and making acts of parliament, is mighty absurd, for that the real and true business of a House of Commons is, in fact, TO VOTE THE SUPPLIES. This has been quietly done, in the session that is past; therefore the session has been a good one, the ministry is a good ministry, and none but foolish or unreasonable people can find fault with either the one or the other.

Meanwhile, these men of honour, these men of noble birth, into whose hands a youthful and inexperienced female sovereign has fallen, seem to cast wholly aside, as a matter not worth their consideration, the positive damage they are inflicting, and the frightful risk they are bringing, on the interests of ONE, of whose affairs they are bound to be doubly, trebly, tenfold careful.

They may be reckless of these things, but it is matter of daily grief to all who feel as they ought to do, for the endangered throne of a betrayed princess, that the mean and despicable pertinacity, or rather adhesiveness, for there is no other equally appropriate word,→ of these selfish men, should draw around the pinnacles of the British monarchy so dark a canopy of clouds as at present enshrouds it.

One would naturally feel assured, that the first sentiment of a gentleman, Occupying the place now filled by Lord Melbourne, would be," If my continuance here should ever appear to be in the slightest degree detrimental to my mistress's interests, that instant I withdraw." Yet it is a matter the most indisputably evident, that his lordship's continuance about the queen is at this moment productive of the greatest injury to the crown; and still he perseveres in holding his place, and in adding to it the further and still more unpopular post of mayor of the palace.

thousands annually, for no practical purpose, that we can perceive, but to enable a young girl to set at naught the deliberately-formed judgments of millions of men, and to put the destinies of the world at hazard, merely to retain about her court one worn-out old roué of agreeable manners.

It has now been matter of common remark, ever since the month of May last, that the queen and her ministers

-the one to gratify her fancy, the other to retain their salaries — are putting the monarchical principle to a test the most severe to which it has ever been exposed. But this is not the only injury which Lord Melbourne is inflicting on his royal mistress. IIe is not content with a general tinge of unpopularity, reflected from himself upon the whole court, but he is perpetually, in matters of practical detail, giving positive and definite ground for complaint,-all which things, remaining unrebuked and unredressed, go to augment the perpetually-increasing feeling of dissatisfaction. Such an act was his brutal letter to the Dowager Marchioness of Hastings. Such another act was the presentation of Robert Owen, the apologist of promiscuous sexual intercourse, at the court of a virgin queen! Both these deeds were disgusting; a third, to which we have already adverted, is less offensive, but almost equally injurious, inasmuch as it lowers the monarchical office almost to the level of contempt. We allude to the ridicule brought upon the royal speeches in parliament by the carelessness and disregard of all proprieties with which they have lately been drawn up.

One of the most severe rebukes ever administered to a premier, was that of the Duke of Wellington in the late debate; when, after having repeated his sincere desire to see something like a government, by whomsoever it might be administered; his grace added the dry and cutting piece of advice, "that in future, before Lord Melbourne submitted a list of the measures to be recommended in the speech from the throne, he should consider those measures well before he inserted them in the speech,

that he should prepare those measures, and that he should be ready to introduce them into parliament the moment the business of the houses commenced."

sterling value of which will be admitted by every man that reads it, conveys in a not uncourteous manner the severest censure possible. It intimates-what is but too obviously the fact that heretofore, and especially during the last year or two, Lord Melbourne has taken a different, and a very reprehensible course. Instead of striving to elevate the royal speeches in character, which might easily have been done; and to render them both polished and dignified in style, and full of meaning in the matter, our off-hand premier seems to have dealt with them in his usual careless manner, as a form which must be gone through, but nothing more! But this is what will not now suit the public mind. The "march of intellect" demanded an improvement; instead of which, his lordship offers a deterioration. Again we say,-this is exposing the monarchical principle to a severe trial.

The sovereign issues forth from her palace in the plenitude of state, and enters the house of parliament, there to greet her faithful peers and commons, and to recommend to their consideration certain weighty matters of state. As we have already said, if the speaker of the House of Commons had discharged his duty with entire truth and candour, on the late prorogation, he would have been obliged to inform her majesty that no one of her recommendations had been attended to! But why is this? Simply because Viscount Melbourne, in preparing the speech for her majesty in February last, had just put down any thing that happened to come into his head, without in the least considering the probable risk he was thus making the sovereign encounter, of introducing matters to the notice of parliament which parliament might afterwards neglect or refuse to take up.

The result, of course, is, that the rank and estimation of these state documents, which had before been sufficiently low, and which any prudent minister would have endeavoured to raise, has now been reduced to a degree scarcely above contempt. Heretofore they have at least had the estimation of conveying a clear and definite view of the plans and intentions of the government. In future, if Lord Melbourne is to draw them, they will supposed do de dar

not even

and recommendations, if he will; no one will suppose that the actual adoption of any of those plans is at all the more certain for such allusion!

The only plea put in by the ministerialists in answer to these charges is, that the failure of all their plans is entirely owing to the Conservatives; for that ministers would have done all that they had promised, if the House of Lords would have allowed them.

This plea is, like all its predecessors, wholly false. There is no other word which will do justice to the case. We have already named the four topics which were especially indicated in the queen's speech, as deserving the immediate attention of parliament. One of these, the Improvement of the administration of the Law, has never even been named in parliament by the ministers. Another, the recommendations of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, was withdrawn by Lord John Russell without the least reference to any fear of a Conservative opposition. A third, the reconstruction of the Canadian constitution, was also withdrawn, or postponed, not from alarm at the Conservative array, but merely because ministers "could not see their way!" The fourth, and only the fourth, was actually submitted to the House of Lords, and was considerably altered by that body. This one, and this alone, out of the four, may be charged upon the peers, and they may be said to have been in some degree instrumental to its defeat; but if we look for an instant at its history, we shall see very clearly that the fault of its loss lay wholly with the ministers.

The cabinet knew very well beforehand what the House of Lords would accept, and what it would not. If it intended merely to offer to that house what it had twice before rejected, it purposed a deliberate waste of the time of the two houses; but we do not suppose that Lord John Russell really paltered with the subject after this fashion. We give him credit for really intending to pass the bill, and we know that the Conservatives meant the same thing. Why then was it not passed? A very few words will answer this question.

The ministry in this, one of the most disputed and critical points, had not remembered the expediency of doing what the Nuke of Wellington has now

their measures before they announced them in the royal speech.

As one consequence of this want of previous thought and arrangement, bills were produced in an incomplete and undigested state. In the case of the Irish Municipal-bill, the first draft was brought into the House of Commons on the 19th of February. On the 19th of April, two months afterwards, no fewer than thirty-four clauses, never seen in either of the former bills, and on an entirely distinct subject, were added. Still the measure was allowed to slumber, and was only finally passed through the Commons in the month of July! It then was remitted to the Lords; and because that house did not swallow a bill of 250 clauses at one gulp, it is now charged with faction! The peers, after deliberation, rejected the new clauses, which had not been thought of in the bills of 1837 or 1838; and then the ministers exclaim, that such rejection must be fatal to the bill! But on this brief history of the transaction, no one can be at a loss to say upon whom the blame of the failure ought justly to be charged.

We repel, then, the allegation, that the utter stand-still to which legislation now appears to be brought, is the fault of the Conservatives, as a charge wholly unsustained by the least iota of evidence; and we say, on the other hand, that this state of things is wholly chargeable upon the ministers themselves. They have two faults, either of which would abundantly account for their predicament. They are incompetent, and they are ill-disposed. The first is a perpetual cause of weakness

and of failure: the second increases the difficulty of their moving a step, inasmuch as it renders the Conservative party, in both houses, suspicious and apt to interpose a check.

Matters have, then, reached a climax. The "dead lock," of which we have long been talking, is now in full operation. It would have driven any other ministry than the present from their posts; but it merely throws our present managers upon the desperate resort of assuring us that legislation is by no means a necessary thing; that " passing laws is only an incidental and subsidiary part of the duty of parliament;' and that its main and "principal duty is" the passing votes of supply!

This piece of assurance, however, will not stand them in much stead. It will disgust rather than appease the people. It is, however, clearly intended to be final. Nothing can be said after this. The man who could venture such a plea could never have intended to expose himself to future remembrances of it. This autumn,— this year's registration-is undoubtedly looked to as the deciding period of the controversy. If the Conservatives will but hold their ground, and maintain a gallant fight throughout the next two months, the issue will probably be, that on the approach of the next parliamentary session, a comparison of the respective strength of the two parties will be made; and the Whigs, to avoid the disgrace and the damage of a defeat in the open field, will sound a parley, and offer to march out of Downing Street with the honours of war.

Mutato nomine! Had he thus written of Flaxman, there might have been some truth in the comparison and justice in the remark; but Flaxman had the misfortune to be born an Englishman, and was hence doomed in the early part of his life to toil for a pottery; to support himself at Rome by making guinea designs; and to spend the remainder of his days in modelling busts for the illustrious obscure, or monuments of which we have hardly an engraving; whilst riches and distinctions, titles and honours, little short of those paid to the divine Raphael, were the portion of the more fortunate and inferiorly gifted Italian.

There are some whose visual organs perceive objects less distinctly and justly near than at a distance. It is thus with my memory; for though many years have elapsed since I visited Rome, Canova's studio, his dazzling casts, the very arrangement of them in his galleries, nay more, the magician and creator of this world of beauty, came back upon my mind in forms so palpable, so like reality, that in the figurative language of Dante, "I see them there."

In the spring of 1821, the time of which I am speaking, it would have been considered little short of sacrilege to have doubted the infallibility of Canova, or the faultlessness of any work of his; a pilgrim to Delphi might as well have denied the divinity of Apollo in the zenith of his power. But, as the Greek tragedian says of prosperity, "Call no man happy till the hour of his death;" thus we may say of fame, call no man great till he has seen the grave. The moral, you will say, should have come at the end of the chapter. Well!

One day, after worshipping the divinities of his temple, and holding muto parlare with his "Napoleon," I entered a room where I found myself with the Pygmalion himself, whom, though I had never before seen, I had no difficulty in discovering to be Canova. Like Flaxman, he was rather below the common height; his figure slight and attenuated, as I judged from his appearance, more by severe mental labours than constitutional ill health. His mild and intelligent countenance had a defined and handsome Italian outline, and made, as may be seen by his own bust, an admirable profile.

His eyes were deeply sunk under his projecting brows, but within their sockets beamed the light of genius; and his high and scarcely wrinkled forehead was the seat of an elegant rather than a profound mind.

There was a simplicity in his manners, an expression of placidity in his features, and a gentle courteousness in his address, which contrasted forcibly with the companions, "Mars" and "Venus," with whom he was engaged. He soon discovered by my accent that I was an Englishman, and fell freely into conversation, having for that purpose discontinued the use of his chisel and mallet which he continued to hold. The group was in a great state of forwardness; so much so, that it hardly seemed to require the last touches he was giving to the face of "Venus" as I entered. "This," said he, "is a commission of George the Fourth; and I fear he will be disappointed when he sees these unfortunate stains in the marble, which I had hoped would have turned out a more beautiful block." I asked him how he accounted for the Greek statues which have come down to us being so blemishless. He replied, "That doubtless those sculptors who made immortality the end and aim of their labours, condemned to destruction all works, however advanced, in which such disfigurements shewed themselves."