Church were kept down by its intimate connexion with the state. But why was this? Because there cannot be any legal and recognised connexion between Church and state which shall not end in the degradation of the former ? So Mr. Dis

raeli appears to think, but in this we believe that he is mistaken. A Church which becomes dependent, as the Church of the Revolution did, on a particular class, and that a usurping class, which aimed at keeping under both the crown and the people, must lose its hold upon the people's affections. But this is the fault, not of the connexion between Church and state, but of that derangement of the social machinery which had thrown all the real powers of the state into the hands of an aristocracy, which, though designed, from its position, to operate as a drag both upon the crown and the people, should either encroach upon the well-understood privileges of the other, was never meant to exercise supreme authority in the state.

Mr. Disraeli is very eloquent upon the Venetian constitution which came with the house of Hanover, and continued till the passing of the Reformbill. We are inclined to think that he does not always understand what he is writing about, at least we earnestly hope so; for if the sentiments which he puts forth on this, and on other occasions, be those of the rising generation, then is England in a more melancholy plight than we take her to be in. For example, while we freely acknowledge that the Whig governments that came in with William, and continued throughout the reigns of the first Georges, were narrow-minded and cruel, both to the Roman Catholics of Ireland, and to the Protestant Episcopalians of Scotland, we must demur to the notion that there is any thing in Toryism, as it flourished under the last princes of the Stuart line, which authorises Mr. Disraeli, or any body else, to say that it gave the smallest countenance to the errors of Romanism. Out of the seven bishops who went to the Tower rather than submit to have the king's letter of indulgence read in their churches, not one gave his consent to the breach in the royal line; while several, as is well known, underwent the pains of

privation rather than renounce their allegiance to James himself. The truth is, that to exclude Romanists from places of power or trust under the crown, was just as much a principle of Toryism as of Whiggery. The difference between the two parties lay here, that the Whigs, hating the Church, because of the support given by Churchmen to the monarch, accused her of favouring the Papists, and gave all their countenance to Protestant Dissenters; whereas the Tories, aware that the Church was opposed equally to Papists and Puritans, rendered her their hearty support, partly through a sincere affection for her ritual and ordinances, partly because they regarded her as the nation's best bulwark against arbitrary power on the one hand, and democratic insolence on the other.

That Mr. Disraeli has failed in his endeavour to describe Toryism as it was, and as it bids fair to be again, when the present generation of trading statesmen shall have passed away, by no means surprises us. Mr. Disraeli looks but at the surface of things. Originally a Radical, then a Whig, by and by a Conservative, and now we really cannot tell what, he has no well-grounded principle to fall back upon; and hence, though clever enough to detect and expose the errors of the existing system of management, he loses himself quite whenever he proceeds to suggest a remedy. In his sneers at the newly invented term Conservatism we heartily concur. It is a word without a meaning; it continually suggests the question which Coningsby delights to put, "What is that you intend to conserve?" But we cannot say that we go with him much farther. For example, Mr. Disraeli is a warm advocate for the revival of rustic sports, and the systematic distribution by landowners of alms, and old-fashioned hospitality to their dependants. Mr. Lyle seems to be his beau idéal of an English landlord; and Mr. Lyle causes the great bell of his mansion to be rung once a-week, in order to make the surrounding tenantry aware that his hall-doors are open; and that the poor may be supplied with what they require. Now, this is pure fancy. You could no more revive

May games, and Witsuntide ales among the humbler classes, than you could create anew a taste for Ranelagh and Vauxhall Gardens among the higher. These things have, like the seasons, their rounds. They come and go with the times that speed onwards. Having once passed by, you may no more hope to recall them than to bring back the days before the flood. And as to the promiscuous doling out of broken victuals, which Mr. Disraeli seems so highly to favour, he may depend upon it that no good would result from the practice were it adopted universally to-morrow. Whether for good or for evil, the ideas of the poor in regard to these matters are not what they once were. If you desire to render your peasantry happy, yea, and respectable, too, in their own eyes, find for them steady employment; give them comfortable houses to inhabit, and attach to each a bit of garden-ground, in the cultivation of which at by hours the father and his sons may find both amusement and profit. But never lead them to depend on the hall for food to eat unless they have earned it. A peasant loses all respect for himself as soon as he becomes a weekly applicant at the squire's gate for a basin of broth or the scrag end of a neck of mutton.

But is this all that we have to say concerning the motives which are assumed to have operated in the breast of its clever author towards the concoction of Coningsby? By no means. Ostensibly, indeed, Mr. Disraeli stands forward in these volumes as the mouthpiece of a new party and the teacher of grave political truths to his countrymen. In reality, it may turn out that he is at once indulging his spleen against particular persons, and making an effort to win for himself a position in public estimation. Nobody, for example, can doubt that Mr. Croker has, somehow or another, inflicted an incurable wound on the self-love of Benjamin. We are sorry for it. It is a painful disease to labour under this same canker of the heart, and the party inducing it deserves reproof in public or in private. But if every disappointed aspirant after place feel at liberty to shew up the

individual who may have come between him and the first lord of the treasury, as Mr. Disraeli has in his Coningsby shewn up the Right Honourable John Wilson Croker, the sooner we get a more stringent law the better. Fie, fie, Benjamin! John Wilson may lie open to many attacks, but, all things considered, it was not quite becoming in you to commence them. And as to the hopes of political distinction which the author rests upon his present performance, we mistake the matter entirely if they ever come to be realised. The truth, and we speak it reluctantly, because Mr. Disraeli may be hurt by it, and perhaps charge us with a breach of confidence, but the plain and honest truth is, that whether in the house or out of it, Mr. Disraeli's opinions carry little weight with them. The new generation look for another kind of leader than he. They have their views of right and wrong, whe ther correctly formed or not we need not for the present stop to inquire, but views they have, fixed, determinate, and steady, which they will work out without putting themselves under the guidance of one in whom they have not much confidence. Mr. Disraeli greatly deceives himself if he imagine that the many young and ardent spirits which are at this moment dreaming of their country's regeneration will ever gather round one who has been all things, and, at the instigation of personal pique or personal vanity, may be all things again.

Are we, then, to part from such a performance as this without one word of praise to qualify our censure? Surely not. The book is an extremely clever book. There are scenes in it which any living writer might be proud to have delineated ; and the style, though grandiloquent throughout, is always pure and sometimes eloquent. But we would not be the author of Coningsby, as a whole, for thrice the sum which Mr. Colburn has paid for the copyright; though we dare say that it will have a very extensive sale, and that it will be followed ere long by another, if possible, more offensive to good taste and good manners.

THE sale of a great man's property (a man in whom posterity will take an interest) is no every-day exhibition. Thank Heaven that it is so, for it is one of the most painful and suggestive sights we can well contemplate or remember. A library contains the tools with which an author works-the flower the poet sucks from the sparks that kindle kindred thoughts-in other words, the books that have suggested or strengthened his conceptions, and given a tone, character, and colour to all his writings. The effects of an eminent artist embrace his studies made from celebrated pictures; his engravings after celebrated masters; the first rude gropings and groupings of his genius; the raw material of his pictures; the palette and pencils with which he has wrought his wonders, and shaped into all but breathing existence the creations and conceptions of his own fancy and observation. "We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain that we can carry nothing out." The grave closes over Sir David Wilkie and Robert Southey, and the hammer of the auctioneer disperses abroad the library of the one and the sketches and effects of the other. There is no bringing them together again, they are scattered like thistle-down before the winds of heaven; the sketches to instruct students yet unborn, and the books to inform new minds, or lie unused on the shelves of the incurious collector.

We have been led into this train of thought from the sale which took place at Messrs. Sotheby and Wilkinson's, last month, of the library of the celebrated Southey, the poet of Roderick, and the author of the Life of Nelson. Mr. Southey was, perhaps, the best read man of his age, the best, perhaps, in this country since Bishop Warburton (if we made an exception, we should make it in favour of Mr. Hallam). He was not, it is true, what Johnson would have called " a good Greek scholar," but he was well acquainted with that language, though not with the constructive niceties of dialect and grammar. He was an excellent Latin scholar, and quite an adept in all

the modern languages; the Spanish and Dutch authors standing preeminently forward in his favour. He had read every English book of consequence or merit, and pursued his studies into fields of reading usually unread. As he advanced in years his love of reading grew into a disease, and in his walks he was invariably accompanied by that communicative friend, a volume. He had all Richard Heber's thirst for books without Richard Heber's fortune. He bought largely, for his circumstances in life, and was obliged to do so from writing so much history as he wrote. A recluse among lakes and mountains, conversing, as he says, with books rather than with men, he was altogether dependent on the resources of his own mind and the treasures of his own library. There was no Bodleian or British Museum to fly to, so that every enjoyment and every source of information he had within himself.

The first sight of Southey's library on the shelves of an auctioneer brought back to our minds a passage in Mr. Wordsworth's beautiful but unequal epitaph on his friend :

"And ye loved books, no more Shall Southey gaze on you!" There was no closing our lips to prevent its half audible utterance; perhaps we were overheard and misunderstood. The sentiment at least was proper, and we spoke then as we would wish to speak and write, just as our full thoughts and better nature would prompt us.

The sale extended over sixteen days, and the number of volumes sold exceeded ten thousand. It was just that class and character of collection we had expected Mr. Southey to have formed; a well selected library of good and general literature, made by one more curious about the inner description of the book than the outward appearance of its leather and condition. He had few bright backs-Lewis and Russia, Hayday and morocco, Mackenzie and calf, had done nothing for his library; of large paper and fine tall copies he had few or none. His