they are perhaps incapable of understanding the object which their own conduct has constantly tended to promote. There are others who, being a little more accessible to conviction, admit that a conspiracy has been formed, but affect to despise it because the persons who are implicated are of low condition; as if in these days rank and fortune were necessary qualifications for a conspirator! But let it be remembered, that of all the shocking diseases to which the human frame is liable, the most shocking and the most loathsome is that in which it is devoured by the vermin which its own diseased humours have generated: and to despise the present appearances in the body politic for this cause, would be as absurd as to disregard the first symptoms of that frightful malady by which Sylla was consumed. The error of these persons proceeds from inattention to the great and momentous change which the public press has produced in the very constitution of society. Formerly the people were nothing in the scale-we are hurrying on towards the time when they will be every thing. Like the continental physicians, such statesmen would pursue the expectant system, and trust to the vis medicatrix. Where the danger is imminent, strong remedies must be applied; if the bones are tainted, they must be searched till the joints are loosened-how else should the poison be expelled?

The Lord Mayor, with his usual discretion, has assured the public that no plot or conspiracy has existed against the government, and that the Report of the Secret Committee is, to his own knowledge, incorrect: for it states that an attack had been made upon the magistrates, and this was not the fact; the people had not attacked either himself or any other magistrate-he had only been fired at by some wanton and drunken individual. Common sense will allow of such a distinction as little as common law. The story is well known of a duellist who proposed to mark out his own lean dimensions upon the waistcoat of a corpulent antagonist, saying, that if he did not hit him between the lines it should go for nothing: the Lord Mayor's reasoning has all the absurdity of this proposal without the wit. Does he believe that the shot was fired because the individual was wanton and drunk, or because that individual was engaged in an actual and fore-planned insurrection, having in all likelihood made himself drunk for the work? For what purpose, does he imagine, had the rioter provided himself with firearms, either before the insurrection, or in the plunder of the gunsmiths' shops? It was no attack, because the man was drunk! By the same reasoning, no attack was made upon Mr. Platt; and it has indeed more than once been remarked in extenuation of that atrocious act, that the assassin was intoxicated :—he was so; and what was the remark of one of his associates upon that point-that 'the

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drunken dog had spoiled all!'-because in his drunkenness he had precipitated the execution of a plot which was soberly laid. His lordship also tells us that he is a member of the Union Club, and vouches for the loyalty of that association. It would be well if he called to mind that Petion, who, like himself, was a popular mayor, was, like him, also a member of a club of reformers, which club would have brought him to the guillotine, if he had not escaped that fate by perishing of hunger in the open fields! The Lord Mayor is a most active magistrate; no man pursues a thief with more alacrity, or collars one with greater spirit; in the language of the fancy, he is game. Nor is this his only merit-he goes through his business with decision and dispatch. But when he meddles with state-affairs, he reminds us of the old adage, Non ex quovis ligno Mercurius-it can never be carved into the bust of a statesman, though it may do very well for the sign of the patriot.

Men engaged in parties, says Bishop Burnet, are not easily put out of countenance. The Lord Mayor denies that he was attacked, though he was shot at; and he would persuade the public that there are no symptoms of a revolutionary spirit in the deluded multitude, though Sir James Shaw, in his presence, seized a fellow bearing the tricolour flag in the Royal Exchange! The Livery of London, in perfect conformity with the opinion of this magistrate, resolved to petition Parliament not to pass any laws restricting the rights of the subject, without allowing the people to ascertain the truth of the alleged grounds upon which such measures had been proposed.' Such a resolution could hardly have been expected from the mayor, aldermen, and livery of Gotham! Information which it is not prudent to lay before Parliament otherwise than through Secret Committees, because, if it were prematurely made public, the guilty would have warning to elude the pursuit of justice, and the persons who had given evidence for detecting them might probably be murdered, the Common Hall would submit to the people, that they may ascertain its truth: they petition Parliament to let the question be tried and decided by the whole people, instead of putting it in train to be brought before a jury! They take no notice of the great retrenchments which have been made; on the contrary, they imply that no such measures have been taken, as far as it can be implied by words without uttering a direct falsehood; and they avow the opinion that there is a settled design in the present ministers of the crown to trample upon the liberties of the people, and to establish a despotic government.' Mr. Favell, in proposing these resolutions, so remarkable for their moderation, their wisdom, and their truth, trusted that the Livery would be willing to die in the last ditch in defence of their rights! Brave Mr. Favell !-did

he

he mean Fleet Ditch, or Shore Ditch? And Mr. Hunt the Orator, pathetically, yet heroically observed, that if the Habeas Corpus were suspended, ministers would have a right to drag him to a dungeon and imprison him until the act expired. They might torture his flesh, he said,—they might impair his constitution, but he gloried in the idea that they could not destroy a noble mind! Heroic Mr. Orator Hunt! But these magnanimous patriots may calm themselves. The worthy members of the Livery are in no danger of dying in a ditch, provided they do not walk too near one on their way home from a Reform dinner; and Mr. Hunt will not have his flesh punished if he appoint no more pugilistic meetings, or keep them no better than his appointment with mine host of the British Coffee House.

'When God only intends the temporary chastisement of a people,' says Cowley, he does not raise up his servant Cyrus, (as he himself is pleased to call him,) or an Alexander, who had as many virtues to do good as vices to do harm, but he makes the Massaniellos and the Johns of Leyden the instruments of his vengeance, that the power of the Almighty may be more evident by the weakness of the means by which he chuses to demonstrate it. He did not assemble the serpents and the monsters of Africa to correct the pride of the Egyptians, but called for his armies of locusts out of Ethiopia, and formed new ones of vermin out of the very dust.' The thing which has been, it is that which shall be! How greatly might it profit the people if they would look back upon the demagogues who in other generations strutted their hour as lords of the ascendant, and were drawn in triumph by the deluded populace through the streets of London! Such a retrospect, beginning with Titus Oates and ending with Colonel Wardle, might teach the Londoners a little to distrust their own sagacity. The Turks preserve a saying of their prophet, If you are perplexed in your affairs, look for assistance from the inhabitants of the tombs:' but alas! for the multitude, the experience of their fathers is buried with them, and the lessons of history, dearly as they have been purchased, are in vain.

The invincible attachment which the French bear to their country is one of the best traits of the French character. No distance, no time, no wrongs, can diminish it. Wherever they may be placed, whatever injuries they may have sustained, though their property should have been confiscated, their family butchered, and thenselves proscribed, we have seen that the honour of France was still dear to them; insomuch, that for this cause the emigrants were often known to rejoice at victories. which prolonged the time of their exile, and seemed to render it perpetual. In this respect they greatly excel us: for, melancholy as it is to confess the dis

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graceful fact, the English have less national feeling than any other people. It is notorious that the bitterest enemies of England in America, the writers who by their falsehoods and virulent invectives have most contributed to exasperate the Americans against Great Britain, are natives and subjects of this country, who with the feelings of renegades and traitors, hate the land in which they were born and bred. And well it is when this generation of vipers transport themselves: but too many of them remain at home to hiss and to sting. We talk of patriotism,-but no men ever possessed so little as our self-styled patriots. They are ready at all times to impeach the motives and calumniate the measures of the government, labouring even, as far as they can, to obstruct its common and necessary operations. In times of war they go on from step to step, pleading the enemy's cause with all the warmth and zeal of unfeed advocates, till they have identified their own feelings with his; and they pursue so precisely the course which is best suited to his interests, that he reckons their efforts among the circumstances which facilitate his success. In times of peace they join in any cry however senseless, take up any cause however frivolous or unjust, and follow any leader however worthless, desperate, or despicable, for the sake of aunoying the government at least, if they cannot succeed in inflicting upon it any serious injury. A spirit like this has never existed in any other country, unless it were Carthage; and had it not been by the prevalence of such a spirit, Carthage perhaps might not have been overthrown,-for Hannibal, like Marlborough, had his worst enemies at home.

It may be neither uninteresting nor unprofitable to trace, if we can, the growth of a spirit by which England is so peculiarly characterized and disgraced, and to seek for the causes which have tended to combine so many persons against the best government in the world.

The wars between the rival houses of York and Lancaster, bloody as they were, and important in their political consequences, were of the same character as contested elections in the present day: the game was of the same kind, though the stake differed tremendously in magnitude; men were engaged on either side from partyfeeling, or private and accidental circumstances, such as their connections, or their birth-place,—not from any public principle, or clear conception that their cause was right. And when the ferocious struggle was terminated by the union of the two families, it is surprizing how little animosity seems to have survived it. The religious disputes under Henry VIII. divided the nation in a different manner, and produced a long train of consequences, which are acting at this hour, and the end of which no human foresight can discern. The first Reformers were possessed by a burning fiery

zeal;

zeal; they trampled under foot all personal considerations; the strongest human ties proved as weak as the green withs which Sampson snapt asunder when he arose from his sleep: their comforts, their worldly wealth and prospects, their affections, their liberty, their lives, were as dust and ashes compared to the kingdom of Heaven, on which their hearts were fixed, and which was ever present to their fervent imagination. Impatient of restraint, and intolerant of all error or even difference of opinion, however harmless, they were equally ready to stand in triumph beside the stake as persecutors, or sing in the flames themselves triumphantly as martyrs. The Catholics, on their part, were neither less sincere, nor less zealous: they saw distinctly the enormous present evil to which their antagonists shut their eyes, and the perilous consequences which those antagonists, perhaps, were incapable of seeing; but they were blind themselves to the corruptions and abominations which had provoked this destructive hostility. Both parties had their time-servers, who sought only to advance themselves in the confusion; but the feelings of the great majority, as well as of the leading persons on both sides, were unalloyed with any baser motives, though all the fiercer passions were called into full play.

6

During the first heat and effervescence of this great revolution, the most momentous by which civilized society had ever, till then, been convulsed, the religious part of the question was exclusively regarded; but it was not long before its earthly relations were perceived: and the church of England had hardly been established by Elizabeth before theological opinions produced two political parties in the state, each mortally inimical to the other, but both hating the new church which stood at equal distance from either. The Catholics looked to Spain, hoping to recover their lost supremacy by the arms of a foreign power. Their hearts had ceased to be English when the government of England became heretical, and Burleigh tells us that Philip II. was even greatly beloved' by them his domestic tyranny, his persecution of the Jews in Spain, and his infernal cruelties in the Netherlands excited in them neither shame nor indignation; the more formidable he was, the greater were their hopes; they looked to him, as the ultra-whigs of the present day have looked to Buonaparte, and in like manner forgave his insatiable ambition, his falsehoods, his murders, and his massacres, because he was the enemy of their own government. The Puritans were not less disaffected, but they were less treasonable, because they expected no foreign assistance, neither were they at this time so strong a party in themselves. It soon became apparent that they tended naturally toward republicanism; for certain it is, that monarchy and episcopacy, the throne and the altar, are much more nearly connected than writers of bad faith, or little reflection,