freed of our colonies, Ireland, 
 and India, the affairs of the Continent consigned 
 to their own insignificance, Westminster-hall de- 
 livered over to the cheap lawyers, and our do- 
 mestic polity regulated by vestries and town- 
 councils, there is a fair probability that the First 
 Lord of the Treasury, who envies you your con- 
 genial repose, may be relieved from any very 
 onerous burden of public duty, and that the 
 Treasury may establish the aptness of its title 
 on the non lucendo character of its once shining 
 coffers. 
 
 Vive la Bagatelle! His Majesty's Ministers 
 may then hold Cabinet Councils to arrange a 
 white-bait dinner at Blackwall, or prick for an 
 excursion to Richmond or Beulah Spa. Such 
 may be the gay confsequences of a Reform Mi- 
 nistry and a reformed Parliament ! No true 
 patriot will grudge them these slight recreations,
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 121 
 
 or hazard even a murmur at their sinecure sa- 
 laries. For, to say the truth, my Lord, if you 
 must remain in office, I, for one, would willingly 
 consent to an inactivity on your part almost as 
 complete as could be devised by the united genius 
 for sauntering of yourself and that energetic and 
 laborious nobleman who summoned you to a 
 worthy participation in his councils. 
 
 Affairs, therefore, my dear Lord Glenelg, are 
 far from disheartening, especially in that depart- 
 ment under your own circumspect supervision. 
 What if the Mauritius be restiff — let the inhabit- 
 ants cut each others' throats : that will ultimately 
 produce peace. What if Jamaica be in flames — 
 we have still East-India sugar ; and by the time 
 we have lost that, the manufactory of beet-root 
 will be perfect. What if Colonel Torrens, perched 
 on the Pisgah height of a joint-stock company, 
 be transporting our fellow-countrymen to the milk 
 and honey of Australia, without even the prepara- 
 tory ceremony of a trial by jury — let the exiles 
 settle this great constitutional question with the 
 kangaroos. What if Canada be in rebellion — let
 
 122 
 
 LETTERS OF 
 
 not the menacing spectre of Papineau or the 
 suppHant shade of the liberal Gosford scare your 
 Lordship's dreams. Slumber on without a pang, 
 most vigilant of secretaries. I will stuff you a 
 fresh pillow with your unanswered letters, and 
 insure you a certain lullaby by reading to you one 
 of your own despatches. 
 
 March 12, 1836.
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 123 
 
 LETTER XIV. 
 
 TO 
 
 THE RIGHT HON. EDWARD ELLICE. 
 
 Sir, 
 In this aoe of faction it is delightful to turn to 
 one public character whom writers of all parties 
 must unite in addressing in terms of unqualified 
 panegyric. From " a man discreditably known 
 in the city," you have become a statesman cre- 
 ditably known at Court. Such is the triumph of 
 perseverance in a good cause, undaunted by 
 calumny and undeterred by the narrow-minded 
 scruples of petty intellects. That influence which, 
 in spite of prejudice, you have gained by the 
 uniform straightforwardness of your conduct, you 
 have confirmed by that agreeable and captivating
 
 ]24 LETTERS OF 
 
 demeanour which secures you the hearts of men 
 as well as their confidence. Uninfluenced by per- 
 sonal motives, always ready to sacrifice self, and 
 recoiling from intrigue with the antipathy native 
 to a noble mind, you stand out in bold and 
 favourable relief to the leaders of that party, 
 whose destinies, from a purely patriotic motive, 
 you occasionally condescend to regulate. 
 
 I ought, perhaps, before this to have con- 
 gratulated you on your return to that country 
 whose interests are never absent from your 
 thoughts ; but I was unwilling to disturb even with 
 my compliments, a gentleman who, I am aware, 
 has been labouring of late so zealously for the 
 commonweal as the Right Hon. Mr. EUice. 
 Your devotion in your recent volunteer visit to 
 Constantinople has not been lost on the minds 
 of your countrymen. They readily recognise 
 your pre-eminent fitness to wrestle with the Rus- 
 sian bear ; and they who have witnessed in a 
 northern forest a duel between those polished 
 animals, must feel convinced that you are the 
 only English statesman duly quahfied to mingle
 
 RrNNYMEDE. 125 
 
 in a combat, which is at the same time so dex- 
 terous and so desperate. Happy England, whose 
 fortunes are supervised by such an unsalaried 
 steward as the member for Coventry ! Thrice 
 fortunate Telemachus of Lambton Castle, guided 
 by such a Mentor ! 
 
 After the turmoil of party politics, you must 
 have found travel delightful ! I can fancy you 
 gazing upon the blue Symplegades, or roaming 
 amid the tumuli of Troy. The first glance at 
 the iEgean must have filled you with classic 
 rapture. Your cultured and accomplished mind 
 must have revelled in the recollections of the 
 heroic past. How different from the associations 
 of those jobbing politicians, who, when they sail 
 upon Salamisj are only reminded of Greek bonds, 
 and whose thoughts, when they mingle amid the 
 imaginary tumult of the Pnyx at Athens, only 
 recur to the broils of a settling-day at the Stock- 
 Exchange of London ! 
 
 In your political career you have emulated the 
 fame, and rivalled, if not surpassed, the exploits, 
 of the great Earl of Warwick. He was only a
 
 126 LETTERS OF 
 
 King-maker, but Mr. Ellice is a maker of Mi- 
 nisters. How deeply was Lord Grey indebted to 
 your disinterested services ! Amid the musings 
 of the Liternum of Howick, while moraHzing on 
 the gratitude of a party, how fondly must he con- 
 gratulate himself on his fortune in such a relative ! 
 It is said that his successor is not so prompt to 
 indicate his sense of your services as would be 
 but just. But the ingratitude of men, and es- - 
 pecially of Ministers, is proverbial. Lord Mel- 
 bourne, however, may yet live to be sensible of 
 your amiable exercise of the prerogative of the 
 Crown. In the mean time the unbounded con- 
 fidence of Lord Palmerston in your good inten- 
 tions may in some degree console you for the 
 suspicions of the Prime Minister, to say nothing 
 of the illimitable trust of the noble Secretary for 
 the Colonies, who sleeps on in unbroken security 
 as long as you are the guardian angel of his 
 slumbers. 
 
 Distinguished as you are by the inflexible in- 
 tegrity of your conduct, both in public and private 
 life, by your bland manners and your pohte car-
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 
 
 riage, your total absence of all low ambition, and 
 your contempt for all intrigue and subterranean 
 practices, you are, if possible, still more eminent 
 for your philosophical exemption from antiquated 
 prejudice. The people of England can never 
 forget that it vvas your emancipated mind that 
 first soared superior to the mischievous institution 
 of a national church, and that, with the charac- 
 teristic liberality of your nature, yours was the 
 intellect that first devised the ingenious plan of 
 appeasing Ireland by the sacrifice of England. 
 Had you been influenced in your conduct by any 
 factious object of establishing your friends in the 
 enjoyment of a power, to exercise which they had 
 previously proved themselves incapable, it might 
 in some degree have deteriorated from the single- 
 ness of your purpose ; but no one can suppose, 
 for an instant, that in forming a close alliance one 
 year with a man whom twelve months before they 
 had denounced as a rebel, or in decreeing the de- 
 struction of an institution vvhich they had just 
 recently pledged themselves to uphold, your 
 pupils of the present Administration were ac-
 
 128 LETTERS OF 
 
 tuated by any other motives but the most 
 just, the most disinterested, and the most ho- 
 nourable. 
 
 You have recently been gratified by witnessing 
 the proud and predominant influence of your 
 country in the distant and distracted regions of 
 the East. The comphments which were lavished 
 on yourself and your companion by the Czar 
 must have been as flattering to the envoy as they 
 were to the confiding Sovereign with v/hose 
 dignity you were entrusted. It must be some 
 time before the salutes of Odessa cease ringing 
 in your ear, and it cannot be supposed that your 
 excited imagination can speedily disembarrass 
 itself of your splendid progress in a steamer over 
 the triumphant waters of the Euxine. Yet, when 
 you have in some degree recovered from the in- 
 toxication of success, and the inebriating influence 
 of Royal and Imperial condescension, let us hope 
 that you may deign to extend your practised at- 
 tention to our domestic situation. The country 
 is very prosperous ; the Stock- Exchange has not 
 been so active since 1825. They certainly have
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 129 
 
 missed you a little in Spanish, but the railways, 
 I understand, have been looking up since your 
 return, especially the shares of those companies 
 which have no hope or intention of prosecuting 
 their designs. In the mean time, perhaps, for 
 you may be destined the glory of inducing Lord 
 Melbourne to tolerate the presence of Mr. O'Con- 
 nel at an official banquet. That would be an 
 achievement worthy of your great mind. The 
 new Liberal Club, too, which, like Eldorado, is 
 to supply 
 
 " Shirts for the shirtless, suppers for the starved," 
 
 may merit your organizing patronage. For the 
 rest, the unbounded confidence which subsists 
 between our gracious Sovereign and his Ministers, 
 the complete harmony at length established be- 
 tween the two Houses of Parliament, the perfect 
 tranquillity of Ireland, vouched by the de facto 
 member for Dublin, and guarantied by Lord 
 Plunket, and the agreeable circumstance that the 
 people of England are arrayed in two hostile and 
 determined parties, all combine to assure us of a
 
 130 
 
 LETTERS OF 
 
 long, a tranquil, and a prosperous administration 
 of our affairs by the last Cabinet which was con- 
 structed under your auspices, 
 
 March 20, 183G.
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 
 
 131 
 
 LETTER XV. 
 
 VISCOUNT MELBOURNE. 
 
 My Lord, 
 I ALWAYS experience peculiar gratification in ad- 
 dressing your Lordship, — your Lordship is such a 
 general favorite. I have read somewhere of '^ the 
 best-natured man with the worst-natured muse." 
 I have always deemed your Lordship the best- 
 natured Minister with the worst-natured party. 
 And, really, if you have sometimes a little lost 
 your temper — if for those Epicurean shrugs of the 
 shoulder and nil admirari smiles, which were once 
 your winning characteristics, you have occasionally 
 of late substituted a little of the Cambyses' vein, 
 and demeaned yourself as if you were practising
 
 132 LETTERS OF 
 
 '^ Pistol " for the next private theatricals at Pan- 
 sanger, very extenuating: circumstances may, I 
 think, be found in the heterogenecus and Hu- 
 dibrastic elements of that party which Fate, in a 
 freak of fun, has called upon your Lordship to 
 regulate. What a crew ! I can compare them to 
 nothino^ but the Swalbach swine in the Brunnen 
 bubbles, guzzling and grunting in a bed of mire, 
 fouling themselves, and bedaubing every luckless 
 passenger with their contaminating filth. 
 
 We are all now going into the country, and you 
 and your colleagues are about to escape for a sea- 
 son from what your Lordship delicately terms the 
 ^' badgering " of Parliament. I trust you will 
 find the relaxation renovating. How you will 
 recreate yourselves, we shall be curious to learn. 
 I think the Cabinet might take to cricket — they 
 are a choice eleven. With their peculiarly pa- 
 triotic temperaments, and highly national feel- 
 ings, they might venture, I think, to play against 
 ^' all England." Lord Palmerston and Lord 
 Glenelg, with their talent for keeping in, would 
 assuredly secure a good score. Lord John, in-
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 133 
 
 deed, with all his flourishing, will probably end in 
 knocking down his own wicket ; and as for Sir 
 Cam, the chances certainly are that he will be 
 •* caught out," experiencing the same fate in play 
 as in politics. If you could only engage Lord 
 Durham to fling sticks at the seals of the Foreign 
 Office, and the agile Mr. Ellice to climb a greasy 
 pole for the Colonial portfolio, I think you will 
 have provided a very entertaining programme of 
 Easter sports. 
 
 My Lord, they say, you know, when things are 
 at the worst, they generally mend. On this prin- 
 ciple our affairs may really be considered highly 
 promising. The state of Spain demonstrates the 
 sagacity of our Foreign Secretary. The country 
 is divided into two great parties ; we have con- 
 trived to interfere without supporting either, but 
 have lavished our treasure and our blood in up- 
 holding a Camarilla. This is so bad, that really 
 the happiest results may speedily be anticipated. 
 Canada is in a state of rebelHon, and therefore 
 after Easter we may perhaps find loyalty and 
 peace predominant, especially when we recall to
 
 134 
 
 LETTERS OF 
 
 our recollection the profound intellect your Lord- 
 ship has selected for the settlement of that distract- 
 ed colony. The Whigs, my Lord^ seem indeed to 
 have a happy knack in the choice of governors, 
 and almost to rival in their appointments the Duke 
 in Don Quixote. To them we are indebted alike 
 for the prescient firmness of a Gosford, and the 
 substantial judgment of a Sligo. The spring-like 
 promise of the experienced Elphinstone will ex- 
 pand the genial seed so deftly sown by the noble 
 member for Glasgow, and complete the trio. 
 Three wise and learned rulers ! To whomsoever 
 of the leash my Lord Glenelg may award the 
 golden palm, I doubt not it will prove an apple of 
 sufficient discord. 
 
 " But all our praises why should lords engross ?" 
 
 particularly when the appointments of Lord Auck- 
 land and Lord Nugent are duly mentioned. 
 
 " Rise, honest muse, and sing Sir Francis Head \" 
 
 The convenient candour of that celebrated func- 
 tionary will at least afford one solacing remi- 
 niscence for your Easter holidays.
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 136 
 
 But what is Spanish anarchy or Canadian re- 
 belUon, the broils of Jamaica, or the impending 
 catastrophe of Hindostan, when Ireland is tran- 
 quil ? And who can doubt the tranquillity of Ire- 
 land ? Has not your Lordship the bond of the trust- 
 worthy Mr. O'Connell, whose private praises you 
 celebrate with such curious felicity, and the choice 
 collateral security of the veracious Lord Plunket? 
 With such a muniment in the strong box of your 
 cabinet securities, what care you for the charges of 
 Baron Smith and the calendar of Tipperary ? And \ 
 yet, my Lord, though Ireland is tranquil, and 
 though the Papists, in their attempts on the lives 
 of their rivals, seem of late charitably to have sub- 
 stituted perjury for massacre, I fancy I mark a 
 cloud upon your triumphant brow, at my incidental 
 mention of that fortunate land. Be of good cheer, 
 my Lord ; and if you cannot be bold, at least be 
 reckless. In spite of the elaborate misrepresenta- 
 tions of party, the state of Irish affairs is very 
 simple. The point lies in a nutshell, and may be 
 expressed in a single sentence. Your Lordship's 
 accommodation bills with Mr. O'Connell are be- |(
 
 136 LETTERS OF 
 
 coming due, and unless you can contrive to get 
 them renewed, the chances are your Lordship's 
 firm will become bankrupt. 
 
 It seems, my Lord, that the hon. member for 
 Finsbury is about to move a petition to our gra- 
 cious Sovereign to intercede with the King of the 
 French in favour of the State- victims of the three 
 glorious days, persecuted like other great men for 
 anticipating their age, and attempting to do that 
 in 1830 the consummation of which was reserved 
 for 1835. My Lord, buffoonery after a while 
 wearies : put an end, I beseech you, to the farce 
 of your government, and, to save time, consent at 
 once that you and your colleagues should be substi- 
 tuted in their stead. Nay, I wish not to be harsh : 
 my nature is not vindictive. I would condemn 
 you to no severer solitude than the gardens of 
 Hampton-court, where you might saunter away 
 the remaining years of your now ludicrous exist- 
 ence, sipping the last novel of Paulde Kock, while 
 lounging over a sun-dial. 
 
 March 30, 1836.
 
 RUXNYMEDE. 
 
 137 
 
 LETTER XVI. 
 
 THE HOUSE OF LORDS. 
 
 My Lords, 
 If there be one legislative quality more valuable 
 than another, it is the power of discrin:iinating 
 between the cause and the pretext. For two 
 sessions of Parliament an attempt has been made 
 to force upon your Lordships' adoption a peculiar 
 scheme of policy under the pretext of doing 
 "justice to Ireland." A majority of the members 
 of the House of Commons, no matter how ob- 
 tained, have not felt competent, or inclined, to pene- 
 trate beneath the surface of this plausible plea. 
 They have accepted the pretext as a sound and 
 genuine principle of conduct, and have called for 
 
 I 
 \
 
 138 LETTERS OF 
 
 your Lordships' co-operation in measures which 
 you have declined to sanction, because you be- 
 lieve you have distinguished the concealed from 
 the ostensible motive of their proposition. Your 
 Lordships believe, that under the pretext of doing 
 "justice to Ireland," you are called upon to do 
 ** injustice to England," and to assist the cause of 
 Irish independence and Papal supremacy. 
 
 My Lords, the English nation agrees with you. 
 The experience of the last few years has not been 
 lost upon your reflective countrymen. Under the 
 pretext of emancipating the Irish people, they 
 have witnessed the establishment of the dominion 
 of a foreign priesthood — under the pretext of 
 Parliamentary reform, they have witnessed the 
 delusive substitution of Whig Government — under 
 i the pretext of municipal reform in England, they 
 have seen a sectarian oligarchy invested with a 
 monopoly of power, tainting the very fountains of 
 justice, and introducing into the privacy of do- 
 mestic life all the acerbities of public faction — 
 " and under the pretext of '^ justice to Ireland," 
 they have already beheld the destruction of
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 
 
 139 
 
 Protestant ascendancy, and the Papacy, if nut 
 supreme, at least rampant. The English nation 
 are reaping the bitter fruits of not sufficiently 
 discriminating between the ostensible and con- 
 cealed purposes of legislation. Had they been 
 aware some years back, as they now keenly feel, 
 that they were only extending power and privi- 
 leges to a priesthood when they thought they 
 were emancipating a people, the miserable dilem- 
 mas of modern politics would never have occurred. 
 They would not have witnessed the gentlemen of 
 Ireland driven from its parliamentary represen- 
 tation, and deprived of their local influence ; they 
 would not have witnessed a fierce and bloody war 
 waged against the property of the Protestant 
 church and the hves of its ministers ; they would 
 not have witnessed the Imperial Parhament oc- 
 cupied in a solemn debate on the propriety of 
 maintaining the legislative union. Political revo- 
 lutions are always effected by virtue of abstract 
 pleas. ** Justice to Ireland" is about as definite 
 as ''the Rights of Man." If the Irish have an 
 equal right with ourselves to popular corporations,
 
 140 
 
 LETTERS OF 
 
 have they less a right to a domestic Legislature or 
 a native Sovereign ? My Lords, are you pre- 
 pared to go this length ? Are you prepared to 
 dismiss circumstances from your consideration, 
 and legislate solely upon principles ? Is the 
 British Senate an assembly of dreaming school- 
 men, that they are resolved to deal with words in 
 preference to facts ? Is a great empire to be 
 dissolved by an idle logomachy ? If Dublin have 
 an equal right with Westminster to the presence 
 of a Parliament, is the rio^ht of York less valid? 
 Be consistent, my Lords, in the development of 
 the new system of politics. Repeal the Union, 
 and revive the Heptarchy. 
 
 When the Irish Papists were admitted to the 
 Imperial Parliament, we were told that they 
 would consist of a few gentlemen of ancient 
 family and fortune. That class is already 
 banished from our councils. When the Protes- 
 tant establishment in Ireland was reformed by the 
 Whigs, we were told that the church in Ireland 
 would then be as safe as the church in Yorkshire. 
 That establishment is now an eleemosynary one.
 
 HUNNyMEDE. 
 
 141 
 
 When the repeal of the union was discussed in 
 the English Parliament, we were told that it was 
 only supported by a feeble section. That section 
 now decides the fate of the British Government 
 and the policy of the British empire. Because 
 much has been conceded, we are told that all 
 must be given up ; because the Irish Papists have 
 shown themselves unworthy of a political fran- 
 chise, we are told that it necessarily follows that 
 they should be entrusted with a municipal one ; 
 because # # # # 
 
 * # # * # 
 
 * # * * * 
 
 * * # * * 
 
 * * * # # 
 
 * # # # # 
 
 This new system of inductive reasoning may 
 pass current with some bankrupt noble, panting 
 to nestle in the bowers of Downing-street ; this 
 topsy-turvy logic may flash conviction on the 
 mind of some penniless expectant of the broken 
 victuals of the official banquet ; but the people of 
 England recoil with disgust from the dangerous
 
 142 LETTERS or 
 
 balderdash, and look up to your Lordships as 
 their hereditary leaders to stand between the ark 
 of the constitution and the unhallowed hands that 
 are thrust forward to soil its splendour and 
 violate its sanctity. The people of England are 
 not so far divorced from their ancient valour, 
 that, after having withstood Napoleon and the 
 whole world in arms, they are to sink before a 
 horde of their manumitted serfs and the Nisi Prius 
 demagogue whom a foreign priesthood have hired 
 to talk treason on their blasphemous behalf. 
 iV.fter having routed the lion, we will not be 
 preyed upon by the wolf. If we are to fall — if 
 this great empire, raised by the heroic energies of 
 the English nation — that nation of which your 
 fathers formed a part — is indeed to be dissolved, 
 let us hope that the last moments of our career 
 may prove at least an euthanasia ; let no pestilent 
 blight, after our meridian glory, sully the splen- 
 dour of our setting ; and whether we fall before 
 the foreign foe we have so often baffled, or 
 whether, by some mysterious combination of 
 irresistible circumstances, our empire sinks, like
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 143 
 
 the Queen of the Adriatic, beneath the waves 
 that we still rule, let not the records of our future 
 annalist preserve a fact which, after all our / i 
 greatness, might well break the spirit of th 
 coming generations of our species. Let it not b 
 said that we truckled to one, the unparalleled and 
 unconstitutional scope of whose power is only- 
 equalled by the sordid meanness of his rapacious 
 soul. Let it not be said that the English consti- 
 tution sank before a rebel without dignity, and a 
 demagogue without courage. This grand pen- 
 sionary of bigotry and sedition presumes to stir 
 up the people of England against your high 
 estate. Will the Peers of England quail to this 
 brawling mercenary — this man who has even 
 degraded crime — who has deprived treason of its 
 grandeur, and sedition of its sentiment — who is 
 paid for his patriotism, and whose philanthropy is 
 hired by the job — audacious, yet a poltroon — 
 agitating a people, yet picking their pockets — in 
 mind a Catiline, in action a Cleon ? 
 
 This disturber is in himself nothing. He has 
 neither learning, wit, eloquence, nor refined taste,
 
 144 LETTERS OF 
 
 nor elevated feeling, nor a passionate and creative 
 soul. What ragged ribaldry are his public ad- 
 dresses, whether they emanate from his brazen 
 mouth or from his leaden pen ! His pathos might 
 shame the maudlin Romeo of a barn ; his invec- 
 tive is the reckless abandonment of the fish- 
 market. Were he a man of genius, he would be 
 unsuited to the career for which he is engaged ; 
 for, after all, he is but a slave. But it is the 
 awful character of his master that invests this 
 creature with his terrible consideration. However 
 we may detest or despise the Nisi Prius lawyer 
 hired to insult and injure the realm of England, 
 we know that he is the delegate of the most 
 ancient and powerful priesthood in Europe. It is 
 as the great Papal nominee that this O'Connell, 
 with all his vileness, becomes a power to control 
 which requires no common interference. 
 
 My Lords, the EngUsh nation believes that 
 that interference can be efficiently exercised by 
 your august assembly. In you are reposed their 
 hopes ; you will not disappoint them. In a few^ 
 hours, in obedience to the mandate of the Papal
 
 RUNNYMEDE. l45 
 
 priesthood, that shallow voluptuary who is still 
 Prime Minister of England will call upon your 
 Lordships, with cuckoo note, to do "justice to 
 Ireland." Do it. Justice to Ireland will best be 
 secured by doing justice to England. The people 
 of England created the empire. At the time 
 when we were engaged in that great strife which 
 will rank in the estimation of posterity with the 
 Punic wars and the struggles of the Greeks 
 against Asia, the very men who are now me- 
 nacing your illustrious order, and stirring up war 
 against our national institutions, were in commu- 
 nication with our most inveterate foe, and so- 
 liciting invasion. My Lords, you will not forget 
 this; you will not forget to distinguish their 
 pretext from their cause. These men cannot be 
 conciliated. They are your foes, because they 
 are the foes of England. They hate our free and 
 fertile isle. They hate our order, our civilization, 
 our enterprising industry, our sustained courage, 
 our decorous liberty, our pure religion. This 
 wild, reckless, indolent, uncertain, and super- 
 stitious race have no sympathy with the English 
 
 G 
 
 /
 
 146 LETTERS OF 
 
 character. Their fair ideal of human fehcity is an 
 alternation of clannish broils and coarse idolatry. 
 Their history describes an unbroken circle of 
 bigotry and blood. And now, forsooth, the cry 
 is raised that they have been misgoverned ! How 
 many who sound this party Shibboleth have 
 studied the history of Ireland ? A savage popu- 
 lation, under the influence of the Papacy, has, 
 nevertheless, been so regulated, that they have 
 contributed to the creation of a highly-civilized and 
 Protestant empire. Why, is not that the paragon 
 of political science? Could Machiavel teach 
 more ? My Lords, shall the delegates of these 
 tribes, under the direction of the Roman priest- 
 hood, ride roughshod over our country — over 
 England — haughty, and still imperial, England ? 
 Forbid it all the memory of your ancestors ! 
 Rest assured, that if you perform your high and 
 august office as becomes you, rest assured that in 
 this agony of the Protestant cause and the 
 British empire, the English nation will not 
 desert you. All parties and all sects of English- 
 men, in this fierce and yet degrading struggle,
 
 RUXNYMEDE. 147 
 
 must ultimately rally round your house. My / 
 Lords, be bold, be resolute, be still ^* the pillars 
 of the State." ' 
 
 April 18tli, 1836.
 
 148 LETTERS or 
 
 LETTER XVII. 
 
 THE HOUSE OF LORDS. 
 
 My Lords, 
 You have unfurled the national standard. Its 
 patriotic and hearty motto is, *' Justice for Eng- 
 land." The English nation will support you in 
 your high endeavours. Fear not that they will 
 be backward. They recognise your Lordships 
 as their natural leaders, who have advanced, 
 according to your hereditary duty, to assist them 
 in the extremity of their degraded fortunes. The 
 time is come for bold and vigorous conduct ; the 
 time is come to rid ourselves of that base tyranny, 
 offensive to the pride of every Englishman, no 
 matter what his religious sect or class of political
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 149 
 
 opinions. The English nation will not be ruled 
 by the Irish priesthood. Five years of Whig 
 government have not yet so completely broken 
 our once proud spirit, that we can submit without 
 a murmur or a struggle to such a yoke. If 
 Athens, even in her lower fortunes, could free 
 herself of her thirty tyrants, let us hope that 
 England, in spite of all the jobs of our corrupt 
 and corrupting Government, may yet chase away 
 those gentlemen who, fresh from the unction of 
 M'Hale and the mild injunctions of the apostolic 
 Kehoe, have undertaken to guard over the rights 
 and liberties, the property and the religion, of 
 Protestant England. We have not reformed the 
 third estate of the realm in order that England 
 should be governed by the nominees of the 
 Papacy. There is not a man in Britain, Tory 
 or Radical, Episcopalian or Presbyterian, who 
 can stand this long ; there is not a man in 
 Britain who at the bottom of his heart is not 
 proud of our empire, and who does not despise the 
 inferior race who dare to menace its integrity. 
 However faction may corrupt and machinate, the
 
 150 LETTERS OF 
 
 people of England will never long submit to a 
 Milesian master ; and when they reflect upon 
 their present degradation, and are conscious that 
 they have experienced it only to secure in power 
 the dull and desperate remains of a once haughty 
 oligarchy, long baffled in their anti-national at- 
 tempts upon the free realm of England, the 
 nation will rise in its wrath, and execute vengeance 
 upon the cabal which has thus trifled with this 
 great country's immemorial honour. 
 
 The English nation requires justice; and it is 
 not content to receive that justice by instal- 
 ments — a process that may suit their lately manu- 
 mitted serfs, but which will not accord with their 
 stern and determined spirits, habituated to the 
 ennobling exercise and the proud enjoyment of 
 an ancient liberty. They require justice, and 
 they will have that justice full and free. It 
 must be meted out speedily, and not scantily. 
 They require this justice, with the Peers of Eng- 
 land at their head, and the result will prove 
 whether the Milesian peasantry, led on by the 
 Papist priesthood, can cope with this proud and
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 151 
 
 powerful society. It is not just to England tliat 
 the Sovereign should be deprived of his un- 
 doubted prerogative ; it is not just to England 
 that M'Hale and Kehoe should dictate to our 
 King the servants whom our Royal master should 
 employ; it is not just to England that the King 
 of England should by such an anti-national pro- 
 cess be surrounded by the Ministers, not of his 
 choice, but of his necessity ; it is not just to 
 England that a knot of Papist legislators should 
 deal with the polity and property of our Pro- 
 testant church ; it is not just to England that 
 no English blood in Ireland should be secure 
 from plunder or assassination ; it is not just to 
 England that a hired disturber, paid by the Ro- 
 man priesthood, should ramble over our country 
 to stir up rebellion against your Lordships' august 
 estate ; that his ribald tongue should soil and 
 outrage all that we have been taught to love, 
 honour, and obey — our women, our princes, and 
 our laws; and, lastly, it is not just to England 
 that its constitution should be attacked, its empire 
 menaced, and its religion scoffed at.
 
 152 
 
 LETTERS OF 
 
 My Lords, the same party that demands justice 
 for Ireland is not less clamorous in its requisition 
 of justice for Canada. Will you grant it? Justice 
 for Botany Bay, too, is, I have heard, in the 
 market, and the cry is said to be worth some 
 good £2,000 per annum. The noble member 
 for Glasgow, the vigorous writer of that lucid 
 Address which I had the honour of transferring 
 from its original Sanscrit and first introducing to 
 the notice of the British public, has, I beheve, 
 already done justice to India. My Lords ! when 
 and where is this dangerous nonsense to termi- 
 nate ? How compatible is the prevalence of such 
 windy words with the subsistence of an empire ? 
 It may be as well for your Lordships to ponder 
 on the consequences. The English nation formed 
 the empire. Ours is the imperial isle, England 
 is the metropohtan country, and we might as 
 well tear out the living heart from the human 
 form, and bid the heaving corpse still survive, 
 as suppose that a great empire can endure with- 
 out some concentration of power and vitality. 
 My Lords, the season is ripe for action. In
 
 RTJNNYMEDE. 
 
 153 
 
 spite of all the machinations of the anti-English 
 faction, never was your great assembly more 
 elevated in the esteem and affection of your 
 countrymen than at this perilous hour. The 
 English are a reflecting and observant people ; 
 they ponder even amid tumult ; they can draw 
 a shrewd moral even from the play of their own 
 passions ; and they cannot but feel, that after 
 all the revolutionary rhetoric which has been 
 dinned into their ears of late in panegyric of a 
 Reform Ministry and a Reformed Parliament, and 
 in simultaneous depreciation of your Lordships' 
 power and usefulness, that not only in eloquence 
 and knowledge, in elevation of thought and feel- 
 ing, and even in practical conduct, your Lord- 
 ships need fear no comparison with that assembly 
 which, from a confusion of ideas, is in general 
 supposed to be more popular in its elements 
 and character, but that on all occasions when 
 the dignity of the empire and the rights of the 
 subject have been threatened and assailed, the 
 national cause has invariably found in your Lord-
 
 154 
 
 LETTERS OP 
 
 ships' House that support and sympathy which 
 have been denied to it by the other Chamber. 
 
 Your Lordships, therefore, commence the con- 
 flict with the anti-Enghsh party under great 
 advantages. Not only is your cause a just one, 
 and your resolution to maintain its justice un- 
 shakable, but there happens in your instance 
 that which unfortunately cannot always be de- 
 pended on in those great conjunctures which 
 decide the fate of crow^ns and nations. The 
 sympathy of the nation is arrayed under your 
 banner. And inasmuch as the popularity which 
 you now enjoy is to be distinguished from that 
 volatile effusion which is the hurry-skurry off- 
 spring of ignorance and guile, but is founded 
 on the surer basis of returning reason and mel- 
 lowed passions, and sharp experience, you may 
 rest assured that the support of your countrymen 
 will not be withdrawn from you in the hour of 
 trial. 
 
 But, my Lords, do not undervalue the enemy 
 which, at the head of the English nation, you
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 155 
 
 are about to combat. If you imagine that you 
 are going to engage only an ignorant and savage 
 population, led on by a loose-tongued poltroon, 
 you will indeed deceive yourselves, and the truth 
 will not be in you. My Lords, you are about 
 to struggle with a foe worthy even of the Peers 
 of England, for he is a foe that has placed his 
 foot upon the neck of Emperors. My Lords, 
 you are about to struggle with the Papacy, and 
 in its favourite and devoted land. Whether the 
 conspiracy of the Irish priests be more successful 
 than the fleets of Spain, and more fatal to the 
 freedom and the faith of England, time can alone 
 prove, and Providence can alone decide. But 
 let us not forget, that Heaven aids those who 
 aid themselves, and, firm in the faith that nerved 
 the arms of our triumphant fathers, let us meet 
 without fear that dark and awful power, that 
 strikes at once at the purity of our domestic hearths 
 and the splendour of our imperial sway. 
 
 April 23, 1836.
 
 156 LETTERS OF 
 
 LETTER XVIII. 
 
 THE LORD CHANCELLOR. 
 
 My Lord, 
 The gay liver, who, terrified by the consequences 
 of his excesses, takes to water and a temperance 
 society, is in about the same condition as the Whig 
 Ministers in their appointment of a Lord Chan- 
 cellor, when, still smarting under the eccentric 
 vagaries of a Brougham, they sought refuge in the 
 calm reaction of your sober Lordship. This 
 change from Master Shallow to Master Silence 
 was for a moment amusing ; but your Lordship 
 has at length found the faculty of speech, and 
 your astonished countrymen begin to suspect that 
 they may not be altogether the gainers in this
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 157 
 
 great transition from Humbug to Humdrum. We 
 have escaped from the eagle to be preyed upon by 
 the owl. For your Lordship is also a Reformer, a 
 true Reformer ; you are to proceed in the grand 
 course of social amelioration and party jobbing, 
 and the only substantial difference, it seems, that 
 a harassed nation is to recognise, is that which 
 consists between the devastation of the locust and 
 the destruction of the slug. 
 
 Your Lordship has figured during the last week 
 in the double capacity of a statesman and a legis- 
 lator. With what transcendent success let the 
 blank dismay that stamped the countenance of the 
 Prime Minister bear flattering witness ; as he 
 hung with an air of awkward astonishment on the 
 accents of your flowing eloquence, and listened 
 with breathless surprise, if not admiration, to the 
 development of those sage devices which, by a 
 curious felicity of fortune, have succeeded in array- 
 ing against them the superficial prejudices of all 
 parties. Yet one advantage, it cannot be denied, 
 has resulted from your Lordship's last triumphant 
 exhibition. The public, at length, become ac-
 
 ]58 LETTERS OF 
 
 quainted with the object of Lord Langd ale's 
 surprising elevation, and the agreeable office which 
 it appears the noble Master of the Rolls is to fulfil 
 in the Senate of Great Britain. We have heard be- 
 fore of a Lord Chancellor's devil ; but my Lord Cot- 
 tenham is the first guardian of the Great Seal 
 whom his considerate colleagues have supplied 
 not only with a coronet, but a critic. 
 
 That your Lordship should be an advocate for 
 ** justice to Ireland" might reasonably have been 
 expected from your eminent situation. Your 
 party may share with you the odium or the glory 
 of your political projects^ but the laurels which 
 you have recently acquired by your luminous elo- 
 quence and your profound legal knowledge are 
 all your Lordship's own, and I doubt whether any 
 of your friends or your opponents will be aspiring 
 enough to envy you their rich fruition. 
 
 And here, as it is the fashion to do *' justice to 
 Whiggism," I cannot but pause to notice the con- 
 trast, so flattering to the judgment and high prin- 
 ciple of your Lordship's party, which their legal 
 appointments afford when compared with those of
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 159 
 
 the annihilated Tories, and especially of the late | 
 
 Government. The administration of justice is still 
 a matter of some importance, and we naturally 
 shrink from the party who have entrusted its con- 
 duct to men so notoriously incompetent as a Sug- 
 den or a Scarlett; or placed upon the judgment- 
 seat such mere political adventurers as an Alder- 
 son and a Park, a Patteson and a Coleridge, a i 
 Taunton and a Tindal. How refreshing is it, after | 
 such a prostitution of patronage and power, to i 
 turn to a Lord Chief Justice like a Denman, raised | 
 to his lofty post by the sheer influence of his un- 
 equalled learning and his unrivalled practice, or 
 to recognise the homage which has been paid to 
 professional devotion in the profound person of 
 Mr. Baron Williams ! 
 
 I say nothing of your Lord Chancellors ; one 
 you have discarded, and the other you are about 
 to deprive of his functions. And, indeed, it can- 
 not be denied, that the appointment of your Lord- 
 ship to the custody of the Great Seal, as a prelimi- 
 nary step to the abolition of the office of Lord 
 Chancellor itself, displayed a depth of State-craft
 
 160 LETTERS OF 
 
 in your party for which the nation has hitherto 
 given them scarcely sufficient credit. Had it been 
 entrusted to a Hardwicke, an Eldon, or a Lynd- 
 hurst — to some great functionary to whom the 
 public had been accustomed to look up with con- 
 fidence, and the profession with respect — some 
 murmurs might naturally have arisen at the 
 menaced disturbance of an ancient order which 
 had long contributed to that pure and learned ad- 
 ministration of justice which was once the boast 
 of Britons. But if the Whigs, as their organs daily 
 assure us, are indeed to be our perpetual masters, 
 we may be excused for viewing with indifference, 
 if not with complacency, that promised arrange- 
 ment by which the most important duties of the 
 State are no longer assigned at the caprice of a 
 party which, with a singular sound judgment, has 
 periodically selected for their performance an 
 Erskine, a Brougham, and, finally, your learned 
 Lordship. The still haughty Venetians sometimes 
 console themselves with the belief that their State 
 Would not have fallen if the last of their Doges had 
 not unfortunately been a plebeian : the Bar of Eng-
 
 RUiNNYMEDE. 161 
 
 land — that illustrious body, which has contributed 
 to our fame and our felicity, not less than the most 
 celebrated of our political institutions, — may per- 
 haps, in a sympathetic strain of feeling, some 
 day be of opinion that they would not have been 
 expelled from their high and just position in our 
 society, if the last of the Lord Chancellors had 
 been worthy of being their chief; and posterity may 
 perhaps class together in the same scale of un- 
 suitable elevation the ignoble Manini and the feeble 
 Cottenham. 
 
 My Lord, the same spirit that would expel the 
 heads of our church from the Senate would ba- 
 nish the head of our law from the King's Council. 
 Under pretext of reform and popular government, 
 your party, as usual, are assaihng all the demo- 
 cratic elements of our constitution. The slang 
 distinction of the day between the political and 
 legal duties of a Lord Chancellor tends, like all 
 the other measures of the party which has ele- 
 vated your Lordship to the peerage, and is now 
 about to lower you to a clerkship, to the sub- 
 stitution of an oligarchical government. We may
 
 162 LETTERS OF 
 
 yet live to regret that abrogated custom which, by 
 giving the head of the law a precedence over the 
 haughtiest peers, and securing his constant pre- 
 sence in the Cabinet of the Sovereign, paid a 
 glorious homage to the majesty of jurisprudence, 
 announced to the world that our political con- 
 stitution was eminently legal, guarantied that 
 there should be at least one individual in the 
 realm who was not made a Minister because he 
 was a Noble, insured the satisfactory adminis- 
 tration of domestic justice, and infused into our 
 transactions with foreign Courts and Cabinets that 
 high and severe spirit of public rectitude which 
 obtained our own rights by acknowledging those 
 of others. 
 
 Will the hybrid thing which, under Lord Cot- 
 tenham's scheme of legal reform, is to be baptized 
 in mockery a Lord Chancellor, afford these great 
 advantages in the Cabinet or the Senate ? He is 
 to be a lawyer without a court, and a lawyer with- 
 out a court will soon be a lawyer without law. 
 The Lord High Chancellor of England will 
 speedily subside into a political nonentity like the
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 
 
 163 
 
 President of the Council ; that ofBce which is the 
 fitting appanage of pompous imbecility. Lord 
 Cottenham may be excused for believing that to 
 make a Lord Chancellor it is enough to plant a 
 man upon a woolsack, and thrust a wig upon his 
 head and a gold-embroidered robe upon his back ; 
 but the people of England have been accustomed 
 to recognise in a Lord Chancellor a man who has 
 won his way to a great position by the exercise of 
 great qualities — a man of singular acuteness and 
 profound learning, and vast experience, and pa- 
 tient study, and unwearied industry — a man who 
 has obtained the confidence of his profession be- 
 fore he challenges the confidence of his country, 
 and who has secured eminence in the House of 
 Commons before he has aspired to superiority in 
 the House of Lords — a man who has expanded 
 from a great lawyer into a great statesman, and 
 who brinos to the woolsack the commanding re- 
 putation which has been gained in the long and 
 laborious years of an admired career. 
 
 My Lord, this is not your portrait. You are 
 the child of reform, the chance offspring of po-
 
 ^64 
 
 LETTERS OF 
 
 litical agitation and factious intrigue. The Whigs 
 have stirred up and made muddy even the foun- 
 tain of justice ; for a moment an airy bubble, glit- 
 tering in the sunshine, floated on the excited sur- 
 face ; but that briUiant bubble soon burst and 
 vanished, and a scum, thick and obscure, nov^r 
 crests the once pure and tranquil waters. 
 
 April 30, 1836.
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 
 
 165 
 
 LETTER XIX. 
 
 VISCOUNT MELBOURNE. 
 
 My Lord, 
 I HAD the honour of addressing you on the eve 
 of your last hohdays; the dehghtful hour of 
 relaxation again approaches : 1 wish you again 
 to retire to the bowers of Brocket with my 
 congratulations. The campaign about to close 
 has been brief, but certainly not uneventful ; I 
 will not say disastrous, because I wish to soothe, 
 rather than irritate, your tortured feelings. The 
 incidents have been crowded, as in the last 
 act of one of those dramas to which it was 
 formerly your ambition to supply an epilogue. 
 Why did that ambition ever become so unna-
 
 166 LETTERS OF 
 
 turally elevated ? Why was your Lordship not 
 content to remain agreeable ? Why did you 
 aspire to be great ? A more philosophical mode- 
 ration would have saved you much annoyance, 
 and your country much evil ; yourself some dis- 
 graceful situations, perhaps some ludicrous ones. 
 When I last addressed you, your position was 
 only mischievous; it is now ridiculous. Your 
 dark master, the Milesian Eblis, has at length 
 been vanquished by that justice for which he is so 
 clamorous, and which he has so long outraged. 
 The poisoned chalice of revolutionary venom 
 which your creatures prepared for our august 
 senate, august although you are a member of it, 
 has been returned to their own lips. The House 
 of Lords, decried for its ignorance and ineffi- 
 ciency, by adventurers without talents and without 
 education, has vindicated its claims to the respect 
 of the country for its ability and its knowledge. 
 Held up to public scorn by your hirelings as 
 the irresponsible tyrants of the land, a grateful 
 nation recognises in the Peers of England the 
 hereditary trustees of their rights and liberties,
 
 RUXNYMEDE. 167 
 
 the guardians of their greatness, and the eloquent 
 and undaunted champions of the integrity of 
 their empire. The greater portion of the nation 
 has penetrated the superficial characteristics of 
 Whig Machiavelism. Your hollow pretences all 
 evaporated, your disgraceful manoeuvres all de- 
 tected, your reckless expedients all exhausted, 
 we recognise only a desperate and long-baffled 
 ohgarchy, ready to sacrifice, for the possession 
 of a power to which they are incompetent, the 
 laws, the empire, and the religion of England. 
 
 My Lord, it requires no prophet to announce 
 that the commencement of the end is at length at 
 hand. The reign of delusion is about to close. 
 The man who obtains property by false pretences 
 is sent to Botany Bay. Is the party that obtains 
 power by the same means to be saved harmless ? 
 You have established a new colony in Australia ; it 
 wants settlers. Let the Cabinet emigrate. My 
 Lord Glenelg, with all his Canadian experience, 
 will make an excellent colonial governor. And 
 there your Lordship may hide your public dis- 
 comfiture and your private mortification. And,
 
 168 LETTERS OF 
 
 indeed, a country where Nature regulates herself 
 on an exactly contrary system to the scheme she 
 adopts in the older and more favoured world, has 
 some pretensions, it would seem, to the beneficial 
 presence of your faction. The land where the 
 rivers are salt, where the quadrupeds have fins, 
 and the fish feet, where every thing is confused, 
 discordant, and irregular, is indicated by Pro- 
 vidence as the fitting scene of Whig govern- 
 ment. 
 
 The Whigs came into oflBce under auspices so 
 favourable, that they never could have been dis- 
 lodged from their long-coveted posts except by 
 their own incompetence and dishonesty. From 
 circumstances which it would not be difficult to 
 explain, they were at once sanctioned by the 
 King, and supported by the people. In the 
 course of five years they have at once deceived 
 the Sovereign, and deluded the nation. After 
 having re-constructed the third estate for their 
 own purposes, in the course of five years a 
 majority of the English representatives is arrayed 
 against them ; wafted into power on the wings of
 
 RUNNYMEDE. 169 
 
 the public press, dusty from the march of 
 intellect, and hoarse with clamouring about the 
 spirit of the age, in the course of five years they 
 are obliged to declare war against the journals, 
 the faithful mirrors of the public mind. With 
 peace, reform, and retrenchment for their motto, 
 in the course of five years they have involved us 
 in a series of ignoble wars, deluged the country 
 with jobs and placemen, and have even contrived 
 to increase the amount of the public debt. 
 
 What rashness and what cowardice, what petty 
 prudence, and what vast recklessness, what 
 arrogance and what truckling, are comprised in 
 the brief annals of this last assault of your faction 
 upon the constitutional monarchy of England I 
 Now hinting at organic changes, now whimpering 
 about the pressure from without ; dragged through 
 the mud on the questions of military discipline 
 and the pension list, yet ready at the next moment 
 to plunder the church, or taint the very fountain 
 of justice; threatening the Peers of England on 
 one day, and crouching on the next before the 
 
 H
 
 1 70 LETTERS OF 
 
 Irish priests ! A few months back you astounded 
 the pubUc by announcing that you had purchased 
 a Lord Chancellor at the price of three coronets. 
 The cost might have been considered not only 
 exorbitant, but unconstitutional ; but the nation, 
 wearied by your vexatious delay of justice, was 
 content to be silent, and awaited the anticipated 
 presence of a Minos. You produced Cottenham. 
 Moses and his green spectacles was not in a more 
 ludicrous position than your Lordship with your 
 precious purchase. Yet this impotent conclusion 
 was announced in January as a coiip-d'etatf and the 
 people of England were daily congratulated on an 
 arrangement now universally acknowledged as the 
 most ridiculous act even of your administration. 
 Morahsts have contrasted the respective careers of 
 the knave and the fool, and have consoled 
 humanity by the conviction that the scoundrel in 
 the long run is not more fortunate than the 
 simpleton. I leave this controverted question to 
 the fabler and the essayist ; the man of the world, 
 however, will not be surprised at the fate of a
 
 RUNNYMEDE. ]71 
 
 political party, the enormity of whose career is 
 only equalled by the feebleness of their con- 
 duct. 
 
 My Lord, the Whigs, a century back or so, were 
 at least no fools. When the Dukes of Somerset 
 and Argyle attended a Privy Council without 
 being summoned, and forced a dying Queen to 
 appoint the Duke of Shrewsbury Prime Minister, 
 they did not perpetrate, a greater outrage than the 
 Whig leader who, by virtue of a Papist conspiracy, 
 returned to the post from which he had been pro- 
 perly expelled, and became the Minister, not of 
 the King's choice, but of the King's necessity. 
 These same Whig leaders, when thus uncon- 
 stitutionally established in power, introduced the 
 Peerage Bill, which, if passed into a law, would 
 have deprived the Sovereign of his prerogative of 
 creating further Peers, and they remodelled the 
 House of Commons by the Septennial Act. The 
 Whigs in 1718 sought to govern the country by 
 '* swamping " the House of Commons ; in 1836 it 
 is the House of Lords that is to be '•' swamped." 
 In 1718 the coup-d'etat\\Q.s to prevent any further
 
 172 LETTERS OF 
 
 increase of the Lords ; in 1836 the Lords are to be 
 outnumbered : different tactics to obtain the same 
 purpose— the estabhshment of an oligarchical 
 Government by virtue of a Republican cry. 
 Where Argyle and Walpole failed, is it probable 
 ^ that Lord Melbourne and Lord John Russell will 
 succeed ? The Whigs, a century back, were men 
 of great station, great talents, great eloquence, 
 supported by two-thirds of the nobles of the land, 
 by the Dissenters, because they attacked the 
 church, inasmuch as the establishment, like every 
 other national institution, is an obstacle to oli- 
 garchical power, and by the commercial and 
 " monied interest" of the country, now, like every 
 other interest of property, arrayed against them. 
 And what are you? Is it your eloquence, your 
 knowledge, your high descent, and vast property, 
 j or the following of your order, that introduce you 
 uito the King's Cabinet ? No, you are the slave of a 
 ll^ \ slave, the delegate of a deputy, the second-hand no- 
 
 O '; ininee of a power the most odious and anti-national 
 
 ^"^ ! in existence, foreign to all the principles, and ahen 
 
 N^ to all the feelings, of Britons. My Lord, the popular
 
 RUNXYMEDE. 
 
 173 
 
 and boisterous gale that originally drove your 
 party into power has long since died away, and 
 though some occasional and fitful gusts may have 
 deceived you into believing that your sails were to 
 be ever set, and your streamers ever flying, the 
 more experienced navigators have long detected 
 the rising of the calm yet steady breeze, fatal to 
 your course. It is a wind which may be depended 
 on — a great monsoon of national spirit, which will 
 clear the seas of those political pirates who have 
 too long plundered us under false colours. 
 
 And yet, my Lord, let us not part in anger. 
 Yours is still a gratifying, even a great position. 
 Notwithstanding all your public degradation and 
 all your private annoyances, that man is surely to 
 be envied who has it in his power to confer an 
 obligation on every true-hearted Englishman. 
 And this your Lordship still can do ; you can yet 
 perform an act which will command the gratitude 
 of every lover of his country ; you can — resign. 
 
 May 15, 1836.
 
 THE 
 
 SPIRIT OF WHIGGISM.
 
 THE 
 
 SPIRIT OF WHIGGISM 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 England has become great by her institutions. 
 Her hereditary Crown has in a great degree in- 
 sured us from the distracting evils of a contested 
 succession ; her Peerage, interested, from the 
 vast property and the national honours of its mem_ 
 bers, in the good government of the country, has 
 offered a compact bulwark against the temporary 
 violence of popular passion ; her House of Com- 
 mons, representing the conflicting sentiments of 
 an estate of the realm not less privileged than that 
 of the Peers, though far more numerous, has en- 
 listed the great mass of the lesser proprietors of
 
 178 
 
 THE SPIRIT OF 
 
 the country in favour of a political system which 
 offers them a constitutional means of defence and 
 a legitimate method of redress ; her ecclesiastical 
 establishment, preserved by its munificent endow- 
 ment from the fatal necessity of pandering to the 
 erratic fancies of its communicants, has main- 
 tained the sacred cause of learning and religion, 
 and preserved orthodoxy while it has secured 
 toleration ; her law of primogeniture has supplied 
 the country with a band of natural and indepen- 
 dent leaders, trustees of those legal institutions 
 which pervade the land, and which are the origin 
 of our political constitution. That great body 
 corporate, styled a nation — a vast assemblage of 
 human beings knit together by laws and arts and 
 customs, by the necessities of the present and the 
 memory of the past — offers in this country, 
 through these its vigorous and enduring members, 
 a more substantial and healthy frame-work than 
 falls to the lot of other nations. Our stout-built 
 constitution throws off with more facility and 
 safety those crude and dangerous humours which 
 must at times arise in all human communities.
 
 WHIGGISM. 
 
 179 
 
 The march of revolution must here at least be 
 orderly. We are preserved from those reckless 
 and tempestuous sallies that in other countries, like 
 a w^hirlwind, topple down in an instant an ancient 
 crown, or sweep away an illustrious aristocracy. 
 This constitution, which has secured order, has 
 consequently promoted civilization ; and the almost 
 unbroken tide of progressive amelioration has 
 made us the freest, the wealthiest, and the most 
 refined society of modern ages. Our commerce is 
 unrivalled, our manufacturers supply the world, 
 our agriculture is the most skilful in Christendom. 
 So national are our institutions, so completely have 
 they arisen from the temper and adapted them- 
 selves to the character of the people, that when 
 for a season they were apparently annihilated, 
 the people of England voluntarily returned to 
 them, and established them with renewed strength 
 and renovated vigour. 
 
 The constitution of England is again threatened, 
 and at a moment when the nation is more prosper- 
 ous, more free, and more famous, than at any 
 period of its momentous and memorable career
 
 180 THE SPIRIT OF 
 
 Why is this ? What has occasioned these dis- 
 tempered times, which make the loyal tremble and 
 the traitor smile ? Why has this dark cloud sud- 
 denly gathered in a sky so serene and so splendid ? 
 Is there any analogy between this age and that of 
 the first Charles ? Are the same causes at work, 
 or is the apparent similarity produced only by de- 
 signing men, who make use of the perverted past 
 as a passport to present mischief? These are 
 great questions which it may be profitable to dis- 
 cuss and wise to study. 
 
 Rapin, a foreigner who wrote our history, in 
 the course of his frigid yet accurate pages, in- 
 dulged in one philosophical observation. Struck 
 at the same time by our greatness and by the 
 fury of our factions, the Huguenot exclaimed, 
 " It appears to me that this great society 
 can only be dissolved by the violence of its po- 
 litical parties." What are these parties ? Why 
 are they violent ? Why should they exist? In 
 resolving these questions, we may obtain an ac- 
 curate idea of our present political position, and 
 by pondering over the past we may make that
 
 WHIGGISM. 181 
 
 past not a prophecy, as the disaffected intend, but 
 a salutary lesson by which the loyal may profit. 
 
 The two great parties in which England has, 
 during the last century and a half, been divided, 
 originated in the ancient struggles between the 
 Crown and the aristocracy. As long as the Crown 
 possessed or aspired to despotic power, the feeling 
 of the nation supported the aristocracy in their 
 struggles to establish a free government. The 
 aristocracy of England formed the constitution of 
 the Plantagenets ; the wars of the roses destroyed 
 that aristocracy, and the despotism of the Tudors 
 succeeded. Renovated by more than a century of 
 peace and the spoils of the Papacy, the aristocracy 
 of England attacked the first Stuarts, who suc- 
 ceeded to a despotism which they did not create. 
 When Charles the First, after a series of great con- 
 cessions, which ultimately obtained for him the sup- 
 port of the most illustrious of his early opponents, 
 raised the royal standard, the constitution of the 
 Plantagenets, and more than the constitution of 
 the Plantagenets, had been restored and secured. 
 But a portion of the able party, which had sue-
 
 82 
 
 THE SPIRIT OF 
 
 ceeded in effecting such a vast and beneficial re- 
 volution, was not content to part with the extra- 
 ordinary powers which they had obtained in this 
 memorable struggle. This section of the aris- 
 tocracy were the origin of the English Whigs, 
 though that title was not invented until the next 
 reign. The primitive Whigs — " Parliament-men," 
 as they liked to call themselves, *' Roundheads," 
 as they were in time dubbed — aspired to an oli- 
 garchy : for a moment they obtained one ; but, 
 unable to maintain themselves in power against 
 the returning sense and rising spirit of a generous 
 and indignant people, they called to their aid that 
 domestic revolutionary party which exists in all 
 countries, and an anti-national enemy in addition. 
 These were the English Radicals, or Root-and- 
 Branch men, and the Scotch Covenanters. To 
 conciliate the first they sacrificed the Crown ; to 
 secure the second they abolished the Church. The 
 constitution of England in Church and State was 
 destroyed, and the Whig oligarchy, in spite of 
 their machinations, were soon merged in the com- 
 mon ruin.
 
 WHIGGISM. 183 
 
 The ignoble tyranny to which this great nation 
 was consequently subject produced that reaction ^ 
 which is in the nature of human affairs. The 
 ancient constitution was in time restored, and the 
 Church and the Crown were invested with greater 
 powers than they had enjoyed previously to their 
 overthrow. So hateful had been the consequences 
 of Whig rule, that the people were inclined rather 
 to trust the talons of arbitrary power than to take 
 refuge under the wing of these pretended advo- 
 cates of popular rights. A worthless monarch and 
 a corrupted court availed themselves of the offered 
 opportunity ; and when James the Second ascended 
 the throne, the nation was again prepared to se- 
 cond the aristocracy in a struggle for their li- 
 berties. But the Whigs had profited by their 
 previous experiment : they resolved upon a revo- 
 lution ; but they determined that that revolution 
 should be brought about by as slight an appeal to 
 popular sympathies as possible. They studiously 
 confined that appeal to the religious feehngsofthe 
 nation. They hired a foreign Prince and enlisted 
 a foreign army in their service. They dethroned
 
 184 
 
 THE SPIRIT OF 
 
 James, they established themselves in power 
 without the aid of the mass ; and had William 
 the Third been a man of ordinary capacity, the 
 constitution of Venice would have been estabhshed 
 in England in 1688. William the Third told the 
 Whigs that he would never consent to be a 
 Doge. Resembling Louis Philippe in his cha- 
 racter as well as his position, that extraordinary 
 prince baffled the Whigs by his skilful balance 
 of parties ; and had Providence accorded him 
 an heir, it is probable that the oligarchical 
 faction would never have revived in England. 
 The Whigs have ever been opposed to the na- 
 tional institutions, because they are adverse to 
 the establishment of an ohgarchy. Local in- 
 stitutions, supported by a landed gentry, check 
 them ; hence their love of centrahzation, and 
 their hatred of unpaid magistrates. An inde- 
 pendent hierarchy checks them ; hence their 
 affected advocacy of toleration and their pa- 
 tronage of the Dissenters. The power of the 
 Crown checks them ; therefore they always la- 
 bour to reduce the Sovereign to a nonenity, and
 
 WHIGGISM. 
 
 186 
 
 by the establishment of the Cabinet they have 
 virtually banished the King from his own coun- 
 cils. But, above all, the Parliament of Eng- 
 land checks them, and therefore it may be ob- 
 served that the Whigs at all times are quarrel- 
 ling with some portion of those august estates. 
 They despair of destroying the Parhament ; by 
 it, and by it alone, can they succeed in their 
 objects. Corruption for one part, force for the 
 other, then, is their motto. In 1640 they at- 
 tempted to govern the country by the House of 
 Commons, because the aristocracy was then more 
 powerful in the House of Commons than in the 
 House of Lords, where a Peerage, exhausted by 
 civil wars, had been too liberally recruited from 
 the courtiers of the Tudors and the Stuarts. At 
 the next revolution which the Whigs occasioned, 
 they attempted to govern the country by the 
 House of Lords, in which they were predomi- 
 nant ; and, in order to guaranty their power 
 for ever, they introduced a bill to deprive the 
 King of his prerogative of making further peers. 
 The revolution of 1640 led to' the aboUtion of the
 
 186 
 
 THE SPIRIT OF 
 
 House of Lords, because the Lords opposed the 
 oHgarchy : the revolution of 1688 led to there- 
 modelling of the House of Commons by the 
 Septennial Act, because the House of Commons 
 then were influenced by the same feelings as the 
 Lords during the great rebellion. 
 
 The accession of the House of Hanover re- 
 vived the hopes of the Whigs, baffled by the 
 subtle policy of William, and by the Tory triumphs 
 of Anne. The new dynasty was unpopular with 
 the mass of the nation, and proportionately de- 
 pendent on the Whig oligarchy. Having a ma- 
 jority in the House of Lords, the Whigs intro- 
 duced the Peerage Bill, by which the House of 
 Lords would have been rendered independent of 
 the Sovereign : unpopular with the country, the 
 Whigs attacked the influence of popular election, 
 and the moment that, by the aid of the most 
 infamous corruption, they had obtained a tem- 
 porary majority in the Lower House they passed 
 the Septennial Act. The Whigs of the eighteenth 
 century *' swamped" the House of Commons; 
 the Whigs of the nineteenth would '* swamp" the
 
 WriIGGISM. 187 
 
 House of Lords. The Whigs of the eighteenth 
 century would have rendered the House of Lords 
 unchangeable; the Whigs of the nineteenth re- 
 model the House of Commons. 
 
 I conclude here the first chapter of the 
 Spirit of Whiggism, — a little book which I 
 hope may be easily read and easily remem- 
 bered. The Whig party have always adopted 
 popular cries. In one age it is Liberty, in an- 
 other Reform ; at one period they sound the 
 tocsin against Popery, in another they ally them- 
 selves with Papists. They have many cries, 
 and various modes of conduct ; but they have 
 only one object — the establishment of an oligar- 
 chy in this free and equal land. I do not wish 
 this country to be governed by a small knot 
 of great families, and therefore I oppose the 
 Whigs,
 
 188 
 
 THE SPIRIT OF 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 When the Whigs and their public organs favour 
 us with their mysterious hints that the Constitu- 
 tion has provided the Sovereign with a means to 
 re-estabhsh at all times a legislative sympathy 
 between the two Houses of Parliament, it may be 
 as well to remind them that we are not indebted 
 for this salutary prerogative to the forbearance of 
 their party. Suppose their Peerage Bill had 
 passed into an act, how would they have carried 
 the Reform Bill of 1832 ? The Whigs may reply, 
 that if the Peerage Bill had become a law, the 
 Reform Bill would never have been introduced ; 
 and I believe them. In that case, the British
 
 T^HIGGISM. 189 
 
 House of Lords would have been transformed into 
 a Venetian Senate, and the old walls of St. 
 James's mii^ht have witnessed scenes of as de- 
 grading mortification as the famous ducal palace 
 of the Adriatic. 
 
 George III. routed the Whigs, consolidated by 
 half a century of power ; but an ordinary Mon- 
 arch would have sunk beneath the coalition and 
 the India Bill. This scheme was the last de- 
 sperate effort of the oligarchical party previous to 
 1830. Not that they were inactive during the 
 great interval that elapsed between the advent of 
 Mr. Pitt and the resurrection of Lord Grey : but, 
 ever on the watch for a cry to carry them into 
 power, they mistook the yell of Jacobinism for the 
 chorus of an emancipated people, and fancied, in 
 order to take the throne by storm, that nothing 
 was wanting but to hoist the tricolour and to 
 cover their haughty brows with a red cap. This 
 fatal blunder clipped the wings of Whiggism ; nor 
 is it possible to conceive a party that had effected 
 so many revolutions, and governed a great country 
 for so long a period, more broken sunk, and
 
 190 THE SPIRIT OF 
 
 shattered, more desolate, and disheartened, than 
 these same Whigs at the Peace of Paris. From 
 that period until 1830 the tactics of the Whigs 
 consisted in gently and gradually extricating 
 themselves from their false position as the dis- 
 ciples of Jacobinism, and assuming their ancient 
 post as the hereditary guardians of an hereditary 
 monarchy. To make the transition less difficult 
 than it threatened, they invented Liberalism, a 
 bridge by which they were to regain the lost 
 mainland, and daintily recross on tiptoe the 
 chasm over which they had originally sprung 
 with so much precipitation. A dozen years of 
 '* liberal principles" broke up the national party 
 of England, cemented by half a century of pro- 
 sperity and glory, compared with which all the 
 annals of the realm are dim and lacklustre. 
 Yet so weak intrinsically was the oligarchical 
 faction, that their chief, despairing to obtain a 
 monopoly of power for his party, elaborately an- 
 nounced himself as the champion of his patrician 
 order, and attempted to coalesce with the hberal- 
 ized leader of the Tories. Had that negociation
 
 WHIGGISM. 191 
 
 led to the result which was originally intended by 
 those interested, the riots of Paris would not have 
 occasioned the Reform of London. 
 
 It is a great delusion to believe that revolutions 
 are ever effected by a nation. It is a faction, and 
 generally a small one, that overthrows a dynasty 
 or remodels a constitution. A small party, stung 
 by a long exile from power, and desperate of 
 success except by desperate means, invariably has 
 recourse to a coup-d'etat. An oligarchical party 
 is necessarily not numerous. Its members, in 
 general, attempt, by noble lineage or vast posses- 
 sions, to compensate for their poverty of numbers. 
 The Whigs, in 1830, found themselves by accident 
 in place, but under very pecuhar circumstances. 
 They were in place, but not in power. In each 
 estate of the realm a majority was arrayed against 
 them. An appeal to the Commons of England, 
 that constituency which, in its elements, had 
 undergone no alteration since the time of Eliza- 
 beth, either by the influence of the Legislature 
 or the action of time — that constituency which 
 had elected Pym, and Selden, and Hampden,
 
 192 THE SPIRIT OF 
 
 as well as Somers, Walpole, and Pulteney — an 
 appeal to this constituency, it was generally ac- 
 knowledged, would be fatal to the Whigs, and 
 therefore they determined to reconstruct it. This 
 is the origin of the recent Parliamentary reform : 
 the Whigs in place, without being in power, re- 
 solved, as usual, upon a conp-d'efat, and looked 
 about for a stalking-horse. In general the diffi- 
 cult task had devolved upon them of having to 
 accomplish their concealed purpose, while ap- 
 parently achieving some public object. Thus 
 they had carried the Septennial Act on the plea 
 of preserving England from Popery, though their 
 real object was to prolong the existence of the 
 first House of Commons in which they could 
 command a majority. 
 
 But, in the present instance, they became sin- 
 cerely Parliamentary reformers, for by Parlia- 
 mentary reform they could alone subsist ; and all 
 their art was dedicated so to contrive, that in this 
 reformation their own interest should secure an 
 irresistible predominance. 
 
 But how was an ohgarchial party to predomi-
 
 WHIGGISM. 193 
 
 nate in popular elections ? Here was the dif- 
 ficulty. The Whigs had no resources from tlieir 
 own limited ranks to feed the muster of the 
 popular levies. They were obliged to look about 
 for allies wherewith to form their new popular 
 estate. Any estate of the Commons modelled on 
 any equitable principle, either of property or 
 population, must have been fatal to the Whigs ; 
 they, therefore, very dexterously adopted a small 
 minority of the nation, consisting of the secta- 
 rians, and inaugurating them as the people with 
 a vast and bewildering train of hocus-pocus cere- 
 monies, invested the Dissenters with political 
 power. By this coup-d'etat they managed the 
 House of Commons, and having at length ob- 
 tained a position, they have from that moment 
 laid siege to the House of Lords, with the inten- 
 tion of reducing that great institution, and 
 making it surrender at discretion. This is the 
 exact state of English politics during the last 
 five years. The Whigs have been at war with 
 the English constitution. First of all they cap- 
 tured the King ; then they vanquished the House
 
 194 THE SPIRIT OF 
 
 of Commons; now they have laid siege fo the 
 House of Lords. But here the fallacy of their 
 grand scheme of political mystification begins 
 to develop itself. Had, indeed, their new con- 
 stituency, as they have long impudently pre- 
 tended, indeed been *' the people," a struggle 
 between such a body and the House of Lords 
 would have been brief but final. The absurdity 
 of supposing that a chamber of two or three 
 hundred individuals could set up their absolute 
 will and pleasure against the decrees of a le- 
 gislative assembly chosen by a whole nation, 
 is so glaring, that the Whigs and their scribes 
 might reasonably suspect that, in making such 
 allegations, they were assuredly proving too much. 
 But as ** the people " of the Whigs is, in fact, a 
 number of Englishmen not exceeding in amount 
 the population of a third-rate city, the English 
 nation is not of opinion that this arrogant and 
 vaunting moiety of a class privileged for the 
 common good, swollen though it may be by some 
 jobbing Scots and rebel Irish, shall pass off their 
 petty and selfish schemes of personal aggrandize-
 
 WHIGGISM. 195 
 
 ment as the will of a great people, as mindful of 
 its duty to its posterity as it is grateful for the 
 labours of its ancestors. The Enghsh nation, 
 therefore, rallies for rescue from the degrading 
 plots of a profligate oligarchy, a barbarizing sec- 
 tarianism, and a boroughmongering Papacy, 
 round their hereditary leaders — the Peers. The 
 House of Lords, therefore, at this moment repre- 
 sents every thing in the realm except the Whig 
 oligarchs, their tools — the Dissenters, and their 
 masters— the Irish priests. In the mean time, 
 the Whigs bawl aloud that there is a '* collision !" 
 It is true there is a collision ; but it is not a colli- 
 sion between the Lords and the People, but 
 between the Ministers and the Consti- 
 tution.
 
 196 
 
 THE SPIRIT OF 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 It may be as well to remind the English nation 
 that a revolutionary party is not necessarily a 
 liberal one, and that a repubUc is not indispens- 
 ably a democracy. Such is the disposition of 
 property in England, that, were a republic to be 
 established here to-morrow, it would partake 
 rather of the ohgarchical even than the aristocratic 
 character. We should be surprised to find in 
 how few families the power of the state was 
 concentrated. And although the framers of the 
 new commonwealth would be too crafty to base 
 it on any avowed and ostensible principle of 
 exclusion, but on the contrary would, in all pro-
 
 WHIGGISM. 197 
 
 bability, ostentatiously inaugurate the novel con- 
 stitution by virtue of some abstract plea about 
 as definite and as prodigal of practical effects 
 as the Rights of Man or the Sovereignttj of the 
 People y nevertheless I should be astonished were 
 we not to find that the great mass of the nation, 
 as far as any share in the conduct of public 
 affairs was concerned, were as completely shut 
 out from the fruition and exercise of power as 
 under that Venetian polity which has ever been 
 the secret object of Whig envy and Whig ad- 
 miration. The church, under such circumstances, 
 would probably have again been plundered, and 
 therefore the discharge of ecclesiastical duties 
 might be spared to the nation ; but the people 
 would assuredly be practically excluded from the 
 services, which would swarm with the relations 
 and connexions of the senatorial class ; for, whether 
 this country be governed only by the House of 
 Commons, or only by the House of Lords, the 
 elements of the single chamber will not materially 
 differ ; and although, in the event of the triumph 
 of the Commons, the ceremony of periodical
 
 198 THE SPIRIT OF 
 
 election may be retained (and we should not 
 forget that the Long Parliament soon spared us 
 that unnecessary form), the selected members will 
 form a senate as irresponsible as any House of 
 Parliament whose anomalous constitution may 
 now be the object of Whig sneers or Radical 
 anathemas. 
 
 The rights and liberties of a nation can only 
 be preserved by institutions. It is not the spread 
 of knowledge or the march of intellect that will 
 be found sufficient sureties for the public welfare 
 in the crisis of a country's freedom. Our interest 
 taints our intelligence, our passions paralyse our 
 reason. Knowledge and capacity are too often 
 the willing tools of a powerful faction or a 
 dexterous adventurer. Life is short, man is 
 imaginative ; our means are limited, our passions 
 high. In seasons of great popular excitement, 
 gold and glory offer strong temptations to needy 
 abihty. The demagogues throughout a country, 
 the orators of town-councils and vestries, and 
 the lecturers of mechanics' institutes, present, 
 doubtless, in most cases unconsciously, the ready
 
 WHIGGISM. 199 
 
 and fit machinery for the party or the indivi- 
 dual that aspires to estabhsh a tyranny. Duly 
 graduating in corruption, the leaders of the mob 
 become the oppressors of the people. Cultivation 
 of intellect and diffusion of knowledge may make 
 the English nation more sensible of the benefits 
 of their social system, and better qualified to 
 discharge the duties with which their institutions 
 have invested them, but they will never render 
 them competent to preserve their liberties without 
 the aid of those institutions. Let us for a mo- 
 ment endeavour to fancy Whiggism in a state 
 of rampant predominance ; let us try to contem- 
 plate England enjoying all those advantages 
 which our present rulers have not yet granted 
 us, and some of which they have as yet only 
 ventured to promise by inuendo. Let us suppose 
 our ancient monarchy abolished, our independent 
 hierachy reduced to a stipendiary sect, the gentle- 
 men of England deprived of their magisterial 
 functions, and metropolitan prefects and sub- 
 prefects established in the counties and principal 
 towns, commanding a vigorous and vigilant pohce.
 
 200 TH£ SPIRIT OF 
 
 and backed by an army under the immediate 
 orders of a single House of Parliament. Why, 
 these are threatened changes — ay, and not one 
 of them that may not be brought about to- 
 morrow, under the plea of the " spirit of the 
 age/' or " county reform," or ** cheap govern- 
 ment." But where then will be the liberties 
 of England ? Who will dare disobey London ? 
 the enlightened and reformed metropolis ! And 
 can we think, if any bold Squire, in whom some 
 of the old blood might still chance to linger, 
 were to dare to murmur against this grinding 
 tyranny, or appeal to the spirit of those neigh- 
 bours whose predecessors his ancestors had pro- 
 tected, can we flatter ourselves that there would 
 not be judges in Westminster-hall prepared and 
 prompt to inflict on him all the pains and 
 penalties, the dungeon, the fine, the sequestra- 
 tion, which such a troublesome Anti-Reformer 
 would clearly deserve ? Can we flatter ourselves 
 that a Parliamentary Star-Chamber and a Parlia- 
 mentary High Commission Court would not be 
 in the back-ground to supply all the deficiencies
 
 WIIIGGISM. 
 
 201 
 
 of the laws of England ? When these merry 
 times arrive —the times of extraordinary tribunals 
 and extraordinary taxes — and, if we proceed in 
 our present course, they are much nearer than 
 we imagine — the phrase *^ Anti-Reformer" will 
 serve as well as that of " Malignant," and be 
 as valid a plea as the former title for harassing 
 and plundering all those who venture to wince 
 under the crowning mercies of centralization. 
 
 Behold the republic of the Whigs I Behold 
 the only republic that can be established in 
 England except by force ! and who can doubt the 
 swift and stern termination of institutions intro- 
 duced by so unnatural and irrational a process? 
 I would address myself to the Enghsh Radicals — 
 I do not mean those fine gentlemen or those 
 vulgar adventurers who, in this age of quackery, 
 may sail into Parliament by hoisting for the 
 nonce the false colours of the Movement ; but 
 I mean that honest and considerable party, too 
 considerable I fear for their happiness and tlie 
 safety of the State, who have a definite object
 
 202 THE SPIRIT OF 
 
 which they distinctly avow, — I mean those 
 thoughtful and enthusiastic men who study their 
 unstamped press, and ponder over a millennium 
 of operative amelioration. Not merely that 
 which is just, but that which is also practicable, 
 should be the aim of a sagacious politician. Let 
 the Radicals well consider whether, in attempting 
 to achieve their avowed object, they are not, 
 in fact, only assisting the secret views of a party 
 whose scheme is infinitely more adverse to their 
 own than the existing system, whose genius I 
 believe they entirely misapprehend. The mo- 
 narchy of the Tories is more democratic than 
 the republic of the Whigs. It appeals with a 
 keener sympathy to the passions of the millions ; 
 it studies their interests with a more compre- 
 hensive sohcitude. Admitting for a moment 
 that I have mistaken the genius of the English 
 constitution, what chance, if our institutions be 
 overthrown, is there of substituting in their stead 
 a more popular polity ? This hazard, both for 
 their own happiness and the honour of their
 
 WHIGGISM. 203 
 
 country, the English Radicals are bound to calcu- 
 late nicely. If they do not, they will find them- 
 selves too late the tools of a selfish faction or 
 the slaves of a stern usurper.
 
 204 
 
 THE SPIRIT OF 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 A Chapter on the English Constitution is a 
 natural episode in the spirit of Whiggism. There 
 is this connexion between the subjects, — that the 
 spirit of Whiggism is hostile to the English 
 constitution. No political institutions ever yet 
 flourished which have been more the topic of 
 discussion among writers of all countries and all 
 parties than our famous establishment of *^ King, 
 Lords, and Commons ;" and no institutions ever 
 yet flourished, of which the character has been 
 more misrepresented and more misconceived. One 
 fact alone will illustrate the profound ignorance 
 and the perplexed ideas subsisting on this point.
 
 WHIGGISM. 205 
 
 The present Whig leader of the House of Com- 
 mons, a member of a family who pique themselves 
 on their constitutional reputation, an author who 
 has even written an elaborate treatise on our 
 polity, in one of his speeches delivered only so late 
 as the last session of Parliament, declared his 
 desire and determination to uphold the present 
 settlement of the *' three estates of the realm — 
 viz.. King, Lords, and Commons." Now, his jf-^^ ^ 
 Gracious Majesty is no more an estate of the , /, ♦ /f 
 realm than Lord John Russell himself. The *' ^J^ 
 three estates of the realm are the estate of the 
 Lords Spiritual, the estate of the Lords Temporal, 
 and the estate of the Commons. An estate is a 
 popular class established into a political order. 
 It is a section of the nation invested for the public 
 and common good with certain powers and pri- 
 vileges. Lord John Russell first writes upon the 
 English constitution, and then reforms it, and yet, 
 even at this moment, is absolutely ignorant of 
 what it consists. A political estate is a complete 
 and independent body. Now, all power that is 
 independent is necessarily irresponsible. The
 
 206 THE SPIRIT OF 
 
 Sovereign is responsible because he is not an 
 estate ; he is responsible through his Ministers ; 
 he is responsible to the estates, and to them alone. 
 When the Whigs obtained power in 1830, they 
 found the three estates of the realm opposed to 
 them, and the Government, therefore, could not 
 proceed. They resolved, therefore, to re-model 
 them. They declared that the House of Com- 
 mons was the House of the people, and that the 
 people were not properly represented. They con- 
 sequently enlarged the estate of the Commons; 
 they increased the number of that privileged order 
 who appear by their representatives in the Lower 
 House of Parhament. They rendered the estate 
 of the Commons more powerful by this pro- 
 ceeding, because they rendered them more nu- 
 merous ; but they did not render their representa- 
 tives one jot more the representatives of the 
 people. Throwing the Commons of Ireland out 
 of the question, for we cannot speculate upon a 
 political order so unsettled that it has been thrice 
 re- modelled during the present century, some 
 300,000 individuals sent up, at the last general
 
 WHIGGISM. 
 
 20: 
 
 election, their representatives to Westminster. 
 Well, are these 300,000 persons the people of 
 England ? Grant that they are ; grant that these 
 members are divided into two equal portions. 
 Well, then, the people of England consist of 
 150,000 persons. I know that there are well- 
 disposed persons that tremble at this reasoning, 
 because, although they admit its justice, they 
 allege it leads to universal suffrage. We must 
 not show, they assert, that the House of the 
 people is not elected by the people. I admit it ; 
 we must not show that the House of the people is 
 not elected by the people, but we must show that 
 the House of Commons is not the House of the 
 people, that it never was intended to be the 
 House of the people, and that, if it be admitted to 
 be so by courtesy, or become so in fact, it is all 
 over with the English constitution. 
 
 It is quite impossible that a whole people can 
 be a branch of a legislature. If a whole people 
 have the power of making laws, it is folly to 
 suppose that they will allow an assembly of 300 
 or 400 individuals, or a soHtary being on a throne,
 
 208 THE SPIRIT OF 
 
 to thwart their sovereign will and pleasure. But 
 I deny that a people can govern itself. Self- 
 government is a contradiction in terms. What- 
 ever form a Government may assume, power must 
 be exercised by a minority of numbers. I shall, 
 perhaps, be reminded of the ancient republics. 
 I answer, that the ancient republics were as 
 aristocratic communities as any that flourished in 
 the middle ages. The Demos of Athens was an 
 oligarchy living upon slaves. There is a great 
 slave population even in the United States, if a 
 society of yesterday is to illustrate an argument 
 on our ancient civilization. 
 
 But it is useless to argue the question abs- 
 tractedly. The phrase "the people" is sheer 
 nonsense. It is not a political term. It is a 
 phrase of natural history. A people is a species ; 
 a civilized community is a nation. Now, a nation 
 is a work of art and a work of time. A nation is 
 gradually created by a variety of influences — the 
 influence of original organization, of climate, soil, 
 rehgion, laws, customs, manners, extr,aordinary 
 accidents and incidents in their history, and the
 
 WHIGGISM. 209 
 
 individual character of their illustrious citizens. 
 These influences create the nation — these form 
 the national mind, and produce in the course of 
 centuries a high degree of civilization. If you 
 destroy the political institutions which these in- 
 fluences have called into force, and which are the 
 machinery by which they constantly act, you 
 destroy the nation. The nation, in a state of 
 anarchy and dissolution, then becomes a people ; 
 and after experiencing all the consequent misery, 
 like a company of bees spoiled of their queen and 
 rifled of their hive, they set-to again and establish 
 themselves into a society. 
 
 Although all society is artificial, the most 
 artificial society in the world is unquestionably 
 the English nation. Our insular situation and 
 our foreign empire, our immense accumulated 
 wealth and our industrious character, our peculiar 
 religious state, which secures alike orthodoxy and 
 toleration, our church and our sects, our agricul- 
 ture and our manufactures, our military services, 
 our statute law, and supplementary equity, our 
 adventurous commerce, landed tenure, and un-
 
 210 
 
 THE SPIRIT OF 
 
 precedented system of credit, form, among many 
 others, such a variety of interests, and apparently 
 so conflicting, that I do not think even the Abbe 
 Sieyes himself could devise a scheme by which 
 this nation could be absolutely and definitely re- 
 presented. 
 
 The framers of the English constitution were 
 fortunately not of the school of Abbe Sieyes. 
 Their first object was to make us free ; their next 
 to keep us so. While, therefore, they selected 
 equality as the basis of their social order, they 
 took care to blend every man's ambition with the 
 perpetuity of the State. Unlike the levelling and 
 destructive equality of modern days, the ancient 
 equality of England elevates and creates. Learned 
 in human nature, the English constitution halds 
 out privilege to every subject as the inducement 
 to do his duty. As it has secured freedom, 
 justice, and even property to the humblest of the 
 commonwealth, so, pursuing the same system of 
 privileges, it has confided the Legislature of the 
 realm to two orders of the subjects — orders, how- 
 ever, in which every English citizen may be con-
 
 WIIIGGISM. 211 
 
 stitutionally enrolled — the Lords and the Com- 
 mons. The two estates of the Peers are personally 
 summoned to meet in their chamber : the more 
 extensive and single estate of the Commons meets 
 by its representatives. Both are political orders, 
 complete in their character, independent in their 
 authority, legally irresponsible for the exercise of 
 their power. But they are the trustees of the 
 nation, not its masters ; and there is a High 
 Court of Chancery in the public opinion of the 
 nation at large, which exercises a vigilant control 
 over these privileged classes of the community, 
 and to which they are equitably and morally 
 amenable. Estimating, therefore, the moral re- 
 sponsibility of our political estates, it may fairly 
 be maintained, that, instead of being irresponsible, 
 the responsibility of the Lords exceeds that of 
 the Commons. The House of Commons itself not 
 being an estate of the realm, but only the repre- 
 sentatives of an estate, owes to the nation a re- 
 sponsibility neither legal nor moral. The House 
 of Commons is responsible only to that privileged 
 order who are its constituents. Between the
 
 "212 THE SPIRIT OF 
 
 Lords and the Commons themselves there is this 
 prime difference — that the Lords are known, and 
 seen, and marked ; the Commons are unknown, 
 invisible, and unobserved. The Lords meet in a 
 particular spot : the Commons are scattered over 
 the kingdom. The eye of the nation rests upon 
 the Lords, fev/ in number, and notable in position ; 
 the eye of the nation wanders in vain for the Com- 
 mons, far more numerous, but far less remarkable. 
 As a substitute the nation appeals to the House 
 of Commons, but sometimes appeals in vain ; for 
 if the majority of the Commons choose to support 
 their representatives in a course of conduct ad- 
 verse to the opinion of the nation, the House of 
 Commons will set the nation at defiance. They 
 have done so once : may they never repeat that 
 destructive career! Such are our two Houses of 
 Parliament — the most illustrious assemblies since 
 the Roman Senate and Grecian Areopagus : 
 neither of them is the *' House of the Peo- 
 ple," but both ahke represent ^' the Nai ion."
 
 AVniGGISM. 213 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 There are two propositions, which, however at 
 the first glance they may appear to contradict 
 the popular opinions of the day, are, never- 
 theless, as I beheve, just and true. And they are 
 these : — 
 
 First. That there is no ])robability of ever 
 establishing in England a more democratic form 
 of government than the present Enghsh consti- 
 tution. 
 
 Second. That the recent political changes of 
 the Whigs are, in fact, a departure from the de- 
 mocratic spirit of that constitution.
 
 214 THE SPIRIT OF 
 
 Whatever form a government may assume, its 
 spirit must be determined by the laws which regu- 
 late the property of the country. You may have 
 a Senate and Consuls, you may have no hereditary 
 titles, and you may dub each householder or 
 inhabitant a citizen ; but if the spirit of your laws 
 preserves masses of property in a particular class, 
 the Government of the country will follow the 
 disposition of the property. So also you may 
 have an apparent despotism without any formal 
 popular control, and with no aristocracy either 
 natural or artificial, and the spirit of the Govern- 
 ment may nevertheless be republican. Thus the 
 ancient polity of Rome, in its best days, was an 
 aristocracy, and the Government of Constantinople 
 is the nearest approach to a democracy on a great 
 scale, and maintained during a great period, that 
 history offers. The constitution of France during 
 the last half century has been fast approaching 
 that of the Turks. The barbarous Jacobins 
 blended modern equality with the refined civi- 
 lization of ancient France — the barbarous Ottomans 
 blended their equality with the refined civihzation
 
 WIIIGGISM. 215 
 
 of ancient Rome. Paris secured to the Jacobins 
 those luxuries that their system never could have 
 produced : Byzantium served the same purpose 
 to the Turks. Both the French and their turbaned 
 prototypes commenced their system with popular 
 enthusiasm, and terminated it with general sub- 
 jection. Napoleon and Louis Philippe are play- 
 ing the same part as the Soleimans and the 
 Mahmouds. The Chambers are but a second-rate 
 Divan; the Prefects but inferior Paclias : a 
 solitary being rules alike in the Seraglio and the 
 Tuileries, and the whole nation bows to his 
 despotism on condition that they have no other 
 master save himself. 
 
 The disposition of property in England throws 
 the Government of the country into the hands of 
 its natural aristocracy. I do not believe that any 
 scheme of the suffrage, or any method of election, 
 could divert that power into other quarters. It is 
 the necessary consequence of our present social 
 state. I believe, the wider the popular suffrage, 
 the more powerful would be the natural aris- 
 tocracy. This seerns to me an inevitable conse-
 
 216 THE SPIRIT OF 
 
 quence ; but I admit this proposition on the clear 
 understanding that such an extension should be 
 established upon a fair, and not a factious, basis. 
 Here, then, arises the question of the ballot, into 
 the merits of which I shall take another oppor- 
 tunity of entering, recording only now my opinion, 
 that in the present arrangement of the consti- 
 tuency, even the ballot would favour the power of 
 the natural aristocracy, and that, if the ballot were 
 simultaneously introduced with a fair and not a 
 factious extension of the suffrage, it would 
 produce no difference whatever in the ultimate 
 result. 
 
 Quitting, then, these considerations, let us 
 arrive at the important point. Is there any pro- 
 bability of a different disposition of property in 
 England — a disposition of property which, by pro- 
 ducing a very general similarity of condition, 
 would throw the government of the country into 
 the hands of any individuals whom the popular 
 esteem or fancy might select ? 
 
 It appears to me that this question can only 
 be decided by ascertaining the genius of the
 
 WHIGGISM. 217 
 
 English nation. What is the prime characteristic 
 of the English mind ? I apprehend I may safely 
 decide upon its being industry. Taking a 
 general, but not a superficial, survey of the 
 English character since the Reformation, a 
 thousand circumstances convince me that the 
 salient point in our national psychology is the 
 passion for accumulating wealth, of which industry 
 is the instrument. We value our freedom prin- 
 cipally because it leaves us unrestricted in our 
 pursuits ; and that reverence for law and all that 
 is established, which also eminently distinguishes 
 the English nation, is occasioned by the conviction 
 that, next to liberty, order is the most efficacious 
 assistant of industry. 
 
 And thus we see that those great revolutions 
 which must occur in the history of all nations, 
 when they happen here, produce no permanent 
 effects upon our social state. Our revolutions are 
 brought about by the passions of creative minds 
 taking advantage, for their own aggrandisement, 
 of peculiar circumstances in our national progress. 
 They are never called for by the great body of the 
 
 K
 
 218 THE SPIRIT OF 
 
 nation. Churches are plundered, long rebellions 
 maintained, dynasties changed, Parliaments 
 abolished ; but when the storm is passed, the 
 features of the social landscape remain unim- 
 paired ; there are no traces of the hurricane, the 
 earthquake, or the volcano ; it has been but a 
 tumult of the atmosphere, that has neither toppled 
 down our old spires and palaces, nor swallowed 
 up our cities and seats of learning, nor blasted our 
 ancient woods, nor swept away our ports and 
 harbours. The English nation ever recurs to its 
 ancient institutions — the institutions that have 
 alike secured freedom and order ; and after all 
 their ebullitions, we find them, when the sky is 
 clear, again at work, and toiling on at their eternal 
 task of accumulation. 
 
 There is this difference between the revolutions 
 of Enoland and the revolutions of the Continent 
 
 o 
 
 — the European revolution is a struggle against 
 privilege ; an English revolution is a struggle for 
 it. If a new class rises in the state, it becomes 
 uneasy to take its place in the natural aristocracy 
 of the land : a desperate faction or a wily leader
 
 WHIGGISM. 219 
 
 take advantage of this desire, and a revolution is 
 the consequence. Thus the Whigs in the present 
 day have risen to power on the shoulders of the 
 manufacturing interest. To secure themselves 
 in their posts, the Whigs have given the new 
 interest an undue preponderance ; but the new 
 interest, having obtained its object, is content. 
 The manufacturer, like every other Englishman, is 
 as aristocratic as the landlord. The manufacturer 
 begins to lack in movement. Under Walpole the 
 Whigs played the same game with the commercial 
 interest ; a century has passed, and the com- 
 mercial interest are all as devoted to the consti- 
 tution as the manufacturers soon will be. Having 
 no genuine party, the Whigs seek for succour from 
 the Irish Papists ; Lord John Russell, however, 
 is only imitating Pym under the same circum- 
 stances. In 1640, when the English movement 
 was satisfied, and the constitutional party, headed 
 by such men as Falkland and Hyde, were about 
 to attain power, Pym and his friends, in despair 
 at their declinins: influence and the close divisions 
 in their once unanimous Parliament, fled to the
 
 220 THE SPIRIT OF 
 
 Scotch Covenanters, and entered into *^a close 
 compact" for the destruction of the Church of 
 England as the price of their assistance. So 
 events repeat themselves ; but if the study of 
 history is really to profit us, the nation at the 
 present day will take care that the same results 
 do not always occur from the same events. 
 
 When passions have a little subsided, the 
 industrious ten-pounder, who has struggled into 
 the privileged order of the Commons, proud of 
 having obtained the first step of aristocracy, will 
 be the last man to assist in destroying the other 
 gradations of the scale which he or his posterity 
 may yet ascend ; the new member of a manu- 
 facturing district has his eye already upon a 
 neighbouring park, avails himself of his political 
 position to become a county magistrate, meditates 
 upon a baronetcy, and dreams of a coroneted 
 descendant. 
 
 The nation that esteems wealth as the great 
 object of existence, will submit to no laws that 
 do not secure the enjoyment of wealth. Now, we 
 deprive wealth of its greatest source of enjoyment.
 
 WHIGGI6M. 221 
 
 as well as of its best security, if we deprive it of 
 power. The English nation, therefore, insists that 
 property shall be the qualification for power, and 
 the whole scope of its laws and customs is to 
 promote and favour the accumulation of wealth 
 and the perpetuation of property. We cannot 
 alter, therefore, the disposition of property in this 
 country without we change the national character. 
 Far from the present age being hostile to the 
 supremacy of property, there has been no period 
 of our history where property has been more 
 esteemed, because there has been no period when 
 the nation has been so industrious. 
 
 Believing, therefore, that no change will occur 
 in the disposition of property in this country, I 
 cannot comprehend how our government can be- 
 come more democratic. The consequence of our 
 wealth is an aristocratic constitution ; the conse- 
 quence of our love of liberty is an aristocratic con- 
 stitution founded on an equality of civil rights. 
 And who can deny that an aristocratic constitution 
 resting on such a basis, where the legislative and 
 even the executive office may be obtained by every
 
 222 
 
 THE SPIRIT OP 
 
 subject of the realm, is in fact a noble democracy i 
 The English constitution, faithfully representing 
 the national character, secures to all the enjoy- 
 ment of property and the dehghts of freedom. Its 
 honours are a perpetual reward of industry ; every 
 Englishman is toiUng to obtain them ; and this is 
 the constitution to which every Englishman will 
 always be devoted, except he is a Whig. 
 
 In the next Chapter I shall discuss the second 
 proposition.
 
 WHIQOISM. 223 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 The Tories assert that the whole property of the 
 country is on their side ; and the Whigs, wringing 
 their hands over lost elections, and bellowing 
 about * intimidation," seem to confess the soft im- 
 peachment. Their prime organ also assures us 
 that every man with £500 per annum is opposed 
 to them. Yet the Whig-Radical writers have re- 
 cently published, by way of consolation to their 
 pennyless proselytes, a list of some twenty Dukes 
 and Marquises, who, they assure us, are devoted 
 to " hberal" principles, and whose revenues, in a 
 paroxysm of economical rhodomontade, they as- 
 sert, could buy up the whole income of the rest of 
 the hereditary Peerage. The Whig-Radical writers
 
 224 
 
 THE SPIRIT OF 
 
 seem puzzled to reconcile this anomalous circum- 
 stance with the indisputahly forlorn finances of 
 their faction in general. Now, this little tract on 
 ^' the Spirit of Vv'higgism" may perhaps throw 
 some light upon this perplexing state of affairs. 
 For myself, I see in it only a fresh illustration of 
 the principles which I have demonstrated, from 
 the whole current of our history, to form the basis 
 of Whig policy. This union of oligarchical wealth 
 and mob poverty is the very essence of the " Spirit 
 of Whiggism." 
 
 The English Constitution, which, from the 
 tithing-man to the Peer of Parliament, has thrown 
 the whole government of the country into the 
 hands of those who are qualified by property to 
 perform the duties of their respective offices, has 
 secured that diffused and general freedom, with- 
 out which the national industry would neither 
 have its fair play nor its just reward, by a variety 
 of institutions, which, while they prevent those 
 who have no property from invading the social 
 commonwealth, in whose classes every industrious 
 citizen has a rio'ht to register himself, offer also an
 
 WIIIGGlSSt. 225 
 
 equally powerful check to the ambitious fancies of 
 those great famiUes, over whose liberal principles 
 and huge incomes the Whig-Radical writers gloat 
 with the self-complacency of lackeys at the equi- 
 pages and establishments of their masters. There 
 is ever an union in a perverted sense between those 
 who are beneath power and those who wish to be 
 above it; and oligarchies and despotisms are 
 usually established by the agency of a deluded 
 multitude. The Crown, with its constitutional in- 
 fluence over the mihtary services ; a Parliament 
 of two houses, watcliing each other's proceedings 
 with constitutional jealousy ; an independent 
 hierarchy, and, not least, an independent magi- 
 stracy, are serious obstacles in the progressive 
 estabhshmentof that scheme of Government which 
 a small knot of great families, these dukes and 
 marquises, whose revenues, according to the Go- 
 vernment organ, could buy up the income of the 
 whole peerage, naturally wish to introduce. We 
 find, therefore, throughout the whole period of our 
 more modern history, a powerful section of the 
 great nobles ever at war with the national insti-
 
 226 THE SPIRIT OF 
 
 tutions ; checking the Crown ; attacking the in- 
 dependence of that House of Parharaent in which 
 they happen to be in a minority, no matter which ; 
 patronizing sects to reduce the influence of the 
 church ; and playing town against country to over- 
 come the authority of the gentry. 
 
 It is evident that these aspiring ohgarchs, as a 
 party, can have httle essential strength ; they can 
 count upon nothing but their mere retainers. 
 To secure the triumph of their cause, therefore, 
 they are forced to manoeuvre with a pretext, and 
 while they aim at ohgarchical rule, they ap- 
 parently advocate popular rights. They hold 
 out, consequently, an inducement, to all the 
 uneasy portion of the nation to enlist under their 
 standard ; they play the discontented minority 
 against the prosperous majority, and, dubbing 
 their partisans '^ the people," they flatter them- 
 selves that their projects are irresistible. The 
 attack is unexpected, brisk, and dashing, well- 
 matured, dexterously mystified. Before the na- 
 tion is roused to its danger, the oligarchical object 
 is often obtained ; and then the oligarchy, en-
 
 WHIGGISM. 227 
 
 trenched in power, count upon the nation to 
 defend them from their original and revolutionary 
 allies. If they succeed, a dynasty is changed, or 
 a Parliament reformed, and the movement is 
 stopped ; if the Tories or the Conservatives cannot 
 arrest the fatal career which the Whigs have 
 originally impelled, then away go the national 
 institutions ; the crown falls from the King's 
 brow ; the crosier is snapped in twain ; one House 
 of Parliament is sure to disappear, and the gentle- 
 men of England dexterously dubbed Malignants, 
 or Anti-Reformers, or any other phrase in fashion, 
 the dregs of the nation, sequester their estates, 
 and install themselves in their halls; and •* liberal 
 principles" having thus gloriously triumphed, 
 after a due course of plunder, bloodshed, im- 
 prisonment, and ignoble tyranny, the people of 
 England, sighing once more to be the English 
 nation, secure order by submitting to a despot, 
 and in time, when they have got rid of their 
 despot, combine their ancient freedom with their 
 newly-regained security, by re-establishing the 
 English constitution.
 
 228 
 
 THE SPIRIT OF 
 
 The Whigs of the present day have made their 
 assault upon the nation with their usual spirit. 
 They have already succeeded in controlling the 
 Sovereign and in remodelhng the House of Com- 
 mons. They have menaced the House of Lords, 
 violently assailed the church, and reconstructed 
 the corporations. I shall take the tv/o most com- 
 prehensive measures which they have succeeded 
 in carrying, and which at the time certainly 
 "were popular, and apparently of a very demo- 
 cratic character, — their reform of the House of 
 Commons, and their reconstruction of the mu- 
 nicipal corporations. Let us see whether these 
 great measures have, in fact, increased the demo- 
 cratic character of our constitution or not— 
 whether they veil an oligarchical project, or are, 
 in fact, popular concessions inevitably offered by 
 the Whigs in their oligarchical career. 
 
 The result of the Whig remodelling of the order 
 of the Commons has been this — that it has placed 
 the nomination of the o:overnment in the hands of 
 the Popish priesthood. Is that a great advance 
 of pubhc intelligence and popular liberty ? Are
 
 WHIGGISM. 229 
 
 the Parliamentary nominees of M'Hale and 
 Keogh more german to the feelings of the English 
 nation, more adapted to represent their interests, 
 than the Parliamentary nominees of a Howard or 
 a Percy ? This Papist majority, again, is the 
 superstructure of a basis formed by some Scotch 
 Presbyterians and some English Dissenters, in 
 general returned by the small constituencies of 
 small towns— classes whose number and influ- 
 ence, intelligence and wealth, have been grossly 
 exaggerated for factious purposes, but classes 
 avowedly opposed to the maintenance of the 
 English constitution. I do not see that the cause 
 of popular power has much risen, even with the ad- 
 dition of this leaven. If the suffrages of the Com- 
 mons of England were polled together, the hust- 
 ings-books of the last general election will prove 
 that a very considerable majority of their numbers 
 is opposed to the present Government, and that 
 therefore, under this new democratic scheme, this 
 great body of the nation are, by some hocus-pocus 
 tactics or other, obliged to submit to the minority.
 
 230 THE SPiniT OF 
 
 The truth is, that the new constituency has been 
 so arranged, that an unnatural preponderance has 
 been given to a small class, and one hostile to the 
 interests of the great body. Is this more demo- 
 cratic ? The apparent majority in the House of 
 Commons is produced by a minority of the Com- 
 mons themselves ; so that a small and favoured 
 class command a majority in the House of Com- 
 mons, and the sway of the Administration, as far 
 as that House is concerned, is regulated by a 
 smaller number of individuals than those who 
 governed it previous to its reform. But this is 
 not the whole evil : this new class, with its un- 
 natural preponderance, is a class hostile to the 
 institutions of the country, hostile to the union of 
 Church and State, hostile to the House of Lords, 
 to the constitutional power of the Crown, to the 
 existing system of provincial judicature. It is, 
 therefore, a class fit and willing to support the 
 Whigs in their favourite scheme of centralization, 
 without which the Whigs can never long maintain 
 themselves in power. Now, centralization is the
 
 WHIGGISM. 231 
 
 death-blow of public freedom ; it is the citadel of 
 the oligarchs, from which, if once erected, it will 
 be impossible to dislodge them. 
 
 But can that party be aiming at centralized 
 government, which has reformed the municipal 
 corporations? We will see. The reform of 
 the municipal corporations of England is a 
 covert attack on the authority of the English 
 gentry, — that great body which perhaps forms 
 the most substantial existing; obstacle to the 
 perpetuation of Whiggism in power. By this 
 apparently democratic act the county magistrate 
 is driven from the towns where he before ex- 
 ercised a just influence, while an elective magi- 
 strate from the towns jostles him on the bench at 
 quarter sessions, and presents in his peculiar 
 position an anomaly in the constitution of the 
 Bench flattering to the passions, however fatal to 
 the interests, of the giddy million. Here is a lever 
 to raise the question of county reform whenever 
 an obstinate shire may venture to elect a repre- 
 sentative in Parliament hostile to the liberal 
 oligarchs. Let us admit, for the moment, that
 
 232 THE SPIRIT OF 
 
 the Whigs ultimately succeed in subverting the 
 ancient and hereditary power of the English gentry. 
 Will the municipal corporations substitute them- 
 selves as an equivalent check on a centralizing 
 government? Whence springs their influence? 
 From property ? Not half-a-dozen have estates. 
 Their influence springs from the factitious power 
 with which the reforming Government has in- 
 vested them, and of which the same Government 
 will deprive them in a session, the moment they • 
 cease to be corresponding committees of the re- 
 forming majority in the House of Commons. They 
 will either be swept away altogether, or their 
 functions will be limited to raisins: the local taxes 
 v^'hich will discharge their expenses of the de- 
 tachment of the metropolitan police, or the local 
 judge or governor whom Downing-street may 
 send down to preside over their constituents. 
 With one or two exceptions, the English corpora- 
 tions do not possess more substantial and durable 
 elements of power than the municipalities of 
 France. What check are they on Paris ? These 
 corporations have neither prescription in their
 
 WIllGGISM. 233 
 
 favour, nor property. Their influence is main- 
 tained neither by tradition nor substance. They 
 have no indirect authority over the minds of their 
 townsmen ; they have only their modish charters 
 to appeal to, and the newly-engrossed letter of the 
 law. They have no great endowments of whose 
 public benefits they are the oflBcial distributors ; 
 they do not stand on the vantage-ground on which 
 we recognise the trustees of the public interests ; 
 they neither administer to the soul nor the body ; 
 they neither feed the poor nor educate the young ; 
 they have no hold on the national mind ; they 
 have not sprung from the national character ; they 
 were born by faction, and they will live by faction. 
 Such bodies must speedily become corrupt ; they 
 will ultimately be found dangerous instruments in 
 the hands of a revolutionary faction. The mem- 
 bers of the country corporations will play the game 
 of a London party, to secure their factitious local 
 importance, and obtain the consequent results of 
 their opportune services. 
 
 I think I have now established the two propo- 
 sitions with which I commenced my last Chapter ;
 
 234 
 
 THE SPIRIT OF WHIGGISM. 
 
 and I will close this concluding one of the " Spirit 
 of Whiggism" with their recapitulation, and the 
 inferences which I draw from them. If there be 
 slight probability of ever establishing in this coun- 
 try a more democratic government than the 
 English constitution, it will be as well, 1 conceive, 
 for those who love their rights, to maintain that 
 constitution ; and if the recent measures of the 
 Whigs, however plausible their first aspect, have, 
 in fact, been a departure from the democratic 
 character of that constitution, it will be as well 
 for the English nation to oppose, with all their 
 heart, and all their soul, and all their strength, 
 the machinations of the Whigs, and the " Spirit 
 of Whiggism." 
 
 THE END. 
 
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