OUR March Number* contained some remarks upon the supposed elevation of this age above all which have preceded it,-in purity of public morals, in scientific views of government,-in the application of practical wisdom to national occasions,-in the perception of, and the inclination to pursue, those courses which really tend to the common welfare. We noticed Lord John Russell's expression of "binding by the fetters of the 17th century the talent and merit of the present enlightened age." We also quoted a more lively exposition, which must be here in part repeated, of the same doctrine.

"The science of government is an experimental science, and therefore it is, like all other experimental sciences, a progressive science. Society,

we believe, is constantly advancing in knowledge. The tail is now where the head was some generations ago. But the head and tail still keep their distance. The absolute position of the parties has been altered; the relative position remains unchanged.

It is delightful to think, that in due time the last of those who now straggle in the rear of the great march will occupy the place now occupied by the advanced guard."-Edinburgh Review, vol. lvi., p.

535.

"The publicity which has of late been given to Parliamentary proceedings, has raised the standard of morality among public men."-Ibid. vol. lviii., p. 242.

We now proceed to furnish some additional proofs, that such opinions can only be assented to with very great modifications. In the real improvements of our own days we place our chief glory and delight; and if the current notion of our universal ⚫ superiority were but a harmless fancy, we should not whisper a doubt of its reality. But we regard it as a mischievous delusion, strongest in reference to those very matters in which we are least improved; forming the very groundwork of our daily legislation, and of the most important trans

actions of the time ;-a belief which is leading us away from all the true sources of wisdom, which has left us without any moral standard to which public measures can be referred, and has taught each man to shape his conduct, not by his own conscience and his own judgment, but according to the will of what he conceives to be the people.

Lord Melbourne said, in 1831, that having always opposed Parliamentary Reform, he then supported that measure in obedience to the popular demand for it. Can Popery itself enjoin any thing more slavish! "Mankind are entitled, or rather bound" (see Mackintosh, Eth. Philos. p. 91), "to form and utter their own opinions, and most of all on the most deeply interesting subjects." Such unlimited deference for opinion and popular usage would justify conformity to the worst practices of the most wicked nations upon earth. We are daily told that power and responsibility should go together; and as no statesman should attempt to govern by violence, and against the wish of the nation, so no statesman should retain power (if power it may be called) which he is obliged to employ in a manner unsatisfactory to his own mind. To what end have man's faculties been bestowed, if he is to throw off all personal responsibility, and to be moved only by extraneous influences?

But it is said that we may safely give up our own convictions, and follow the pure current of opinion of the nineteenth century. Now, in thinking of the ignorance and immorality of the last age, and of the passions by which its public men were actuated, we are too apt to forget that the next century may recognise the same moral features in ourselves. Men are still beset with temptation, and not yet steeled against it. Periods may be divided and classified by historians; but nations do not rapidly change, and their existence has a certain continuity which bridges over these ima

ginary chasms. We may fix dates and eras as we please; but still, in all that goes to make up national character, and in all that results from it, the men of this day are extremely like their ancestors.

How often is temperament hereditary, even where talent does not descend!

The Duchess of Marlborough says (Correspondence, ii. 147) of Queen Anne-" She had such a diffidence of herself, that she would always yield to the persuasions of those she liked, even though they had still less judgment than herself."

Clarendon (Hist. Reb. vi. 238) has preserved the very same trait of her grandfather, Charles I.-" He had an excellent understanding, but was not confident enough of it; which made him oftentimes change his own opinion for a worse, and follow the advice of men that did not judge so well as himself."

In the address of Junius to the Duke of Bedford_" You have nice feelings, my lord, if we may judge from your resentments,"-we may trace the germ of that little simmering implacability which we see in one of his descendants, ever and anon bubbling forth against the Bishop of Exeter.

It is evident that men sprung of the same blood, in the same climate, their minds formed by the same literature and institutions,-cannot be very unlike each other, though born at the interval of a century. But we may find maxims familiarly known two thousand years ago, which are hailed as discoveries in modern times. For instance, Mackintosh's sensible, but obvious remark, that "Governments

are not made, but grow," occurs in Cicero's De Republica.* And in the

same work are several notices of character and of political affairs, very much corresponding to the appearances of modern Europe. Sir Robert Peel might not inaccurately apply the following words to his own coduct:

"I might have lived in retirement with more advantage than other men, on account of the delightful variety of the tastes which I had cultivated from my earliest years. If any misfortune overwhelmed society, I was threatened with no peculiar I could be no worse off than danger. other people; yet I did not hesitate to face the storm in all its fury, that I might save my countrymen from destruction, and at my own risk secure the public tranquillity."†

"Could any more momentous crisis arise than that in which I was called upon to act? Yet what could I have done on that occasion, had I not been at the hea d of the government? and how could I have held that station, had I not pursued from my youth upwards that career by which alone I could arrive, though the son of a simple knight, at the highest dignity of the commonwealth ?"‡

We are told, too, of a statesman,

lend effectual aid to the State, then in"Who, being the only man who could volved in the utmost difficulty and peril by the derangement of its foreign relations and the pressure of intestine agitation, while some innovation was every day attempted by seditious men, and all quiet citizens and men of property were alarmed-was yet prevented from serving his country by the hostility of one section of the Senate." §

66

$ Obstrectatores et invidi Scipionis

partem dissidentem a nobis

tenent

The enlightenment" in which Lord John Russell rejoices, as characteristic of a perfectly new and im proved state of society, seems to have visited Berlin (according to Tieck) at the end of the last century.

"I had early remarked this tone of arrogancy and all-knowingness which so often offended foreigners. What we designate by the word Illumination, used in a bad or reproachful sense, had been spread especially from

[query

Edinburgh ?] as a centre; that shallowness which, without any feeling for depth or mysteriousness, brought every thing which it was unable or unwilling to comprehend before the judgment-seat of socalled plain common-sense."

To return, however, to our own country:- We cannot see that the spirit of party has been ameliorated, since it was described in a paper contained in the Harleian Miscellany (Vol. II. p. 352), and entitled

"He could not but smile to see, in our late times of dissension, so many, in all outward appearance, honest and thinking men, continually jog on, like a gang of pack-horses, after the leaders of their several parties; and though they wander after these blazing but deceitful lights into never so many crooked and by-paths, yet, with an implicit and blind faith, still believe themselves to be in the right way.' The race of political hacks next mentioned is not yet extinct.

"Those false and treacherous friends who have formerly gone along with, nay, much before him in the same cause, yet who, when our Church and State were designed for immediate ruin, with the same mercenary breath, servilely offered themselves to be employed as tools in the destruction of them both."

Patriotism is now a very cheap vir

tue, and servility to the multitude is as base as servility at Court. In fact, the same turn of mind which impelled man to cultivate the favour of the dispensers of power, long ago, leads their descendants to apply themselves to the dispensers of power in modern times. We shall see that the topics of political attack are little changed since the last century. Invective, of course, is not to be mistaken for history, but we may fairly infer that similar criticisms must have been provoked by similar conduct. We quote again, from the Harleian Miscellany (II. 254), a paper which, did it not bear the date 1705, might almost seem to have been written from observation of the shifts and devices of the present Administration. It is headed

Lord Palmerston, who once represented Cambridge, might feel interested in the first sentence.

"He has been a member of Parliament for one of our universities. yet shrinks back from the defence of the doctrines" (at least of that which ensures the dissemination of the doctrines)" of that church which is acknowledged by his electors for the only true one."

What would another member of the Government say to the following description?

"He is a gentleman who has slept away the remembrance of what recommended him to be knight of the shire for

"

[query, Inverness?]" and dreamt himself into a place in the Exchequer, which has dazzled his eyes so, and confounded his understanding, that he sits down as if

at his journey's end, with a pension of fifteen hundred pounds per annum [the very amount, we believe], and thinks he has done enough for his county (who sent him up to town to do their business, not his own), in making provision for himself." . . . . "His heart is as good as any man's in England for the Church established; but charity begins at home, and let the national religion sink or swim as long as one is taken care of."

"He is an Aristotelian, though he loves the Mammon of unrighteousness too much to be a philosopher; and his actions are sufficient arguments to show that the corruption of one thing is the generation of another, i. e. he makes it appear that the defection of a good man to a bad party is the accession of an ill one.'

of his Grace of Canterbury's chaplains, because he is not a churchman good enough, he may serve for one of his watermen, for to look one way, and row another, is their business. He was put into a post, under pretence of being a Churchman, but imagines the ready way to keep in it is not to be against the Dissenters, for somebody has said, They are too great a body to be disobliged;' and he knows he stands but on slippery ground, while he

gives not implicit obedience to somebody's

orders.

"He is one that has been deputed by

the people to make new laws, and thinks it of no consequence what becomes of the old. He is of a modern cut; and the very reason that should be of force with him to stand up for the Church, slackens his resolutions to defend it. She has been a church from the beginning." "He is a pretended stickler for the Queen's authority, just so long as he receives the Queen's money; while to show how undeserving he is of her royal favour, he confederates himself for the downfal of the Queen's religion. He is an Englishman with a Scotch heart, an Irish pair of heels, and a Spanish countenance. His policy consists in a demure look, his courage in withdrawing himself when there is an occasion; his constancy is variation; and his honesty is what you think fit to call it, for I know not where to find it."

"He is for a single Ministry, that he may play the Tom-double under it, and had rather the management of affairs should be in one great lord's or court lady's hands than in several, because the fewer the superintendents, the more may be the miscarriages of those that are subordinate to them, without being discovered, not that he is of this temper for any other account; since, notwithstanding his pretended zeal for her Majesty's person and Government, he leans more towards a commonwealth than a monarchy, and had rather the executive Government was to be intrusted

with a committee of safety, and he to be the Obadiah of the party, than to be lodged

where it is."

"He is like the Satyr in the fable, that

blows hot and cold with the same breath, and never does any thing praiseworthy but when he blushes for shame of his playing at hide-and-seek with his old principles."

"He plays the child's part, and because he shuts his own eyes, thinks no creature in the world sees him."

Servile and unconstitutional Ministers will, in all ages, be driven to have recourse to similar expedients.

Lord Melbourne, in defiance of the established usage of the monarchy (we will not urge any topics of a personal nature), haunts the palace with inveterate assiduity, that he may be "a great court lord," and that "the management of affairs" may thus be in his hands. In the mean-time, he neglects all his official duties, and exhibits a degree of ignorance of public mestic, perfectly worthy of the colbusiness-colonial, foreign, and doleague of Lord Normanby, who believes that "Hyde, afterwards Earl of Clarendon," was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, under James II. (the illustrious Hyde, the first Earl of Clarendon, having in fact been driven into exile, from which he never returned, early in the preceding_reign)!

Lord Melbourne has frequently spoken in the tone of a good Churchman, but his measures (for instance, the marriage and registration acts, the church-rate scheme, &c.) have been, almost without exception, either dictated by the Dissenters, and conceived in a spirit of hostility and persecution towards the Church of England; or, if well intended, given up to conciliate the Dissenters. But that upon which the whole character of his Government depends, its Irish policy, has been pursued in "implicit obedience" to the Irish Roman Catholic Dissenters; for "Somebody bas said, "we are too great a body to be disobliged.' Who is "Somebody?" He is the person with whom Lord Melbourne," to show how undeserving he is of the Royal favour, has confederated himself for the downfal of the Queen's religion;" and "he knows he stands but on slippery ground, while he gives not implicit obedience to Somebody's orders.'

It is indisputable that a large majority of the English members of the House of Commons are against the present Ministers, and that they maintain themselves only by the favour of the Scotch and Irish Radicals. Irish pair of heels," that is, "his couAnd Lord John Russell showed "an rage was evinced in withdrawing himself, when there was an occasion," on Mr W. S. O'Brien's motion against the Spottiswoode subscription. What a spectacle he then presented! a Minister of the Crown, a Leader of the House of Commons, attempting to