1829.] England and Europe. 489 



step he found it a heavier burthen : and none of its long succession of 

 bearers would have more gladly flung down a weight which disqualified 

 him from every hope of carrying with him the true affections of the 

 country. But the curse of his education was upon him. He had, like 

 his predecessor, been the Child of Office ; from his public infancy, 

 he had breatlied only the atmosphere of Downing-street. To leave the 

 circle of clerks, and the sallow and hungry visages of preferment hun- 

 ters, to get out of the perpetual croak of the whole vulture tribe that 

 make their daily ineal of the national bowels, would have been to him 

 like leaving the world. His was not the mould that can oppose the resist- 

 ance of a virtuous fortitude to old inclination. The cravings of an 

 appetite pampered for t^^enty years at the table of the public, were not 

 to be hushed by the .ueagre regimen of popular respect, nor of an 

 approving conscience. He must have power. Its sole tenure was a 

 coalition with an Opposition, which had sunk from one grade of popular 

 scorn to another, and which brought, as its marriage portion, the alarm 

 and the contempt of the whole intelligent community. But it was powerful 

 in votes. The boroughs had worked well for those clamorous advo- 

 cates of popular rights, and the Old Sarum and Westbury system ena- 

 bled him to laugh at the remonstrances of England. When London 

 cried out, Knaresborough answered, and silenced the presumptuous 

 appeal. When Yorkshire demanded justice, the might of Sandwich was 

 set in array against her, and she was driven to an ignominious retreat. 

 The alliance of Mr. Tierney, the member for two individuals, or of Mr. 

 Abercromby, the member for one, was, on the simplest ministerial calcu- 

 lation, a tenfold equivalent for the wrath and aversion of an empire. 



But the condition of "lending their sanction," of suffering the " clarum 

 et venerabile nomen," that had flourished on all the sign-posts of radical- 

 ism, to be blazoned in the front of the Treasury bench, was the Catholic 

 question. It is nothing to the purjo'e, that in this intrigue radicaUsm 

 exhibited its habitual baseness, that it compromised its pledges 

 to tlie rabble, while it trafficked with the minister, and that it 

 equally compromised its pledges with the minister, to keep up its 

 interest with the ragged majesty of Palace-yard. To the minister 

 it ostensibly gave permission to declare, that it would not force 

 the Catholic question ; to the rabble, it renewed its strongest decla- 

 rations of revoking the Test Act, of cai-rying the Cathohc question, 

 and, by a consequence familiar to the mind of faction, of warring upon 

 the Establishment. The purpose was to defraud both ; to seize power, 

 first in conjunction with the minister, then to sicken him of his col- 

 leagues, and seize it alone ; finally, to perform or violate every promise 

 merely with reference to its sustaining them in the office, to which 

 through the day and the dark, through the revolutionary storm and the 

 shoals and windings of domestic faction, their bark had steered for thirty 

 weary years. But they were not yet to have the grand consummation 

 within their hands. They were to be vexed by finding that their busi- 

 ness was confined to partial mischief; and that not being yet empowered 

 to overthrow a kingdom, they were to look for their penurious consolation 

 in tainting and corrupting, by their mere touch, the reputation of a 

 minister. I\Ir. Canning died. Let the earth tliat covers him, cover his 

 faults ! The dead can give no farther lesson, and tliey must be no 

 further pursued for a public example. But before liis death^ he did one 



M.M. New Series Vol. VIII. No. 47. 3 R 



