246 The Opening of the Session of Parliament. [MARCH, 



Brazilian prince, nor of the guarantee of England to the perpetual con- 

 nection of the thrones, nor a syllable of the antagonist right of Don 

 Miguel. The only question with his Majesty's ministers, after all their 

 virtuous wrath at usurpation, comes to be one of profit and loss. 

 Whether shall we gain or lose more by siding with Don Miguel or 

 grappling with him ? The question is undoubtedly an excellent one 

 for a rat cabinet, but it is, be believe, the first time that it has been 

 embodied in a king's speech. That Don Miguel's conduct has been 

 contemptuous of the opinions of the cabinet we perfectly allow, and by 

 no means blame him for it. That he " humbugged" the vulgarity of 

 the word does not prevent its applicability the Lord Dudley in the most 

 consummate manner, is matter of universal acknowledgement ; nor do 

 we impeach him for so fair and so easy an exercise of his ingenuity. 

 (The noble lord had, however, the compensation of getting his house 

 handsomely furnished on the retreat of the royal fugitive, on which for- 

 tunate windfall we congratulate a nobleman of his narrow income). 

 That Don Miguel laughed at in council, and put to instant rout in the 

 field, the whole rabble of that puppyism in politics, which, armed with 

 a Benthamite consitution, and a clamorous tongue, began with giving 

 lectures on liberty, with the dungeon and the scaffold in the back- 

 ground ; we cannot place among the counts of his indictment. But, that 

 he did as it pleased his royal will, to our merchants and fellow subjects 

 that he treated England with scorn, and menaced us with the com- 

 bined hostility of the family thrones, is as well known, as it would have 

 been natural that we should retort scorn with scorn. But he knew our 

 ministers better ; he threw " embarrassments" in their way ; and he left 

 them to flounder on as they could. It does not appear that he moved 

 hand or foot to assist us out of the slough. The policy of contempt 

 fully achieved its triumph, and the ministerial expose has at once taught 

 him, and every other state, how to deal with us in future. But among 

 the " quips and cranks" of the affair, is the horror of the radicals at the 

 triumphant Portuguese. In their journals, in their harangues, in the 

 streets, in the Honourable House, in every spot, from a Mechanics' In- 

 stitute up to the legislature, they exhaust all their righteous indigna- 

 tion upon this " unlicensed grasper at a diadem/' Brougham exhales a 

 subtler venom while the name hangs upon his lip ; Hume is more un- 

 bearably Scotch in that conglomeration of rugged words which tumble 

 out to announce his virtuous wrath ; and poor Lord Holland shakes off 

 his years, and shoulders his crutch, to shew how fields were won in the 

 days when Burdett and he were babes, sitting beside the full-charged 

 kennel of Westminster eloquence, and sworn to Fox and buff-waistcoats. 

 And the best part of the burlesque is, Don Miguel's " guilty disregard 

 of royal rights," concentred in the word, usurpation, 



Oh word of fear, 



Ungrateful to a whiggish ear ! 



To have overlooked the glaring ridicule of this sudden fastidiousness 

 would have argued wilful blindness ; and accordingly Lord Aberdeen, 

 who, mystified as he is, is not wilfully blind, attacked the noble lord on 

 his sudden oblivion of his great friend, Napoleon, that gentle and un- 

 usurping friend of liberty, on whose fall his lordship had bestrode his 

 foundered Pegasus, and over whose tomb he had wept, to the amount of 

 one of the most melancholy epigrams that ever made the clay lie heavier 

 on the remnants of a lamented rogue. 



The portion of the speech specially addressed to the House of Com- 



