spirit, to think how inconsistent and contradictory a composition of clay, at the best, is that poor weak creature-Whig-man!

In the sixth place, his Lordship ought, we humbly think and say, to have remembered throughout all these transactions, that he was not only" the Right Honourable Francis Jeffrey, Lord Advocate of Scotland," in the eyes and ears of the many foolish people who had no idea whatever of what those sonorous words may mean, and of the many more blackguard people who in their hearts wish such an office had never been invented, but that he was so before his country, and in that character had not only privileges but powers, and not only rights but duties. His chief duty, as Lord Advocate, during great part of that day and that night, was to assist the other authorities to coerce the mob. That mob, he has told us himself, grievously and grossly offended against the law; and why did he not interpose the shield of his power between them and the people? There can be but one answer, because he was a candidate for their favour, and hoped on another occasion to have their sweet voices. Nor let any timid trimmer hint that in saying so, we are doing injustice to a high-minded gentleman. We respect the character of Mr Jeffrey more truly, and on firmer and broader grounds too, than perhaps most of his noisy friends, and certainly than all the insinuating sycophants who, incapable of appreciating the worth of such a man, yet eat his figs and lick his phlegm, and, after all, care not, so that they gain their ends, if he were dead to-morrow. But

it was natural that he should have been with the mob, for the mob was with him; and it seems worse than ungracious, most ungrateful, to do even one's duty to a mob of one's own creation. The more so, the plainer that duty may be; for in this case, what could it be but to assist the magistrates and the military with baton or with bayonet to charge, disperse, arrest, imprison, and punish? So far from shewing a vigour beyond the law, he shewed a weakness that was nothing less than dangerous injustice; and the recollection of his having called dragoons into Forfar all the way from Perth, when no

body was in any danger but himself and his friends, and that danger, by all accounts, so very slight as almost to be beneath the ludicrous, comes painfully across one's mind, do what one will, when one thinks of his seeking to soothe the infuriated Edinburgh rabble then threatening destruction to so many of his opponents, by telling the mob that the soldiers should not have been called out, and promising that they should immediately be withdrawn, (a promise he had no power to perform,) at the same time pledging himself" for their good and peaceable conduct!" Such were his Lordship's words-the good and peaceable conduct of the identical set of ruffians-the few seized by the police excepted-who had twice attempted the life of the Lord Provost, wounded hundreds to the effusion of their blood, and who were still breathing vengeance against those they had so savagely insulted and injured! Long before this time (it was about seven o'clock when his Lordship thus addressed the military, having been sent for, as we have said, to Moray Place by one of the Magistrates still imprisoned in the Exchange), the Riot Act had been read, and placards posted up warning the mob of the dangers they would face by continuing on the streets after such a warning; and these placards his Lordship ordered to be destroyed, as we have been told, with apparently much indignation. He has not ventured to say that the Riot Act ought not to have been read-nor will he venture; and if it was right to read it, it was incumbent on the Magistrates, as men of common humanity, as well as common firmness, to forewarn the deluded miscreants

(and who else but miscreants would continue to rage along the streets of a city after that reading?)-of the fearful liabilities they incurred by persisting in their defiance of the law? Why did the Lord Advocate angrily order or enjoin that those placards should be effaced? Could he for one instant have been so deluded as to dream that the Magistrates were instigated by the same sort of feeling-anger-to bid them be put up-as he seemed to be instigated by in bidding them be pulled down? If so, then notwithstanding the lesson they had already

read to him, he little knew his men. They were actuated by a thoughtful humanity-he by a thoughtless gratitude-to the mob. The voices of the Magistrates who read the Riot Act, though at different places, could not be heard over all the streets and squares where the mob was raging; but the stone-deaf are not always stone-blind too; and by such placards alone could proclamation be made to the mob that had so long had possession of the city, that the time had come when they might be lawfully treated as its enemies, and visited with extremest punishment. But in the teeth of such telling, the Lord Advocate delivered another doctrine more palateable to those who had drawn him in triumph to his house, and driven the Lord Provost in terror (no-in peril) to his; and Mob, being assured on the authority of their own member, that they were safe from the soldiers, and that the ugly placards were sent to Pozzi, after such pause in their proceedings as they thought in politeness, or rather in loyalty, due to their King, (for they have no God,) sent him back to his palace in triumph under guard of the drag-division, and with increased courage resumed the campaign-in many a savage skirmish, for they aye refused the offer of a pitched battle-through all quarters of the town.

In the seventh place, who would wish to fire wantonly upon a mob? Not we, as we hope to be saved. We are confident, that even the Whigs and Radicals themselves will believe us; for we never fired wantonly upon them, when threatening to blow up our very Magazine, not even after we had read the Riot Act in their hearing, with the voice of a Stentor. A mob is notlike other great big wild beastsalways a beast. It is not with him once a mob always a mob, as it is with a war-wolf, once a war-wolf always a war-wolf. Were it so, we should not wait for the Riot Act to fire upon him, but fling him a pill to swallow, of such wondrous potency that he should be "hoist with his own petard." But soon as this multiform Polypus has fallen into pieces-and he is almost sure to do so within twenty-four hours of his birth at the farthest-the same being of the race of the ephemerals-why, in many

cases, each piece of the inexplicable monster becomes not only a quiet citizen, but a not unexemplary Christian. A friend of ours insists that not one man in a million dies without having committed a capital crime; a severe libel, we hold, if the truth be so, either on human nature, or the criminal law of England. Without feeling ourselves necessitated either by experience or observation to acquiesce with that dictum of our wicked friend, who we hope may escape hanging, there can be little doubt that few men deserving the name but have been in a row, and that a row is uterine brother to a mob. Their constituents are sometimes pretty much the same; they differ-by the by, like almost every thing else but in degrees. In the meal-mob which we described a few pages back, there was the flower of our village population. Had you fired upon it, there had been broken the stalk of rose or lily, full-blown or budding, and there would have been grief both in field and garden. The mob we have been treating of just now was a very different mob indeed-hardly human on the day of election, and many of its members not human yet, nor likely ever to become so,-yet, generally speaking, human, and in the long run, though it will again lose its humanity on passing of the Bill. Even in it, on that day, besides loungers, spectators, lookers-on, bystanders, idlers, amateurs, connoisseurs, et id genus omne, there were doubtless some innocent, some thoughtless, some joyous, some reckless, some drunk, and some dismal souls, encorpsed with its brute-bulk, any single one of whom almost under any imaginable circumstances, it would have been as pleasant to a good citizen to knock down, as painful to fracture his skull, and most miserable to shoot through the heart. Here a knave, there a fool-yonder a simpleton who believes in a hell of Gilmertou coal, and by his side an atheist-the bully of a bad-house arm-in-arm with the teacher of a Sunday school

the jail-bird who has broken his parents' hearts "keeps together in his chivalry" with a journeymanmason who supports both his widowed mother and his grandmother -that is the hoary head of a thrice

electing a Member of Parliament, the Councillors had a right to vote according to their own opinions of the candidates, or of their princi ples. You report him to have said, that it is a privilege which they are not called on to exercise in their own right;'-and again, but as to the Town Council, with great submission, he would say, that they were merely the office-bearers of the Corporation, merely the organs by which it performed certain functions.'

ment!!

"Is this the man that is fit to be Lord Advocate for Scotland? Is this the man to whom, in times like these, we are to look for wisdom in council -for energy in the exercise of his office-for protection to our lives and properties against infuriated mobs, first inflamed by his own previous writings and speeches, then treated with impunity for past outrages, and only threatened with future punishment for riots, which, perhaps, may have no reference to him or his cause? Was it thus that Lord Advocate Dundas (the late Chief Baron), the gentlest but the firmest of human beings, acted, in order to protect us against Margarot's and other mobs at the commencement of the French Revolution? No, indeed. If the Lord Advocate of those days had acted as the Lord Advocate of this day has done, the question of Reform would have been settled long ago by the British Convention, à-la-mode of Robespierre and Marat." *

But let us hear Senex again, for he is no ordinary old man. If not restrained by modesty, we should call him a second Christopher.

"Sir, I have a few remarks to make on the speech of the Right Hon. Francis Jeffrey, Lord Advocate of Scotland (at full length, as his friends affect ostentatiously to call him) to the Town Council, at the late election, as reported in your paper.

"In the first place, he denied, that, in the exercise of their privilege of

chines, to be moved and guided by the petitions of Mr Jeffrey's friends out of doors.

"Well, be it so. The Town Council are to be considered as mere organs, trustees, as he calls them in another place, for the public. Then, pray, what will his 3000, or 4000, or 5000 ten-pound voters be? They will no doubt be a more numerous body of trustees. But still, according to his argument, as they will form but a very small proportion of the male population of Edinburgh, they will be only organs, or trustees, for the public, and ought not to vote according to their own opinions and consciences, but according to the dictates of the one hundred and twenty thousand of the most enlightened and intelligent people to be found within the bounds of the empire.' By the by, this 120,000 enlightened and intelligent people includes, at least, 70,000 or 80,000 women and children; and, of the men, also includes the thousands of most enlightened and intelligent people' who acted the dignified part of coach-horses to the Right Hon. Francis Jeffrey, on his return from the election.

"Therefore, according to the principles of the Right Hon. and Learned Lord, his ten-pound voters are only to be the organs of 120,000 enlightened and intelligent non-voters. Now, what is this but universal suffrage in its worst and most mischievous and equivocal shape? If we had universal suffrage, out and out,

+ Ibid. May 17.

then there could be no doubt or ambiguity as to the wishes and opinions of the multitude, as each man would signify them unequivocally by his own individual vote.

"But, according to the learned Lord's 's new principle, that voters are only organs and trustees to echo the sentiments of others, the opinions of those other influential people, those non-voters, and yet virtual and real voters, are to be collected from petitions and counter-petitions, and, probably, in the end, from mobs and counter-mobs, and to be gathered and counted according to the number of broken heads in said mobs.

"In the next place, let us see what the right honourable and learned Lord says on the Reform Bill. He would take leave only to say this, that he understood the government did not consider themselves pledged to all the details of the Bill.' Now, sir, I am bound to believe that this is the learned Lord's understanding; but, if so, I believe that it was not the understanding of any one person of the 120,000 enlightened and intelligent people of Edinburgh, nor of any one person in either House of Parliament, who heard the speeches of the Ministers.

"Were they not to stand or fall by the Bill? Did they not ostentatiously put it forth as the offspring of their united and unanimous wisdom? When many of the monstrous absurdities, inconsistencies, and partialities, both in its principle and details, were pointed out by various Members in the House of Commons, did they admit any one of them, or rather did they not defend every one of them to the very last? except that, at the very last, they did admit, in the case of one or two boroughs, that they had fallen into a mistake, owing to the returns of population in some burghs, including the parish to landward, and in others, not. But, in every other respect, they stuck by the Bill, to the very last, in all its details.

"But now, says the learned Lord, Ministers are disposed to free it from many (mark this) of the peculiarities that were held to be objectionable. Peculiarities!! elegant and gentle word! Peculiarities, that is, whereby a thing may be considered as peculiar, which is a very good word! Now, it certainly is peculiar, that

this bill, which leaped out of Lord Durham's head, all perfect, like Minerva out of the head of Jupiter, in full panoply of wisdom, is now discovered to have not a few, but many peculiarities! I love to repeat the word. I hope when the learned Lord draws an indictment against some of his 120,000 enlightened and intelligent friends in Edinburgh, who may have committed a crime, that he will not forget to designate it as one of the many peculiarities to which his enlightened friends are sometimes addicted.

"Then, as to Scotland, the Learned Lord says, As to the details there might be alterations. The right of voting might be varied-it might be L.10 or L.20-but certainly it would not be raised to the extent of L.100.'

"In short, the plain English of this is, that, instead of the Bill, the whole Bill, and nothing but the Bill, we are to have a spick and span' new Bill, to use a vulgar but significant expression, and that, as far as Scotland is concerned, the Learned Lord has not yet made up his Right Honourable mind as to what the Bill is to be; Minerva is not yet, come to full growth in his majestic head.

"Having done for the present with the Lord Advocate, I have a word or two to say to his master, Earl Grey, and I will convict him of folly and rashness-I had almost said madness, by the example and conduct of Lord Chancellor Brougham, in similar circumstances.

You will remember, sir, that some months ago, the Lord Chancellor introduced into Parliament a Bill for establishing Local Courts of Justice, and Provincial Judges in England, very much on the model of the Sheriff Courts in Scotland.

"Now, how did he act on this occasion? The establishment of these Courts in every county of England and Wales, on the scale of expenses contemplated by him, would have required an allowance to the Judges, Registrars, Clerks, &c., of not less than L.200,000 a-year; therefore it would have been rash to have established all these Courts at once, without any experience whether they really would prove useful or not-and yet, sir, if Lord Brougham had so done, the incurring of unne