THE LATE AND PRESENT MINISTRY. 



In the downfall of Earl Grey, there is, however, one circumstance 

 that cannot fail to be regarded with feelings of unmingled satisfaction : 

 he was shipwrecked for the very cause he most deserved of all others 

 to be shipwrecked ; he went to pieces on the rock of his own forma- 

 tion, and was engulphed in the v/hirlpool his anile rashness had 

 created. Ireland, in declaiming against whose wrongs he first 

 challenged the attention of the British people ; in upholding whose 

 rights he secured a permanency in the good opinion of that people ; 

 but in oppressing whom, he forfeited the respect and confidence of 

 his fellow-citizens Ireland has been the element of discord, that 

 shattered, in the twelfth hour, his political reputation. What states- 

 man in British history would rival the author of the Reform Bill, if 

 he were not, at the same time, the author of the Coercion Bill ? 

 And what statesman would suffer by comparison with the oppressor 

 of Ireland, if he were not the destroyer of rotten boroughs ? A 

 splendid celebrity was within his grasp, and he forfeited it, through 

 the puerile ambition of retaining the premiership in his seventieth 

 year. The consummation of his career as a legislator, was marked 

 by an attempt at the renewal of an act which would have driven his 

 predecessor from office, even in the climax of his popularity, attend- 

 ant on the measure of Catholic Emancipation. And here the reader 

 cannot fail to institute a comparison between the Duke of Wellington 

 and Lord Grey, respecting the decline of the popularity of both. 

 Had the victor of Napoleon been content to retire from the field of 

 the last and most glorious of his fights, his fame would now be as 

 green as the laurels of his triumphs. The people would have for- 

 given the Tory feelings and predilection in the soldier, they cannot 

 and will not tolerate in the lawgiver. He might have indulged his 

 anti-plebeian fancies, provided he did not attempt to restrict plebeian 

 opinions. But, as if anxious to demonstrate the truth of the some- 

 what trite adage, that a very great hero may be a very little man, he 

 ran headlong in the teeth of the wishes of the age, and illustrated the 

 applicability of the equally trite simile of the viper and the file. His 

 legislative would have not very distantly approached his military 

 rivalry of his illustrious competitor, had he even been content to 

 forego the trappings of authority, after carrying the Catholic Bill of 

 Rights. But the insane laudations of his titled admirers, operating 

 on a very simple mind, urged him to the ludicrous folly of becoming 

 the most conspicuous land-mark of bye-gone times and opinions. 

 His declaration of the inutility of any and all reform, was followed 

 by a declaration on the part of the people, of the inutility of any and 

 all utterers of such absurdity. Accordingly, we find him, with all 

 dexterity of a proficient in legerdemain, abandoning the game of 

 playing at statesmanship, and taking up the inane pastime of Babel- 

 mongering with the bigotted and overgrown schoolboys of Oxford. 

 Earl Grey, on the other hand, not content with being the most 

 popular man in the kingdom, not content with exhibiting the might 

 of the greatest people on record, evinced in their simultaneous up- 

 rising on a question involving the enlargement of their political free- 

 dom and not content with humbling the ostentatious vanity of a do- 

 minant oligarchy, seeking to oppress the people, was smitten with the 



