have adopted views, not merely tinged with the ordinary weakness of human judgment, but degraded by utter ignorance of the subject, by a weak prejudice against all that belonged to a manly policy, by an absurd homage for the enemy, and by a miserable powerlessness of feeling with the feelings of England. With Whiggism at the head of affairs, the great Spanish Insurrection would have been extinguished in its own blood, the Continent in chains to this hour, and France, under the Napoleon dynasty, the terror and the tyrant of Europe. If we had peace, it would have been purchased by some wretched humiliation, and it would have been only a hollow truce preparatory to a war of extermination. If we had war, it would have been a lingering and hopeless struggle against power accumulating day by day; war without energy and without end; reluctant, fearful, successless, and desperate. Or, if we are to believe that no man born on the soil of England could thus abuse her cause, what is the alternative? We must decide that the Whigs, in their bitter reprobation of our Peninsular policy, were totally insincere; that they inwardly honoured what they publicly abjured; and that their language was only one of the miserable artifices of party, eager to attract partizans, and, for the sake of a few contemptible votes, to vilify the name, and hazard the fates of their country.

In memorable contrast to those disastrous expositions, I shall give some extracts from the sentiments of the present head of the administration; a man whose integrity, public spirit, and knowledge of government, are honoured beyond panegyric, in the respect and confidence of the nation. In the year 1808, on the first breaking out of the Spanish Insurrection, when the prospects and power of Spain were yet all uncertainty, and France was sitting on the height of a dominion which seemed to defy all resistance and all casualty, Lord Liverpool thus threw down the pledge which he and his fellow-ministers have since so splendidly redeemed.

"With respect to Spain, the people of that country had manifested a spirit and determination to resist the attempts of their invaders, which would have done honour to the most glorious period of their history, and which,

perhaps, were not to be expected under the pressure of such formidable difficulties. Such a scene every man in the House, every man in the country, must hail with the liveliest satisfaction; and what every generous heart must wish should be done in support of so glorious a cause, his Majesty's Ministers would feel it their duty to do. With regard to what information they had received of the designs or the hopes of those brave and resolute men, who, in defence of their country's independence, were exposing themselves to everything which a powerful and sanguinary tyrant could devise or inflict, it could not be expected that he should now unfold it. His Majesty's Ministers were fully sensible of the extreme importance of this event, and he trusted they would be found to act accordingly."-Debate of January 30,

1808.

I give this fragment as an evidence of the early decisiveness of Administration. While those who had insolently and exclusively assumed the name of friends of freedom, were feebly retracting, or culpably resisting, the English Cabinet, with a boldness and sagacity that do them matchless honour, took up the cause of liberty, bound themselves at once to the Spanish cause, and, on the strength of their fidelity to that cause, demanded to be tried before the nation. The trials of this fidelity must not be forgotten. The Spanish cause was, after the first burst of triumph, uniformly disastrous. In two years from the French Invasion, the whole military force of Spain was annihilated; her armies and generals had been trampled like dust under the heels of France, her civil government was in the hands of Napoleon, her revenue was gone, her colonies were in revolt; a French army, greater than the greatest that had broken down martial Germany, had flooded indolent, unwarlike Spain. The roots of regular resistance had been burnt up. The powers of popular resistance were unknown. But the honourable decision of England had been taken; and while Opposition hung their ominous heads over the ruin, and almost triumphed in it as a proof of their prophecy, Ministers renewed their pledge to Spain, and manfully foresaw her victory.

In Lord Liverpool's speech, in the commencement of 1809, this senti

do homage to the liberality of Whig gism. This speech worthily closed with a due bending of the knee before Buonaparte. Commencing with contempt of our ally, it suitably closed with panegyric of Napoleon. "He had all the opposite qualities of Fabius and Marcellus ;" he rivalled " Hannibal in the application of his means, and was exempt from his only fault, that of not improving by his past experience." To this fervour of praise what could lend an additional glow ? Lord Grey finds it in the contrasted rashness, levity, and hazard, of Ministers. Napoleon "never enters into an enterprize without a calculation of consequences; he never exposes his fortune to risk, on the desperate chance of a distant possibility of success." Such is Lord Grey's penetration into character; so shallow, prejudiced, and feeble, was his estimate of that great military gambler; so little capable was this Whig of seeing human fallibility in the bloodiest enemy of human freedom. The Marquis Wellesley at once pronounced Napoleon to be "a man prone to great hazards, and sure to be ruined by his rashness in the end."

Lord Liverpool's answer to Lord Grey's singular speech was worthy of the man and of the cause.

"The noble Earl (Grey) had censured his Majesty's government for precipitation. He had declared it his opinion, that they ought to have waited to ascertain the probability of the success of patriotism in Spain, before they offered the Spaniards assistance. This was a most extraordinary opinion. What! when the feeling of resistance and oppression was so strong and so general in Spain, would it have been honourable to the British character, had his Majesty's ministers told the gallant Spaniards, We will not give you aid, while you are most in want of it, while your efforts at emancipation are in their infancy; but we will defer our assistance till you are in full strength, and need it not. Had such been the language of his Majesty's ministers, they would have indeed deserved the reprobation of every man in the country."

Having thus cleared up the principle of the co-operation, he rapidly refutes the charge of rash expectation.

"His Majesty's ministers, in embarking in that cause, were not so weak, so improvident, so foolish, as

to expect that the first efforts of the Spanish people, contending with such an enemy, would be crowned with unqualified success; that no discomfitures, no disasters, no reverses, would retard and embarrass the early and crude operations of undisciplined bravery, when brought down into the open plain to contend with the superior discipline, the superior strength, and the superior generalship, of such a power as France. No! Weak as the noble Earl might suppose ministers, they were not yet guilty of calculating with certainty upon impossibilities. They did not expect that such a cause as the cause of Spain, to be fought for with such an enemy as the Ruler of France, could be determined in one campaign.”

He then turns to the proof from history, that national resistance contains the sure seeds of triumph.

"I cannot feel lukewarm in my hope, that the efforts of Spain will be crowned with ultimate success. When your lordships consider the great popular revolutions that have occurred, have they ultimately succeeded without great vicissitudes? Switzerland and Holland are instances of this; but, above all, America. In that fatal contest with America, we had gained every battle, we had taken every town which we had besieged, until the capture of General Burgoyne, and yet the Americans ultimately succeeded in the arduous contest. In the present important struggle, do not the extent and nature of the country afford a hope of success? Does not its population forbid despair?”

He then turns, with brief but vigorous sarcasm, to the pluckless policy of the Whig year.

"The noble Earl (Grey) concluded his speech with a censure on the conduct of his Majesty's ministers. The noble Earl may not approve of our measures; so neither do I approve of his counsels. I do not approve of those sublime operations in Egypt, at Buenos-Ayres, at Constantinople, and other places, that emanated from the wisdom of those with whom the noble Earl had been used to act."

He then closes with a lofty and feeling peroration on the motives of British sympathy and Spanish resist

ance.

"Upon the whole, I have the satisfaction, in common with the rest of

his Majesty's government, to reflect, that, whatever may be the consequences of the struggle in which we are embarked, we have not lost the confidence of the Spanish people; we know that every true Spanish heart beats high for this country; we know that, whatever may happen, they will not accuse us. Submission may be the lot which they are fated to endure in the end; but they do not impute to us the cause of their misfortunes. They are sensible, that neither the thirst after commerce, nor territory, nor security, is to be imputed to us in the assistance we have afforded to them on this most important occasion. Whatever may be the result, we have done our duty; we have not despaired; we have persevered, and we will do so to the last, while there is anything left to contend for with a prospect of success."-Debate of April 21, 1809.

To this powerful and luminous speech-of which I have given but a fragment, but of which the whole deserves to be studied, and is not less an honour to its speaker, than an exposition of the policy of the war-no reply could be made; and Opposition, broken down at once by defeats in the legislature, and unpopularity with the nation, abandoned its resistance for a time. New casualties at length arrived to its succour, and it rose again, to impede the interests, and degrade the honour, of the empire.

Why do I insist upon the conduct of the Whigs in the peninsular war?

Because it was the very crisis of Europe; because it was more than a war -it was a conflict of the principles of freedom with tyranny-a great trial of the question of national independence against universal domination; because such was the palpable and intrinsic interest of the contest to Europe, to England, and to freedom, that those who could not honour the resistance of Spain, or see its vital connexion with the hope of nations, must be either fools or knaves.

But if our contempt for Whiggism could be deepened, what could throw it into more cureless ridicule than its present clamour for Spanish insurrection; a miserable, half-cast descendant of French Jacobinism-repelled by the people, revolting to national manners, uncalled-for by the necessities of the country, and, at the sight of punishment, flying in despair to the remotest corner of Spain? What can be more ridiculous than that charlatan Wilson, deported from village to village of Portugal, in the midst of popular disgust, and, like a beggar, lashed back to his parish? What more silly, than the attempt to bolster up the emaciated fraud of Whig boasting at home, by fetes and fooleries in taverns and theatres? The failure of the Spanish ball was ludicrously completethe influence of quadrilles and syllabubs, in sustaining a national war, has been found impotent-and the Whigs are without resource for revolutions to come.

DEAR NORTH, THANK you for the Quarterly. I have just glanced through it with rather a hasty eye, and send you, as you wish, my opinions concerning it. You rather astonish me when you tell me that people are amazed at some of my former remarks. You are asked, you say, what you mean by abusing the Quarterly every now and then, and every now and then puffing the Edinburgh. As to the latter, that is mere matter of taste. The Edinburgh is decidedly going down; it is hardly seen in decent company now-a-days, and I imagine it owes whatever circulation it retains, to the desire which all buy

ers of periodicals feel of continuing their sets. Therefore, if a good article, a rara avis, nay, a rarissima, appears in the Edinburgh, it is open to you to praise it, without any fear of hurting your own side of the question. You may say that Jeffrey's review of Simond, for example, was light, sketchy, and pleasant, trifling agreeably, and just fit for the calibre of the reviewer. You may allow that Sydney Smith can still trim off an article, which, if you be in a great hurry, you might admit into your Magazine. You may confess that Brougham is a good sort of scold, whose intemperance to his literary superiors amuses you, on the same principle that you are amu

sed by the slang of a blackguard going it against a gentleman. This, I repeat, does no harm. The qualities of these gentlemen are admitted by all parties; and the smartness of Jeffrey, the buffoonery of the parson, the Billingsgate of Brougham, serve to float the lumber of the stottery of Macculloch, and filth of Hazlitt. We now look on it as a sort of fangless viper, which we allow to crawl about, permitting ourselves to smile now and then, if any of its slimy contortions please the fancy of the moment, knowing that it can do no hurt. It is indeed quite helpless at present. Look at the articles in the last on Slates and Virginius, and other crockery-ware. Why, sir, the work which talks of such trash, except, by a sentence or so, to dispose of them for ever, is destroyed.

Therefore it is that you may praise a good article of the Edinburgh, as I said before. When it went forth triumphing and to triumph; when its slander and scurrility dealt death about it, it would have been treason to have pointed out anything good which it contained; it would have been a dere liction of duty not to have taken the monster by the horns, and shewn him forth in full brutality, proving that, strong as he was in vice, there were still giants in the land who could overmaster his evil power. But now, when he has neither hoof nor horn, but only a pair of great long ears to prick up in defiance, it is surely an act of Christian charity, which does not at all in terfere with our allegiance to Toryism, to hold forth to admiration the good points of the creature. Puff accordingly, if it so pleases you, any good article which you may see immersed in the Serbonian bog of Constable's Review, without fear. The concern is about as low as their old ally Dicky Phillips's affair, which I am told is still published somewhere about Fleet-ditch.

Then, as to finding fault with the Quarterly, it strikes me to be pure impertinence in any of the Quarterly people to endeavour to bind you up. The principles of that journal I admire, I love-I mean its political principles. But am I bound to acknowledge it paramount in literature? Not I! Have not I as good a right to give an opinion on a book, as such people as Millman or Whittaker? In truth I have, and shall as liberally exercise my privilege of finding fault

with them, as they do with other writers, if I think them wrong. The great ability of many, of most of its articles, I not only admit, but am proud of. I think it does honour to our party to have such powerful writing engaged in its cause; but, at the same time, I cannot shut my eyes to its occasional puffery and humbug, by which it sometimes betrays that cause. I cannot see why the mere circumstance of its being printed by Mr Murray, should render it necessary that every one of Mr Murray's books, no matter how infamous or indecent, should be puffed off, directly or indirectly; and, above all, I cannot see why we are to hold our tongues, or wink at such conduct. Still farther, when I see a Review, professing to be the organ of Toryism, turning round on the Lord Chancellor who, if we view him in all his bearings, honour, integrity, knowledge of law, impartiality, and talent, must be considered to be the greatest man who ever sat in Chancery, the very nucleus of our principles-abusing him and reviling the law of the land, because the judge and the law will not allow Mr Murray to make money by the sale of foul works-works altogether opposed to the political and religious views which the Review supports, I must speak out, if nobody else will, and protest that the Quarterly does not utter my sentiments, in this instance at least. To Murray's using the engine in his hands for puffing off the fair books which he publishes, I do not object. I think, indeed, that it is bad taste to do it so much as he does; but I do most strenuously object to the Quarterly's giving up, in any case, its party for the sake of its publisher.

Without further preface, then, I beg leave to remark, that there is too much France in this number. Of thirteen articles, six are on French works, which is more than needful in an English review, particularly as there have been so many books worth reviewing, published since the last appearance of the Quarterly. It strikes me that both Edinburgh and Quarterly pay too limited attention to our own literature; that they are anything but a fair picture of the actual state of the writing world among us. They are just a bundle of Essays on books apparently selected at random, or, at most, with a view to serve their booksellers. The old Monthly Review is a much fairer record of our current literature in this