need? We have deserted him because his subjects revolted; revolution was the rage; the reformers threw up their caps in favour of the brave Belgians,' and our government had not the magnanimity, or they had not the will, to discourage the revolutionary frenzy. Belgium is become an unsightly wen on the body politic of Europe; the sooner it is eradicated, and the parts reunited, the better it will be for our credit and the general advantage of nations. Our foreign policy has been exhibited to disadvantage in various other points, which have been communicated to us through the press. If I am rightly informed, our foreign policy does not lay, for the administration, a favourable claim to statesmanship."

All this is true; but the noble duke, had he been disposed, might, by entering more fully into the details, have exhibited in a stronger light the wretched policy, the unfortunate blunders, of the Grey administration. The Wine Duties bill, by the mode of enforcement, was not only an unexampled act of cruelty, but on the score of policy was unjust in the highest degree towards Portugal and the middle classes of society in England. There, again, was the Hackney Coach bill let any man read it, and, whether lawyer, common-councilman, or cobbler, if he can read at all, we venture to insure him more amusement than he ever found even in the pages of Don Quixote. Of all the oddities in legislation this is the oddest; and, as a satire on senatorial wisdom, beats any thing to be met with in Swift. "Black letters on a white ground," or "white letters on a black ground," have caused more serious disputes than ever were occasioned in Lilliput among the bigendians and small-endians. But this is not all. we pass over the Ancona affair the ignorance of Lord Palmerston, both as to the sailing and destination of the French fleet-we pass over all this with sickness of heart, and bid the admirers of the ministry look at the West Indies! Here is blood enough and burning enough, which, when considered in conjunction with that of Bristol, ought, in all conscience, to gratify, if not satisfy, the most sanguinary Jacobin. If we are only threatened with rebellion in Ireland, here is actual insurrection in our western colonies. And this is caused, by what? Not by poverty-not by

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tithes not even by heavy taxes - but by certain orders in council concocted by Lord Goderich, who, although formerly celebrated as Mr. Prosperity Robinson, is certainly one of the unhappiest and most unfortunate gentlemen in England. This one stroke of liberal policy, if persisted in, will inevitably dissever these valuable dependencies from the British crown; and then farewell, a long farewell to all our greatness!

We also, for the reasons before stated, pass over the noble author's animadversions upon the state of affairs in Ireland. They are well worth the attentive perusal of every man who wishes to preserve the integrity of the empire, and to see the rights of property protected, and impartial justice administered to all classes of the King's subjects. We hasten to that which is of more importance at the present moment, namely, the threatened creation of peers. The following will be read with interest:

"We are told, what is the use of resistance; new peers will be created to such an amount that resistance will be

perfectly unavailing, and it will be better at once to concede something, rather than be ultimately forced to yield to the numerical force which will be brought against us. Concession will save the House of Lords, and there will be no necessity for a creation of peers; resistance, on the other hand, will be its ruin, and it will be overwhelmed by a creation which will at once make it despicable and impotent.

"That the British people should desire to see the House of Lords rendered useless is not the fact; the very reverse, I am convinced, is the truth, provided that the Lords prove themselves worthy of their nobility, and do not, by meanness or pusillanimity, forfeit their claim to the respect and affection of their countrymen. That the reformers them.. selves should desire it, is what I cannot understand, if I am to listen only to their own reasoning upon the necessity of reform; namely, the undue control and influence exercised over the members of the House of Commons, which causes a corrupt state, and renders the representation a mockery. But that the King should desire any thing so preposterously absurd- so monstrously wicked! The very IDEA is treasonable: but if such is the idea, what would the act be? reflection is really too fearful to be enter tained; nor would I admit it for a moment, if it were not proper to endeavour to refute

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the foul calumny with which the revolufionists seek to stigmatise our gracious Sovereign, hoping to force a belief in the truth of the aspersion, or to inveigle their King into an accordance with their desires, on the ground of insuring his own popularity and the stability of the throne. Vain hope! The King knows far better his duty to the kingly authority and to his people. The King would not forget, although the reformers may not choose to remember, that an overstretched prerogative lost James II. his throne, even more than his odious display of popery. The page of history would shew that the English and Scotch conventions, even then, considered that a compact existed between the King and his people (subsequently strengthened and confirmed by the Bill of Rights), which James had violated. Enslaved by the Romish superstition,' we are told, and blinded with the love of arbitrary power, he obstinately violated the civil and religious constitution of his country, and was therefore justly deprived of his throne.' The memorable resolution of the English convention was, 'That King James II. having endeavoured to subvert the constitution, by breaking the original contract between king and people; and having violated the fundamental laws,' &c. The Scotch convention was even more decisive That King James, by maladministration, and by his abuse of power, had forfeited his right of the crown.' Even though a king might be inclined to an arbitrary exercise of power, he would learn wisdom from such an example; and, reasoning from analogy, would profit by the deduction. A king, for his own sake, if he were a merely selfish person, would do this; but our King, we may be sure, is actuated by still higher feelings, and more worthy motives. He loves the nation over which it is his destiny to rule. He would not violate the solemn compact that he entered into before the altar, and in the

face of that nation; nor would any counsellors be able to persuade him to the commission of an act of arbitrary power unexampled in history, and ill requiting that affection and confidence which all ranks of his subjects repose in him, as the father of his people. Reformers, therefore, for their own vile purposes, may confidently spread the base report; but depend upon it, King William IV. will never betray his duty, nor outrage the lawful independence of any class of his subjects.

"The House of Lords, we are informed, was constituted for two purposes; ad consulendum and ad defendendum regem. If the Lords should be deprived of the power of the one, how could it be expected that they should be of the slightest use for the other? It must be evident, that the existence of the House of Lords as an independent branch of the legislature, depends upon the modified exercise of the King's prerogative. If it be exerted to control debate by an influx of new members, its independence is gone, the liberties of the body are extinguished for ever, and with them those of the nation.”

We are sorry we must stop here, our limits being already overstepped. The pamphlet contains much more able matter on the same subject; and, in fact, this part of it is the most forcible and unanswerable in the whole Address. We say again, we rejoice to see the Duke of Newcastle standing forward in this fearless manner, exposing himself to further obloquy from the rabble press - vindicating himself and his order from the slanders which have been heaped upon them—and contending for the law, the whole law, and nothing but the law of the con stitution, against its revolutionary assailants.

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IT would be a superfluous effort, in the midst of that halo of prejudice and misconstruction which, hell-born as the falsehoods by which it was raised, envelopes in "dim eclipse" the lights on our altar and the pillars around our throne, to attempt to draw from the archives of that French revolution (whose horrors we in vain disclaim, while emulating their inseparable preli

minaries,) materials for reflection and compassion in the sufferings of priests and of nobles; nay, even of the defenceless and offenceless crowd of women and children, to whom party was unknown, and whose crime it would have baffled even Jacobinism to define.

Peace to the manes alike of these illustrious and nameless victims! whose bloody obsequies have been celebrated

on their native soil and elsewhere, be-neath a course of retributive discipline, from the effects of which "le peuple tigre-singe" (as that "anarch old," Voltaire, chose to designate the nation he had perverted,) have been recently rousing themselves to a fresh taste of blood.

How these "fantastic tricks beneath high heaven" affect the loftier natures which contemplate them, we know not; but well might " angels weep" to see the gallant vessel of our state drifting in the turbid wake of the foe she once breasted on the wildest billows of revolution, directly on that whirlpool over whose abysses she long held out, secure in her own steadfast, rock-girt anchorage-a warning beacon to a tempest-shattered world! But imminent as is the peril, let it still be a crime to despair. England expects every man to do his duty; and as the tiny skiff which carries out through foaming breakers one additional anchor, contributes, none can tell how essentially, to the safety of the vessel, so may the humblest effort of the humblest individual add a link to that chain of faith, and hopes, and principles, which, till Heaven in its wrath shall cast it loose from its adamantine moorings on high, still retains from the brink of the abyss the destinies of Britain.

In this bright concatenation of much that is rich, and rare, and heaven-born, the ignoble but useful alloy of selfinterest must necessarily have a place; and it is to this I address myself, while throwing together, from unquestionable republican authority, a few brief traits of the instinctive ferocity which taught that fertile parent of mischief, the French revolution of 1793, to devour, not enemies and opposers, not aristocrats and emigrants, not bishops and anti-reformers, in short, alone-but her own once darling brood of Jacobins, incendiaries, and levellers; men who, not satisfied to follow, had preceded her in the cry of spoliation and march of equality -who were king-haters while France was yet a king-worshipper, and sworn republicans ere renegade courtiers had dared to lay their trembling hands on one pillar of the tottering throne.

suspected of backwardness to glut her slakeless thirst for blood, than, stretching her hydra heads, she hunted them from one end to the other of the France they had revolutionised, to invoke in their extremity the Heaven they had so often defied, and curse in unpitied misery the human nature they had steeled and degraded-to be spurned from door to door by friends to whom friendship had become a name, and ties a derision-and to cumber the public ways and polluted rivers of their demoralised country with the self-immolated corses of those who first made her a charnel-house, and who had taught her to deny to themselves a Christian grave!

And whom do I accuse (and with truth and history on my side) of these atrocious crimes, and recall to the memory of my countrymen as thus dismally expiating them? Was it the Marats, or Dantons, or Robespierres, of the reign of terror-men whose "bad eminence" in the annals of crime and carnage has gone far to shield from opprobrium the calm, philosophic, bloodless, yet not less guilty agitators who, from the solitude of their chambers, as well as in public assemblies where their voice for a brief period predominated, insinuated into the minds and ears of Frenchmen that "leprous distilment" of incredulity and disorganisation, whose ultimate consequences (as it is my purpose not to deny, but enforce,) those decorous moralists no more contemplated than the conscientious reformer of our own land does that total overthrow of all he most venerates, which the removal of the landmarks with which he is ignorantly tampering must entail on himself and his descendants.

It is to such-and they form a numerous, and as yet, perhaps, reclaimable class-that I have deemed it might not be wholly fruitless to recall a brief sketch, and from his own trembling pen, of the persecution of an individual Girondist -a persecution which he shared with all the most illustrious of his party, and which he almost alone, thanks to a more robust constitution, and that devotedness of female attachment of which, from the licentious tone of his writings, he might have been pronounced unworthy-ultimately escaped

to record.

It is from the journal of the too famous Louvet, vice-president of the

Jacobin club, that the following hurried extracts are selected; and lest any suspicion of the incivisme (alias, leaning to monarchy and order) for which he was ostensibly proscribed should remain in the breast of any reader, it may be well to let him, in one confidential sentence, define his sentiments, and those of the friends whose opinions and perils he shared.

"I was," says he, "of the small number of those bold philosophers who had, at the end of 1791, deplored the fate of a great nation, obliged to stop midway in the career of liberty, and to style herself emancipated while she yet had a court and a king!!!" And yet mark what follows, ye who assign to revolution its mile-stones and halting-places- he was content, he adds, (with a solemn appeal to Heaven), to have awaited the inevitable end of the previous steps already taken, viz. his beloved republic, had not circumstances, over which he does not even pretend a control, hurried it irresistibly forward.

One other feature - one alone-in the opening pages of this memorable journal (with a host of conservative pamphlets!) deserves mention, before proceeding further. Louis the Sixteenth still nominally reigned in France, when, with a simplicity which sees nothing remarkable either in the fact or the expression, Louvet informs us that peace or war with Austria depended on the fiat of the Jacobin club! Whatever latitude may prevail in defining, among ourselves, the sacred privileges of Political Unions, this function, at least, has not as yet been assumed or recognised.

With equal coolness and palpable application, he informs us, that four stanch republicans composed at this time the leading ministers of the crown, and that he, a fifth, only missed being proposed to, and, as a matter of course, accepted by, the puppet monarch, through a counter intrigue of Robespierre, his sworn enemy and rival in the tribune. And why does he chiefly regret the failure? As fatal to the immediate foundation of the republic!

These particulars I record, for a double reason as a Jacobin testimony to the inevitable result of a radical ministry, and an additional proof (were any wanting) that ultra republicanism was in France, as it will be in England, no guarantee for the

safety of its professors, amid the collision of interests and strife of passions to which Reform will fling open· alas! to shut no more. - the Stygian portals.

Let me concentrate this conviction in the energetic words of its victim himself. Speaking of some want of nerve, which, at an important crisis, had paralysed his well-intentioned party, he says, "Henceforward I foresaw that the men of daggers would, sooner or later, overwhelm the men of principles, and warned my wife to prepare for exile or the scaffold!"

One quotation more-too applicable to the "blind guides" among ourselves, who, on the mine of revolution, are coolly adjusting imaginary franchises. The nation, the press, the galleries, every thing," says Louvet,

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re echoed with cries of insubordination and revolt; and still our unhappy friends continued to see for all these ills but one sovereign panacea - the plan of a constitution at which they were labouring! and when exhorted to vigour in putting down conspiracy, they answered, with the most deplorable sang froid, that it was inexpedient to irritate by resistance the natural violence of the public temper!"

"It is almost needless," he says, "to add, that among those who could thus talk and thus act, on the brink of the already flaming volcano, there were some men of rare talent and pure morals, fitted to shine in private life, and regenerate, perhaps, a peaceful, longestablished republic; but not one capable so much as of suspecting, far less fathoming, the extent of the peril impending over themselves and their country, or of averting it, if suspected, otherwise than by futile axioms and idle declamation. Their intentions,"

he says, 66 were too honest-they were too virtuous !" Will the honesty of Lord Althorp, or the virtues of Lord Goderich, fit them better for the crisis they have provoked? Will their principles, such as they are, let them earn a title to radical favour as unquestionable as that which failed to save Louvet-the motion (of which he boasts in vain) for the expulsion of the Bourbons.

There only remains to be added, previous to entering on the "hairbreadth 'scapes" of this martyr of Jacobinism, his testimony to that delightful revolutionary freedom of dis

cussion, which never once permitted him, for some eventful weeks, to open his lips in the assembly over which he nominally presided - to that dearbought liberty of the press which rendered his printed addresses equally nugatory, by intercepting them at their entrance into every department—and that enviable republican vigilance, which subjected to inquisitorial scrutiny the whole private correspondence of France, and left its occasional invasions by royal surveillance under the old régime hopelessly behind!

The Girondists, to the number of twenty-two, had been formally proscribed, and their heads demanded, in the "Political Union" over which they had lately ruled. This proof of the mutability of popular assemblies might suffice for my purpose; but it "hides its diminished head" before the nearly incredible but nevertheless true circumstance, that, moved by the rhetoric of an eloquent defender, twothirds of the assembly rose up, embraced, and openly united themselves to the proscribed deputies, who-mark the sequel!-were not one whit the less, ere two short days had elapsed, again on the black list, hunted, denounced, forced to conceal themselves in holes and corners, with despair for their portion, and fire-arms for their resource! And against whom? The people, to whom they had offered a republic, and who clamoured, in answer, for bread and for blood!

What a picture, for those who flatter themselves that even republican virtue can disarm revolutionary fury, does Louvet present to us, when describing the situation of the really amiable mother of his friend Barbaroux-awakened, during a whole horrible night, from successive fainting fits, by the sound of the tocsin, and shouts of the populace demanding her son's head, to exclaim, "Do mothers, then, educate you the most virtuous of sons, only that you should thirst for their blood?" And while a parent thus exclaimed in bitterness of spirit, what must have been the agony which whitened, during that eventful night, the yet youthful looks of the republican wife of Louvet?

At length Louvet and his wife contrived to escape from Paris, at the gates of which commenced a new species of moral martyrdom, as the unconsciously levelled curses of their ferocious Maratist driver, and his rejoicings over the

report of the arrest of one of their dearest friends, formed a sample of the conversation they were henceforth doomed not only to endure, but, to avoid suspicion, cheerfully join in! while the junction, further on, of their fugitive comrade Guadet, his plebeian disguise, and harassing pedestrian escape, gave some foretaste of the lot awaiting them all.

The reign of terror had now commenced; and bitter are the reflections from the apostle of its introductory doctrines, by his experience of their accursed fruits! "It was all over," says he," with the republic! and we, its unhappy founders, are about to experience all the horrors attendant on the lot of men as universally known as proscribed, whom every villain persecutes, and every coward abandons. Those whose possessions we had, at incalculable risk to ourselves, so long protected from rapine, never offered us, in our distress, the least portion of those riches which on the morrow they abjectly laid at the feet of every brigand who chose to seize hold on them. Those whose lives we had for ten months, at the peril of our own, been defending, refused to put theirs to a moment's hazard by opening us their doors. Nay-hardest trial of all to which we were subjected-friends of twenty years' standing hunted us from their dwellings to the very foot of the scaffold! Since, even in a country on the eve of regeneration, the good are so weak, and the wicked so omnipotent, it is clear that every aggregate of men pompously styled, by fools like me, the people, is, in fact, but a senseless flock, too happy to be permitted to grovel under a master!"

God forbid that we should re-echo sentiments so foreign to Britons, and which he from whom they were extorted by agony, himself seeks to excuse! Suffice it for our moral, that one to whom despotism and anarchy were alike intimately known, hesitates not to pronounce happy those whom the former yet shields from acquaintance with the latter !

Twenty of the chief Girondists had now united, with the joint view of escape, and of cherishing, by their presence, the expiring flame of pure republicanism in the department to which they chiefly belonged. For greater safety, they joined on the march the retreating battalions of patriot volun