dispersed, to warn the people against the seductions of the emissaries of insurrection, and to point out to them the inevitable consequences of resistance to the lawful authorities. Whatever the hopes or designs of the disaffected may have been, they were completely baffled; and though some excesses were committed in the country, and a few houses were broken into for the purpose of obtaining arms, no regular combined attempt was made to overturn the authority of the laws. Only in one instance was any resistance offered to the constituted powers. On the morning of the 5th of April, one of the Stirlingshire yeomanry, as he was proceeding from Kilsyth to join his troop at Falkirk, met a party of radicals, equipped some with muskets, some with pikes, and some with pistols. They demanded his arms; he refused; and, though five shots were discharged after him, escaped back uninjured to Kilsyth. The commanding officer there, immediately sent a detachment of eleven cavalry, supported by an equal number of yeomanry, to scour the road to Falkirk, and to fall in with the insurgents, if they were still to be found. The detachment soon came in sight of them. They had by this time increased in number; and having found some arms, and supplied themselves with food, in the houses in the neighbourhood, they had chosen as their post a piece of high ground in Bonnymuir, which commanded an extensive view on every side. As

the cavalry advanced, the insurgents quitted the high ground which they had occupied, and stationed themselves behind

a

stone-wall, from which they fired several times. The commander of the military detachment now called upon them to lay down their arms, and to surrender; but, instead of obeying, they replied with a loud cheer, that they had come there in order to fight, and instantly fired a volley. The mossy nature of the ground embarrassed the cavalry. This, with the stone-wall which was on their front, prevented them from charging straight forward, and forced them to make a circuit, in order, to enter by a gap. When the rebels observed this movement, some of them hastened to the gap for the purpose of defending it; but more than the half of them immediately ran off. They who still offered resistance, were instantly broken; many of them were severely wounded, and nineteen were made prisoners. Of the troops, three were wounded, besides their commanding officer: they had likewise one horse killed, and three wounded.

The greater number of the persons concerned in this petty insurrection, had come that morning from Glasgow, in the hope of finding, according to preconcerted arrangements, a large body of their associates, from all the adjacent districts, assembled on Bonnymuir. Their plan was, to have proceeded immediately from Bonnymuir, and to have taken possession of the Carron works. Here they were to have equipped themselves with artillery and arms; and a regular scheme of military operations was then to have been commenced. The precautions, however, which the magistrates and the military had taken throughout the country, deterred the ill-disposed from as

sembling at the appointed place of rendezvous: so that the few infatuated men, who had lost sight of common prudence, and adhered to their engagements, found their number to amount to only forty or fifty, instead of the four or five thousand on whom they had calculated. No other attempt at open resistance was made; and the failure of this extravagant venture, served at once to open the eyes of the deluded, and to crush the hopes of the deluders.

In the mean time, the vigilance of the government detected many of those, who, in different parts of the country, had been most active in spreading dissatisfaction, and in furthering measures for promoting a revolution. Numerous arrests took place in Renfrewshire, Lanarkshire, Dumbartonshire, Stirlingshire, and Ayrshire. On the very day of the skirmish at Bonnymuir, eleven supposed members of the committee for organizing a provisional government, were taken into custody at Glasgow; and, shortly afterwards, considerable quantities of ammunition and arms were seized. In a few days, the agitation, that had prevailed throughout the country,

subsided: the labouring classes returned to their ordinary course of life; and the late alarms were forgotten, except by the wretched individuals who awaited, in prison, the vengeance of the law.

Towards the end of July, and in the month of August, the persons who were in custody on charges of treason, were brought to trial before a special commission, which sat in the different counties, where the treasonable acts were charged to have been committed. Numerous convictions took place; but the royal mercy was extended to all, except three. One of these had long been an organizer of and trader in sedition: the other two had been engaged in the skirmish at Bonnymuir. Their execution, though a more melancholy, was a less disgusting scene, than that of Thistlewood and his associates : for the Scotch rebels died, some of them penitent, and all of them deeply impressed with moral and religious feelings, instead of avowing, like the Cato-street conspirators, and triumphing in, sentiments, which degrade man below the level of the beasts.

diminish, on my account, the amount of the reductions incident to my accession to the throne, I can have no wish, under circumstances like the present, that any addition whatever should be made to the Settlement adopted by parliament in the year 1816.

"My Lords and Gentlemen; "Deeply as I regret that the machinations and designs of the disaffected should have led, in some parts of the country, to acts of open violence and insurrection, I cannot but express my satisfaction at the promptitude with which those attempts have been suppressed by the vigilance and activity of the magistrates, and by the zealous co-operation of all those of my subjects, whose exertions have been called forth to support the authority of the laws. The wisdom and firmness manifested by the late parliament, and the due execution of the laws, have greatly contributed to restore confidence throughout the kingdom; and to discountenance those principles of sedition and irreligion which had been disseminated with such malignant perseverance, and had poisoned the minds of the ignorant and unwary.

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"I rely upon the continued support of parliament in my determination to maintain, by all the means entrusted to my hands, the public safety and tranquillity. "Deploring, as we all must, the distress which still unhappily prevails among many of the labouring classes of the community, and anxiously looking forward to its removal or mitigation, it is, in the mean time, our common duty, effectually to protect the loyal, the peaceable, and the industrious, against those practices

of turbulence and intimidation, by which the period of relief can only be deferred, and by which the pressure of the distress has been incalculably aggravated.

"I trust that an awakened sense of the dangers which they have incurred, and of the arts which have been employed to seduce them, will bring back by far the greater part of those who have been unhappily led astray, and will revive in them that spirit of loyalty, that due submission to the laws, and that attachment to the constitution, which subsists unabated in the hearts of the great body of the people, and which, under the blessing of Divine Providence, have secured to the British nation the enjoyment of a larger share of practical freedom, as well as of prosperity and happiness, than have fallen to the lot of any nation in the world."

In both Houses the address was voted without a dissenting voice. Indeed, the royal speech was so general in its language, and kept so completely clear of every thing which the spirit of party might lay hold of, that it was impossible to refuse to re-echo its sentiments.

The elections, notwithstanding the previously agitated state of the country, were conducted without any unusual violence or tumult; and their general result was such as, if it varied at all the relative parliamentary strength of the ministers and their opponents, was rather favourable to the goverument than otherwise. They probably were not much displeased with Hobhouse's victory over the Whig interest in Westminster; and in the city of London, the exclusion of the two aldermen, Waithman and Thorpe,

in favour of sir William Curtis and the lord mayor, was a signal triumph. Upon the whole, the new House of Commons found itself, in its composition and its attachments, little different from the former. It had gained no new ornaments; neither had it lost any of those, who were accustomed to take a large share in the management of business in it.

In the course of the session, however, it was deprived of one of its most eminent members. Mr. Grattan had come over to take his seat once more, for the especial purpose of again advocating the claims of the Catholics. Upon his arrival in London, he found himself in a state of health, which rendered him incapable of exertion; his infirmities increased; and he expired, without having again appeared in that House, which he had so often instructed and delighted. The claims of the Catholics was the last subject which occupied his thoughts: and in his dying hour, he exhorted them, how oftensoever they might be disappointed, to abstain from taking any part in the dissentions that might be occasioned by existing differences in the royal family, and never to make common cause with the abettors of radical reform, or of annual parliaments and universal suffrage.

Mr. Grattan may be regarded as the last of those celebrated parliamentary orators, who dignified the close of the eighteenth and the commencement of the nineteenth century. He had been the contemporary and the rival of Pitt, of Fox, of Sheridan, of Windham; and, if he did not surpass them, he exhibited at least a peculiar species of eloquence, (brilliant in itself, though sometimes

too profuse and too effeminate in its ornaments), in which no one came near him. In losing him, the House of Commons was deprived not merely of one of its most distinguished individuals, but of the last member, as it were, of the most illustrious band of orators, which it had ever possessed at any one time.

Sir James Mackintosh (June 13th) in moving a new writ for Dublin, paid the deceased that tribute of admiration to which he was so well entitled; and, ardent as the eulogy was, both sides of the House agreed with it in its full extent. Lord Castlereagh, Mr. Charles Grant, and Mr. Wilberforce, expressed their sentiments at length, with a warmth of admiration not inferior to that of Sir James Mackintosh. In the survey of the public services rendered by Grattan to his country, and of the modes in which his various talents had been displayed, two circumstances were more particularly deserving of attention. He was the only individual of the age, to whom, though in the situation of a private gentleman, and without either civil or military honours, parliament had voted a recompense for services rendered to the country; and he was the sole person in the history of modern orators, of whom it could be said, that he had arrived at the first class of eloquence in two parliaments, differing from each other in their habits, tastes, opinions, and prejudices. Confessedly the first orator of his own country, he came over to England at a time when the taste of the House of Commons had been rendered justly severe, by its habit of hearing speakers, such as the