tory impressions-to excite the minds of five hundred gentlemen at midnight, without saying anything that any one of them will be able to remember in the morning." An Attack on Prejudice.-The following characteristic passage is from a celebrated speech by Sir James Mackintosh on the reform of the old Criminal Laws: "If a foreigner were to form his estimate of the people of England from a consideration of their penal code, he would undoubtedly conclude that they were a nation of barbarians. This expression, though strong, would be unquestionably true; for what other opinion could a humane foreigner form of us when he found that in our criminal law there were two hundred criminal offences against which the punishment of death was denounced, upon twenty of which only that punishment was ever inflicted-that we were savage in our threats, and yet were feeble in our execution of punishments-that we cherished a system which in theory was odious, but which was impotent in practice from its very severity that in cases of high treason we involved innocent children in all the consequences of their father's guilt-that in cases of corruption of blood we were even still more cruel, punishing the offspring when we could not reach the parent-and that on some occasions we even proceeded to wreak vengeance upon the bodies of the inanimate dead? If the same person were told that we were the same nation which had been the first to give full publicity to every part of our judicial system-that we were the same nation which had established the trial by jury, which, blamable as it might be in theory, was so invaluable in practice-that we were the same nation which had found out the greatest security which had ever been devised for individual liberty, the writ of habeas corpus, as settled by the Act of Charles II.-that we were the same nation which had discovered the full blessings of a representative government, and which had endeavoured to diffuse them throughout every part of our free empire, he would wonder at the strange anomalies of human nature which could unite things that were in themselves so totally incompatible. If the same foreigner were, in addition to this, told that the abuses which struck so forcibly on his attention were the abuses of the olden time, which were rather overlooked than tolerated, he might perhaps relent in his judgment, and confer upon us a milder denomination than that of barbarians; but if, on the contrary, he were told that influence and authority, learning and ingenuity, had combined to resist all reformation of these abuses as dangerous innovations-if he were informed that individuals who, from their rank and talents, enjoyed not an artificial but a real superiority, rose to vindicate the worst of these abuses, even the outrages on the dead, and to contend for them as bulwarks of the constitution and landmarks of legislation, he would revert to his first sentiments regarding us, though he might perhaps condemn the barbarism of the present instead of the barbarism of the past generation." Things taken for Granted.-"How is it," Mackintosh was once asked, “I never hear a word about the blessings of liberty, and the glory of the British Constitution, in your debates?" "Because we take all that for granted," was his reply. A Precaution.-I remember (writes Earl Russell) that in 1819, after the Manchester meeting known by the name of Peterloo, I was staying in the house of Sir James Mackintosh, in the country. We read every day in the newspapers accounts of meetings; it was generally stated that the meeting at Manchester, although legal, had been attacked and dispersed by military force. Sir James said to me, "It will be worth while to look at my law-books, and see whether this assumption that the meeting at Manchester was legal is founded in law." We soon found reason to conclude that the Manchester meeting was an illegal meeting. Sir James Mackintosh and I agreed that in the approaching session of Parliament we would not affirm the legality of the Manchester meeting. 66 FRANCIS HORNER. (1778-1817.) His First Canvass.-On the 19th of October, 1806, Francis Horner received an offer of a seat in Parliament from Lord Kinnaird, which he accepted, untrammelled by any conditions. St. Ives was the borough destined for him, and in a letter to his mother from that place he gives some account of the election proceedings. "I am glad enough,” he says, none of you were here to quiz me as I went through my duty; entering every cellar in the place, and behaving as sweet as possible to every man, woman, and child. I did sometimes feel ashamed of myself, I own, and there were some hovels that went against my stomach, if it had not been for the number of pretty women, three or four of them quite beautiful, whom I found in these hovels." Treaties of Peace.-Mr. Horner took part in the debate which arose on the treaties of peace entered into consequent on the downfall of Napoleon. A speech delivered by him in the House of Commons, February 20th, 1816, attracted much attention at the time. Referring to the guarantees to be exacted from France, he said: The real security which was required from France, after the destruction of that military monarchy which oppressed the greatest part of the continent of Europe, combined the integrity of that kingdom with the establishment of a government agreeably to the wishes and deserving of the confidence of the people. The question of territorial cession had been discussed at great length, and he would merely state that, in his opinion, any attempt to dismember France, instead of being likely to afford any security for the continuance of peace, would be the certain source of inquietude and danger. There was no chance of the stability of peace if guarantees were sought for in measures that must be galling and irritating to the French people; there was no chance of continued tranquillity but in conciliatory arrangements; there was no chance of reconciling them to Europe but by allowing them to establish the government they liked. Wo could never rationally entertain confidence in the pacific dispositions of people upon whom we forced a government of conquest, which we maintained by arms." An Element of Stability.-Referring to the motion in the House of Commons for a new writ for St. Mawes in the room of Francis Horner, March 6th, 1817, and to the encomiums on the character of the deceased member embodied in the motion, Sir James Mackintosh, writing in his Journal, says: "A Howard introduced, and an English House of Commons adopted, the proposition of thus honouring the memory of a man of thirty-eight, the son of a shopkeeper, who never filled an office, or had the power of obliging a living creature, and whose grand title to this distinction was the belief of his virtue. How honourable to the age and to the House! A country where such sentiments prevail is not ripe for destruction." HENRY ADDINGTON, LORD SIDMOUTH. (1755-1844.) Respectable Mediocrity.-Henry Addington (Viscount Sidmouth) was nicknamed "the Doctor," his father having been physician to the elder Pitt. Earl Russell says of him, "He was a man of average understanding, equal to the requirements of quiet times, of respectable prejudices, and undoubted courage; but as minister for a great emergency he excited only ridicule and contempt. Little could he withstand the daily epigrams of Canning, and the scarcely more endurable compassion of Sheridan 'As London is to Paddington, So is Pitt to Addington.' 'When his speeches lag most vilely, Cheer him, cheer him, Brother Hiley; When his speeches vilely lag, Cheer him, cheer him, Brother Bragge.' 'The Pells for his son, the pills for himself.' These and a thousand other arrows which wit squandered upon Addington utterly ruined him in public opinion." Spoiling Nature.-On the 8th of June, 1789, Addington, who had just completed his thirty-second year, was elevated to the dignity of Speaker of the House of Commons. Mr. Gilpin, in a congratulatory note, writes on that occasion: "I was in some little pain at first how you could restrain the natural modesty of your disposition on so sudden an elevation to one of the most awful posts I know; but Sir John Dayley and other gentlemen gave such an account of your setting out, that all apprehensions for you are now over; and I have only to regret, as a picturesque man, that such an enlightened countenance as God Almighty has given you should be shrouded in a bush of horsehair.” A Cabinet of Mediocrities. The following story was told by John Hookham Frere: "I remember old Lord W, the father of the present lord, a fine specimen of a thorough-going old country Tory, coming to call on my father to tell him that Pitt was out of office, The sinecure of Clerk of the Pells. and that Addington had formed a ministry. He went through all the members of the new Cabinet, and, rubbing his hands at the end, with an evident sense of relief, said, 'Well, thank God, we have at last got a ministry without one of those confounded men of genius in it!"" A Necessary Evil.-Lord Dalling remarks in his "Life of Palmerston" that the necessity of pleasing George III. introduced Addington into so many administrations, as to justify Mr. Canning's criticism that he was like the small-pox, that everyone was obliged to have once in their lives. A Sheep in Wolf's Clothing.-A few days before the declaration of war with France, in 1803, a warlike message from the Crown was sent to Parliament. Addington, then being minister, appeared in the full dress of the Windsor uniform, and strutted up the house in the midst of a burst of laughter, just as the Speaker was reading a medicine bill. It must have been on this occasion," says Earl Russell, "that Sheridan redoubled the laughter of the House by saying, "The right hon. gentleman, who has appeared this evening in the character of a sheep in wolf's clothing,' &c. In fact, nothing could be more tragical than the occasion, nothing more comical than the chief actor in the tragedy." A Royal Appeal.-Mr. Addington used to tell his friends that at the interview with which he was honoured on the 10th of May, 1804, the King again pressed upon him the acceptance of the peerage and pension, in terms which it must have been very difficult for so devoted a subject to resist: "You are a proud man, Mr. Addington, but I am a proud man too; and why should I sleep uneasy on my pillow because you will not comply with my request? Why should I feel the consciousness that I have suffered you to ruin your family, and that through your attachment to me ?" Taking Things Coolly. At the time of the trial of Queen Caroline (1820) the general transports raised the popular exasperation against Lords Castlereagh and Sidmouth, the supposed authors of the proceedings, to the highest point; they never appeared in the streets without being hooted and reviled by the mob, and both daily received anonymous letters threatening them with instant death if the bill against her Majesty were not abandoned. These intrepid men, however, disregarded those threats, and walked about the streets as usual, without any attendants; and the people, admiring this spirit, abstained from actual violence. One day at this time they were walking together in Parliamentstreet, when, being recognised, a large mob got up round them, and they were violently hooted. "Here we go," said Lord Sidmouth, "the two most popular men in England.” "Yes," replied Lord Castlereagh, “through a grateful and admiring multitude."-Alison's "Life of Castlereagh." LORD CASTLEREAGH. Common-place Oratory.-No man (remarks Lord Brougham) ever attained the station of a regular debater in our Parliament with such an 99 66 entire want of all classical accomplishment, and indeed of all literary provision whatsoever. While he never showed the least symptom of any information extending beyond the more recent volumes of the "Parliamentary Debates," or possibly the files of the newspapers only, his diction set all imitation, perhaps all description, at defiance. It was with some an amusement to beguile the tedious hours of their unavoidable attendance upon the poor, tawdry, ravelled thread of his sorry discourse, to collect a kind of ana from the fragments of mixed, incongruous, and disjointed images that frequently appeared in it. "The features of the clause;" "the ignorant impatience of the relaxation of taxation;""sets of circumstances coming up and circumstances going down; men turning their backs upon themselves; " the honourable and learned gentleman's wedge getting into the loyal feelings of the manufacturing classes;" "the constitutional principle wound up in the bowels of the monarchical principle; ""the Herculean labour of the honourable and learned member, who will find himself quite disappointed when he has at last brought forth his Hercules" (by a slight confounding of his mother's labour, which produced that hero, with his own exploits which gained him immortality) -these are but a few, and not the richest samples, by any means, of a rhetoric which often baffled alike the gravity of the Treasury bench and the art of the reporter, and left the wondering audience at a loss to conjecture how anyone could ever exist, endowed with humbler pretensions to the name of orator.-Historical Sketches of Statesmen. 66 66 Courageous Leadership. When the Tory party, "having a devil," preferred Lord Castlereagh to Mr. Canning for their leader, all men naturally expected that he would entirely fail to command even the attendance of the House while he addressed it, and that the benches, empty during his time, would only be replenished when his highly-gifted competitor rose. They were greatly deceived; they under-rated the effect of place and power; they forgot that the representative of a Government speaks as one having authority, and not as the scribes; " but they also forgot that Lord Castlereagh had some qualities well fitted to conciliate favour, and even to provoke admiration, in the absence of everything like eloquence, and without ever having written a line in the Anti-Jacobin. He was a bold and fearless man: the very courage with which he exposed himself unabashed to the most critical audience in the world, while incapable of uttering two sentences of anything but the meanest matter, in the most wretched language; the gallantry with which he faced the greatest difficulties of a question; the unflinching perseverance with which he went through a whole subject, leaving untouched not one of its points, whether he could grapple with it or no, and not one of the adverse arguments, however forcibly and felicitously they had been urged-neither daunted by recollecting the impression just made by his antagonist's display, nor damped by consciousness of the very rags in which he now presented himself-all this made him, upon the whole, rather a favourite with the audience whose patience he was taxing mercilessly, and whose gravity he ever and anon put to a very severe trial. Nor can anyone have forgotten the kind of pride that mantled on the fronts of the Tory |