to find philosophy in the fool and the beggar.74 The hour that was to place the friends of Fox on the throne, had been long anticipated for the full revel of all that crowd of low and giddy extravagancies which had hitherto scarcely lurked under the name of constitutional principle. There can be no doubt that this alliance with the Mob was a trial of patience to the heads of Opposition; but it was "in the bond," the league of minds, still not divested of human feelings, with the black, furious, obscene agents of a reform, which must have issued in revolution, and was written in the life-blood of their society. With such auxiliaries, if they had possessed themselves with power, the possession must have been brief. They would have been overwhelmed by darker subtlety and bolder guilt; the penalty of the bond would have been exacted to the last drop, and they must have paid it, perhaps even by adding the sacrifice of themselves to that of their country. It is scarcely possible to look upon that decision which excluded the Democracy from sovereign power in England, but as a great deliverance. What terror, shame, and public calamity must have been the fruits of peace with France-Jacobinical even in its empire-made by a government of levellers at home? For the government must have become revolutionary year would not have passed without seeing the higher names of Opposition thrown into popular contempt, by the more brilliant intrepidity and rabble sympathies of their underlings. In this Bacchic festival, all the instruments of a more composed piety must have given way to the torch and the spear. When the Saturnalia was once proclaimed, the slave would take his master's seat the more speedily, as his natural fierceness was the more drunken. What we have escaped, it may not be within human conjecture thoroughly to conceive. To contemplate it, is to look from the edge of a precipice, the base may be wrapped in darkness, but we can see enough to convince us that the fall must have been ruinafe a The brief administration of Fox was not to be considered as a complete test of Opposition. They were but upon trial, and they felt it in every step. George III., a man, whose name will be honoured wherever there is honour for sincerity and patriotism, was not to be acted upon by the finesse or violence of faction. He was not the man to fling the reins upon the neck of a giddy and unmanaged ambition. His bridle was felt in their lips at every attempt to start from the road. The fall of the Whig administration was the inevitable consequence of its composition; but brief as its authority was, it had given time for the play of some of "those fantastic tricks" which disgust superior wisdom, and their exclusion was received as a national boon. The Prince's coming to the throne was looked up to in their disappointment, as the grand resource, the epoch of the whole developement of their influence, the assured and final triumph of their principles. Even during the year of the Restrictions," the sentiment was too eager not to speak. The whole ingenuity of intrigue, down to the boast of its success, was exerted. The rejected tribe, not unlike the Jews in their sufferings or their spirit, sounded the trumpet on the first gleam of that splendour, for which they had looked so long from the nakedness of the hill-top, as the commencement of the Jubilee which was to wash off the stains of the past, and transmit the debtor and the bondsman, clear and white-robed, into aninheritance luxurious and perpetual. The delusion, rapturous as it was, had the brevity of human rapture. The Sovereign's declaration, that he had no predilection to indulge, no resentment to gratify, no personal object to attain, put an end at the instant to the hopes of a party which could have risen only on predilections and resentments. The whole spirit of disappointment was let loose in a cureless, bitter, desperate hostility, without reason, and without measure. ago The first act of the Prince Regent's government was a trial of its principle. A negociation was proposed by France. For a government yet unsettled, there could be no stronger temptation than a peace with the power which had paused only from victories to offer the hope of tranquillity to Europe through the medium of England. Thenationdesired peace, the war had been glorious but exhausting, the perpetual lifting of the sword, even for triumph, was wearing out our vigour, and selfishness in our allies, and tremendous and hourly increase in the force of our enemy, seemed to make success ungrateful, and defeat ruinous. This was one of those moments on which the fates of ages turn. The outcry of the multitude was for submission; and it was echoed in Parliament by those who could discover nothing but stainless honour and irresistible talents in the enemy of England. Submission would, for the time, have relieved the Prince Regent of the whole burthen which pressed upon his throne. But it would have eventually crushed all that belonged to the hope of freedoin in Europe. An unpurposed, or an ungenerous spirit on the British throne at that hour, might have decided the ruin of the Continent with a dash of the pen. The Liberties of the World had then but one neck; and the sword, either to smite or to save, was in the hand of the Sovereign of England. We might at that time have purchased, with perfect facility, such peace as could have been made with France. We had but to sacrifice the Peninsula, and the offering and the treaty would have been made on the same altar., He had seen her growing with his growth,-ascending to a nobler height of rivalry with every fresh accession of his power. From whatever quarter of Europe he looked, she was in his horizon like a mountain, flinging her shadow upon his conquests. The farther his disastrous splendour was shot, the farther following with her mighty obscuration. Napoleon's fame and his ambition called for the unequalled effort of France; and it was made with a violence and wild magnificence of physical force, the most rapid, extended, and overwhelming that the world had ever seen. The beginning of the year 1812 was a period of the deepest anxiety felt by the Civilized World since the irruption of the Barbarians into the Roman Empire. Gallant things were said and thought,-brave men knew that they could not die unrevenged,-good men looked to Providence, and consoled themselves with the conviction that the triumph of rapine and irreligion could not last for ever: But the holiest and noblest feeling was shaded by the belief that it must yet have to fight the fight of despair. This sentiment did not depress the exertions of the Empire. Ancient heroism had nothing in its annals more lofty than the unostentatious fortitude of the English heart in that trying hour. The Spartan leader, in all the excitement of public glory, in the shout and gaze of surrounding nations, did not hear of the coming of the PERSIAN with a more solemn fortitude, than the man of England, when he took up his arms, and repaired to his solitary post, and devoted himself to final battle. France, repelled in negociation, resolved to overwhelm us by war. Another trial of the firmness of the Prince Regent's administration was at hand. The wrath of France, exceeding all that had ever been felt of hostility, was now to be executed by a force exceeding all that had ever been known of military strength. Napoleon had from the commencement looked upon England as almost the only enemy; as if the miseries of the nations whom he bowed to a yoke of iron, had not raised deathless hostility to his throne in the heart of every people. But Eng- The armament of France was worland was the great antagonist. He thy of a genius bound to work the found her wherever the battle was to world's woe. Europe was converted be fought for innocence and freedom, into one great arsenal; all the energies against bloody, remorseless, godless of human life were seen turned to the usurpation. She followed him like a means of its destruction. From the conscience. Her spirit was perpetual- Channel to the Vistula, every road was ly on the wing, above his march, like covered with armies passing and rethe eagles on the track of an army, pre- passing-every river was choaked with dicting the hour when they should feed ships turned from the supply of nations on the pomp below. While England to the transport of the materials of lived, he felt all his conquests inse-war-every cottage was visited for the care; and it was the whole scope of his policy to throw a weight of war upon England, which would trample her soil till it was incapable of giving nutriment to the minutest flying seed of Freedom. She had resisted him to his astonishment, and that of the world. VOL. VIII. devote to the ambition which had already violated its property and its freedom. For a time it was unknown what empire this gigantic devastation was to cover with ruin. Darkness was about the throne of France. The proximity 4 S "devotement of a new soldier and a new of England made all the menace audi ble. In the stillness of a juncture that had the gloom of midnight without its tranquility, the Englishman on his shore could hear the "hum of the camp," the "armourers furnishing the knights," the whole dreadful note of preparation for the morn. There was no strength in man to impede that preparation. While the storm gathered up its materials of havoc, and hung above human reach, compounding, mingling, deepening its volumes, and sending out at intervals a voice of mysterious menace round the horizon, Europe lay beneath in silence, and expecting on what quarter the final and capricious ruin might be flung. It rushed down in flame. It will yet be among the proofs of England's glory and prowess, vilified as they are by the opponents of her Government, even among ourselves, that Napoleon felt to the utmost their solidity and grandeur. She was the only antagonist whom he did not dare to attack in front. He had before shrank from the armed form of the nation, after gazing on it at the head of all the force of France; and he returned from his baffled warfare like Caligula, with only the weedy trophies of his own sea-shore. But all his warfare was against England. Her conquest would be the final subjection of the world; and to conquer her he ranged the world. He attacked her outwork as far as Russia. This is not the place to detail a warfare, to which history will yet look as one of the sublimest demonstrations of the providence of the God of Battles. We know the moral. When human valour could do no more, a mightier strength interposed and fought the fight alone, and with the weapons of his winter, the storm and the snow, smote the pride of the blasphemer. The force of France was now put beyond the power of universal conquest. But there was still in the indefatigable treachery, and reckless ambition of its nature, serious exercise for courage and decision in the defence of Europe, It is enough to say, that Europe has been saved. The eye that had looked upon the world in 1812, would recognize in its tranquillity at this day, nothing less than the workings of an efficient wisdom, under the influence of a favouring Providence. Something like an anticipation of that glorious period to which prophecy has looked for the first triumph of good. The trumpet heard no more in our border-thesword beaten into the ploughshare-the seas covered with fearless wealth, and become the great undisturbed highway of the world-the minds of men turning to the arts of a happy civilization-the inhabitants of the earth sitting under their own vines and fig-trees the knowledge of religion spread, by a holy zeal, to the shores and desarts that scarcely even the ardour of gain had visited the slight tumults of the world all conveying to the one central and splendid point of secure tranquillitynation no longer at the mercy of nation -war dying-conquest dead. Are we to suppose that those stupendous benefits have been spontaneous-that they have come with the winds of heaven? or, are we not rather, when we see this stately tree, that from England projects its fertility and its shade over the world, to consult the common course of nature, and ask by whose hands it has been planted and watered? It is not the purpose of these pages to offer adulation to the King, but to pay him the honourable tribute of justice. They have looked upon him as a public be ing. At a future time they may turn to those circumstances of personal conduct from which the generosity and British feeling of hisgovernment might have been anticipated. But the whole experience of nations proves, that where there is a course of decided success, there cannot be a counteracting feebleness in the government. If the members of Administration have been men of ability, is there no honour due to the choice which selected them from the crowd of competitorship? Late events have brought forward the Monarch more distinctly from his servants, than is the custom of England. But have they not so far tended to his honourable distinction? Is there a doubt still clinging to the mind of any rational man, that the public were imposed on by the basest fabrications, for the most dangerous purposes? The national disturbance is now at rest. It served the objects of faction for a moment; but the stream, with all its load of offence, has sunk, and left, naked and loathsome to the sense, all that it had buoyed up on its sudden and squalid flowings. The King has appeared before his people, and they have shewn that they honour him. But History must be the giver of his most perma nent distinctions. It will turn from the minute impressions of the national mind, to the grand and universal impulse which his government has administered to England and to Europe. When we shall have been gathered to the grave, and the petty shades and stains of party shall have disappeared, like the outlines of the thicket and the hut, from the face of an ascending sun, History will contemplate with wonder and thanksgiving, the order that we have brought into the system-the stately power by which it has been sustained the glory which our glory kindled. This is the attestation of posterity. It will see England standing on the summit of human sovereignty. The representative of a beneficent Providence, holding the most powerful influence ever given to a nation, by that holiest and gentlest tenure of the affections and interests of the world. The kingdoms of the earth, strong not in her weakness, but in her strength; The law of her dominion, like the announcement that proclaimed the great advent of religion, " Glory to God in the highest, and peace and good will to men." They will remember at what moment this illustrious elevation was reached, and without asking through what delays and struggles-through. what unkindliness of the elements, or what ungrateful caprices of man, its steps at length surmounted the height, they will think of the hand by whose guidance, under Heaven, she was led resolutely up to universal empire. This is history. It is not enough to say, that the Government only followed the impulse of the people. If the great and noble portion of the English spirit was ranged in direct hostility to France, there was a vast and restless portion which fluctuated between peace and war; and a keen, desperate, and compact influence, which demanded peace as a right and a necessity. Was it nothing that the throne was assailed with outcries from all the commercial cities that the table of parliament was loaded with petitions for peace-or that the more formidable hazard of war was draining the land of its blood, and entailing on its finances a burthen to which there was no discoverable limit, and which seemed to be crushing the bone and marrow of English prosperity? Ruin would have been the consequence of submission, but it would have been comparatively remote. A year or two are much in the calculations of a pusillanimous avarice. And is it no wisdom and no praise to have resisted the temptation of immediate ease; and with it to have withstood the whole torrent of unpopularity within and without parliament? It is to the results of the King's instant and masculine resistance to peace with Napoleon, in defiance of the clamours and prophecies of the Opposition, that future times will look for the Royal character. Secret and feeble malignity may endeavour to deface the monument that transmits the memory of our day of triumph; but a few years will purify away those shallow devices, and nothing will remain but the inscription, 66 TO THE SOVEREIGN WHO SAVED ENGLAND BY REFUSING TO YIELD TO HER MORTAL ENEMY." WORKS PREPARING FOR PUBLICATION. LONDON A Continuation of Professor Tytler's Elements of General History, from the deaths of Queen Anne and Lewis XIV. to the present time; by E. Nares, D.D. Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Oxford. Profile Portraits of Distinguished Living Characters, at the accession of George IV., drawn from life, and accompanied by Concise Biographical Notices; by Mr Thomas. To be published in monthly parts, each containing seven portraits. Professor Lee is preparing for the press, in Persian and English, the late Mr Martyn's Controversy with the Learned of Persia; the whole exhibiting a more Complete Account of Mahomedism than has yet appeared. Mr H. J. Wiffen will shortly publish the Fourth Book of Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, translated into English Spensenar Verse; with a Prefatory Dissertation on Existing Translations. The Elements of Natural History, translated from the German of Blumenbach, with considerable Additions; by Clarke Abel, M.D. F.R.S. and F.L.S. A new edition of Burder's Missionary Anecdotes, with considerable Additions and Alterations. Preparing for the press, a new edition, considerably enlarged, of Dr Rusi's Essays on Hypochondriasis and Nervous Affections. Shortly will be published, in 1 vol. 12mo. Practical Economy; or, The Application of Modern Discoveries to the Purposes of Domestic Life. Mr Ackermann has nearly ready for publication, a Description of that part of Western Africa, comprehending the Zahara, or Great Desart, and the Countries between the Rivers Senegal and Gambia, in continuation of the work commenced by him under the title of the World in Miniature. It will form four volumes, with nearly fifty engravings, illustrative of the manners, customs, dresses, &c. of the inhabitants, with views and maps. Nearly ready, the History of Thirsk, including an Account of its once celebrated Castle, and interesting Particulars of places in its vicinity, with Biographical Notices of Eminent Men. Mr Ackermann is about to publish, in a distinct form, The Sentimental Travels to the South of France, (part of which has appeared in the Repository) in 1 vol. royal 8vo., with numerous coloured engravings, from designs by Rowlandson. Otto Von Kotzebue's Narrative of a Voyage round the World, is translating for the press. Sermons for the Use of Families, in an octavo volume; by the Rev. W. Brown of Enfield. An Account of the Interior of Ceylon, and its Inhabitants, with Travels in that Island, by John Davy, M.D. F.R.S. Mr Wood has in the press The Linnæan Genera of Insects, illustrated by eighty-six coloured plates, and General Observations on each Genus. Observations on the Climate of Penzance, and the District of the Land's End in Cornwall; by John Forbes, M.D. The first volume of Sir Robert Ker Porter's Travels in Georgia, Persia, Armenia, &c. embellished with numerous engravings, will appear in a few days. The first number of the Magazine of the Fine Arts will appear on the 1st of May. Sir Ronald, and other Poems. A new novel, entitled, The Cavalier. Shortly will be published in royal 18mo. Part I. of Select British Divines; containing the First Part of Bishop Beveridge's Private Thoughts; edited by the Rev. C. Bradley. A short Biographical Sketch of each Author will be given, and, in some instances, a portrait. It may be comprised in thirty, or may extend to fifty volumes. A new edition of the Pleasures of Home, with corrections and improvements. A Selection of the Speeches delivered at the late County Meetings, on the Proceedings instituted by his Majesty's Ministers against the Queen; with a Dedication to the People of England. Preparing for the press, Two Volumes of Sermons; by the Rev. Joseph Pickering, A.M. Perpetual Curate of Paddington. The Articles of the Church of England, illustrated by Copious Extracts from the Homilies, Howell's Catechism, Jewell's Apology and the Liturgy, and confirmed by numerous Passages of Scripture; by the Rev. W. Wilson, B.D. Fellow of Queen's College, Oxford. A Practical Treatise on the Hydrocephalus Acutus, or Water in the Head; by L. D. Goles, Physician to the Institution for Sick Children at Vienna. The Moss-Troopers, a novel, in 3 vols. 12mo. Bannockburn, a novel, in 3 vols. 12mo. A new edition of the Universal Cambist; by Dr Kelly; with numerous additions. Mumbo Jumbo; an African tale, in 1 vol. 12mo. |