335 

 NOTES OF THE MONTH. 



THE Two SPEAKERS. The Speakers of the Houses of Lords aud 

 Commons, viz. the Right Hon. Lord Brougham and Vaux, and the 

 Right Hon. Charles Manners Sutton, have been this month the prin- 

 cipal performers in the ministerial Whig extravaganza, called '" Mock-Re- 

 trenchment !" The curtain at last draws up, and enter the Lord Chan- 

 cellor, with an eloquent harangue on public virtue, philosophic desires, 

 and patriotic disinterestedness, followed by a proposition, expressive 

 of his determination to be contented, as long as he shall remain 

 in office, with the trifling emolument of 14,000 a year, and setting 

 forth also, in the plenitude of his lofty liberality, his Lordship's in- 

 tention to accept, on retiring from the said office, of not one sixpence 

 more than 5,000 a year as a pension. On this point he is imperative, 

 as he is desirous of resting his good name with posterity upon this onr 

 fact that he, the enlightened advocate of cheap knowledge and cheap 

 government, the pledged supporter of retrenchment, the moral painter 

 of his country's wrongs and wretchedness, was pensioned only 1,000 

 a-year higher than an Eldon or a Lyndhurst ! 



It is certainly true that Lord Brougham has given up fees and patronage 

 to a certain extent; but why claim eternal honour for doing a very 

 small portion of what he had been pledged to do. We say, a 

 very small portion; because when Lord Althorpe confesses that the 

 average income derived from the Chancellorship for some years past, 

 has only amounted to 14,500. and when, in the same breath, he asks 

 for a settled and regularly paid salary of 14,000. (with an increased 

 pension) for Lord Brougham, the amount of his Lordship's sacrifice of 

 emolument may be pretty accurately guessed at, His disinterestedness 

 requires no great depth of calculation to fathom. We do not blame 

 Henry Brougham, however, we blame his lawyer's wig and his coronet, 

 which have turned heads as strong as his before now. 



The Speaker's pension on his announced retirement from the chair, is 

 equally objectionable. What are our famished labourers to think, when 

 the pension of a Speaker of the English House of Commons, is almost 

 as much as the salary of an American president ! 



MYSTERIOUS INSULT TO His MAJESTY! We have been exceedingly 

 surprised at a most unceremonious obstacle offered to his gracious Ma- 

 jesty's progress the other day. It appears that he had been paying a 

 visit to Sir (we really forget the name) at Datchet ; and, with a view 

 of shortening the road homewards, had directed the postilions to turn 

 down a lane, which, by some singular accident, had no thoroughfare. 

 It resembled numberless passages in ancient as well as modern poetry - 

 it led to nothing! By this strange occurrence, the King, it is reported, 

 was put to much inconvenience. Such we find to be the newspaper 

 report ; but we take the whole story to be nothing but an ingenious in- 

 vention. We have too high an opinion of the royal prerogative. We 

 know that in ancient times, mountains were levelled before the footsteps 

 of triumphant monarchs ; and Herodotus, the Grecian historian, in- 

 forms us of a valley in Egypt, which enlarged itself, to admit the pas- 

 sage of the army of Aruspes. Indeed, in former times, it was an 

 established rule, never questioned, that not only the mental and corporeal 



