'MV,\ Thr Stulf of the Km pi re : [OcT. 



Whiggism of" the Attorney-General, or of the Chancellor, may have 

 betrayed their associate into this slouch of State prosecution, we must 

 leave to their own development ; but the Ethiopian might as well wash 

 away his skin, or the viper purge away Iiis venom, as the Whig ever 

 extricate himself from the original pi-opensities of his Whiggism. They 

 have now their triumph over the blustering Tory that so long kept them 

 at a scoffing and contumelious distance. They have suffered him to 

 plunge from vexation into folly, and from folly into violence. And tlieir 

 triumph will be completed in the verdict, declaring that the chai-ges are 

 frivolous, vexatious, personal, and contemptible. They have utterly 

 Codringtonized hira. 



But of all the journals, the Standard ought to have been the last to be 

 marked out for the heavy hand of law. That paper is in every sense of 

 the word an honour to the public literature of England. Eloquent and 

 powerful in its style, it is still more memorable for its principles, for its 

 adherence to its original declarations, through good and evil, and for its 

 dignified and intelligent support of every essential interest of the British 

 empire. If to have advocated the constitution in the crisis of Church and 

 State, be a source of praise, we cannot conceive the ground of an attack 

 on the Standard. But if to have advocated it tlien, and to struggle for 

 it now, shall be declared a crime, we acknoAvledge that a deeper criminal 

 tlian this paper cannot be grasped by the hand of ambitious vengeance; 

 and we shall congratulate the Standard on being selected as tlie victim. 



But the whole process is pre-eminently degi-ading to the individual 

 for whose defence it has been constructed. He is overwhelmed in the 

 dust of his own sandy fortification. We almost regret to see an English 

 nobleman driven to such expedients. What ! the Duke of Wellington 

 stooping to wash the stains off his character in the pools of the Old 

 Bailey ! The man who a few years ago would have answered a charge 

 on his name by a victory, and have extinguished the voice of personal 

 rebuke in the acclamations of armies and empires. When Scipio was 

 accused of embezzlement, he answered it by writing on the accusing 

 page the single word Carthage. The answer was irresistible. 



But dismissing a subject which we have adopted only from a feeling of 

 its necessity — we say to all public men, that there is but one way to obtain 

 the confidence of the nation, and that way is by sincerity and straight- 

 forwardness. A mind worthy of power will feel an instinctive scorn 'of 

 obtaining it by the arts of low disguise, by trimming and time-serving — 

 by shuffling and sourness. Englishmen are a manly people— and they will 

 not prostitute the name of patriotism, nor even of personal dignity, to 

 that distorted sensitiveness which, if it can stifle the public voice, cares 

 not for the pubhc judgment; that sinister delicacy of conscience, which 

 is hurt only by being tbund out, and which, reversing the Roman's 

 maxim, " places the virtue in the not being suspected." Contemptible 

 as we think the whole group by whom the premier has surrounded him- 

 self, we will not yet believe him incapable of regret for his share in the 

 common humiliation. But we must remind him, that conjectures of undue 

 ambition or covert designs against the State, cannot, from the nature of 

 things, be within the clearance of a London jury. — They may assist the 

 vengeance of an angry and intemperate minister, but how is it possible 

 that their opinions can purify the principles of an accused Statesman ? 

 The charge in the present instance is doubly childish. The old bur- 

 lesque accusation of France in her maddest hour was — " Soupgonne d'etre 

 sHxpcrt." No living man would have thought the reputation of a British 



