its plains and valleys? Why should man alone be degenerate there? Surely it is written of it in heaven,-martyrs, and it had many, pray for their country, and not that their blood be laid to its charge; Paul trod its ground, or purposed to do so; and with his visit, or the thought of his visit, spread over that destination a cloud of prayers. Surely shall this land be recovered from the desolations of many generations! Surely shall a country so grandly and so independently set, with its harbours and headlands, amidst an almost circumfluous deep, not be lost to its continent, if that continent have any other task to fulfil! Once the pioneer, bursting open a way for that continent to a new world, we cannot forebode that all its work is done! When shall the nobler aspirations of a true religion soar in this people like their heaven-climbing mountains, and their spirits be free as their waves?

Thoughts, big and mighty, come to our aid and solace, when we mourn, in mortification and anguish, over the failures which history records. There was not wanting many a crisis when the Reformation seemed about to spring up in Spain. Personages were beheld in its monasteries and its palaces who might, from their peculiar conformation of character, have struck the blow. It appeared to hang as by a thread, whether it should not have claimed the glory of banishing persecution for ever from its shores, and of smiting it down for ever in the world. These results are constantly shadowed out, and we still wonder why they were withheld. But our mortal progress is slow; a large research is demanded to yield the proper conception. We must look afar. One Pleiad lost darkens not the heavens; endless concentricities do not deform them. But ours is the delight of the astronomer, who not only sees the successions of the firmament which strike the vulgar eye, but marks the influence of an inscrutable attraction bearing the entire sidereal system forward, notwithstanding its apparent intersecting rotation in its wonted paths,-some sublime pivot on which the whole vibrates, and some inconceivably wider orbit through which the whole revolves!

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ART. VIII. The Public and Private Life of Lord Chancellor Eldon, with Selections from his Correspondence. By HORACE TWISS, Esq. one of her Majesty's Counsel. In three volumes. Second edition. London: John Murray, Albemarle-street. 1844.

LORD CHANCELLOR ELDON was one of the most prominent actors in the great political drama which terminated the Georgian age. At the most critical juncture of that period, he was brought into public life. He chose his own part, certainly not a subordinate one, as it regarded the office which he held, whether we consider him as a lawyer or a statesman; while he occupied the anomalous position of being the keeper of the conscience of his sovereign, and at all times, and under all circumstances, that of his ready and obsequious minister. The consciences of the master and the servant never clashed. Wolsey's Ego et Rex meus' was, in the case of Lord Eldon, reversed, and it was the king who might have said Ego et Cancellarius meus.'

In almost every written communication, the emphatical phrase which his majesty employed in addressing this great officer of state was, the king has found his chancellor's letter 'the king is much pleased with his excellent chancellor's note'-'the king fully authorises his most excellent Lord Eldon.' No doubt, the personage thus addressed, persuaded his conscience that, in yielding to every dictate of the royal will, he was promoting the interests of his country. History will tell the result. The king's will, in matters of government, was the chancellor's law; and all the measures in parliament, which he either originated or supported, were not to advance constitutional liberty, but to stretch beyond all reasonable limits the prerogatives of the crown. To escape the storm of tumultuous democracy-a phantom which had been artfully conjured out of the French revolution, the Lord Chancellor, following the example of the memorable apostate ostensibly at the head of the administration, was ready to sacrifice the constitution to royal influence. With Lord Eldon and his colleagues, absolute monarchy was the panacea for popular discontent, which, though excited and aggravated by themselves, was to be annihilated by the total extinction of popular freedom. Toryism-such, happily, as is little known to the present generation-pervaded the country, and Eldon was its impersonation; a toryism so ruthless, that could its reign have been perpetuated, the Dey of Algiers might have envied the occupant of the British throne. A writer of the period thus describes the state of public affairs, when the office of attorney-general was entrusted by the monarch to

the man whom he well knew would, by a strange conscientiousness, united with the most unscrupulous disregard of all other interests, gratify the personal prejudices of his most gracious master by the sacrifice of the lives and liberties of his subjects, whom he had been taught to look upon as seditious and incorrigible rebels, because they had learnt their political catechism from the Duke of Richmond, and consistently carried out the reformed doctrines of his heaven-born minister, the now recreant son of Chatham.

We have seen the influence of an odious and unpopular 'court victorious during a long reign, in hostility to the pre'judice, and in defiance of the jealousy of the people. What, 'then, are we to expect from that increased and increasing influence, conducted, perhaps, with more dexterity in the cabinet, 'seconded with equal devotion in the House of Commons, and 'aided by the blind enthusiasm of a people, who are intoxicated 'by commercial prosperity, and infatuated by all the prejudices of the most frantic toryism? Under such a state of things, what can prevent the formation of an uncontrolled monarchy, and the absorption of every power by a court, from which Englishmen are to learn what remnant of personal security it 'will vouchsafe to spare, what formality of public freedom it will deign to endure, with what image of the constitution it will indulge and amuse an infatuated rabble.'

Then was the time, if wise and liberal statesmen had been at the helm, for the vessel of the state to have weathered the storm. If reform was expedient in 1782, it was imperative ten years afterwards; and the resolute denial of it then, by the very man who at the former period was its strenuous advocate, and by his colleagues in the administration, of which Lord Eldon became first the solicitor, and afterwards the attorney-general, together with the efforts made to tread out every spark of liberty kindled by popular enthusiasm, was the cause of all the political calamities with which the country struggled for nearly thirty years, and which, but for a reaction, the consequences of which, for evil or for good, it is impossible at this moment to calculate, would have made us not the envy, but the scorn of the civilized world.

Menaced by the predominance of a democratical or a monarchical spirit, give the people their rights,' said the writer before quoted, in a letter to the right honourable premier, who had just taken into his hands the reins of government, and

6

they will not be provoked to ask more; create an independent 'House of Commons, and the power of the crown will be 'checked; despotism and tumult will be equally averted; the 'peace of the country will be preserved; the liberty of the 'country will be immortalized.'

The deaf adder would not listen to the voice of the charmer, but condescended to practise artifices which we shall not just now attempt to designate. Pretending to be alarmed at the spirit which he had done more than any man in the country to excite, he persuaded the greater portion of the aristocracy, the monied interest, and the men whose talk is of bullocks, and the anomalous crowd that delighted in war, on account of the advantages they derived from it, that they were surrounded with perils the most imminent-that French principles and the Rights of Man had corrupted the body politic to the heart's core, and that nothing could save the nation but a suspension of the constitution. To avert imaginary dangers, he commenced a reign of real terror. The measures of the minister were infinitely more to be dreaded than the spirit of disaffection and revolt they were intended to suppress. There was a worse spirit than this abroad. The Birmingham riots were among its early demonstrations, and such men as Pitt and Castlereagh, Eldon and Ellenborough, were, in succession, its organs and representatives. Reeves, a Middlesex magistrate, and the principal organizer of the association against republicans and levellers,' that is, against those who, in 1795, maintained the principles which Mr. Pitt openly avowed and eloquently supported, at the great meeting of noblemen and members of parliament, at the Thatched House Tavern, in the year 1782,*-has given us a fair specimen

To some of our readers the following extract may convey information which might not otherwise fall in their way :

The Duke of Richmond

Lord Surrey

Lord Mahon

The Lord Mayor

Sir Watkin Lewes

Mr. Duncombe

Sir C. Wray

Mr. B. Hollis

'Thatched House Tavern, May 16, 1782. PRESENT,

The Hon. William Pitt
The Rev. Mr. Wyvill
Major Cartwright

Mr. John Horne Tooke
Alderman Wilkes

Dr. Jebb

Mr. Churchill

Mr. Frost

Mr. Withers

&c. &c. &c.

RESOLVED UNANIMOUSLY,

"That the motion of the HoN. WILLIAM PITT, on the 7th instant, for the appointment of a committee of the House of Commons, to inquire into the state of ⚫ the representation of the people of Great Britain, and to report the same to the house, and also what steps it might be necessary to take, having been defeated by a motion for the order of the day, it is become indispensably necessary that application should be made to parliament, by petitions from the collective body of the people in their respective districts, requesting a substantial reformation of the commons' house of parliament.' This resolution was followed by another, passed also unanimously, recommending that the sense of the people be taken, in order that their said petitions might be laid before parliament early in the next session, for the purpose of obtaining parliamentary reform, without which neither the liberty of the nation can be preserved, nor the permanence of a wise and virtuous 'administration can be secure.'

of the fundamental principle by which that spirit was actuated. He had the effrontery to declare, in a pamphlet published at the time, for which he was prosecuted and acquitted by a British jury, that the government of England is wholly monarchical; that the monarch is the stock from which have sprung those ' goodly branches of the legislature-the Lords and Commons; but that they are still only branches which may be lopped off, and the tree is a tree still-shorn, indeed, of its honours, but not, like them, cast into the fire. The kingly government may go 'on in all its functions without Lords or Commons; it has here'tofore done so for years together, and in our times it does so 'during every recess of parliament; but without the king his 'parliament is no more.' While they repudiated this language, the government had all along acted as if they believed every word of it. If a writer on the other side, in the heat of discussion, pressed the necessity of reform, and complained of the unconstitutional stretch of the royal prerogative, in terms that proved that he was sincere and in earnest, he was at once denounced as a leveller and revolutionist, and was fortunate indeed if he escaped the especial benefit intended to be conferred by that favourite measure of the king and his attorney-general-the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act; while Mr. Reeve, for a doctrine that would have disgraced Sacheverel, was acquitted, though tried by a jury, with the gentle animadversion forced by one of the jurymen upon the other eleven, as the price of his concurrence in the acquittal, that the publication was a very improper one, though the motives of the author were not of the criminal nature laid in the indictment.' That the people to whom republican and radical tendencies were imputed, were not driven and goaded by the tyranny of the Pitt administration into the wildest extravagancies of anarchy, proves that the imputation was not only unfounded, but that it was a base and ungenerous calumny. A people that could bear the yoke then imposed, which degenerated in its transmission through various hands, from Pitt to Perceval, from Perceval to Castlereagh, and all the time presided over by Eldon, till it was broken for ever by the glorious inconsistency of Wellington and Peel in passing the Catholic Relief Bill, deserve admiration for their untiring and ill-requited loyalty. We have alluded to the degeneracy of that system: and it has had its reward. It is now in the condition of Lord Chancellor Eldon, when playing at the game of commerce with the ladies of the royal family, Queen Charlotte and the princesses, which he thus humorously describesThrough Lord Eldon's bad luck or bad play, he had soon for'feited his three lives. In perfect ignorance, however, that this