every man who dared to name himself the friend of a cabinet which six months before had possessed the overflowing confidence of the nationwhich had, by its sole strength, accomplished a measure too strong for all the powerful cabinets during the last half century, and which, on the completion of that measure, had seemed entitled to sit down in the full security of acknowledged and established power.

Instead of this security the cabinet saw all shaken without a conceivable cause. They saw the country covered with more than metaphoric flame, and distress threatened by the spreading destruction of years' provision. On their entrance within the doors of Parliament, they were met by a desperate defiance. Ministers found themselves fighting the battle of the constitution alone; for it was not merely now a conflict of party, but a subversion of principle. The constitution was, for the first time, in danger. A new power, unknown since the great rebellion, Radicalism, appeared in the Legislature, ready for the wildest commotions, and, contemptuous of all disguise, demanding a republic.

Whiggism made its assault without delay. Lord Grey, in his speech on the address, strongly objected to the language of the royal speech, which had characterized the Belgian insurrection as "a revolt." "All this sounded," said his lordship, "like threatened interference, while our policy should have been, as in the case of France, non-interference." But this language was merely preliminary to the true principle of his speech. "We ought," said he," to learn wisdom from what was passing before our eyes; and when the spirit of liberty was breaking out all around, it was our first duty to secure our own institutions, by introducing into them a temperate reform."

Thus was sounded the trumpet, yet with how feeble a tone compared to the rude and desperate blast of those who have since taken it into their hands! "That reform, "added his lordship, "he did not found on any abstract right. We had been told that every man who paid taxes, nay, who had arrived at years of discretion, had a right to vote for representatives. The existence of such a right he utterly denied. The right of the people was, to have a good government, one

calculated to secure their privileges and happiness; and if it was incompatible with universal, or very general suffrage, then the limitation, and not the extension, was the right of the people." His lordship was still deplorably behind the "march of his age." In the House of Commons, Mr Brougham gave notice of a motion for reform, and, like Lord Grey, protested against being charged with extravagance on the subject. He said, "that he had been represented, and that, from no good motive, as desirous of introducing a radical sweeping innovation, or, he might more correctly designate it, a revolutionary reform. This assertion, however, was devoid of truth. He was resolved to take his stand on the ancient ways of the constitution. Whatever might be the plan he would propose, it would be propounded with a view to conciliate the friends of that constitution, as it existed originally in its days of purity and vigour."

The cabinet now saw its days numbered. On the 15th of November, on the motion of Sir Henry Parnell for a "committee on the civil list," ministers were left in a minority of 29, 233 voting for the motion, and 204 against it. On the next day, the Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel, disdaining to keep the emoluments of power without the honours, announced that his Majesty had accepted the resignation of their offices. A new administration was formed, with Lord Grey at its head; Lords Melbourne, Palmerston, and Goderich, as the home, foreign, and colonial secretaries; Mr Brougham as lord chancellor; Sir James Graham at the admiralty; Lord Althorp as chancellor of the exchequer; and the Marquis of Lansdowne as president of the council.

Whiggism had now obtained power, and it recklessly proceeded to adopt measures for making that power perpetual. It had once been aristocratic, in the haughtiest spirit of aristocra

cy.

In its fall it had stooped to the lowest flattery of the populace; it now pledged itself to the doctrines of change. Of all public wants, a reform of Parliament had been the least felt by the nation. It had been a habitual pretext, a trick, a tub to the whale ; always the refuge of Whiggism when cast out from power, and always contemptuously abandoned when power was capable of being reached again.

Fox had always used it in his day of difficulty, as a mendicant affects the crippled leg and the professional whine, but throws them both aside when he has extracted alms enough to enable him to carouse. The Whigs had been the great boroughmongers, the keepers of the key of representation, the established dealers in all that constituted influence; and it was not until Pitt broke down their corporate commerce, their traffic in the constitution, that they had ever discovered the virtue of appealing to the mob.

The Reform Bill was brought in. We shall not now discuss this one-sided measure. It has long since been stigmatized by the men who then proclaimed it a necessity of the state. It has been scorned by Radicalism as a deception, and denounced by Whiggism as a failure; its only supporters have been found in those who, accepting it as the will of Parliament, obeyed it as the law of the land. But no man loved it either then or now-the Whigs took it as the child of Lord Grey's decrepitude, soon grew weary of their nursling, and have fluug it on the highway. The Conservatives are now the only protectors of the Reform Bill.

There never had been a measure less required, if we are to judge of the necessity of public measures by the only true standard-calm, consistent, and continued public demand. The people had forgotten it for fifty years. The empire had gone through peace and war-the whole succession of all that tries a government and a peoplewithout a sense of the privation. No man had uttered a syllable of enquiry for the "Whig elixir," of which the first draught was to banish public disease, and make national existence imperishable. This is not the history of things essential to relieve the hunger and thirst of states. With all the intrigue of Whiggism, driven to rely on this single topic for their last hope of popularity, the preceding ten years had been totally unproductive. In 1821, there had been but nineteen petitions for reform; in 1822, but twelve a strong pressure on the screw, in 1823, had forced them up to twenty-nine; but, like all fictitious impulses, the strain produced exhaustion. From 1823 to 1829, not a single petition was sent in-so careless was the British empire of the food which Whiggism declared to be the national bread. Thus evidently

had England disdained to breathe the reform "air, without which it must die." Even in 1830, with all the efforts of Whiggism in sight of power, the petitions were but fourteen. But at that moment, the French "three days" threw a new force into the hands of party. The explosion which moved the throne of the Bourbons from its foundation, laid open to the day the strength of those dark and dangerous materials which lie under the surface of all free governments; the Whigs instantly turned from the people to the populace, and the first levy of revolution was in the field.

On the 1st of March 1831, the Reform Bill was brought in by Lord John Russell. We pass over a discussion now become obsolete, and allude to it merely to show with what strange facility Whiggism can abandon its gravest opinions for the convenience of the hour. Sir Robert Peel, in a speech of remarkable force, after unanswerably proving the emptiness of the pretexts for reform, turned the lash on the mover of the bill,"What," said he, "was the language of the noble lord in 1819, when the topic before the House was the disfranchisement of a corrupt Cornish borough? It was this, that a general disfranchisement of the unconvicted boroughs must be considered as a reconstruction of the House of Commons. Old Sarum had existed when Montesquieu pronounced the Constitution of England the nearest to perfection of any which the most enlightened states had ever experienced,-when Lord Somers, and the other great legislators and philosophers who flourished with him, bore attestation to its merits, it was open to the same objections which were since urged against it; when Hampden lost his life, Rutland returned the same number of representatives as Yorkshire. He was not inclined, with the pseudo-merchant in the fable, to ery new lamps for old,' neither would he willingly throw our political system into the wheel, on the chance of obtaining a prize in the lottery of constitutions."

Such," said his powerful castiga. tor, "had been the noble lord's warning against the danger of rashly departing from the practical wisdom of mankind, during centuries of experience; proffered too at the critical juncture of the year 1819, when the Six Acts' had passed, when the

Seizure of Arms bill, the Blasphemous Libel bill, and the Newspaper Stamp bill, were in actual progress through the House. If such was the line of the noble lord's argument in 1819, he, in his lordship's own language, would now call upon the House to prefer the solid ancient lamp of the Constitution to the tinsel of modern sophistry."

The second reading of the bill was carried but by a majority of one among 603 members-the largest House on record-302 for the bill, 301 against it, and that one an individual who had formed a part of the late ministry, and had even spoken strongly against the first reading within a few weeks after this fatal act, he died by his own hand.

This majority was a virtual defeat of ministers. The bill was evidently lost in this parliament, and on the 11th of May it was dissolved.

Popular agitation was now the sole instrument, "The Bill, the whole Bill, and nothing but the Bill," was the general watchword; as if the bill was the exclusive purpose of Parliament. Pledges were universally demanded at the hustings. The right of the electors to bind the representative was unhesitatingly claimed ; and in this subversion of the first principle of Parlia ment, a House was returned, charged to give additional security to the Constitution. That House soon showed how far it was disposed to tread beyond the bound of even its heated predecessor. On the 4th of July the second reading was carried by a majority of 136, in a House of 598. But the peers were still unshaken-the bill was thrown out in the Lords by a majority of forty-one.

In 1832 it was renewed, and carried in the Commons by a majority of 110; 355 for the motion, and 239 for the amendment. A popular clamour was then raised against the peers. A popular leader in the House declared that ministers had been armed with full powers for a creation of peers, and threatened them with impeachment unless they exercised those powers to carry the Reform Bill through the Lords. Such is the liberty of opinion, allowed by power in the dictation of the populace. Yet the second reading was carried only by a majority of nine, 184 against 175. The resistance in the Committee was more determined. Ministers were defeated by a majority of 35. The

king refused to create peers to counteract this opposition ministers resigned; returned; and the opposing peers withdrew. Finally the bill was carried; receiving the royal assent by commission, though the king had been violently called on by the press and the populace to give the last sign of his approval, by his personal presence at the ceremony. Thus, on the 7th of June 1832, was the Reform Bill made the law of the land. Whiggism was now in full power, and a new and unbounded horizon was opened to popular change.

It is not within our purpose to go into the detail of the subsequent years. The course of Whiggism fully justified all the fears and all the contempt of the country. It was seen to be wholly incapable of decided counsel, and wholly influenced by the circumstances of the hour; not a great directing principle, guiding the various currents of the national opinion into one large and healthful movement, one regular and beneficent tide; but a feeble and halfwitted propensity to hazard every dan. ger, and then fly from it at the moment it assumed a form; science, bewildered by every current that crossed its course; and courage, that, after the haughtiest boasts of piloting the national ship through all tempests, was ready to run her on shore at the sight of the first cloud.

The Irish agitator, himself but the agent of the Irish priesthood, became their chief counsellor for Ireland. He ruled them with a rod of iron, and a simple attempt to act without his approval ruined the ministry. The growing violence of Irish conspiracy had made some restraint palbably necessary. A Coercion bill was introduced. Its clauses were reprobated by the agitator. The Chancellor of the Exchequer instantly threw up office. The Premier followed his example with singular speed, and the cabinet seemed to be extinguished; but after a long and complex game, still unintelligible if it were ever worth comprehending, Lord Althorp announced the formation of a new ministry out of the old materials, with Lord Melbourne at its heada réchauffé of the cabinet dish, of which the nation had become sick under its old form. No culinary art of Downing Street could ever render it palatable again. But what office was provided for Lord Grey? If the philoso

phers declared that the sight of a hero struggling with the storms of fate was a sight for the gods, they had not defined for what class of spectators a broken Whig, remorselessly flung from the place which it had cost him half a century of feverish struggle to reach was to be the admiration or the amusement. But his lordship's fall was complete; he never returned to power. The French orator who said that the Revolution, like Saturn, had devoured its own children, would have reversed the figure for his lordship, and described him as the Saturn in his decrepitude, deprived of power, mutilated, and fettered, to stand by and form a part of the pageant of the unfilial usurper who had dispossessed him of the throne.

The

We must now have done. succession of the Melbourne cabinetthe "appropriation compact" of Lichfield House-the measures involving the discipline, revenues, and existence of the Protestant church in England and Ireland-the affected resignation of ministers in 1839-their restoration by the new and anomalous agency of the ladies of the bedchamber-are topies which history will pass over in willing and contemptuous silence, and which are almost too frivolous even for the slight and general sketching of the periodical page.

But the higher question presses on the country-Is England to be henceforth governed by chance, or by the constitution? A breathing-time has been given to her to decide. She has before her at this moment the choice which may mould the whole future good or evil of her empire. On the one side stand the Conservatives, headed by the first names of the country, Wellington and Peel-experienced in council, vigorous in administration, popular with every man of honour with every man who can admire eminent abilities, and with every man who desires to see the first soldier of Europe and the first statesman of England guiding the vast resources, inspiring the ardent mind, and fulfilling the mighty duties of England to the world. On the other hand, we see a shattered and unpurposed partya general gathering of the remnants of fallen cabinets-too feeble to stand on its own limbs, and therefore clinging for hourly support to others; too unprincipled to regard the nature of that support, and therefore bargaining

for help alike with all the passers-by; now hanging on the skirts of the papist, now on those of the sectarian, now sending out a supplication to the Radical, and content to live in dependence, and do the drudgery of all in

turn.

What, if the country has not already felt suffering as she has felt shame: What, if she has been, against all hope, marvellously protected from revolutionary insolence and foreign aggression: What, if she has not long since experienced the national disease arising from this handling of contagion and decay-we can ascribe it only to the Great Disposer, who had made her the depositary of religion and liberty for mankind, and who wills that her mission shall not yet be closed. One generous, bold, and combined effort would rescue the country. Ministers have virtually acknowledged that they cannot carry on the business of the country; their own House of Commons has voted them incapable; they stand now only holding the badges of office in their hands until their successors advance to take them. They stand now like servants discharged from their master's presence, and waiting now only to strip off their liveries. They are utterly extinguished; and though the polypus will propagate when cut to pieces, and the parts of the dissevered worm will creep away with equal vitality, we cannot believe that the present Cabinet is capable of any further existence, however writhing a reptile. The elections must decide, and well will it be for England if she there "does her duty." We are convinced, that upon this hour vast consequences depend. The state of Europe is threatening-the spirit of violence is growing in Ireland-Chartism and Socialism are arrogantly boasting of their designs among ourselves. Is this the prospect that will induce us to trust in men who have sunk in times of general peace; who, in the midst of public prosperity, have lowered the finances by annual millions; and with the most unusual confidence of the throne, and the keenest alliance with the most daring portion of the people, after a ten years' trial, have fallen on their knees, and, not hoping to find approbation, are scarcely venturing to ask acquittal, at the great tribunal of the empire.

WHILE Mr Pounce and Mr Quod, after their own quaint fashion, are doing decisive battle with each other, as it were, in a remote corner of the field of action; while-to change the figure-Mr Titmouse's pedigree is being subjected to the gloomy, silent, and mysterious inquisition of the ecclesiastical court, let us turn for a moment to contemplate a pitiable figure, a victim of the infernal machinations of Mr Gammon-I mean the poor old Earl of Dreddlington. He was yet a month after the death of his unhappy daughter, Lady Cecilia-staggering under the awful shock which he had experienced. Before he had been in any degree restored to consciousness, she had been buried for nearly three weeks; and the earliest notification to him of the melancholy occurrence, was the deep mourning habiliments of Miss Macspleuchan, who scarcely ever quitted his bedside. When, in a feeble and tremulous voice, he enquired as to the cause of her death, he could get no other account of it-either from Miss Macspleuchan, his physicians, or the Duke of Tantallan-than that it was occasioned by the shock of suddenly seeing his lordship brought home seriously ill, she being, moreover, in a very critical state of health. When, at length, he pressed Miss Macspleuchan upon the matter, and challenged her as to the real cause of what had happened-viz. the blighting discovery of Mr Titmouse's illegitimacy-she resolutely maintained that he was labouring altogether under a delusion-indeed a double delusion; first, as to his imaginary conversation with Mr Gammon, and secondly, as to his supposed communication of it to Lady Cecilia. Her heart was smitten, however, by the steadfast look of mournful incredulity with which the Earl regarded her from time to time; and, when alone, she reproached her

self in tears with the fraud she was practising upon the desolate and broken-hearted old man. The Duke, however, seconded by the physician, was peremptory on the point, believing that otherwise the Earl's recovery was impossible; and as his Grace invariably joined Miss Macspleuchan in scouting the mere mention of the matter as but the figment of a disordered brain, the Earl was at length silenced if not convinced. He peremptorily prohibited Mr Titmouse, however, from entering his house-much more from appearing in his presence; and there was little difficulty in causing him to appear satisfied that the sole cause of his exclusion was his cruelty and profligacy towards the late Lady Cecilia : -whereas, with a sickening inward shudder, he was apprised of the real reason by Mr Gammon. Very shortly after the Earl's illness, the Duke of Tantallan had sent for Mr Titmouse to interrogate him upon the subject of his lordship's representations; but Mr Gammon had been beforehand with the Duke, and thoroughly tutored Titmouse-dull and weak though he was -in the part he was to play, and which Mr Gammon made as easy to him as possible. He started with well-feigned astonishment, indignation, and disgust, as soon as the Duke had mentioned the matter, and said very little (such were Gammon's peremptory injunctions)-and that little only in expression of amazement that any one could attach the slightest importance to the mere wanderings of a disordered brain. 'Twas certainly a ticklish matter, the Duke felt, to press too far, or to think of entrusting it to third parties. His Grace very naturally concluded, that what his own superior tact and activity had failed in eliciting, could be detected by no one else. He frequently pressed Mr Gammon, however, upon the subject; but