tlemen and innkeepers, and offer to submit to instant search, adding, however, that his highness must undergo a similar operation. This his highness declines; he thinks it best to put up with the loss of ten pounds, and depart; and what will the reader think he therefore did? 6 Why,' says the prince, I therefore took some more bank notes out of my travelling-bag, paid the reckoning, and so departed.' From this splendid detail we discern that his highness travelled with a sac de nuit stuffed with bank-notes; nevertheless The Prince, unable to conceal his pain' at the loss of his ten pounds, runs to his amiable friends at the bookshop, and imparts to them the disaster: The surprise and concern of all were equal. In a few minutes the daughters began to whisper to their mother, made signs to one another, then took their father on one side; and after a short deliberation, the youngest came up to me and asked me, blushing and embarrassed, "Whether this loss might not have caused me a temporary embarrassment,' and whether I would accept a loan of five pounds, which I could restore whenever I returned that way:" at the same time trying to push the note into my hand. Such genuine kindness touched me to the heart: it had something so affectionate and disinterested, that the greatest benefit conferred under other circumstances would perhaps have inspired me with less gratitude than this mark of unaffected good-will. You may imagine how cordially I thanked them. "Certainly," said I, "were I in the slightest difficulty, I should not be too proud to accept so kind an offer; bnt as this is not in the least degree the case, I shall lay claim to your generosity in another way, and beg permission to be allowed to carry back to the continent a kiss from each of the fair girls of Monmouth." This was granted, amid much laughter and goodnatured resignation. Thus freighted, I went back to my carriage!' (N. B. he had come by the mail.) The end of all this interesting story is, that two or three days after, his highness (whom, like Goethe, and unlike the barmaids, and the bookseller's daughters, we always figure to ourselves as of a dignified aspect') finds his purse and his book in his dressinggown pocket, so that the whole episode is given to show his Julia what a fine man he is, and how ready his specimens of innocence' are to fall vanquished at his feet.- Eich dyn!' But we must cut his highness short.-At Bristol he enters Radcliffe Church while the organ is playing, and stations himself in a corner, whence he could catch a glimpse at the interior: The illiberality of the English Church would not allow me this satisfaction, and the preacher sent an old woman to tell me that I must sit down, As it is not the custom in Catholic churches to interrupt the devotions of a congregation on such light grounds, even if strangers strangers go in without any caution to view whatever is worth seeing in the church, I might justly wonder that English Protestant piety should have so little confidence in its own strength, as to be thus blown about by the slightest breath. The riddle was explained to me afterwards I should have had to pay for my seat, and the truly pious motive was the sixpence. However, I had had enough, and left their mummery without paying.' The substantial veracity of this narrative who can doubt? but that no preacher at Radcliffe Church ever took the slightest notice of his highness we will venture to affirm; the pewopener might have thought that such a fine man as his highness would like to sit down, or the beadle might have thought it civil to an Israelite-for which he seems to have generally been mistakento show him a little Christian charity. Passing over his highness's account of Bath, and Mr. Beckford, a sort of Lord Byron in prose, who pays fifty guineas a week for leave to walk in a nursery garden and pick what flowers he chooses;'-of Salisbury, where the prince meets another specimen - a very pretty young girl,' a dress-maker,-and of course takes an opportunity of libelling the bishop, the venerable and excellent Dr. Burgess,-who never preaches, and draws 15,000l. a-year from his see!!'-of Wilton, to which house he obtains admission by a story, and under an assumed name, which he rejoices to hear the housekeeper could neither pronounce nor write;-and some other seats and towns,-we reach London,—his highness's description of which is to occupy the two first, but as yet unpublished, volumes of this work. When he has sufficiently reinspected the grand foyer,' he again mounts the box for Canterbury, criticises the cathedral, the peculiar beauty of which he considers to arise from its not having a screen! and satirizes the archbishop, who enjoys the rank of a prince' within his jurisdiction, but not in London,'-as if London were not in the heart of his Grace's jurisdiction, moreover he has sixty thousand a year!!! and may marry!' (in the teeth we presume of the statute against bigamy.) The illustrious stranger' proceeds to Dover-thence to Calais-dines with, and of course abuses, Mr. Brummel, having, by the bye, gained admission to his table, as he had done to Lord Pembroke's gallery, under a feigned name! The thorough lustre' of his principality is then enshrined in the cabriolet of a diligence; he eats smoking hot plinzen with the coachman, and arrives in Paris, where for the present we shall leave him, and that sweltering venom' which is luckily neutralized by an unfailing effusion of dulness. We are sorry that the first Prussian castigator of our manners should have been a prince! We had, at one time, been led to expect the notice of a personage, who, though of not quite princely rank, could have told a much more amusing story,-described specimens' of a higher order than barmaids-pecuniary incidents more important than the loss of a ten-pound note out of a sac-de-nuit, and even wound up his picture of insular existence' with an interesting appendix to the Mémoires d'un Homme d'Etat.' ART. IX.-1. Reply to a Pamphlet entitled, Speech of the Right Hon. Lord Brougham, delivered in the House of Lords, on Friday, Oct. 7. Second edition. 1831. 2. A Letter to the Farmers of the United Kingdom. From B. Escott, Esq. Second edition. 1831. 3. What will be done with the Lords? Second edition. 1831. 4. What have the Lords done? and What will they do next? 1831. 5. Householders in Danger from the Populace. By Edward Gibbon Wakefield, Esq. 1831. 6. Two Letters on the State of Public Affairs. From a Member of Parliament to a Friend Abroad. 1831. 7. Great Britain in 1841, or the Results of the Reform Bill. Second edition. 1831. 8. A Short History of the House of Commons, with reference to Reform. By John Allen, Esq. 1831. 9. Progress of the Revolutions of 1640 and 1830. N avowing our conviction, that the state of anarchy into which we could say, from which it has escaped!) was the fruit of misgovernment, the direct, natural, and necessary result of the acts and omissions of ministers,-it can scarcely, we suppose, be requisite, that we should disclaim any intention of holding up those dignified persons to the world, as the deliberate instigators or abettors of burning and massacre. Such a charge, if ever it should be made, we should not regard much more seriously than the insinuation gravely put forth by more than one of the Whig papers, that a Tory conspiracy was at the bottom of the Bristol riots. Whatever may be our estimation of the moral and political virtues of his Majesty's counsellors, we have always given them credit for a reasonable degree of attention to their own personal interests; and who could suspect them of indulging a notion so besotted, as that those interests could in any way be advanced by scenes from which human nature recoils? They desired, indeed, agitation ;-agitation to the extent necessary for their purposes, for crying up the bill, shaking the constancy of the the lords and bishops, and preserving their own supremacy at court; such agitation they desired, courted, and promoted. They desired just so much agitation and no more; but they were content rather to take the hazard of more, than to have none at all. Their generous minds the fair ideas drew of fame and honour which in dangers layWhere wealth, like fruit on precipices, grew, Not to be gathered but by birds of prey.'-DRYDEN. Scarcely, however, had the Lords pronounced their verdict, ere all the elements of mischief were at work ;-the minions of the Whig press set up a war-cry enough to fright the isle from its propriety;'-denunciations the most daring and seditious were hawked about the streets and placarded on every wall;-and, to pass over, as of inferior importance, even the fearful scenes of Nottingham, Derby, &c., the SYSTEM of associating the jacobinical fanatics of the middle and lower orders in Political Unions received a new impulse. The mutual coquettings, the repeated public interchanges of civility between members of the cabinet and those high confederacies,-from the lofty premier's first apologetic correspondence with the Birmingham council about that sad inadvertence' in the construction of the qualification clause, to the midnight scene which exhibited this first of Place-men • Swallowing with open mouth a tailor's news,' and the discreet and adulatory epistles of Lord John Russell and the Chancellor of the Exchequer,-all these demonstrations naturally impressed the public mind with a belief, that those societies were viewed with an eye of peculiar complacency by the Government! Journals professing to be in the confidence of the ministry, called aloud for the formation of more Unions, in order to support Lord Grey, and enable him to carry the Bill;-and if they did so without the authority or in opposition to the real wishes of their patrons, it is rather remarkable, that the moment the Government found it necessary to turn a little round and make an effort to cast off the connexion, those same journals should from that very instant have become silent, and, in one instance (we believe), should even have seen reason to deprecate and decry the very combinations which they had been so instrumental in raising. The first call, however, was answered; and a multitude of new societies sprung up in consequence in different parts of the country. On the 31st of October, a meeting of the populace was held in Lincoln's Inn Fields, for the purpose of constituting a grand National Political Union, in which the middle and working classes of the metropolis were to join together, and of which Sir Francis Burdett had consented to become the chairman, at the solicitation, as has been confidently asserted, of Earl Grey! For the truth of this assertion we do not pretend to vouch; but it is worthy of remark, that no contradiction has ever been given to the statement, though another story, with which it was in the first instance coupled, about Lord John Russell having subscribed a sum of money in aid of the Union at Birmingham, was eagerly and indignantly denied. However, even if the Noble Premier has identified the parentage of the Political Unions with the policy of his cabinet by this crowning act of indiscretion, he may console himself-he has done nothing but what is in perfect consonance with a principle which enters deeply into the whole scheme of the Whig creed,-which has become grafted into the very nature of the older factionaries of the party, by dint of habits inseparable from that false position in which they have been pining away their political lives,-and which, furnishing, as it often does, a plausible plea to weak and well-intentioned men brought up in a better school, for consulting their fears, their scruples, and their love of ease-for conciliating, conceding, and temporising-has been of more real disservice to the constitutional cause than the most venomous efforts of its avowed assailants. His lordship acted doubtless from a conscientious belief in the approved doctrine, that the best way of moderating a great political movement is to give way to it ;-just as if a torrent could be stayed by adding to its volume, or as if the multitude of givers-way did not in fact constitute in such cases the whole danger. Well. The Political Union beings embodied, it remained only that they should be organized and armed, and the business was done-let but those points be gained, thought they, and we are at once and for ever masters of the state. An effort, a most strenuous effort for this, was not wanting;-nay more, it had very nearly succeeded; and it may be questioned if it has yet failed. It was sustained by the utmost power of that very portion of the press which had just before been urging the formation of the Unions. And it will scarcely be credited in after times, that such was the pitch of license which that press had obtained under the fostering wing of a liberal government, so close on the brink of anarchy was the nation already standing, without having yet passed through an ordeal of actual revolution,-that those very journals, those professed partisans of the administration, openly, and day after day, avowed, in express terms, that one of their objects in desiring such an organization and armament, was to control the executive government,-to restrain his Majesty from the exercise of his prerogative, in case it should be his pleasure to change hereafter his constitutional advisers,-and to resist, in short, by force, |