his own personal versatility, attained, in the world of politics, what Shakspeare, by the versatility of his characters, achieved for the world in general, namely, such a universality of application to all opinions and purposes, that it would be difficult for any statesman of any party to find himself placed in any situation, for which he could not select some golden sentence from Burke, either to strengthen his position by reasoning, or illustrate and adorn it by fancy. While, therefore, our respect for the man himself is diminished by this want of moral identity observable through his life and writings, we are but the more disposed to admire that unrivalled genius, which could thus throw itself out in so many va rious directions with equal splendour and vigour. In general, political deserters lose their value and power in the very act, and bring little more than their treason to the new cause which they espouse :— "Fortis in armis

Casaris Labienus erat; nunc transfuga vilis.”

'But Burke was mighty in either camp; and it would have taken two great men to effect what he, by this division of himself, achieved. His mind, indeed, lies parted asunder in his works, like some vast continent severed by a convulsion of nature,—each portion peopled by its own Giant race of opinions, differing altogether in features and language, and committed in eternal hostility with each other.

There is an excellent account of the public and private rupture between this great man and Mr Fox, from which we have no room to make extracts. We do not know, however, that the true ground of the distinction between our Revolution in 1688, and that upon which these illustrious friends now differed, in France, were ever so clearly stated as in the few following words of Mr Moore. There was, in truth, but little similarity between them,-the task of the former being to preserve liberty, that of the latter to destroy tyranny; the one being a regulated movement of the Aristocracy against the Throne, for the Nation, the other a tumultuous rising of the whole Nation, against both for itself.'

In some parts of the following passage on the war policy of Mr Pitt, the temperate and impartial tone which is in general so steadily maintained throughout these volumes, may appear to be lost, in the ardour of an eloquent crimination: But the undeniable truth of the facts, and the singular importance of the cause, may excuse some warmth even in an historian; and the concluding sentences seem at all events to prove, that the author's judgment was not warped, even on this occasion, by personal or party favour.

In judging of the policy of Mr Pitt, during the Revolutionary war, his partisans, we know, laud it as having been the means of salvation to England, while his opponents assert that it was only prevented by chance from being her ruin-and though the event gives an appearance of triumph to the former opinion, it by no means removes or even weakens the grounds of the latter. During the first nine years of his administra

tion, Mr Pitt was, in every respect, an able and most useful minister, and, "while the sea was calm, showed mastership in floating." But the great events that happened afterwards took him by surprise. When he came to look abroad from his cabinet into the storm that was brewing through Europe, the clear and enlarged view of the higher order of statesmen was wanting. Instead of elevating himself above the influence of the agitation and alarm that prevailed, he gave way to it with the crowd of ordinary minds, and even took counsel from the panic of others. The consequence was a series of measures, violent at home and inefficient abroad—far short of the mark where vigour was wanting, and beyond it, as often, where vigour was mischievous.

When we are told to regard his policy as the salvation of the country-when (to use a figure of Mr Dundas) a claim of salvage is made for him, it may be allowed us to consider a little the nature of the measures, by which this alleged salvation was achieved. If entering into a great war without either consistency of plan, or preparation of means, and with a total ignorance of the financial resources of the enemy-if allowing one part of the Cabinet to flatter the French Royalists, with the hope of seeing the Bourbons restored to undiminished power, while the other part acted, whenever an opportunity offered, upon the plan of dismembering France for the aggrandizement of Austria, and thus, at once, alienated Prussia at the very moment of subsidizing him, and lost the confidence of all the Royalist party in France, except the few who were ruined by English assistance at Quiberon-if going to war in 1793 for the right of the Dutch to a river, and so managing it that in 1794 the Dutch lost their whole Seven Provinces-if lavishing more money upon failures than the successes of a century had cost, and supporting this profusion by schemes of finance, either hollow and delusive, like the Sinking Fund, or desperately regardless of the future, like the paper issues-if driving Ireland into rebellion by the perfidious recall of Lord Fitzwilliam, and reducing England to two of the most fearful trials, that a nation, depending upon Credit and a Navy, could encounter, the stoppage of her Bank and a mutiny in her fleet-if, finally, floundering on from effort to effort against France, and then dying upon the ruins of the last Coalition he could muster against her-if all this betokens a wise and able minister, then is Mr Pitt most amply entitled to that name ;— then are the lessons of wisdom to be read, like Hebrew, backward, and waste and rashness and systematic failure to be held the only true means of saving a country.

6

Had even success, by one of those anomalous accidents, which sometimes baffle the best founded calculations of wisdom, been the immediate result of this long monotony of error, it could not, except with those to whom the event is every thing-" Eventus, stultorum magister" —reflect back merit upon the means by which it was achieved, or, by a retrospective miracle, convert that into wisdom, which chance had only saved from the worst consequences of folly. Just as well might we be called upon to pronounce Alchemy a wise art, because a perseverance in its failures and reveries had led by accident to the discoveries of Chemistry. But even this sanction of good-luck was wanting to the unredeemed mistakes of Mr Pitt. During the eight years that intervened

between his death and the termination of the contest, the adoption of a far wiser policy was forced upon his more tractable pupils; and the only share that his measures can claim in the successful issue of the war, is that of having produced the grievance that was then abated—of having raised up the power opposed to him to the portentous and dizzy height from which it then fell by the giddiness of its own elevation, and by the reaction, not of the Princes, but the People of Europe against its yoke.

What would have been the course of affairs, both foreign and domestic, had Mr Fox-as was, at one time, not improbable-been the Minister during this period, must be left to that superhuman knowledge, which the schoolmen call" media scientia," and which consists in knowing all that would have happened, had events been otherwise than they have been. It is probable that some of the results would not have been so different as the respective principles of Mr Pitt and Mr Fox might naturally lead us, on the first thought, to assert. If left to him

self, there is little doubt that the latter, from the simple and fearless magnanimity of his nature, would have consulted for the public safety, with that moderation which true courage inspires; and that, even had it been necessary to suspend the Constitution for a season, he would have known how to veil the statue of Liberty, without leaving, like his rival, such marks of mutilation on its limbs. But it is to be recollected that he would have had to encounter, in his own ranks, the very same patrician alarm, which could even to Mr Pitt give an increase of momentum against liberty, and which the possession of power would have rendered but more sensitive and arbitrary. Accustomed, too, as he had long been, to yield to the influence of Burke, it would have required more firmness than habitually belonged to Mr Fox, to withstand the persevering impetuosity of such a counsellor, or keep the balance of his mind unshaken by those stupendous powers, which, like the horses of the Sun breaking out of the Ecliptic, carried every thing they seized upon so splendidly astray"quaque impetus egit,

Hac sine lege ruunt, altoque sub æthere fixis

Incursant stellis, rapiuntque per avia currum.”

His notice of the conversion of Mr Windham and other illustrious alarmists to the side of the Minister, in 1794, is distinguished by the same calmness and impartiality,—though he cannot refrain from observing, that

It is to be regretted that, in almost all cases of conversion to the side of power, the coincidence of some worldly advantage with the change should make it difficult to decide upon the sincerity or disinterestedness of the convert. That these Noble Whigs were sincere in their alarm there is no reason to doubt; but the lesson of loyalty they have transmitted would have been far more edifying, had the usual corollary of honours and emoluments not followed, and had they left at least one instance of political conversion on record, where the truth was its own sole reward, and the Proselyte did not subside into the Placeman.'

In what he says of Mr Canning's first introduction into public life, there is the same spirit of perfect candour and dignity. That distinguished person had been bred up in Whig principles, and in the particular circle of Sheridan, who had even

announced, somewhat rashly, in the House of Commons, the accession which his party was likely to receive in his talents and energy. But before committing himself in public, the young statesman took other counsel—and came out under the auspices of the Minister.

However dangerous,' says Mr Moore, 'it might be to exalt such an example into a precedent, it is questionable whether, in thus resolving to join the ascendant side, Mr Canning has not conferred a greater benefit on the country than he ever would have been able to effect in the ranks of his original friends. That Party, which has now so long been the sole depositary of the power of the State, had, in addition to the original narrowness of its principles, contracted all that proud obstinacy in antiquated error, which is the invariable characteristic of such monopolies; and which, however consonant with its vocation, as the chosen instrument of the Crown, should have long since invalided it in the service of a free and enlightened people. Some infusion of the spirit of the times into this body had become necessary, even for its own preservation,-in the same manner as the inhalement of youthful breath has been recommended, by some physicians, to the infirm and superannuated. This renovating inspiration the genius of Mr Canning has supplied. His first political lessons were derived from sources too sacred to his young admiration to be forgotten. He has carried the spirit of these lessons with him into the councils which he joined, and by the vigour of the graft, which already, indeed, shows itself in the fruits, bids fair to change altogether the nature of Toryism.'

The year 1795, when the new Treason and Sedition Bills were first enacted, is distinguished by Mr Moore as the era of the grossest servility on the part of the advocates of the Court, and the greatest excesses on that of their opponents. The two extremes, as he justly remarks, mutually provoked each other; and the reflections with which he closes the following brief notice of them, seem to us to breathe the very spirit of dispassionate truth and monitory wisdom.

Among the worst effects, as I have already remarked, of the rigorous policy adopted by the Minister, was the extremity to which it drove the principles and language of Opposition, and that sanction which the vehement rebound against oppression of such influencing spirits as Fox and Sheridan seemed to hold out to the obscurer and more practical assertors of freedom. This was at no time more remarkable than in the present Session, during the discussion of those arbitrary measures, the Treason and Sedition Bills, when sparks were struck out, in the collision of the two principles, which the combustible state of public feeling at the moment rendered not a little perilous. On the motion that the House should resolve itself into a Committee upon the Treason Bill, Mr Fox said, that "if Ministers were determined, by means of the corrupt influence they already possessed in the two Houses of Parliament, to pass these Bills, in violent opposition to the declared sense of the great majority of the nation, and they should be put in force with all their rigorous provisions-if his opinion were asked by the people as to the

1

Obedience, he should tell them, that it was no longer a question of moral obligation and Duty, but of Prudence.' Mr Sheridan followed in the bold footsteps of his friend, and said, that" if a degraded and oppressed majority of the people applied to him, he would advise them to acquiesce in those bills only as long as Resistance was Imprudent." This language was, of course, visited with the heavy reprobation of the Ministry;-but their own partisans had already gone as great lengths on the side of absolute power, and it is the nature of such extremes to generate each other. Bishop Horsley had preached the doctrine of passive obedience in the House of Lords, asserting that "man's abuse of his delegated authority is to be borne with resignation, like any other of God's judgments; and that the opposition of the individual to the sovereign power is an opposition to God's providential arrangements." The promotion of the Right Reverend Prelate that followed was not likely to abate his zeal in the cause of power; and, accordingly, we find him in the present session declaring, in his place in the House of Lords, that "the people have nothing to do with the laws but to obey them.

The Government, too, had lately given countenance to writers, the absurd slavishness of whose doctrines would have sunk below contempt, but for such patronage. Among the ablest of them was Arthur Young -one of those renegades from the cause of freedom, who, like the incendiary that set fire to the Temple with the flame he had stolen from its altar, turn the fame and the energies which they have acquired in defence of liberty against her. This gentleman, to whom his situation as Secretary to the Board of Agriculture afforded facilities for the circulation of his political heresies, did not scruple, in one of his pamphlets, roundly to assert, that unequal representation, rotten boroughs, long parliaments, extravagant courts, selfish Ministers, and corrupt majorities, are not only intimately interwoven with the practical freedom of England, but, in a great degree, the causes of it!

But the most active and notorious of these patronized advocates of the Court was Mr John Reeves-a person who, in his capacity of President of the Association against Republicans and Levellers, had acted as a sort of Sub-minister of Alarm to Mr Burke. In a pamphlet, entitled "Thoughts on the English Government, which Mr Sheridan brought under the notice of the House, as a libel on the Constitution, this pupil of the school of Filmer advanced the startling doctrine, that the Lords and Commons of England derive their existence and authority from the King, and that the Kingly Government could go on, in all its functions, without them.'

And here, in reference to this notice of the dangers to which the conflict of opposite extremes must always expose the peace and the liberty of a country like England, we may be allowed, perhaps, to pause a little in our abstract,-and to say a word or two in answer to the manifold attacks which we, and the party to which we are supposed to belong, have lately had to sustain, from the extreme parties of the present pacific time-the uncompromising Tories, on the one hand, and the Radical Reformers, on the other. We should regret extremely if the