18 Europe, and the Horse-Guards' Cabinet. |~JuLY, 



ever flourished a daily paragraph in a daily paper, drew their salaries, 

 half-pay, full-pay, allowances, and all with official punctuality, laid on a 

 tax, defended a sinecure, were burlesqued in the house, or hated in all 

 houses beside. 'Tis true that we have at its head the greatest orator, 

 financier, diplomatist, and letter-writer that ever existed a luminary at 

 once to lighten the darkness of Britain, and flash terror in the eyes of 

 submissive Europe. 'Tis true that he has compiled to aid him, if such 

 powers can by possibility require aid, a cabinet composed of the most 

 unquestionably able, pure, and public-minded personages that ever were 

 charged with Apostacy ; that he has at his foot the manliness, candour, 

 and official dignity of Sir Robert Peel, whom, we with pain observe, the 

 public are determined to call Sir Robert Blifil ; that he commands, soul 

 and body, the personal virtue, honourable independence, and pro- 

 fessional learning of Lord Lyndhurst, with a long et cetera of official 

 underlings, (we beg pardon for the word, but our language is not rich 

 in diplomacy,) the close copies of their talents and virtues. Still we find, 

 that the infinite consolation of this knowledge does not penetrate us ; and 

 that if we were inclined to express the words that burst to our lips, we 

 should pronounce the aspect of public affairs mortifying, degrading, and 

 hazardous ; and the only remedy for the evil hour, the instant expulsion 

 of a ministry whom we alternately pity and scorn, hate and despise. 



The Duke of Wellington has not the talents for governing the country. 

 This is the fact, no matter in what terms it may be told. No man may 

 be fitter to make soldiers march and fight, though there has at no time 

 been much required in the general to make the British soldier do all 

 this: he had done it long before the Duke of Wellington was born, and 

 we trust that he will do it again, long after the Duke may be where his 

 love of office at least will trouble him no more. But the Minister has not 

 ability enough to govern this country, nor any other. We are to be 

 duped no longer by the glitter of epaulettes or the nonsense of Horse- 

 Guards' language. What is it to us how many lazy sons of lazy lords may 

 be on his pension-list, or how many hungry general officers may levy him 

 for commands in the colonies ? We want a minister who will exhibit 

 some depth of view, some knowledge of the principles by which alone 

 great and free communities have been and are to be sustained, some de- 

 cision in public emergencies, some originality and manly sagacity in 

 devising relief for the casualties of the state. We ask of the whole 

 race of ministerial panegyrists, of the hired and the willing to be hired, of 

 the battalion of sinecurists, of the whole host of nightly applauders of 

 the Home Secretary's speeches, can they answer those demands? 

 where is the single measure of the Minister on which they can lay their 

 finger as an answer to any one of those requisitions ? 



We pass over the figure which the Minister himself makes in the Lords. 

 We shall suffer his worshippers or his burlesquers to pronounce it digni- 

 fied, rational, and self-possessed : let them have the full benefit of his 

 style as a model of statesman-like elocution, and of his manners as 

 the perfection of statesman-like temper. But we turn to more 

 tangible things. We demand what relief has the Premier dis- 

 covered for any one of the public pressures ? What has he done 

 for Coin, Corn, or Commerce ; those great principles of life in our 

 struggling country? Has he devised one salutary measure? or has he 

 been able to conceive any measure whatever ? Has he not left the 

 remedy to what he calls the work of time ; but what every body else 



