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Her. You do; all envy of the gods keep hence!
Adm. Blest be thou, noble son of highest Zeus,
And may thy father ever watch o'er thee!
For only thou hast raised me up again.
How didst thou bring her up into the light?
Her. I fought a battle with the grisly king
Of them below.

Adm.
Where didst thou fight with Death?
Her. Surprising him, I seized him at the tomb.
Adm. Why is she silent? Wherefore speaks she not?
Her. It is not lawful that you hear her voice
Till the third day, when she by lustral rites
Has been absolved from the infernal powers.
But lead her in; be just, and show respect
To strangers. Now, farewell! I go to achieve
The task set by the son of Sthenelus.

Adm. Remain with us, and be our honoured guest.
Her. Some other time, but now I must proceed.

Adm. Good luck go with thee, and return in safety! [Exit HERCULES. But I command through all the tetrarchy,

That choirs, in memory of this blest event,

Be duly set, and blood of victims flow

To the best gods from whom these blessings come.

Now is my present state flowering with joy,

And my condition better than before.

[Exit ADMETUS, leading ALCESTIS into the Palace.

Chor. Through many a shape, and many a change
The skyey influences range:

The gods oft bring about events,
Our strange unlooked-for accidents;
And what we think shall surely be,
We look for, but we cannot see.
God finds an unexpected way,
And so it has turned out to-day.

Edinburgh: Printed by Ballantyne and Company, Paul's Work.

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THREE years ago Lord Brougham sent the Melbourne Cabinet into the world with the brand of "The Incapables" on its forehead. Among all changes of principle and practice, they have been true to their title. They intended nothing; they were capable of nothing; and they have fulfilled both their intention and their capacity. The country has gone on without them. They are no more responsible for its movements than the barnacles on the ship's bottom are responsible for the ship's course. The business of the barnacles is to cling where they have been once stuck on, and their instinct is to repel any force that would scrape them off. The Cabinet have the same business, and the same instinct, and no more. They would perhaps, like the barnacles, have some sense of inconvenience, if the ship were to be bulged against the rocks, or broken up by utter rottenness; but, like them, they will only follow their natural impulse in clinging to it, while there is a plank together, and in sucking that plank while they live.

That this is wholly a new condition of a British Government we perfectly acknowledge; that the individuals composing this Government are utterly helpless, trifling, and ridiculous, we suppose no man of any kind of observation in the country doubts in the slightest degree; and that this state of public matters has been suffered to go on merely through the

VOL. XLIV. NO. CCLXXVI,

The

patience of the public, and the singular leniency of the national protectors in Parliament, is, we take it for granted, wholly undeniable by any man who knows his right hand from his left. Another point is equally to be taken into consideration. The Cabinet is not more frivolous as a body, than impotent in its members. broadest glance cast over British history can absolutely find nothing so destitute of all the qualifications for the government of empire. A brilliant and bold ambition has sometimes dazzled the nation into the endurance of bad men and bad measures; superior eloquence, and the art of persuading great assemblies, has often bewildered the nation; a character for honest public intentions, sanctioned by private decency of life, has raised and kept many a man of mediocrity in high station; even the habit of being known as the client of a popular and generous line of politics has had its effect. Thus the Walpoles, Chathams, Foxes, hazardous as they were, and even the Liverpools, simple and stagnant as they showed themselves in the midst of the most glowing impulses of the most glowing times, and, last and least, the slipperiness of Canning, were more than tolerated; nay, in some instances, exact the same retrospective homage from the national memory, with which we look upon the sword and armour of some great champion, hung above his tomb; or fix our eyes on the fiery

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line in the horizon, which tells us that there the sun has set. But the Melbourne Cabinet have discovered another source of distinction, which, if few may desire to rival, none can hope to exceed. They are contemptiTheir feebleness is so completely beyond all controversy, that they have the double advantage of being supposed incapable of mischief, and of exciting commiseration, in every instance where they are attacked. Sir Robert Peel against Lord John Russell! Why, every sense of common humanity enlists itself on the side of the little victim querulously writhing in the grasp of the powerful Opposition leader. Lord Melbourne against Lord Lyndhurst! Was there ever such painful inequality? When the great Law Lord rises to inflict the lash upon his nerveless and frightened opponent, however justice may command severity, every feeling of compassion longs to save the startled culprit from the scourge, which, like the knout, may extinguish his public existence at a blow. We have, of course, no wish to touch upon the mysteries of high men and things. But if those scenes occurred in China, caricature might amuse itself richly with the burlesque of the Chief Mandarin. Not the possession of the "blue button, and the peacock's feather," not bowing Mandarins, and Tartars kissing his feet-not even the exclusive ear of the sitter on the imperial cushion could save him from being consummately laughed at. Of the multitude of trifling, unpurposed, and shallow speakers who figure so disastrously before the people of England, the Premier with all his accomplishments, probably ranks among the worst; he is certainly the worst who ever attempted the part of a leader of the Cabinet. After his first half-dozen sentences, he becomes wholly confused, evidently loses all sequence of thought, blunders from one folly to another, and after a help less discharge of the most unhappy verbiage, either drops into silence, from mere powerlessness of saying any thing, or attempts to cover his retreat by falling into a ridiculous passion. On the other hand, Lord Lyndhurst's force, combined with his calmness, his full and palpable knowledge of every subject on which he treats, his easy mastery of language, and that

language often enriched by allusions of classic elegance, render him one of the most accomplished of living speakers. But he can cut deep. His castigation of O'Connell, when that truculent bully ventured to come into the House of Peers, probably with the hope of overawing him, the resistless contempt with which he lashed the fellow, and the summary justice with which he actually forced him to take flight, are still remembered by the House as among the public services of the noble Lord, and have sunk into the memory of O'Connell as among the bitterest debts of that sweeping vengeance which cankers his heart. In the hands of such a man imbecility can only fret and foam. But it is when Lord Brougham makes the assault that the condition of the Premier becomes utterly pitiable. Brougham pays no attention to those etiquettes which restrain execution in the hands of Lord Lyndhurst. His style is trenchant, fierce, and desperate. He darts upon his prey like a vulture, and is not content with striking it down; he tears and gnaws; he turns it over in every direction, and strikes again wherever a vestige of life or vulnerability remains. Even the noble Lord's eccentricity gives him additional power in this species of conflict; like the bird of the churchyard, he fights better on his back than on foot or wing, and plies the beak and the claw to the last with remorseless fury, and never finishes while there is a wound to be given, or a feather to be torn away.

But leaving the Cabinet en masse to the scorn which its impotence deserves; if we enquire what has been done by its individual members, we only descend from its general usefulness to personal inanity. If we ask what has that man of the red ribbon and "all the loves," the Foreign Secretary, done, since his unhappy fixture on the public purse, we can find nothing but a list of public failures, resulting from a policy in direct contradiction to all the old established maxims of England, and that contradiction resulting from the new-fangled deference of an English ministry for the power of the rabble leaders at home. We thus have as the memorabilia of the noble lord the blockade of Holland; the Anglo-Spanish expedition; the Turkish diplomacy; the Greek instalments; the American

boundary negotiation; the negotiation with France on the infamous seizure of Algiers; the negotiation with Spain and Portugal for the suppression of the slave trade. If all these were not failures, we demand the evidence of success in any one of them.

From the Foreign Secretary we turn to the Colonial. There the single word "Canada" is more than enough. The infinite dulness that could not see rebellion preparing year after year; the infinite tardiness that so long pondered about sending out the force which was so imperiously necessary; the infinite foolery which suffered such a personage as Lord Durham to go out as "the peacemaker," attended with such guardians of public interests, and such examples of personal conduct, as the Turtons, Wakefields, and Duncombes. Such are a few features of the Secretary's achievements in a single branch of his office. But we leave the Morpheus of the Cabinet to his poppies.

What exhibition has the Home Secretary made of his fitness for power? Has there been a single bill of the session which has not been either given over to the Opposition to correct into the capability of public use, or been trampled under foot by them? Has he had a will of his own for an hour together? Has he been able to bring a single measure of Government into action but by the sufferance of Sir Robert Peel; and is he not at this moment a puppet, pulled alternately by the strings of the Irish faction at his back, and the Opposition in his front? As for the remainder of his coadjutors they are fit to draw on the Treasury once a quarter, and that is the sum total of their capacities.

But how long is this system of negations to go on? How long can England endure to see eleven five thousands a-year given to the necessities of eleven luminaries of this order? How long are those men to be suffer ed to sow the seed of their Whig-Radicalism in every spot of office at home, in every colony, in every regiment, in every ship; to turn all public employment into a Whig retaining fee, and fasten upon the nation, in the form of well paid pauperism, the dregs of worthless partisanship? Will Europe give us time for the quiet process of this experiment ? Will Ame

rica give us time? No. What says Russia? Follow your worthless policy, for it is my profit; but interfere with my projects in the east or the west, and then look to the consequences if while our Ministry are thus doing noyou dare. Is it not notorious, that ing on with a mixture of contempt thing at home, and England is lookand amazement, Russia is arming on every frontier, building vast fleets, and in the midst of the most profound peace, and without a rival to fear, is calculating on the conquest of countries, of which fifty years ago she had scarcely heard the name? Is it not notorious that France is openly caleulating on the possession of the whole northern coast of Africa before our face, a possession which would seal up the Mediterranean from us, as Russia has sealed up the Euxine? Is it not notorious that America is making an iniquitous demand for the surrender of that vast territory which, lying between New Brunswick and the St Lawrence, seals up the mouth of that great communication between our Canadian empire and the ocean?

But all this is done because the attention of the Cabinet is employed on Ireland.

So say the defenders of the Premier and his colleagues. Ireland let us soothe the Agitator, and satisfy must first be pacified; you must first the Irish Papist, and then-The Greek arrival of that day. We say unCalends will be an early date for the hesitatingly that this hope of settlement is an absurdity. the Cabinet believe that any arrange. Or, that if ment for the peace of Ireland will be valid with Popery for a moment beyond its own convenience in breaking through that arrangement, we must hold the Ministerial intellect in still more condign scorn.

We ask, what have the Ministry ever been able to fix, or the nation to gain, in the negotiations with the Agitator and his tribe? To talk of the utter vileness of Papist politics is wholly superfluous. But while he remains the acknowledged regulator of our public measures, the master of our public men, the lord of British council, those things invest his opinions with an importance which makes their perfidy an object of public peril. It will be found that, in all the great points in dispute between Irish faction and national safety, the Papist has

contradicted himself in the most unhesitating manner; that the most solemn pledge of to-day has not prevented the most contemptuous denial to-morrow; that to-day, on his knees, swearing to one opinion before the legislature, he feels himself fully at liberty to harangue a mob against that opinion within the next twenty-four hours, and that, for the pledge and for the denial, he has but one discoverable motive."

We shall give only a few examples, but they are wholly unanswerable. The Agitator is now furious against the Irish Poor-Law. He was once its equally furious advocate. In 1831 he thus addressed Dr Doyle, the Popish Bishop. "My lord, you have convinced me. Your pamphlet on the necessity of making a legal provision for the poor of Ireland has completely convinced me. I readily acknowledge that you have done more. You have alarmed me, lest in the indulgence of my own selfishness as a landholder, I should continue the opponent of him who would feed the hungry and enable the naked to clothe themselves." The approach of a Poor-Law subsequently startled the Irish Papists, and O'Connell backed out for two years. Another convenient turn comes; his Cabinet think proper to throw out a tub to the whale, and he shifts about again; assembles his Trades' Union, and moves "for the appointment of a committee to wait on Lord Morpeth, in order to ascertain the views of Government on the subject of the Poor-Laws, and to aid in the arrangement of that question in a manner most likely to avoid all mischief," &c. &c.

Against the provision for the Romish Clergy Mr O'Connell is now as furious as he is against the Poor Law. In 1837, at the meeting of his Dublin Association, he thus declared his sic volo, sic jubeo. "I speak here in the presence of many revered Catholic Clergymen, and I think I only speak their sentiments when I say that we will never consent to the payment of the Roman Catholic Clergy by the State." A Popish priest, here echoing the cry, and declaring that he and his brethren would rather beg than be pensioners of the State, Mr O'Connell proceeded to say, "that he felt he was not mistaken in the sentiments of the Romish Clergy," and pointing to

a Romish Bishop, declared that "his venerable friend, the Bishop, would rather lay down his head on the scaffold than consent to the Catholic Clergy receiving a salary out of the taxes of the country." The Bishop nodded assent. Mr O'Connell proceeded, "the whole Catholic priesthood are against the measure, and what is more, if they were for it, the Catholic body would not allow them to accept it." (Cheers.)

Yet what was this man's language in 1825?" Daniel O'Connell, called in and examined before the Committee of the House of Commons-(March 1.) "I think it would be unwise in Government, if emancipation were carried, and until it was carried they would not accept of a provision, to leave them unprovided. And I think it would be extremely wrong to give them any part of the revenues of the present Church Establishment, and that they would not accept of it. But I think a wise Government would preserve the fidelity and attachment of the Catholic Clergy by what I call the golden link, the pecuniary pro

vision."

In the Committee of the Lords, March 11, in answer to the question, "Would the Popish Clergy accept of the provision?" Mr Daniel O'Connell's answer was distinctly, "I have no doubt whatever that they would accept the provision as accompanying emancipation."

It is only to be remarked that his pledges were given before emancipation, and that the denials came after it! But this is the case with the whole of the pledges and denials of Popery. Promises cost it nothing to make, because they cost it nothing to break. All is for the good of the church," and the more solemn the pledge the more merit in the infraction!

But the grand object is spoil. The language of insulted rights and injured sensibilities is merely for the multitude, whose ears require to be tickled by metaphors. The tithes, the acres, the easy transmission of the clerical property into the pockets of indigent patriotism, are the true prize, the grievance that presses into their Hibernian recollections, the fond tribute which robbery and rebellion in all lands long to collect, in honour of liberty, and for the comfort of their own empty purses. To a call of this

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