1830-3 [ 327 ] 



NOTES OF THE MONTH ON AFFAIRS IN GENERAL. 



THE King proceeds on his course of popularity. Nothing can be 

 easier, pleasanter, or wiser. By living like an English gentleman, he 

 enjoys all the comforts of a private station, and by acting like a King he 

 secures the public respect. Queen Adelaide follows his example. She 

 has one unroyal quality, for which we like her the better she pays her 

 debts. All demands on her are punctually discharged, and no one can 

 reproach the first lady in the realm with a meanness which would dis- 

 grace the lowest. Let our titled people look to this. The Queen has 

 but one thing more to do, to fix herself in the highest degree of public 

 respect. Let her, like old Charlotte, refuse to receive any woman of 

 tainted character at her Court, let harlotry be branded whether it appear 

 under the coronet of a Baroness or a Duchess. Let the odious and inso- 

 lent race of women who disgraced the late court, dishonoured the name 

 of the late too easy King, and spread the infection of their manners 

 through society, be altogether excluded from reception by the Queen, 

 and she will seat herself on a safer throne than St. James's. She will 

 be Queen of the people. England has long looked with disgust on the 

 conduct of the higher classes. Revolution is abroad, and will not spare. 

 Jf the crimes of public life in England earn the scourge, it will fall ; it 

 can be averted by nothing but our virtues. 



The elections are over, and what is the result ? that every syllable which 

 we said in scorn of the last parliament, has been echoed and re-echoed from 

 .every hill and dale, and town and hamlet of the empire ; that it has been 

 pronounced a time-serving, an un-English parliament. Upwards of 

 two hundred new members have been returned, and in every instance 

 where the public voice could have been heard, those men were returned 

 on the strength of their declarations, that they despised the ministry, 

 scorned the conduct of the last parliament, and were bound to the will 

 of the nation alone. 



So much for the junto who huzzaed for every administration 

 alike ! of the four that filled up their four years : the thick-and- 

 Jthin parliament of the moping and hypocritical Lord Liverpool, of the 

 vivacious and tricking George Canning, of that genius of blundering, 

 Lord Goderich, and of the Field Marshal, the man of gendarmerie 

 and horse, foot, and dragoons. And if his celestial highness Pope Pius 

 had sat in Downing-street in his mitre, the thick-and-thin parliament 

 would have discovered that he was the very man to secure the con- 

 stitution in Church and State ; or if the Dey of Algiers, in want of 

 employment, had, like the Duke of 'Wellington, turned his mind to 

 place-making and place-giving in the neighbourhood of the Treasury, 

 erected his slipper-bearer into a Sir Robert Peel, or any other sallow- 

 hearted minion of the same dimensions of mind and conscience; made 

 his chief bastinado-man into the likeness of a Sir George Murray; and 

 clothed the keeper of his harem in the outward man of some com- 

 plying secretary, who looks upon his domestic arrangements with a 

 politic view to the comforts of his superiors ; there cannot be a doubt 

 under the canopy of Heaven that the patriotic parliament of 1829 

 would have discovered within the round of his highnesses turban all 

 the legal, political, and patriotic wisdom essential to the government of 

 the Empire, and found in the sweep of his highness's scymetar an un- 



