Ex Libris C. K. OGDEN THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES HILLSDON COI / <, 3 (;. 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. PRINTED BY A. J. VALPY, RED LION COURT, FLEET STREET. 3, St. James s Square, August 1. Mr. Macrone has just published the following NEW WORKS. Second Edition of Mr. N. P. VVii-lis's Xew Work, with >iew Preface and numerous additional Letters. PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. By N. P. Willis, Esq. Second Edition. 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