in doing the last homage to suffering assassination on scaffolds-was rapidly sinking into that fatal obscurity," from whose bourne" no demagogue returns. But the possibility of making a tool of the Queen, awoke the tribe from their deep sleep on that slough of despond, and they rose with freshened energies. Her Majesty was tampered with to come to England, and the temptation was the promise of the mob. As she $ approached the coast, Lord Hutchinson found his ground pre-occupied by Mr Alderman Wood, and the measured movements of the royal diplomatist were turned into contempt by the gallant rapidity of the representative of the majesty of St. Giles's. Even Mr Brougham felt the mastery of this active politician, and was spurned from the presence of offended sovereignty. The name of Mr Alderman Wood has been so prominent in all matters of public disturbance for some years, that he defies all novelty of description. He is a man of no education and no talents. He is certainly the most contemptible among all the practisers on the rabble of London, since the days of Tyler and Cade. Wilkes is probably his model, but Wilkes had scholarship, manners, and considerable public ability. Wood is as helpless in public, as his cause and means are uniformly base. But he knows the arts that stir the refuse of society. If a culprit is to be hanged, he makes a parade of indignation against his oppressors, and takes leave of him at the gallows; if a mob is assembled, he takes an opportunity of riding through them, before they proceed to the day's riot, and bears off their congratulations. These are the arts only of the most miserable minds, and it is almost burlesque to lift up this petty and struggling agitator to the dignity of being an object of public suspicion. Demit honorem æmulus Ajaci.

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mere contest with such men is a degradation. But it is into such hands that the Queen flung herself without remorse and without resource.

Jacobinism never dies; it is crushed and cut up from time to time; but the seed always finds soil prepared in the profligacy and poverty and restless cupidity of the baser human mind. It can scarcely be flung upon the air, without finding a spot for its vegetation. This great evil forms the great present difficulty of legislation. A disaffected VOL. VIII.

spirit has spread through every kingdom of Europe, and by a desperate perversion of the bounties of Providence, has spread with the most comprehensive malignity, through the most prosperous and best governed of all its kingdoms. To this danger, all the old trials of administrative wisdom were but the play of children. War, to it, was but the casual burst of a storm to the earthquake. The ground sounds hollow and shakes under the foot.

The great statesman is fatigued with baffled opportunities, and the noble and benevolent minds that have struggled through good and evil report, for the public welfare, are disposed to give up the contest with this capricious and general corruption. But the vigour of government had not been carelessly exerted, and the punishment of the leading disturbers had been followed by fear and silence. The elements of mischief were not destroyed, for they live in the very breath of dissolute poverty.

The Queen in the embrace of radicalism, was equivalent to a victory. The libels which the boldest hand of rebellion dared not scatter in its own behalf, had now the sanctifying semblance of being the lawful defence of an injured woman. The grossest and most virulent paragraphs of Cobbet were not more atrocious than the language which this misguided individual suffered to appear as answers to addresses.

Nothing could have a stronger odour of their degraded sources than the composition of those revolutionary billets. Their outrages on common sense and grammar, were proofs that their scribes were of the populace-their principles were the common jargon of Jacobinism. It is a matter of justice, that their writers should be made accountable to the law. If they are passed over, Cobbet may be entitled to cry out against his prison hours;

if not, to take his action against the judge that flung him into chains.

The defiance which the queen's coming threw out, absolutely demanded some public answer. The clamo-◄ rous disaffection of her rabble leaders, has made the country echo with their contempt of royal feelings. But the principles of English loyalty are not yet "thin air"-the whole fabric of that generous homage, that manly and liberal fidelity, that dignified and

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The panegyric of the king is not the purpose of these pages-but a calmer time will find itself impelled to do honour to the forbearance, dignity, and impartiality of the sovereign, in the whole course of transactions, which might well have stirred up his indignation. But there was a duty to the nation, and that was laid upon the king's ministers. Whatever question there might have been of the national evil of bearing with the rumour of profligacy a thousand miles off, there could be but one sentiment on its danger and offence in the immediate presence of the people. Was a royal palace to be stained and infested by the presence of a court of Italian harlots and mountebanks? The example of the late queen was of the most powerful influence in sustaining the morality of England. Was every libertine female, in high and low life, now to find an example and an authority in the unpunished dissoluteness of her queen? Were the nation to be hourly met by some revolting repetition of the continental scenes? Was the tent at Aum to be but a rehearsal of the display on Richmond Hill?-was the royal barge to navigate the Thames for five week, together with the royal pilgrim, and her attendant Bergami sofa'd by her side? or, was it to be presumed, that the miserable infatuation that had survived the snows of Inspruck, would have died away in the visitations of an English winter? Were the nobility of England to be elbowed by Italian footmen, and fabricated knights of Malta? Were the wives and daughters of the English nobility to be presented to this woman; and was their induction into courtly life to be only through the instrumentality of one whose name

This measure was brought forward. Lord Liverpool has, with a spirit consistent with his whole sincere and honourable life, vindicated this proceeding for himself. It was brought forward in justice, but also in mercy. It was not a trial of the Queen, but of the charges-not a struggle between advocates, each zealous to criminate or defend-but a solemn previous inquiry, whether the crimination should stand. It was a grand jury with the great and singular advantages of an open court, and the permission to the accused to retort the evidence at the moment. The history of the process is now familiar to the public. All the main points are now proved by the reluctant confession of the Queen's own witnesses. Her two principal witnesses were openly declared by Lord Lauderdale to be perjured by their own showing, and were besides contradicted by men whose veracity was not impeached even by the petulance of the Queen's advocates. Amidst all the contradiction and absurdity of the other witnesses on both sides, it was proved beyond all contradiction, that theQueen, after raising her footman with suspicious celerity to the highest rank in which she could place him, had made him the companion of her private hours, in a mode that would have irresistibly obtained a verdict against her in any criminal court;-that she had given the especial superintendence of her person to this obscure individual, and that all his family were brought into her household,-with the single exception of his wife. The voyage up the Mediterranean seemed to have been undertaken for the chief purpose of indulgence, apart from English eyes; and her Italian footman was for five weeks the solitary tent-companion of the Queen, day and night. On these grounds, an overwhelming majority of the Lords declared the charges to be

established. But the question was twofold; it involved, first, the truth of the charges; and, secondly, the political necessity for pursuing them to trial. There is an obvious distinction between the knowledge of guilt, and the risk of evil in its punishment. On this point, a great number of those who declared their full conviction of the Queen's crimina lity stopped. The second hearing was thus carried by only a majority of 28. The divorce clause impeded others; the majority was thus reduced to nine; and the minister, after having proved all that the preamble of his bill contained, and after having attained, at least the one important object of marking the sense of the Lords, by a verdict of guilty, withdrew the bill.

This has been called a defeat of the minister, and a triumph of the Queen. It is as much the one as the other. It is neither. The Queen is in the state of a convict who has obtained a reprieve the minister in that of a man, who, after having redeemed his pledges, has given up his personal opinion to public expediency. The smallness of the majority would not have justified the further proceedings against the hazards of public agitation, during the session. The division upon the expediency of punishment, would have still farther broken down the division on the guilt; and party, and popular clamour, would have been sustained in dangerous excitement till the catastrophe. But why was not this result foreseen in the introduction of the bill? The answer is, that it could not have been foreseen by any man who entertained an honourable prejudice in favour of the common sense of the English character. Three months since, it would have been an impeachment of any man's patriotism, to have stood up in the house of Lords, and dared to predict, that the whole lower population of London would have taken up the cause of a woman, solemn ly and on the gravest authority charged with adultery; that the whole lower population of the country, would have echoed this monstrous and profligate clamour; that the whole press, with a few exceptions, would pledge itself to a course of ribaldry, blasphemy, and rebellion in this cause; and that the whole force and corporate mind of revolution, the crushed and maimed conspiracy against the throne, the haters of the name of royalty,

would have all at once started up, and clustered themselves round the banner of a Queen. The minister who had dared to promulgate this heretic faith, would have been assailed by all the radical orthodoxy of the house. Lord Grosvenor would have doubled his plan of conviction, and ordered the archbishop of Canterbury to fling the history of England in the prophet's face. Lord Holland would have growled exulting jacobinism at him, and quoted the heaviest paragraphs of his own defunct speeches without mercy; he would have been immersed in the diluted vinegar of Lord King's jocularity, and stood a mark for the laborious expectoration of "sound and fury" from Lord Carnarvon, that personification of " an idiot's tale;"-Lord Grey, would have sat in grim repose, "waiting his evening prey," and prepared to strike the coup de grace, after his victim had been sufficiently tortured by the minor avengers of the good name of England.

In fact, the cause was judged out of doors. The tribunal under the roof of the house of Lords, was a mere ceremonial; the true judgment court was in the work-shops and alehouses, and receptacles of low debauchery and haggard disaffection. This cause was decided in drunkenness and riot, and bitterness of heart and visions of blood and plunder. This was the original covenant, and it was rigidly kept. The most desperate arts were adopted to make the mob look upon the cause as their own. The walls were covered with infamous allegations against the king, the hierarchy, and the nobles. The radical newspapers were bribed into daring activity. The proceedings in the house of Lords were every morning sent among the populace in handbills, which suppressed all the truth, and magnified all the falsehood. Signatures and subscriptions were openly canvassed from house to house; and processions, with insulting banners, were the display of every week. A day's excursion, the glory of being in any mode a public personage, the vanity of being in a royal presence, led a considerable number of decently dressed exhibitors into this indecency. But every procession was for the express purpose of intimidation; and in the beginning, and towards the close of the system, when the experiment was new, and

when the resource was nearly exhausted, those pageants were alike reinforced by every rank of notorious profligacy, and common harlots and felons stalked among the foremost in those pomps of national zeal. The impression outside the House gave the key to the Queen's advocates within. Every popular shout found its response in the increased effrontery of the defence-and the counsel defied the House with a feebleness of argument and an excess of insolence unparalleled in the history of legislature, either of judicial or of legislatorial proceedings. The Whigs played

were fluctuating, they talked with their old pomp of indecision. But when St Giles's raised its roar, they took the tone of St Giles's. And the most strenuous abettors of the Queen were those whose habits led them into the most perfect cognizance of female virtue. And Lord Holland's superior memory of Italian intrigue qualified him to decide in an authoritative manner on the opportunities necessary to adultery. And the example might be extended, but for the disgusting nature of the subject. The two principal speakers, on the opposite side, formed an admirable contrast to the intemperance and feebleness of opposition. How are the mighty fallen!"-How would the spirit of Fox, if he were now to rise from his grave, look upon the struggling and diminished remnant of the once colossal party?-its ranks abandoned by every man of honour and British feeling, and its vacancies recruited from the mob, the Woods and Hobhouses, and Wilsons, and Joseph Humes, and Peter Moores, and all that brainless and nameless crowd, that beggary drives into the gulph of politics.

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With the Whigs the question of the Queen's guilt was transformed into a question of party. With the ministers it retained the dignity of a question of justice. Lord Liverpool's conduct has done him high honour with the rational public. He was forced more forward, on this occasion, than usual, and has distinguished himself by a possession of temper, a clearness of view, and a manly deliberation, that might give an invaluable lesson to his opponents. The mildness and moderation of this minister's manners are almost prejudicial to his public fame;

but he can speak with the power and fervour of true eloquence. No man in the House condenses more into his speech, no man brings a larger fund of information to his subject, no man in speaking maintains a more immediate communication with the mind and heart of the hearer. His style is the model of a noble and lofty sincerity. The Lord Chancellor's presidency has forced praise from all sides. Under circumstances of peculiar difficulty he exhibited great presence of mind, and the most profound knowledge. The opinion of

hesitating on the guilt of the Queen; and their opinion comes with a force which, as it seems to us, nothing can withstand but the rankest prejudice, or the most incapable folly.-What the end of the whole matter may be, time will shew. Enough has passed to make all men sick of the very name of prophesy. In the mean time, so far as the Queen herself is concerned, we think there should really be much moderation observed in all such journals as do not wish to be considered as mere party publications. In spite of all the strength of evidence that has been brought forward-in spite of all the weight of opinion which has been pronounced-it seems likely (to say the least of it) that we may never hear any more of this disgusting subject in any shape of authoritative nature. We do not say what we should have wished a few weeks ago; but we do say now, that we wish most heartily it were possible to bury the whole affair in utter oblivion. We fear it is not possible to do so. But, at all events, if the bad spirit and the good must be arrayed against each other in open warfare, we would fain have them contend on some ground where it is not absolutely necessary that victors, and vanquished, and byestanders, should all alike be defiled. If the Queen be innocent, " God bless her," say we never was woman so injured, not by enemies only, but by friends. If she be guilty, "God pity her," we say;-and if, being guilty, the voice of the whole nation shall decree that she has already been punished sufficiently, why should we stand by ourselves, and refuse to join in her own Counsel's happy quotation-"Woman, go and sin no more ?"

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