224 Notes of the Month on Affairs in General. QAuo. 



and given a dangerous power to the Irish Roman Catholics, the only 

 hazardous part of the Irish population, \ve say to the last Parliament, we 

 remember you with bitterness and contempt, and may England never 

 see such another ! 



The elections will shortly commence, and there will probably be con- 

 siderable changes in the representation of the boroughs. The counties 

 are too expensive for contests, and, therefore, the old members will in 

 general remain, not from any love or liking for them, but from the 

 natural fear of new candidates to plunge into their pockets for hundreds 

 of thousands of pounds sterling. Lord Milton's Yorkshire contest cost 

 each of the parties 120,000/. ; the other counties have occasionally cost 

 from 50,000 to 90,000/. : a tolerable sum for the privilege of eating a 

 beef-steak at the St. Stephen's coffee-house, and sleeping on the back 

 benches for seven years together ! 



Mr. Serjeant Wilde has again tried his crusade at Newark. The 

 Serjeant is a bold man, and certainly not easy to be put out of counte- 

 nance. We hope none of the family of his client, Jenkins, are in the 

 town, and that he has not accompanied his placard by a copy of the 

 solicitor-general's speech, or the vice-chancellor's judgment on that trial. 

 However, he will be beaten as ignominiously as ever, notwithstanding 

 his new forensic glories. Mr. Sadler will be the member ; and Newark 

 will have the honour, for a high honour it is, of returning a man of great 

 ability, and, what is better, and rarer even in this age of mediocrity, of 

 pure principle ! No man in the House of Commons has risen to such 

 sudden and deserved distinction as Mr. Sadler. His speech on the 

 Catholic question was the most powerful and shame-striking appeal that 

 was made in the whole course of the debate to a house of apostacy ; 

 and his public eloquence is more than a casual display. No man has 

 studied the topics on which he speaks so profoundly as Mr. Sadler. He 

 speaks not from fluency of tongue, but from fulness of knowledge, nor 

 more from natural vigour of understanding, than genuine Christian 

 ardour of heart in the good cause. 



We look only with ridicule on the lacrymose procession of the ousted 

 voters of Newark ; and however sorry we may be at their loss of the 

 good things which a contested election may be generally supposed to 

 ripen, we are quite as well pleased to see that they have been turned out, 

 and that the Duke of Newcastle knows the difference between an 

 ungrateful tenant and a grateful one, and between the petty admirer of 

 Mr. Serjeant Wilde for reasons best understood by the admirer, and the 

 honest English yeoman who votes for a man of honesty and virtue for 

 no other reason than that he respects honesty and virtue. We give the 

 Duke of Newcastle credit for every point of his conduct ; for his original 

 determination to put down all borough trading, for his manliness in 

 announcing that determination in utter scorn of the thousand scribblers 

 who would, of course, be up in arms against such a determination, and 

 for his firmness in persevering to the last. We give him additional 

 credit for having, in an age of venality, scorned to take advantage of the 

 time; for having looked upon his power only as a means of public 

 good, and of bringing into parliament thoroughly honest and thoroughly 

 able men ; for bringing in such men as Sadler, Wetherall, and Attwood, 

 and for the determination, astonishing as it may sound in the modern 

 parliamentary ear, of giving up the great influence of his name, of his 

 fortune, of his connexions, and of his public and exemplary honour, 

 wholly and solely, to the preservation of what remains to us of the 

 British constitution. 



