THE ELECTIONS. 115 



obvious merit or defect of plain and creditable avowals. Aristocratic 

 arrogance has lost that spacious and demoralizing power of placing 

 in the seats of legislation the hireling creatures of its will, of giving 

 guardians to the systematic fraud and lucrative corruption which 

 infected former parliaments with an immedicable pest; of neu- 

 tralizing patriotism by conspiracies against intelligence and virtue, 

 and of driving a democracy of over-patient freemen through all 

 the sufferings of hopeless degradation, in the likeness of " a 

 swinish multitude." We have fewer of those instances of noble 

 cyphers occupying, in the crudity of adolescence, the places in the 

 senate, designed by every rule of wisdom and security for individual 

 talent, virtue, and experience. There are fewer of those upstart ap- 

 paritions, without character or name, the mysterious produce of the 

 closets and the bed-chambers of wantonness and profligacy ; of those 

 ready agents in the meaner regions of impurity, at once indifferent to 

 fame, and irresponsible to conscience ; of those fouler instruments of 

 office, which patronage is too fastidious to denote by open gratitude, 

 and merely gifts, with opportunities of public peculation, as the re- 

 compence of secret prostitution. These are certain of the charms 

 which the despoiling genius of Reform has unrelentingly effaced from 

 the venerable image of the constitution. These are certain of the 

 blessings which the present ministers of England, in their sensitive 

 alarm at innovation, were strenuous to retain with such conservative 

 enthusiasm. These were certain of the idols of those candid patriots, 

 who now approach the bar of public reason and intelligence with all 

 the winning graces of conversion, and glowing, like the proselytes to 

 new fanaticism, threaten to outstrip the old apostles of Reform, and 

 stamp a saving faith with the delirious outrages of profanation. What 

 was the language of the present cabinet, of its impervious heads and 

 drivelling tails, before the country had subdued the partisans of par- 

 liamentary corruption ; in those palmy times of inexpugnable venality, 

 when liberty of speech was menaced by examples of oppressive per- 

 secution, and the king's attorney-general, the avenging angel of his 

 party, was entrusted with the powers of desolation to assail the cri- 

 minality of liberal discussion. Throughout a period of peculiar suf- 

 fering, when every evil endured by England, by her colonies, by 

 Ireland when her domestic poverty and discontent, the languor of 

 her commerce, her humiliated position and degraded character abroad 



