the most powerful cabinet, of the last fifty years.

The arguments which Lord Hervey puts into the lips of the Queen are scarcely less corrupt in another style. She tells the King not merely that Walpole's long experience and known abilities would make him the best minister, but that his simply being in power would make him the most submissive -that his having made a vast fortune already would make him less solicitous about his own interest-that new leeches would be more hungry, and that, Walpole's fortune being made, he would have nothing in view but serving the King, and securing the government, to keep what he had got-closing all this grave advice with that maxim of consummate craft, that in royal breasts both enmity and friendship alike should always give way to policy. If such were to be regarded as the habitual rules of the highest rank, well might we remonstrate against their baseness. The bigotry of James, or the morals of Charles II., would be preferable to this scandalous selfishness. But those maxims have never found tolerance among the people of England. We are to recollect that they came from a despotic soil, that they were the wisdom of courts where the great corrective of state-craft, public opinion, was unknown; that they were the courage of the timid, and the integrity of the intriguing; and that the maxims, the manners, and the system, have alike been long since consigned to a deserved and contemptuous oblivion.

By much the best part of Lord Hervey's authorship consists in his characters of public personages. No rank is suffered to shield any man. He exercises a sort of Egyptian judgment even upon kings, and pronounces sentence upon their faults with all the indignation of posthumous virtue. The King of France at that period had begun to exercise a powerful influence over Europe. France, always liable to great changes, had been for half a century almost prostrated before the great powers of Europe. The triumphs of Marlborough in the earliest years of the century had swept her armies from the field, as the close of the preceding century had desolated the industry of her southern provinces

by persecution. The supremacy of the Regent had subsequently dissolved almost the whole remaining force of public character in a flood of profligacy, and the reigning King was perhaps the most profligate man in the most licentious nation in the world. The description of him in these volumes is equally disdainful and true. "I cannot," says Lord Hervey, "by the best accounts I have had, and by what I have myself seen of this insensible piece of royalty, venture absolutely to say that he was of a good or bad disposition, for, more properly speaking, he was of no disposition at all. He was neither merciful nor cruel, without affection or enmity, without gratitude or resentment, and, to all appearance, without pleasure or pain.' tions are described as resembling more the mechanical movements of an automaton, than the effects of will and reason. The state of his mind seemed to be a complete apathy, neither acting nor acted on. If he had any passion, it was avarice; and if he took pleasure in any amusement, it was in gaming. It is observed that he had not any share in the "epidemical gaiety that runs through the French nation." He appeared to take as little pleasure as he gave, to live to as little purpose to himself as to anybody else, and to have no more joy in being King, than his people had advantage in being his subjects.

His ac

It was the good fortune of France to be governed at this period by Cardinal Fleury, a man of no distinction for talents, yet possessing a plain, practical understanding, habitual prudence, and personal honesty. But his most important qualification was a remarkable absence of the passion for disturbing the world, which seems to have made him an exception to all Frenchmen since the days of Julius Cæsar. Fleury loved peace, and was so far an illustrious anomaly in French nature. Something of this singular contradiction to his countrymen may have arisen from his being eighty years old, from his habits as an ecclesiastic, and from his being fully acquainted with the fact, that France had not the power to go to war. The result of this policy was not merely tranquillizing to Europe, but fortunate

for France. Her task was to recover from the wasteful wars of Louis XIV., from the general corruption of the Regency, from the financial follies of the Mississippi scheme, and from the weak and rapacious ministry of the Duke of Bourbon. The administration of Cardinal Fleury met all her evils, and met them with patience, and thus with success. France has been always the great disturber of Europe, and will be so whenever she has the power to disturb; but the old Cardinal, conscious of her helplessness, applied himself to restrain her ambition, and taught her that the indulgence of vanity was no compensation for defeat, and that war was folly, at least until success was possible. Under this rational course of government, the public mind was turned to intellectual advancement and national industry. Paris, instead of being the centre of European profligacy, rapidly became the centre of European science. A succession of extraordinary men threw light upon every kingdom of nature and knowledge. The Continent actually basked in the beams of France; her language became universal, her literature the general model, her taste the leader of European refinement, her manners the standard of fashion to the world; and, at the accession of the unfortunate Louis XVI., Paris, the court, and the people, possessed an acknowledged supremacy over the opinions, the habits, and the accomplishments of Europe, to which no kingdom of the modern world has ever exhibited a parallel.

The closing period of the eighteenth century has already been given to the world by a historian equal to the magnitude of his subject. The "History of the French Revolution," by Alison, will never be superseded. The extent of its information, the clearness of its details, the freshness and fidelity of its descriptions, and the force and vividness of its language, place it at the head of all contemporary annals. But we should wish also to see a History of the whole preceding portion of the century. The French Revolution was a result: we should desire to see the origin. It was a burst of gigantic violence, and gigantic strength: we should desire to

have the primal myth of this assault of the Titans; the narrative of their growth, their passions, and their powers, until the moment when they moved against the battlements of all that was lofty, magnificent, and glittering in the land. There is nothing without a cause on earth,-accident is a name which has no place in the Providential supremacy of things. To investigate the sources of even the common events of nature is a subject worthy of the philosopher. But there never was a time when it was more important to connect its mightier changes with the mystery in which they find their birth; to ascertain the laws of national convulsion; to fix the theory of moral storms and inundations. Such would be among the highest services, as they might administer to the most effective security of the social system.

It strikes us, that our chief historians have hitherto limited their view too much to England: a broader view would have been more productive. The combinations of this great country with the Continental kingdoms; the contrasts furnished by them all; the variety in their means of working out the same object of national power; their comparative tardiness; even their failures would have supplied new conceptions of history, and have added alike to the illustration and the interest of that political science which is among the noblest bequests of a great nation to posterity. We are fully convinced that politics, rightly examined, will be found to constitute a system, as much as astronomy, and that a solitary kingdom would be as much a contradiction to nature as a solitary star.

We now glance over the pages of these volumes: they are very amusing. If they do not give the court costumes of a hundred years ago, they give the mental costumes. The witty and the wise, the great and the little, pass before the eye with the rapidity and the oddity of the figures in a showbox. Kings, queens, and courtiers are exhibited to the life; and, harsh as their physiognomies may sometimes seem, the exhibition is always amusing.

The King was generally regarded as being governed by his wife, and the opinion was not the less, general because the King constantly boasted of his own independence. One day, alluding to this subject, he said, "Charles I. was governed by his wife, Charles II. by his mistresses, James by his priests, William by his men-favourites, and Anne by her women-favourites." He then turned with a significant and satisfied air, and asked, "Who do they say governs now?" The political squibs of the time were, however, of a different opinion from the King. For example

reign

You govern no more than Don Philip of Spain.

Then, if you would have us fall down and adore you,

Lock up your fat spouse, as your dad did before you."

The "dapper" was an allusion to the King's figure, which was much under size. The locking up was an allusion to the imprisonment of the wife of George I., whom, by an atrocious act of cruelty, he had shut up in one of his castles for thirty-two years. It argues something in favour of the progress of public opinion, that in our day the most despotic or powerful sovereign of Europe would not dare to commit an act, which was then committed with perfect impunity by a little German Elector. Another of those squibs began

"Since England was England there never

was seen

So strutting a King, and SO prating a Queen."

The first of those brought Lord Scarborough into a formidable scrape; for, being taxed by the King with having seen it, evidently in private, the King demanded to know who had shown it to him. Scarborough declared that he was on his honour not to reveal it. On this the King became furious, and said to him, "Had I been Lord Scarborough in this situation, and you king, the man should have shot me, or I him, who had dared to affront me in the person of my master, by showing me such insolent nonsense!" His Lordship replied,

that he never told his Majesty it was a man from whom he had it. He consequently left the King (who never spoke to him for three months after) almost as much irritated against him as the author.

Lord Hervey's portrait of the celebrated Chesterfield is a work of elaborate peevishness. It has all the marks of an angry rival, and all the caricature of a pen dipped in personal mortification. He allows him wit, but with an utter "mismanage ment of its use;" talent without common sense, and a ridiculous propensity to love-making, with an ungainly face and a repulsive figure. This character is new to those who have been so long accustomed to regard Chesterfield even on the more unfavourable side of his character. To his admirers the portrait is of course intolerable; but we must leave some future biographer to settle those matters with the ghost of his libeller.

An anecdote is given illustrative of the violence of Lord Townshend's temper, and the cutting calmness of Walpole's. Townshend was a man of considerable powers, but singularly irritable. He had been from an early period engaged in office, and was a constant debater in the House. His temper, however, made him so publicly disliked, and his selfishness so much alienated public men, that when he left office he did not leave a regret behind. He was followed only by epigrams, of which one is given—

"With such a head, and such a heart,
If fortune fails to take thy part,
And long continues thus unkind,
She must be deaf as well as blind,
And, quite reversing every rule,
Nor see the knave, nor hear the fool.”

Lord Townshend had been Foreign Secretary, and Walpole had to defend his blunders in the Commons. This made the latter anxious, and the former jealous. Another source of discontent was added, probably with still greater effect. Walpole, who had begun as a subordinate to Townshend, had risen above him. He had begun poor, and now exceeded him in fortune; and, as the last offence, he had built Houghton, a much handsomer mansion than Lord Townshend's house at Raynham, which his lordship had once con

sidered as the boast of Norfolk. Thus both were in a condition for perpetual squabble. The anecdote to which we have alluded was this:-One evening, at Windsor, on the Queen's asking Walpole and Townshend where they had dined that day, the latter said that he had dined at home with Lord and Lady Trevor; on which Walpole said to her Majesty, smiling, "My lord, Madam, 1 think, is grown coquet from a long widowhood, and has some design upon my Lady Trevor; for his assiduity of late, in that family, is grown so much beyond common civility, that without this solution I know not how to account for it." The burlesque of this not very decorous observation was obvious, for Lady Trevor was nearly seventy years old, and, besides being a woman of character, was of the "most forbidding countenance that natural ugliness, age, and small-pox, ever compounded.”

But Townshend, affecting to take the remark literally, replied with great warmth-"No, sir, I am not one of those fine gentlemen who find no time of life, nor any station in the world, preservatives against follies and immoralities that are hardly excusable when youth and idleness make us most liable," &c., &c. In short, his lordship made a speech in which his voice trembled, and every limb shook with passion. But Walpole, always master of his temper, made him no other answer than asking him with a smile, and in a very mild tone of voice, What, my lord, all this for Lady Trevor!"

66

The Queen grew uneasy, and, to avoid Townshend's replying, only laughed, and turned the conversation.

An anecdote is told of the Duchess of Queensberry's being forbid the court; which belongs to the literary history of the cleverest opera in our own or any other language-Gay's famous production. Walpole, justly regarding himself as caricatured in the "Beggar's Opera," obtained the Duke of Grafton's authority as Lord Chamberlain to suppress the representation of his next opera, "Polly." Gay resolved to publish it by subscription, and his patroness, Duchess of Queensberry, put herself

the

at the head of the undertaking, and solicited every person she met, to subscribe. As the Duchess was handsome, a wit, and of the first fashion, she obtained guineas in all directions, even from those who dreaded to encourage this act of defiance. The Duchess's zeal, however, increased with her success; and she even came to the drawing-room, and under the very eye of majesty solicited subscriptions for a play which the monarch had forbidden to be acted. When the King came into the drawing-room, seeing the Duchess very busy in a corner with three or four persons, he asked her what she was doing. She answered, "What must be agreeable, she was sure, to anybody so humane as his Majesty, for it was an act of charity; and a charity to which she did not despair of bringing his majesty to contribute." This proceeding was so much resented, that Mr. Stanhope, vice-chamberlain to the King, was sent in form to the Duchess to forbid her coming to court. The message was verbal; but she desired to send a written answer-wrote it on the spot

and thus furnished a document, whose style certainly exhibited more sincerity than courtiership.

"That the Duchess of Queensberry is surprised and well pleased that the King has given her so agreeable a command as to stay from court, where she never came for diversion, but to bestow a great civility on the King and Queen. She hopes that, by such an unprecedented order as this, the King will see as few as he wishes at his court, particularly such as dare to think or speak truth. I dare not do otherwise, and ought not, nor could have imagined that it would not have been the very highest compliment I could possibly pay the King, to endeavour to support truth and innocence in his house-particu larly when the King and Queen both told me that they had not read Mr. Gay's play. I have certainly done right, then, to stand by my own words rather than his Grace of Grafton's, who hath neither made use of truth, judgment, nor honour, through this whole affair, either for himself or his friends.

"C. QUEENSBERRY." When her Grace had finished this

paper, drawn up, as Lord Hervey observes, "with more spirit than accuracy," Stanhope requested of her to think again, and give him a more courtly message to deliver. The Duchess took her pen and wrote another, but it was so much more disrespectful, that he asked for the former one and delivered it.

There was, of course, a prodigious quantity of court gossip on this occasion and, doubtless, though some pretended to be shocked, many were pleased at the sting of royalty, and many more were amused at the dashing oddity of the Duchess. But public opinion, on the whole, blamed the court. It certainly was infinitely childish in the King, to have inquired into what the Duchess was doing among her acquaintances in the draw ing-room; it was equally beneath the natural notions of royal dignity that the King should put himself in a state of hostility with a subject, and in so trifling a matter as the subscription to an unpublished play; and it was equally impolitic, for the world was sure to range itself on the side of the woman, especially when that woman was handsome, eccentric, and rich. It produced some inconvenience, however, to the lady's husband, as he, in consequence, gave up the office of Admiral of Scotland.

The history of the "Beggar's Opera" is still one of those mysticisms which perplex the chroniclers of the stage. It has been attributed to the joint conception of Swift, Pope, and Gay. The original idea probably belonged to Swift, who, in that fondness for contrasts, and contempt of romance, which belonged to him in everything, had observed, "What a pretty thing a Newgate pastoral would make!" Pope may have given hints for the epigrammatic pungency of the dialogue; while the general workmanship may have been left to Gay. It is scarcely possible to doubt the sharp and worldly hand of Swift in some of the scenes and songs. Pope may have polished the dialogue, or nerved some of the songs, otherwise it is difficult to account for the total failure of all those characters of sternness, sharpness, and knowledge of the world, in Gay's subsequent and unassisted drama, "Polly." For, as the note on the

subject observes, nothing can be more dull and less sarcastic, or, in fact, less applicable to either public characters or public events than the latter opera, against which a prime minister levelled the hostilities of the Lord Chamberlain, and engaged the indignation of the King.

Gay had been a dependant on Mrs. Howard,-a matter which, in the scandalous laxity of the time, was by no means disgraceful. He had been solicitor for some place under the court, and had been disappointed. But the " Beggar's Opera" had been written before his disappointment. Of course, it is unlikely that he should have then thought of burlesquing the minister. His disappointment, however, may have given him new intentions, and a few touches from Swift's powerful hand might have transformed Macheath, Peachum, and Lockit, into the fac-similes of the premier and his cabinet. It is remarkable that Gay had never attempted anything of the kind before, nor after. His solitary muse was the very emblem of feebleness, his ambition never soared beyond a salary, and his best authorship was fables.

As ours is the day when rioting is popular, and rebels in every country are modellers of government, it may be amusing to remember how those matters were managed in the last century. The history of the famous Excise scheme, which in its day convulsed England, and finally shook the most powerful of all ministers out of the most powerful of all cabinets, is amongst the curious anecdotes of a time full of eccentricity. Walpole was no more superior to the effects of prosperity than honester men. Long success had confirmed him in a belief of its perpetual power; and the idea that, with a court wholly at his disposal, with a Queen for his agent, a King almost for his subject, the peerage waiting his nod, and the commons in his pay, he could be cast down and shattered like a plaster image, seems never to have entered into his dreams. But in this plenitude of power, whether to exercise his supremacy, or for the mere want of something to do, it occurred to him to relieve the country gentlemen by reducing the land-tax to a shilling in the pound, turning the duty on