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tourney-ground of modern spirits, and which bound all his other virtues and powers together as with a golden cord, shone preeminently forth-the perfect equanimity of his temper! None worked with him without discovering that few men in any class ever bore contradiction, and overcame opposition, with such gentle courtesy and patience.*

Nor was the activity of his co-operation confined to meetings and set days. Whoever has had the advantage of perusing his correspondence on any department is well aware what formidable demands were made on his time by letter-writing. No matter how dry the details or pressing the interruptions-whether from on board the Royal yacht or in the bustle of Royal receptions-the homeliest business was never neglected. In such autograph letters is found undeniable evidence, if any were needed, of the genuineness of his speeches and addresses. They are all of the same mental family-clear, vigorous, entirely free from mannerism, and abounding in original ideas.

And is it possible that this man, gifted among the gifted, learned among the learned, for scope, balance, and unity of moral and intellectual qualities, unprecedented, at all events, in his generation-who learned our ways and did our service better than those who are born to it-who outstripped all our fond but meagre measure of royal decorum of life, making our Royal residences schools of modesty, order, and intelligence, and giving the lie to every hackneyed proverb of Court corruption-who thus lived and laboured among us for upwards of twenty-one years— is it possible that such a man should have reaped chary confidence and scant courtesy from the best-should have suffered all that malice could invent and glib credulity spread abroad, and should have been, in common parlance, 'unpopular '? We deny the charge, on every head, in the name of the Great Public and in the name of all men of science, art, letters, benevolence, and intelligence. That the tones of humble and admiring reverence should be hushed, and the voices of vulgar detraction loud, were but the natural conditions of the respect and the disrespect which governed each party, and the penalty which it is the lot of princes to suffer. But it is not within the range of moral possibility that a Prince whose death is thus mourned should not have been honoured, respected, and beloved. It is not morally possible that the tearful prayers which have poured upwards for the Queen should have come from hearts who did not value what she had lost!-tears, not without self-reproach

*The Prince was President of the St. Martin's Lane Savings-Banks, and by his constant attendance and careful management showed his desire to encourage provident habits among the poor.

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and a certain tender remorse, such as all know who have lost the loving Head or the strong and true brother, and who feel as if they had never sufficiently valued-nay, as if they had not even been just or kind enough to-one they now so bitterly deplore.

But the Prince was too wise not to perceive that by the good he was identified with the loving homage paid to the Throne, and the Throne with the gratitude felt for his works. He knew, too, that his detractors knew that he could not, even in idea, be separated and considered apart from the Queen; that their malice was the more levelled at him because of the very sacredness of that higher Head; that he stood as a kind of shield to the illustrious woman whom he served as a subject, and loved and protected as a man. And can it be doubted, with the evidence we have of his mind before us in his words and works, that while he felt his so-called unpopularity-felt it as man must feel ingratitude and injustice-yet that this was precisely the lot, for better and for worse,' to which this noble and singlehearted Being had from the first most aspired?

That the young and royal Consort should immediately have attracted the ill-will of those whom we may call the Vulgar High-that a party who have looked upon the corruption, of princes as their immemorial perquisite-that these should find no part in him,' and try to pull down that to which they could not rise-this was the greatest compliment they could pay him. Had he had their vices, had he led an immoral or a spendthrift life, we should have heard none of those tales of his haughtiness and his illiberality, which no honest lips ever repeated but in disgust at their utterers.

But as a matter of shame to a people, there is more perhaps to blush for in the conduct of the Vulgar Low,-those who had no. vested interests in corruption which his uprightness thwarted. When we look back at the rumours which prevailed in the winter of 1853-4, which, like worthless rubbish, gathered weight only by accumulation-but such weight as to require the condescension of the Crown to refute (we mean by the letter from Lord Melbourne to the Queen, supplied to her Ministers) and the interposition of both Houses of Parliament to explain-we feel how little secure even this enlightened country is against the epidemic of any vile calumny which rogues can invent and fools repeat. It seems now incredible that grey statesmen should have had gravely to contradict such unutterable folly as that which brought crowds of credulous and malignant idiots to see the Prince pass on his way to the Tower!

There are many reasons-none of them much less degrading

than

than itself why such an ebullition could not have taken place in another country. But if less openly spoken against, it may be justly doubted whether Prince Albert would have been as truly valued and appreciated in his own land. He who set little store even by real aristocracy of birth, and whose motto was the Progress and Improvement of the Public, would have found no enviable lot among the Kreutz Partei' of an empty and pauperised noblesse, existing only by the exclusion of all other classes save their own. Not even Science, as we have seen, respected him there. The written words of one supposed to be so enlightened as Humboldt, may well be set against all the voices of the vulgar herd, high and low, here, and are in truth infinitely more to be condemned.

But let us not measure the rewards to such a mind by any standard lower than itself. He suffered injustice; he bore disappointment; but his joy no man taketh from him! Seen by the light which his peerless life has shed upon his position, it now appears the noblest that a noble mind could desire. His not the applause and homage; his not the pomps and the vanities of Sovereignty; but his the wisdom and the forethought, the lofty, manly, Christian devotion which surrounded a woman's crown, as with an earthly Providence. This has been a joint reign in all but the name; and let us pray that it may be so still; for not even death can sever that long intimacy of two hearts and two wills which God has joined together. Alone, the royal widow must bear in time to face her loving subjects; alone, her loving and most deeply-sorrowing subjects must bear to gaze upon her august person; but the knowledge of that example none can take from her or from us. For his sake the Queen is already sublimely struggling to fulfil her duties; for his sake shall we not doubly strive to do ours? We can conceive no higher human spectacle than that of our Sovereign Lady thus bowing her head to the will of God, and raising it again by the Divine aid. If we have loved her in her years of virtuous happiness, shall we not venerate her now? And this, too, will be his doing, who has done so much for her, and for us! So that his influence is yet felt in the workings of that sorrow of which we venture to foresee the hallowed uses.

ART.

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ART. VII.-1. Lives of Lord Castlereagh and Sir Charles Stewart. By Sir Archibald Alison. London. 1861.

2. Correspondence, Despatches, and other Papers of Viscount Castlereagh. Edited by his Brother. Third Series. London. 1856.

3. Histoire du Consulat et de l'Empire. Par M. Thiers. Vols. xviii., xix. Paris. 1861.

4. Supplementary Despatches, Correspondence, and Memoranda of Arthur Duke of Wellington. Vol. viii. London. 1861.

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E are accustomed in the present day to strange historical rehabilitations, and to the reversal of all our traditional ideas upon the guilt or virtue of the great men of the past. But it seems hard of belief that this process should be already necesin the case of a statesman whose career is so recent as Lord Castlereagh's. Yet the mythical mist which rises under the influence of the strong passions of party had already gathered round his name before he had ceased to live. He was even then associated in the minds of a large part of the community with a cause for which he had no sympathy; charged with the responsibility of measures which he had done his best to avert; and vilified for hostility to the liberties of mankind which it had been the main work of his life to vindicate. The energies of a whole school of political writers were devoted to the task of persuading his countrymen that he was the English representative of the Holy Alliance, and an accomplice in every freak of tyranny that was perpetrated from Warsaw to Cadiz. Even after his labours in his country's service had brought his life to a premature and terrible close, the animosity of his enemies did not relent. They had many things to avenge which political partisans are slow to forgive. He had not only excluded them for many years from power, but he had succeeded in spite of the prophecies of evil with which they had pursued his policy. He had attained the objects which they had declared impracticable, and carried through to a glorious triumph the measures which they had stigmatised as imbecile. Forced to admit the success of his policy, they were driven to avenge themselves upon his motives. Against criticism of this kind a statesman who has the foreign policy of an empire to conduct is almost defenceless. The obscurity in which diplomatic transactions are necessarily shrouded will probably conceal from the public eye the circumstances upon which his justification rests. The necessity of sparing the feelings of powerful monarchs or ministers elsewhere, and of hiding the faults or follies of men whom it would be injurious to English interests to offend, often forces him to be silent, where silence is interpreted

interpreted by his enemies as confession. Lord Castlereagh was not the man to jeopardise the meanest English interest for the sake of refuting some calumniator of his own good name. The tyranny of the Southern monarchies, and the assumptions of the Holy Alliance, had aroused an abundance of bitter and resentful feeling among educated Englishmen. It was easy to persuade men that the minister who always, as became his office, spoke in public with courtesy of the Allies of England, shared their maxims of government, and acquiesced in their policy to secondary states. The impression was strengthened by the measures of domestic repression which it fell to him to defend in the House of Commons, and which, even when levelled against assassinationplots, are always unpopular in England. Thus the belief that Lord Castlereagh was the arch enemy of freedom all over the world was widely spread, and came to be almost an article of faith with the school of writers and public men who prepared the English soil for the Reform Bill, and reaped its earliest fruits.

A lie, however, according to the Chinese proverb, has no legs, and in course of time this article of popular belief began to lose its footing. Those who once despairingly considered a Whig administration to be about as probable as a thaw in Zembla,' have since by force of habit come to look on themselves as possessing a kind of tenant-right to office. And this improvement in their political climate has effected an evident thaw in their sentiments. They feel towards calumniators of administrations and critics of foreign policy much as usurpers are said to feel to the tyrannicides to whom they owe their thrones. Moreover, the just Nemesis which generally decrees that partisans shall be forced to do in office precisely that which they most loudly decried in opposition, has not failed to dog the footsteps of Lord Castlereagh's detractors. Since the Whigs have passed Irish Arms Acts and suspended the Habeas Corpus Act, their partisans have been less keen to infer from similar measures an inveterate hostility to freedom. And after the exposition which the model Republic has presented to the world of the duty of the friends of freedom in the presence of domestic revolt, we shall probably hear less for the future of Lord Castlereagh's milder measures of repression. Facts also have told heavily in his favour. Recent events have indisposed the mass of writers on the Liberal side to formulate so precisely as of old the wickedness of Transalpine powers interposing in the internal politics of Italy. No one now dreams of professing that sympathy for the extinguished nationalities of Norway and Genoa, which formed the basis of so many bitter invectives against him five-and-forty years ago. And, after the experience of many revolutions, his hostility

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