respect for aristocracy, and monarchy, and the church. But they who should defend these stand aloof from them; they only see them afar off, while the industry of the revolutionary party is ever on the watch, and its members are ever personally assiduous in promoting its sway over the people. If firm, united, governed by one spirit, the Tory Party in this country would still be irresistible. They have but to come forth and shew themselves banded together, and ready to do battle for the country, and their enemies would quail and crumble before them. But if they will not combine their strength, and bring it forth in open array against the enemy,-if they will not make sacrifices of personal ease and tranquillity, ay, and of personal feeling too, in the public cause, they may possibly, though not probably, be suffered to enjoy themselves in a private station, while they live, but their children will not be the inheritors of their political power, their aristocratical honours, nor their vast possessions.

We began cheerfully, almost, some might think, with levity, but we follow our own humours-the moods of our own mind-and we close our "say" for the present in a grave spirit. It was worthy of a reforming Whig Ministry, during all the debates on this measure, to shew themselves, along with all their menials, abjectly servile, and basely slavish, to the nod, beck, lip, finger of their lord and master-the King. Never may such loyalty as theirs, false and hollow in spirit, as it is crafty and insidious in words, effect a lodgement in one Tory breast. "Fear God and honour the King," is our religious and political creed in one. But theirs is, omitting the first clause--"Fawn on the King." Never before were so many hyperbolical and hypocritical eulogies heaped on the name and nature, the duty and the diadem of a king, and all for a party purpose, in assemblies of free men. Sir Francis Burdett did not scruple to slaver his Majesty all over with the nauseous and monstrous falsehood, that "William the Fourth was the noblest king that had sat on the throne of England since Alfred." Lord Brougham himself, who once

brutally abused the "breed" of which his Royal Master is come, as a breed debased by the curse of hereditary idiocy, deified, while yet alive to enjoy his own apotheosis, the son of that sire on whose grey hairs and dim eyes he had vented his Jacobin rage, to the disgust and horror of all English hearts. Sir Thomas Denman, who had drawn a parallel between the character of his Majesty's brother, who was himself "every inch a King," and that of the pathic Nero, the madman and matricide, must needs too lay his forehead at the Royal feet, a lick-spittle of the footstool before the Throne, talking unintelligibly about Harry the Fifth, and his Lord Chief Justice who had reproved his youthful follies when Prince of Wales--between which fine old story, and that of his own truculent transgressions as a hired libeller, vanity of vanities alone could have discovered any similitude either in lawyer or in King. While Shiel, who when another brother of his Majesty's was lying on his death-bed, enduring with more than heroic fortitude, with Christian resignation, soul-sickening agonies that to the uncomplaining sufferer lengthened many a sleepless night, laughed at the Duke because he was dying of a dropsy,-why Shiel too must be forthcoming with his offering of fetid flummery, at which the Royal Stomach, however strong by nature and fortified by habit, must have scunnered, and at the first swallow thrown up in energetic nausea the revolting load.

We have not to decide here, whether or no all this king-slobbering was constitutional; but simply whether it was manly; whether it was more becoming British senators or Turkish slaves; whether it was such as was to have been naturally expected from men who worshipped Magna Charta as the guarantee of their liberties, or eunuchs who knew no writing but the Firman black with the doom of death.

Then, what Ministry, even Whig, did ever before strive to intimidate a House of Commons into any measure, by declaring, in good set terms, that if they resisted and defeated it, the populace, or the people, would cut their throats? Yet so argued the unprincipled poltroons. For unprin

cipled they are, and proved them selves to be at the hour of dissolution. Yet poltroons they are notfor they are Englishmen.

But to whom had they the audacity to address-not once, but a hundred times -that argumentum ad timorem? To Englishmen, Scotchmen, Irishmen, who never yet feared the face of clay, except perhaps some of them that of a bumbailiff before they had got a seat in the House. That truly noble character, Sir Richard Vyvyan, flung from him with disdain such insults, in a style becoming one who can, either in mental or bodily conflict, meet his adversary with a Cornish hug; and Sadler, the most eloquent of the eloquent, and many others besides, withered the wretched supposition with a freeman's scorn. The press echoed the coward cry; and has over and over again warned us anti-Reformers, that the Reformers, rather than that the bill should be lost, will fight for it. Are they the gentlemen of the press-cravens? No. Neither are we; and while we pity the fools who could for a moment dream of frightening us, who claim no more courage than belongs to themselves, we despise the knaves who, in the rage and malice of foreseen defeat, could strive to urge on a desperate rabble to death.

Of the ferocity of the metropolitan press towards all opponents of the Revolutionary Bill, we have now neither time nor room to speak; nor of the wretched ravings of some of their provincial plagiarists, not forgetting two or three of our own insolent ignoramuses here, who in good time shall undergo their chastisement. Shame to Scotland, that a few unworthy creatures, whose lips had all life-long drank the pure waters of the Tweed and the Teviot, should have been so denationalized and unnaturalized by the lessons of the Cockney crew, as to hiss the noblest man among us all, standing somewhat stoopingly in a meeting of his countrymen, under the weight of his world-honoured age. That sin is beyond expiation, but not of punishment; and the miscreants, whose names are known to us, must not hope that their obscure lot may shield them from that infamy which shall be imperishably emblazoned,

in these pages, over their ignoble and dastard dust.

We have lived long enough to have witnessed many periods of great and awful political interest to other countries and to our own. We have seen almost all the governments of continental Europe made the sport of fortune, and a tyrant's will, and the stability of our own momentarily put in peril by popular discontent. We have seen kingdoms and principalities, and thrones and dynasties, tossed and scattered like chaff in the wind; but we have seen no time when for the fate of our own country there was so much cause for deep and anxious solicitude, as there is at the present moment. We are in a state of dangerous uncertainty respecting all things, such as we never saw before; change is expected everywhere; rumours are afloat everywhere, and we are reminded every day of that condition of the Roman people which Tacitus describes to have existed when the death of Augustus Cæsar began to be expected. "Pauei bona libertatis incassum disserere, plures bellum pavescere, alii cupere; pars multo maxima imminentes dominos variis rumoribus differebant." Such is our condition at present-every one talks-no one takes the lead-no one stamps the image of his mind upon the nation, and gives life and energy, and a determinate end to its endeavours. In other periods of danger, when the people imagined vain things, and were led away by the frantic violence of speech-makers, or of the press, we still had the constitutional legislature to look to as a power possessing sufficient courage and force to reassure the timid, and to lead the well-disposed and firm in the line of honourable exertion. We had, moreover, not only the strength of the aggregate legislature to rest upon, but particular members of it so rose above the mass of ordinary men in intellect or in character, that they were as leading stars, giving light and confidence to the nation, shewing to others the way that was right, and themselves never swerving from the direct line of their lofty course. But now this foundation of security rocks beneath our feet-these lights of our course have become extinct, or

are dim, and we know not on which side to look for safety. The executive government has sought for aid in the power of the multitude, and this united force has flung itself headlong against the constitution of the House of Commons, and it has now become a question whether that Assembly, the parent and guardian of all our great institutions, shall not be immediately and totally changed in form, character, spirit, and even numerical amount. Men will naturally ask what object the Executive could have for an experiment which seems on the face of it to be rather the last resort in a desperate emergency, than the course of a firmly established and powerful state; or what hope they could have of being able to accomplish what they had the temerity to attempt? As to their object, it appears to us, after the most careful examination we have been able to give the subject, to have been to produce such an alteration in the system, and method, and combination of interests, by which this country has been hitherto governed, that the Tory Party who so long possessed

exclusive power, might be prevented for a series of years from returning to it, by the annihilation of the whole machinery with which they worked. They knew that by erecting a paramount democratical authority, the power of the Tory Party would be for ever destroyed; but they had the egregious and most mistaken vanity to suppose that they would be able to manage such an authority, and to render it subservient to their own purposes.

"Rebusque fidentes, avitæ

Tecta velint reparare Troj." Herein lay the capital error which makes the danger so great. So long as the contest lay between Whig and Tory, it was nothing but healthy exercise for the constitution, and there was no fear of fatal blows being struck; but the present government, wishing to knock the stage from beneath the feet of the Tories, have embarked in a scheme which would produce alike accident to themselves, and then the democratic mob would rush in, and tear monarchy and aristocracy to pieces in the struggle. Sanctum, April 25th, 1831.

Ar the close of the debate on Reform, of which a sketch was given in the last number, the bill was read a first time, without a division. Why it was that, after such a debate, in which the preponderance of argument, of eloquence, and of national feeling, was so strongly against the project of the Government, the bill should have been allowed, without resistance, to find its way within the House-why it was that a bill, embodying propositions so monstrous, as to excite laughter in the first instance, then alarm, and at last disgust, should have been permitted quietly to take up a position within the vestibule of the Legislature, we leave to be answered by those managers of party affairs, who deem that there may be a more expedient course in politics than that of bold and straight-forward honesty. There are, we know, persons of such prodigious sagacity about little things -mere formalists, with minds better fitted for arranging points of etiquette with antiquated dowagers, than for the management of any concerns of more weight, who would tell us, that the more regular and methodical course was to have the bill upon the table of the House before it was resisted, because until then, there could, according to strict form, be no certain knowledge of its contents-but such men as those ought not to guide a body in whose hands are the destinies of the nation. If they did not know what the bill was, why had there been seven nights of speeches about it? If they did know, why hesitate to spurn it from the House with the indignation natural to men who

felt that it was a desperate project of those in office to retain power and place at the hazard of convulsing the country and destroying its institutions ? But, as if we were fated to destruction, like Troy of old, the bill was suffered to obtain a footing even by those who knew, or said they knew, the mighty danger which it involved.

"Instamus tamen immemores cæcique furore, Et monstrum infelix sacrata sistimus arce."

The opposition to the bill, so far as the making of speeches went, was most able, but there lacked the lofty spirit of other days, to lead the way in action worthy of the vindicators of the old constitution of England. The enemy was parleyed with, when he should have been stricken down; and even young men may remember with a sigh the leaders they have seen, who would not have suffered the common sense of the nation to be insulted for seven nights, with talk about a proposition so outrageous in all its parts. Whoever took the lead of the friends of order, security, and the established constitution, should have had the spirit to call upon the House at once to negative the motion for bringing in the bill, when its dangerous extravagance became known, through the statement of that puny changeling, Lord John Russell-he, the scion of a noble house, who had the wretched meanness to falsify and stultify himself, by arguing directly in the teeth of what he had written and publishBut a bold ed, with his name.* decisive course of opposition did not

suit that kind of genius which cannot discriminate between the moments that may save a kingdom, and those that may be devoted to the study of a speech, so the bill passed on to a second reading; the debate upon which it is proposed to give some account of, first noticing, however, the preceding debate on the new timber duties, and that respecting the Times Newspaper, both of which are of too much importance to be omitted in a record of Parliamentary proceedings, however limited.

An alteration of the timber duties, so as to increase the tax upon the consumption of that article, was one of the propositions in Lord Althorpe's most absurd and ill-starred budget, for which, as well as for several of the other items of this never-to-beforgotten financial plan, his lordship was evidently indebted to the deep sagacity, and modest disinterestedness of Mr Powlett Thompson. Coming from such a source, the policy of the measure may be easily guessed at-it was to sacrifice the important shipping trade between this country and North America, and to ruin our Canadian colonies, in order to carry into effect a theory of the Economists, and to serve the interests of those engaged in the Baltic trade, a class towards whom Mr Thompson seems to have a sympathy so lively, that most of his attempts in politics have a curious connexion with their advantages. While all the other important features of the budget were abandoned, in consequence of the storm of dissatisfaction and contempt which was raised by their announce

ment, the Chancellor of the Exchequer thought proper to manifest some valour on the subject of the timber duties, and intimated the determination of Government to adhere to their plan. When, however, the night came for taking the sense of the House upon this question, the Minister suddenly changed his plan of attack upon the established interests of the country, and, relinquishing that part of the scheme which went to increase taxation, contented himself with a plan for effecting gradually the destruction of the trade with Canada, and transferring our demand for timber to those places, on the shores of the Baltic, which maintain the inviting system of a strict exclusion of our manufactures. By this sudden alteration, of which no previous notice was given, it was hoped to catch the votes of those whose opposition was merely to an increase of taxation, and thus to effect the favourite object of encouraging a trade with foreigners, at the expense of destroying that with our own subjects. Mr Attwood rose at once to resist the plan, upon the broad principle of the necessity of affording justice and protection to those embarked in the Canadian trade. "Our merchants," he said, "on the faith of the protection offered to them, exerted all that enterprise which has ever belonged to them; they invested their fortunes in the recesses of the Canadian Forests; erected mills and machinery; cut canals, and built wharfs and warehouses, all of which will be useless, if this protection be withdrawn. But we are deceived if we think such a measure will not bring