gitimacy. But mention the miseries of Ireland! Then William is a hero. Then Somers and Shrewsbury are great men. Then the revolution is a glorious era! The very same persons who, in this country, never omit an opportunity of reviving every wretched Jacobite slander respecting the whigs of that period, have no sooner crossed St. George's channel, than they begin to fill their bumpers to their glorious and immortal memory. They may truly boast that they look not at men, but at measures.

The advocates of Charles, like the advocates of other malefactors against whom overwhelming evidence is produced, generally decline all controversy about the facts, and content themselves with calling testimony to character. He had so many private virtues! And had James II. no private virtues? Was even Oliver Cromwell, his bitterest enemies themselves being judges, destitute of private virtues? And what, after all, are the virtues ascribed to Charles? A religious zeal, not more sincere than that of his son, and fully as weak and narrow-minded, and a few of the ordinary household decencies which half the tombstones in England claim for those who lie beneath them. A good father! A good husband!-Ample apologies indeed for fifteen years of persecution, tyranny, and falsehood!

We charge him with having broken his coronation-oath -and we are told that he kept his marriage-vow! We accuse him of having given up his people to the merciless inflictions of the most hot-headed and hard-hearted of prelates-and the defence is, that he took his little son on his knee and kissed him! We censure him for having violated the articles of the petition of right, after having, for good and valuable consideration, promised to observe them-and we are informed that he was accustomed to hear prayers at six o'clock in the morning! It is to such considerations as these, together with his Vandyke dress, his handsome face, and his peaked beard, that he owes, we verily believe, most of his popularity with the present generation.

For ourselves, we own that we do not understand the common phrase, a good man, but a bad king. We can as easily conceive a good man and an unnatural father, or a good man and a treacherous friend. We cannot, in estimating the character of an individual, leave out of our con-sideration his conduct in the most important of all human relations. And if, in that relation, we find him to have

been selfish, cruel, and deceitful, we shall take the liberty to call him a bad man, in spite of all his temperance at table, and all his regularity at chapel.

SECTION LXXXIV.

KING OF SPAIN A DISSECTOR.....Blackwood's Magazine.

King. I AM come to your apartment, Mr. Dissector, because I am desirous of examining the great work of the Creator-Man. You will, therefore, briefly demonstrate to me the anatomy of the human frame.

Doctor. The honour conferred upon me by your majesty, is one for which I cannot be sufficiently grateful. But anatomy I fear is a study little calculated to afford pleasure to princes. It requires much labour and application, and is therefore better suited to an humble subject like myself, than a great king, like your majesty.

King. You seem an old man, and must therefore have long studied your profession.

Doct. My hair is gray, your majesty, less from age than from intense study and the duties of my profession. I have lived amid disease and death, and laboured in poverty and distress. My life has been an obscure one, yet I trust not quite useless to my fellow-creatures. It has been

King. Enough! you will now proceed to the demonstrations I require of you. The body I perceive is cov

ered.

Doct. Nothing can escape the penetration of your majesty I feared the sight might be too shocking, and I

King. You are mistaken, let the covering be removed. Where did you procure this body?

Doct. It is the body of a galley slave, who died without receiving extreme unction, and was therefore denied the rites of christian burial, and sent thither for dissection. These are the features of Arguelles-your majesty may perhaps remember him. He was the chief of the traitorous Cortes, who betrayed your majesty and their country, during the unfortunate interregnum caused by the invasion of the French.

King. He never came to court, and I do not remember to have seen him; but I well know he was an enemy to

our holy church, which he attempted to ruin by the overthrow of the inquisition. For this he was condemned to the galleys a punishment only too lenient for such a crime. I had forgotten him, but I now wish to receive some further information with regard to him.

Doct. He was a man, your majesty, of noble and various attainments. He possessed a grand and powerful eloquence, which even those who condemned his reasoning could not hear unmoved. His learning was extraordinary, though unprofitable; for he read the works of heretics who wrote on liberty and emancipation, and they wrought in his brain like madness. The absence of your majesty, and the troubles of the kingdom unfortunately afforded him a theatre on which he was well qualified to act. He became a member of the Cortes, in which he found many enemies, but no rival. Yet even these were influenced by his talents, and with freedom on his lips, and revolution in his heart, he led the Cortes to betray their king, their country, and their religion. Time was when I could not have borne to behold his body thus exposed, for he was my friend, and I loved him as a brother.

King. Inform me what became of his family.

Doct. His wife died young, and left him but one son, whom he loved with even more than a father's love, and to whose education he devoted much of his time. On the return of your majesty, it was found that he had become a convert to the doctrines, and a party to the schemes of his father; and he too, was sentenced by your majesty to the galleys.

King. It was wisely done, for the breed of traitors and heretics must be extinguished before Spain can again be what she has been. Where milder arguments fail, a gibbet, or the galleys generally carry conviction; and, at all events, they prevent the spreading of the disease. I wish to know in what spirit Arguelles submitted to his punishment-and in what temper he died.

Doct. He often talked wildly, and imprecated blasphemous curses on your majesty, which filled all who heard them with horror. For this crime he was publicly flogged, and he became insane, and soon afterwards died. As he had never recanted his heresies, he was denied the rites of burial, and his father dug a pit with his own hands and laid his body in it. Arguelles, however, seemed little moved with his fate; indeed, the only smile I ever saw on his face was when I told him of his son's death. When

pressed by the priest to confess and receive absolution, he rejected it, nor would he declare in what faith he died. His religion, he said, was what only concerned himself, he had already confessed his sins to God, and in his mercy alone he trusted for absolution. His body, after death, was sent thither.

King. I have heard enough of him. Proceed Mr. Dissector to cut him up.

SECTION LXXXV.

EXTRACT FROM MR. BROUGHAM'S SPEECH ON THE FOREIGN POLICY OF ENGLAND.

I WOULD now call the attention of the noble lord in the blue ribbon, to some things which, though within his department, it is very possible he may not be aware of; because it is quite possible, that those military gentlemen whom he has planted as ministers and consuls in different places, how skilled soever in their own profession, may have failed to make any reports upon commercial arrangements, as things very much out of their line, if not below their notice. Does the noble lord now hear, for the first time, and, if he does, I am sure it should make a deep impression on his mind, that punishment has so swiftly followed guilt? Does he for the first time hear, that the fruits have already been gathered of the two worst acts in that system of wicked policy of which the noble lord is the advocate in this house, as he was the adviser elsewhere-that the very persons, in whose behalf those deeds were done, have even now set themselves in direct hostility to the interests of this country? If he has not before heard this, it may prove a useful lesson to him, and, I trust, it will not be thrown away upon public men generally, if I make known how those very individuals, for whose sake the noble lord sacrificed the honour of his country, and abandoned its soundest policy towards foreign states; those with whom after pulling down the usurper, he plunged into the deepest of all the public crimes that stained his course, and gave the ground for resisting him-that they now execrate or contemn the man who made himself the accomplice of their infamous projects? I suspect the noble lord's conscience already whispers to what I allude. I guess he is aware that

I am going to name Ragusa and Genoa-Ragusa and Genoa! where the name of England received a stain, that all our victories cannot wipe away, nor the services of the longest life of the greatest minister that ever lived could atone for. I will speak of Ragusa first: it is the smaller state, and, for that reason, I dwell upon it the most; because, if there be such a thing as political morality and political justice-if those words have any sense-they can only mean, that the rights and the liberties of the weaker states are to be protected by the more powerful; because, in the nature of things, public crime, the offence of one nation against another, must always consist of the strong trampling down the feeble. Have we not, without the least regard to the rights of a free people, parcelled out their country at our own discretion; and, from the liberty they were enjoying and the independence they were proud of, delivered them over to what they deemed subjugation and tyranny? Had they, the Ragusans, the people of Ragusa, the smallest share in the deliberations of the famous congress? They had no minister there-they had made no communication to the assembled negotiators-they had received none from thence. Their existence was hardly known, except by the gallant example they had set of shaking off, without any aid, the hated empire of France. And how did we requite them for this noble effort-nay, this brilliant service in what we cantingly termed "the common cause of nations?" We, who had sounded to the uttermost corners of the earth, the alarum of Bonaparte's ambition-we, who could never be satiated with invective against his despotism and injustice-we, who, in the name of freedom and independence, had called on the people of the whole globe, and on the Ragusans among the rest, and they at least had answered the summons, to rise up against him and overthrow his usurped dominion-we requited them by handing them over, in the way of barter, as slaves, to a power of which they detested the yoke!-But let the noble lord, and let this house, and let the world mark the retribution which has followed this flagitious act. Austria, extending her commercial regulations to all her new acquisitions, has absolutely shut our trade out of that very Ragusa, which we had betrayed into her hands; and thus has the noble lord received his punishment upon the spot on which he had so shamefully sacrificed the honour of his country!