1831.J The Stale of Etirope. 119 



unfortunate Speaker alone wakeful, and inwardly cursing — if so decorous 

 a functionary can commit such an enormity — the art of speech newly 

 discovered by so many tongues. The Reform Bill lingers and lan- 

 guishes in the Commons. The subject has run itself dry, and if the 

 ministry do not resuscitate it by some coup d'etat, it will never find 

 nerves or breath enough to walk into the House of Lords. Sir Robert 

 Peel is the antagonist leader. What more need we say for the inactivity 

 of its advocates ? We have feelings towards that " breaker down of the 

 constitution of 1(388" which we will not trust to paper. But it is 

 enough for us to know that Sir Robert Peel mingles himself with any 

 question, to shrink from it with disgust. If we should ever be con- 

 vinced that the " Reformers" are honest men, it will be from hearing 

 Sir Robert Peel's naost determined declaration against "giving them his 

 confidence." We remember him on the fatal Catholic Question too well. 

 We remember the solemn decorum of his solemn visage, his formal 

 protestations that " no change of public affairs, no accident of time, nor 

 glitter of office, no popular outcry, no command of parent, people, or 

 king, should nor could shake the firmness of a principle that was all but 

 born with him, that he felt as the breath of life, and that he would part 

 with only when he parted with all things in the grave." 



And we remember the equally solemn decorum, the supersober 

 sanctity of visage with which, at a week's warning, he told us the direct 

 contrary. In this thing, we offer no reproach to Sir Robert, he could 

 not help it. It was not in his nature to be firm, and he gave way a6- 

 cordingly. But if we should yet rank among the Reformers, our an- 

 swer will be — " the measure was reprobated by Sir Robert Blifil 

 Peel." 



THE CHOLERA. 



There is, we may easily believe, avast quantity of unnecessary alarm 

 on the subject of this disease. Three-fourths of the English drawing- 

 rooms seize upon it as a subject ; it supplies a capital relief, when every- 

 thing has been said about the weather, that can be said about weather, 

 and when politics are cast aside as " mauvais ton." The citizens find it 

 the matter of a new paragraph, in the dull intelligence of the foreign 

 papers, and the whole of the watering-places have laid hold of it, as the 

 happiest auxiliary to the exhausted topics of high water and low water, 

 the " sub-acid taste of the hot spring, this morning ;" " the deficient 

 sulphur in the bath dose ;" " the superabundant steel in the JMalvern 

 potation," " the marvellous phenomenon of a celebrated alderman, who is 

 just able, after forty years of swallowing a bottle of it before breakfast, 

 to see his own knees, and even put one foot before the other," and the 

 " prodigious improvement in the complexions of Sir Watkin Wigs- 

 borough's seven daughters, from Cumberland, whose cheeks it has 

 turned from peonies into the colour of pie-crust, by the activity of its 

 saline," — and so forth. 



In all cases, there will be a great deal the work of gossip, and every 

 wicked old man, with a hundred thousand in the three per cents, and 

 every ancient lady, conscious of the secret sins of card-jjlaying and car- 

 mine, will tremble at tlie first touch of a cold, as the lierald of that dire 

 enemy, which sweeps the unfortunate people of the north from the 



