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1837, is in the spirit of a farther insight into the seven years, than we had hitherto given him credit for. "One name," says his lordship, "has not been introduced into these pages. The sovereign of a country, at a crisis like the present, has a duty to perform. He unfortunately suffered the ministers of his brother to remain in office, and to dissolve the parliament. He will now have to choose between a difficult, a turbulent, an inglorious reign, under the viceroyalty of his minister, and one of ease, tranquillity and respect, by means of constitutional ministers. His Majesty has probably begun, before this time, to inquire, why the present ministry should remain in office at all-what claims they have to his royal confidence-where their strength lies in the country-what power they have in parliament-what weight with the aristocracy and the church. His Majesty is indeed most deeply interested in this inquiry; and one thing may be very safely pronounced as certain, that if he endeavours to maintain them in office, they will have but the single title of his royal pleasure whereby to hold it. Nothing but sad experience will persuade any loyal and reflecting person, that our present gracious sovereign will sacrifice his popularity, and risk all the best interests of his kingdom, by setting the first example since the Revolution, of a struggle between the crown and the country." We leave those statements as we find them. The application is inevitable and irresistible: they point out the peculiarities of the cabinet crisis at this moment, as if they had but just emanated from the little minister's closet; and if they make him ridiculous as a secretary, they make him respectable as a soothsayer.

But what can be said for Whig lords, and great landholders professing whiggism? What alternative can the gravest judgment find, in such cases, between absolute infatuation and gross hypocrisy? It may be not difficult to comprehend the lawless appetite of the wretch to whom "the world is no friend, nor the world's law;" we may lament over the despair that drives the broken man of better days to the pistol and the highway; we may even pity the nobler natures, the "Pierres and Jaffiers," thanking their stars "that they are not worth a ducat," and soliciting the scaffold. Yet what feeling but disgust can be in reserve for men whose whole existence is the direct reverse of their protestations; whose habit is to enjoy, while it is their trade to complain; who, with the haughtiest sense of their rank, talk the language of the leveller; at once tempt and tremble, disdain and flatter; and, with the keenest determination not to sacrifice the least of their luxuries, stimulate the poverty, to league themselves with the passions of the people.

The outcry of the Radical is against the whole state: his demands are a general capitulation of the country; his terms are a surrender at discretion, and his fulfilment of them would be

general plunder, probably followed by general massacre. The great Whig lord knows this, as every man must know it; yet he pledges himself to the cause. The Radical exclaims, "Down with the throne! Down with the Church! Down with the peerage!"-" My principle," says Mr. Roebuck, in the calmness of secure consummation, "is democracy." Rebellion echoes the cry, through all its depths. Yet what Whig peer has rebuked this insolence? Has Lord Grey bent the brutum fulmen of his brows upon the upstart audacity which thus presumed to shake his "order?" Has Lord Holland shot one of the feeblest of his feeble jests at the naked pretender who thus plucked his beard? Has the complexional gaiety of Lord Melbourne's bacchanalian cheek worn a shade at the declaration? And yet can any one of those individuals be sincere? Can it be the wish nearest to the heart of any one of them, to see the practical and inevitable result of his avowed principles; to see himself stript of his title and estate, the door of the House of Lords shut upon him, his inheritance parcelled out among the rabble, and himself flung down into the mire of that equality, which he so zealously lauds as the grand renovation of mankind? Which of them would desire to be cast out on the world, the thing that a revolution would inevitably make him; the animal bipes implume, the naked abstraction, the unfeathered fowl, the shivering, struggling, plucked specimen to which the busy fingers of radicalism would so unsparingly reduce him! What then must be the only conclusion? That they are hypocrites. If whiggism had never committed but this one sin, it is so utterly base, evil, and contaminating, that like the primal sin, it ought to exclude them for ever. In their hearts they must be Conservatives; as must all men who have any thing to lose. Why, then, their revolutionary harangues? Because they believe that there is a virtue in their antagonists, which will exempt themselves from the practical consequences of maddening the people. Consciously sheltered from ruin by the strength of that Conservatism which they profess to hate, they popularize their hypocrisy without hazard to their interests; they empty their quivers against the constitution, in the confidence that the shafts will be grasped and broken by the hands which they libel; they teach the populace to toss firebrands, and set the land in flame, in the belief that the defenders of religion and the laws will be vigilant and manly enough to trample out the conflagration before it can surround themselves. What criminality can exceed this desperate game of party artifice against public principle? Yet this is notoriously the game of the Whig aristocracy; a diminished and decrepit portion of the nobles of England, it is true; but still affecting the name of honour. What must be the public contempt for individuals proposing measures of the most extreme hazard, only in the conviction that they may propose them with

personal impunity; challenging political martyrdom, in the certainty that their scaffold will never be built; faithless, in the assurance that the nation will be faithful; extravagant, in reliance on the public common sense; lavish in the liberality that is to cost them nothing; enjoying the heroism of words, and revelling in the scandalous emoluments which they gather out of a criminal popularity by the prostitution of a degraded character, and the pledges of a bankrupt conscience.

The party pretence, that the queen is with them, is mere effrontery; a fraud which detects itself; an incompatibility with the education, principles, and interests of the young and estimable inheritor of the crown. No sovereign of England can be with them; for none can solicit revolution. None will be with. them; for no sovereign of England will ever again lay the diadem at the feet of the Popedom. The Protestant throne is founded on the Protestant constitution.

What, then, are the domestic prospects of the country? If the present ministry shall be suffered to continue in power, we unhesitatingly pronounce, that they must grow more alarming day by day. A cabinet without personal weight, ability, or character, must be a cabinet of dependence, of sufferance, and of expediency. And whom does it now acknowledge for its champion? The open libeller of England; the open disturber of Ireland; the notorious abettor of popular excitement in every portion of the empire. This man pays himself for his sinister protection, by claiming the whole patronage of Ireland. The progress to national hazard is now to be measured by steps, at every hour taking a broader stride. The agitator, already master of three-fourths of the Irish elections, is rapidly filling up every office, from the seat of justice down to the policeman, with Papists. For every place which he gives away he makes fifty dependents, whom he commands. In a few years of this influence he will have filled the country with his Papist lordlieutenants, judges, sheriffs, magistrates, and members of Parliament. All the organs of authority will be Papist, and all at his disposal. Then will all be exactly in the condition of Ireland on the verge of 1641; and the preparative in the one case will be inevitably followed by the consequence in the other. It is no matter whether Mr. O'Connell be the poltroon or the bravo; whether he be saturated with possession or grasping at supremacy; whether he be living or dead. The complete structure of Popish power will have been erected; the altar flaming, and the doors thrown open for the first jacobin who calls on the Papist multitude to follow him. If O'Connell were bleaching on his gibbet to-morrow, some brawnier ruffian, adding courage to his cunning, and ambition to his revenge, disdaining the tortuous duplicity of his political swindling and the detected sordidness of his vulgar avarice, will yet stride before the infuriated

544 Prospects of the Country under the New Parliament.

million, and, with the dictatorship or the diadem luring him on, consummate the work of the Jesuit and the conspirator. The feeble cabinet of England will be thrown into terror, as the roar of rebellion sends the truth into their ears. All will be wondering, protesting, and perplexity; while Popery, pike in hand, will trample on the supremacy of Britain, and Rebellion be lord from shore to shore.

Let the Melbourne cabinet exist but a few years longer, and this consequence is inevitable. Their utter incompetency to conduct the foreign interests of the empire is proved, in their baffled councils, defeated expeditions, and the contempt of Europe. But the unanswerable count in their impeachment, the desperate danger, is on the side of Ireland. Unless Opposition come to the aid of the country, and extinguish the cabinet, Ireland is lost. It is not in the competence of such men as the present ministers to interpose between her and ruin. They know it, and they attempt by feeble artifice and empty deprecation, what was never to be done but by integrity and courage. O'Connell laughs at them, perseveres, makes a new demand for every new deprecation, and obtains it. This every honest man in the empire has pronounced already. The Protestant sees with terror, the politician with contempt, the formal burlesque of cabinet independence, the helpless moderation, the uneasy pretence of those feeble personages to control the power of Popish faction. What can a fancy fertile in scorn conceive more ridiculous than their attempts to control the movements of the agitator's imperious and insulting policy? The crazy Cabinet pursuing the Leviathan through his own fathomless region of uproar? The laziness of Lord Melbourne sitting at the helm, the meagre activity of his little subordinate at the prow, with the miniature harpoon in his hand, attempting to pierce the blubber of the huge animal, whose gambols "tempest the brine," whose course makes the very current in which they move, and a sweep of whose fin would send the whole in an instant to the bottom?

The country still has her choice, and upon that choice will depend her political redemption. The question is, Will she have the government PAPIST or PROTESTANT? In this all others merge-whether she will confide in a cabinet already enslaved by a faction which no oath can bind, or demand a cabinet pledged to the constitution and the religion of England,-DEMOCRACY, or CONSERVATISM.

"Deterior qui visus, eum ne prodigus obsit,

Dede neci; Melior vacua sine regnet in aulâ.
Nam duo sunt genera. Hic melior, insignis et ore,
Et rutilis clarus squamis. Ille horridus alter
Desidiá, latamque trahens inglorius CAUDAM!"

545

General Literature.

1. The Charge delivered to the Clergy of the County of Nottingham, and Three Sermons preached at Nottingham, Newark, and Retford, at the Visitation of the Venerable GEORGE WILKINS, D.D. Archdeacon of Nottingham. London: Rivingtons. 1837. 2. A Charge delivered to the Clergy of the Archdeaconry of Wilts. By the Venerable WILLIAM MACDONALD, M. A. Archdeacon of Wells. London: Rivingtons. 1837.

DR. WILKINS'S Charge is one of the most masterly and most orthodox productions that has for a long time appeared in theological literature; and it is a credit to our church that she possesses a member so capable of proving its apostolicity, and so discreetly temperate in the enforcement of its precepts. In it there is none of that truckling, temporizing spirit, which accommodates principles to the changes in political affairs; none of that false liberality, which is the cant-term of the age, and signifies licentiousness; and which is licentious because it has no solid principle to fix it, and in many respects resembles the tossing to and fro on every wind of doctrine, and certainly is that departure from the faith which the great Apostle predicted.

We go not too far in saying, that it is such a Charge as we might imagine an Apostle to have given, had he been required to give his high monition under a similar aspect of affairs.

The Archdeacon powerfully dwells on the causes which occasion the hatred of Romanists and Sectarians to our church, and aptly observes, that, "like its Divine Founder, it is, as it were, crucified between two thieves; the one robbing it of its spirituality, and the other of its apostolical character." He shows that the danger which threatens it is not lest its strict principles be stretched into bigotry, but lest its moderation lapse into licentiousness; that though unbelief be not now vented in the folly of the Atheist, the arrogance of the Deist, or the theories of philosophers; though the sceptic direct not his attack on the citadel of Christianity, stratagem and treachery are at work, seeking to gain that which is impregnable, by a false security instilled into its defenders. Popery, according to circumstances, varies its mode of attack:-it entices, or threatens, or lights the faggot. In every country (the Archdeacon observes) where it is the established religion, the government and people are anathematized, if they fail in the strict maintenance of an establishment: but here the principle is inverted; for Papists league themselves with heretics to undermine an establishment. Such an unnatural combination but flimsily conceals the private object: how else would the Romanist, who overrules the exercise of all

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