scendent merits of Mr. Burke, or any overweening admiration of Mr. Bishop's merits, but appears to proceed from the fact of the bishops having been accessory to Burking the reform bill in the House of Lords. Yet what a picture of inequitable conduct does this exhibit, when, for the purpose of levelling a dead thrust (for so the ignorant portion of the world will deem it) at the bishops, the greatest injustice is attempted to be practised on the reputation of one of the most ardent friends of science the world ever saw! The inferiority of Messrs. Bishop and Williams, therefore, was manifest; but with every drawback, these two professors were creditable to the English name, and conferred no small honour on London. Like Mr. Burke, they died in the cause of science, and went to the scaffold rejoicing that anatomy would in some slight degree be benefited by their own shots; while, at the same time, they experienced the regret of generous minds that they were prevented by the perverse cruelty of the law from carrying into effect their meditated plans for its improvement. As for May, who was accused along with them, and condemned (but afterwards respited), he was a poor creature, and quite unworthy of perishing with them in their glorious cause. He had no grasp of mind, and was so destitute of that courage necessary for the system, that he fainted when he got his respite. Messrs. Bishop and Williams, in fact, were ashamed of him: they saw that science would be disgraced by his execution, and shewed with success that he had not the honour to be associated with them in any of their enterprises. In consequence of these representations, the poor creature's life was saved, and they alone had the honour of dying in the good cause. It is not necessary to pursue this subject farther. We believe that there are still a few minor lights carrying on the practice in a small way, but none worthy of being named with the two last-mentioned professors, and still less with Messrs. Hare and Burke. All we can say is, Go on and prosper. The time must come when prejudice will pass away from the earth, and when those whose lights are now hid under a bushel will appear exposed in broad day to the eye of an admiring world. A MODERN PYTHAGOREAN. In the above excellent quiz, our friend the Modern Pythagorean seems to have been inspired with the same ludicrous desire to practise on the gullibility of the reader which influenced Dean Swift in his proposal for eating children, and Mr. De Quincey when he penned his erudite lecture in praise of murder conducted on scientific principles.-See the twenty-first vol. of Blackwood. In point of seriousness, the reader (unless a member of the long-eared fraternity, which we hope he is not) will perceive that the Dean, the Opium-Eater, and our Contributor, are very much upon a par. Indeed, such is the solemn gravity in which the Pythagorean has veiled the rich humour running through his jeu d'esprit, that we should not be surprised if a few of our long-eared friends (always supposing REGINA to have a few, as well as her neighbours) should believe him to be in serious earnest, when, in reality, he is practising upon them an excellent joke. O. Y. SOLITUDE. Ar such a time as this the mind throws off Its innate helplessness, and soars above All earthly bonds; and now the world's dull scoff The human heart; in whose full ebb and flow All idle griefs and troubles quickly go. But there's a passionate longing in the breast For something which we know not off,—so deep, It makes the very flesh to stir and creep With apprehension of some unseen power; VOL. V. NO. XXV. Γ ZETA. ABOLITION OF THE PEERAGE. THE principle-if principle it may be called which actuates the leading statesmen of France and England at the present extraordinary crisis, is avowedly that which regulates the conduct of the highwayman or housebreaker. "To rob a man of his purse on Hounslow Heath, I know is a crime severely condemned by the laws of God, and punishable by death, according to the laws of England," says Captain Grey, a noted gentleman of the road; "but I am forced," says he, "to rob by my necessities. driven to these acts of guilt by my exigencies, or by my mistress. I am poor, and yet I must live; money I must have, and it happens that the Hounslow bank is the only one upon which I can draw, and where my check or my pistol is sure of being honoured." I am "To abolish the hereditary peerage of France is an unwise and an unjust measure," exclaims Casimir Perrier, the prime minister of Louis Philippe ; "but the people demand the sacrifice, the mob yearn for their degradation, the bourgeois hate the aristocracy, and, as an honest and conscientious minister, I must yield to public opinion, and sanction every act of robbery or spoliation which they demand, but which in my own heart I deprecate." These are the principles of the day - these are the maxims which guide the ascendant arbiters of the two first nations in Europe. To rob a peer of his coronet and his jewels is an act of monstrous injustice, equally reprehensible as the stealing a poor man's pig, or seducing his daughter; but the "people" cheer the robber on in his acts of spoliation, and public opinion, detestable though it be, and repugnant to all our ideas of right and justice, sanctifies the deed, hallows the crime, and merges every rule of law and property in some assumed and revolting doctrine of expediency. When Charles I. signed the deathwarrant of Strafford, he did so contrary to his own inclination, and in conformity to the wishes of the Commons of England and of public opinion. In that unfortunate catastrophe he sacrificed conviction, and a sense of justice, to expediency; he dipped his fingers in blood, to gratify his faithful ad visers; he outraged the laws of heaven and earth, in order to conciliate an unprincipled and sanguinary faction: but the same men to whose doctrines he assented, to whose dictum he bowed, to whose levelling innovations he too readily subscribed, led their royal master to the block, and triumphed in the expiation of their own follies and crimes by virtue of the martyrdom at Whitehall. Far be it from our intention to deduce, or even imagine, any similar results from the policy of kings or ministers in the present times. But history is a sacred record; and we cannot too frequently place its lessons before us, if we have any wish to eschew the errors and crimes which are incident to human nature. What is it that impels a man to risk his life upon the ocean, or amid the swamps of pestilential climates, in the service of his country, but the strong and natural desire to realise a fortune, and obtain an honourable fame? The patriotism which does not aspire to these rewards is the patriotism of an idiot. It is for wealth and distinction, probably only for a competency in the first instance, that makes the weaver toil sixteen hours a-day, and the poor barrister, who hopes to be chancellor, carry an empty bag, for twenty years, to the back seats of a court of law. He who has acquired wealth in an honourable way, either by his industry or inventions at home, or by his sword in the wars, naturally seeks other rewards, equally dear to his ambition. We shall suppose him to have earned the gratitude of his country and the favours of his sovereign. He is elevated to the peerage; why? because his merits entitle him to a higher station in society than that in which he had formerly stood. But next to himself are his children. How mean would be that ambition which could have no anxieties about them—no wish to transmit to them the honours he had fairly won-no desire to place them in the same high position in society to which he had raised himself, and which they alone, perhaps, are capable of enjoying! It is contemptible selfishness, based upon the vilest of all human incentives, that would restrict a father to a life-interest only in the honours he had acquired, and deny him the right, and the truly noble gratification, of transmitting to his legitimate posterity the titles which his Sovereign had conferred upon him. Such titles, so restricted, would not be worth accepting from the best prince in Europe; they would be barren honours, inspiring no sense of gratitude, exciting no feeling of pride, worn reluctantly by a sick man at the close of a long life, to be taken from his family at his death, and buried with him in his coffin. Such rewards for services would be a mere mockery -such empty titles would confer no nobility. The law might as well restrict him from devising his property, as restrict him from transmitting his honours to his family. All the pride of noble birth, illustrious rank, and ancient descent, would be annihilated by such a law; and the aristocracy of the country would become an aristocracy of pawnbrokers, he being considered of the first grade who had the largest balance at his bankers, or the greatest number of tea-spoons and caudle-cups in his shop-window. The French Chamber of Deputies, however, seem to view the matter in a very different light. They are willing that the crown should be hereditary, but the coronet only elective. The Duke of Orleans is to retain the privileges of his birth, while these are to be withheld from the sons of all the other peers of France. The honours which the people have conferred on their citizen king are to remain hereditary and in perpetuity in his family, while those belonging to his noblesse are to die with them. But this is not all. The peers of France are to be elected by his majesty's ministers. For instance, M. Casimir Perrier, a banker of Paris, while he remains prime minister, and provided the present bill pass into a law, is to have the nomination of those life-rent peers who shall constitute the second estate in the realm. What will be the result? Why, just this, that the minister pro tem. shall have the power of electing his own creatures-excluding from the upper house every man opposed to his measures-packing the Chamber of Peers with so many puppets, whose sole business will be to record the edicts of the Chamber of Deputiesof miserable, servile, truckling, obedient, and dependent puppets, sent into that house with the brand of the slave imprinted on their foreheads, to be at the beck and nod of M. Casimir Perrier. Call this a peerage, indeed! Call these men-these princes and counts of a French comedy, who must speak by the book, and do what is set down for them-call these men peers, or independent legislators, indeed! The thing is disgusting—it is an insult to common sense, and shews to what a degree of debasement and absurd folly the mania of revolution will carry its dupes. But there are secret motives, many impelling reasons, which are not visible on the surface; and we think we have a key to this extraordinary enigma of a hereditary monarchy and a ministerial peerage. Death has not yet weeded unhappy France of all the abettors of the first revolution. The fire has not yet consumed all the tares. A leaven of the old Jacobins still remains-active, restless, and intriguing, as at firstcherishing in their imbecile dotage their early hatred of monarchy and monarchical institutions, sighing for their pure and imaginary republic, and stirring heaven and earth to effect that by wile and stratagem, by fraud and hypocritical professions, which they formerly effected by more direct means, by open treason and wholesale assassination. A remnant of these heartless and unprincipled men, we say, still remains. They have found a king formed according to their own wishes, and ready to promote their most secret designs. His claim to their patronage and favour he inherited from his father. Subtle and avaricious, mean and unprincipled, affectedly plebeian in his manners and temporising in his policy, he is prepared to yield to the circumstances of the times, and succumb to those who alike despise him, his house, the bauble which he calls his crown, and the right by which he wears it. These Jacobins are therefore playing their old game, but playing it more warily. To have leaped from monarchism to republicanism at one spring would have been impolitic and dangerous. This would at once have raised the old battle cry in all the kingdoms of Europe. The spirit of the old Duke of Brunswick would have been seen by night wielding his trenchant blade in the plains of Germany. The infant republic, with none but poor, wornout, pantaloon statesmen, the spectres of 1793, and with no second Napoleon, with the soul and energy of the first, to protect it, would have been crushed at the outset, and its Parisian coterie of drivellers either hanged or sent to the galleys. They felt their helplessness, and foresaw their peril. They adopted a safer course, and compromised their principles, by accepting a charter which they scorned, and a constitutional monarchy which was the subject of their bitterest jests,-consoling themselves with the impotence they had enshrined in royalty, the feebleness of the man of their choice, the hope of recognition, which would allay for a season foreign resentment, and leave them sufficient breathing time to mature their plans, and conso and the three days, had been governed according to the charter. She had a House of Peers consisting of the noblesse of France, of old hereditary peers, and those created by Louis XVIII. and Charles X.,-she had her Chamber of Deputies elected according to law and the provisions of the charter. But when Louis Philippe was placed on his mock throne, let us see how the Chamber of Deputies, one estate of the realm only, acted. Did they pay any respect to the charter ? No. They at once annulled the peerages created by Charles X. They by an arbitrary vote expelled from the upper house all the peers created by this unfortunate and ill-advised prince, exercising an authority which the law did not give them, usurping a power which was unconstitutional, and mak case which they had no more right to adjudicate upon than the Commons of England have with regard to the creations of George IV. Where then goes their moderation, their prudence, or their sense of justice? The moment the reins were placed in their hands their conduct evinced all the caprice and absolutism of a conclave of tyrants. They trampled the charter under foot; they scuttled and swamped the upper house, as independent a branch of the legislature, in law, as themselves; they at the same time reformed their own house, it is true, by extending the franchise, and admitting an augmented number of commoners; but they did this to favour and promote the objects of revolution, for the new members returned were almost exclusively of that class which belongs to the movement party, the fiercest jacobins of France, the republicans par excellence, who are ready to place their shoulders to the wheel, and hurry on those ultra-revolutionary measures which the citizen king, although armed with his umbrella, is totally unable to resist. lidate their resources. In a republic-ing themselves judges and jurors in a the old, beautiful, and bloodless republic of France they intended to merge at length. They never for one moment lost sight of this desirable consummation. They threw the robes of royalty over the person of their citizen sovereign merely as a disguise. They made Louis Philippe their Trojan horse. They placed him on a temporary throne, erected for the purpose, as the stage of a mountebank is erected at a village fair, solely to delude the astonished diplomatists, and much more astonished kings of Europe. They put a sceptre in his hand, which it was stipulated he should wield precisely as they directed. The crown which they placed on his head it was agreed should remain there only during their will and pleasure, and not one moment longer; and the complacent king, as agreed upon, promised to lay it at their Sovereign feet whenever they should call upon him to do so. And they gained their object. England, under the tottering administration of the Duke of Wellington, was the first to recognise this straw-made and scarecrow king. The then English ministers gave the mob of Paris credit for their moderation, their abstemiousness in the hour of victory, their good sense in adhering to the charter, and their election of a king whose popularity clothed him with all the influence of efficient restraint, and whose principles were a guarantee to Europe of peace and repose. No one will deny that France, previously to the issue of the ordinances Do we stop here to inquire, whether Louis Philippe holds his place in public opinion which it was asserted he did when his faithful citizens of Paris, who disdain being termed his "subjects," called him to the throne? It is a repulsive task-it is a painful recital —— it is a humiliating detail; but we should flinch from our duty if we passed it over in silence. We shall come to more important considerations anon; but here it is proper to speak of the situation, unpleasant though it be, in which the patriotic king is placed by his faithful deputies. M. Lafitte, who was his minister when he ascended the throne, when 66 young France," glorying in its triumph of paving-stones over holster-pistols, proclaimed him to be the best of kings, and the idol of a regenerated people, obtained for him, by acclamation, a civil list of 18,000,000 francs. It served the purposes of the revolutionary party to appear liberal to excess, and in heart and soul devoted to the interests of the best of constitutional sovereigns. A year and a day have scarcely elapsed before these liberal patriots have entirely changed their views. Instead of 18,000,000, these gentlemen now only grant him 12,000,000. M. Casimir Perrier's proposition of 14,000,000 was rejected in the Chamber of Deputies by a large majority, considering the materials of which that chamber is composed. To the minister's urgent entreaties they replied by a vote of dissent. They evinced some sagacity, though not much loyalty in this. To a king who can walk the streets, with his umbrella in hand, bowing to every fiacre driver and costermonger who condescends to salute him, 12,000,000 francs a-year are as much as 18,000,000 to one who disdains to set his foot on the filthy pavement of his capital city. They have accordingly, from the purest principles of patriotism, and an unfeigned regard for his comforts, docked him of one-third of his income. They have, moreover, for the same reasons, deprived him of some of his royal domains, taking from him two or three of the best grazing parks in the vicinity of St. Cloud, stripping him of all superfluous land, and although giving him the opportunity of a day's hunting in certain places, shutting him, in reality, as much up in the Palais Royal as we should do were we to confine William IV. in the Marshalsea or the Tower of London. But we must not mince matters. Louis Philippe is at this moment as unpopular in France as ever Charles X. was. When the last-named king abolished the censorship, on his accession to the throne, he was what is termed "popular," in the highest degree. Louis Philippe never was, and never will be so popular. The old jacobin feeling which had subsided, or, at least, had lost its hopes and its energy, when Charles X came to the throne, has been revived, and its caustic sneers, and bitter ridicule, and revigorated passions, are all directed against the reigning and hitherto considered popular monarch. The Carlists of France naturally hate him; the Bonapartists hate him still more; the Republicans, as they have all along considered him as their tool, take every opportunity to spurt their verjuice in his face, and proclaim that they not only hate but despise him. Give him the benefit of all that is said and done in his favour-all that an ostentatious display can gain from the mob-all that obsequious familiarity can wring from the vulgar-all that pretence can extort from the weak, or favours conferred can purchase from the needy and the servile, he is nevertheless most unpopular; and it would not surprise us, if, before many days, we saw him resign the crown which young France" placed upon his head, and, disgusted with exhibitions which only lead to sorrow of heart, retire into that privacy which under certain circumstances is considered the "post of honour." But humiliating as these admissions are, seeing how far they detract from the confidence which certain persons repose on public opinion, and the sentiments of the middle and " intelligent classes of society," we have more to tell, and still more recent occurrences to consider, which, when viewed dispassionately, place the last revolution of France, and the object of its abettors, in a truer though more repulsive light. We allude to the ministerial measure, sanctioned, of course, by Louis Philippe, of abolishing the hereditary peerage of France, and substituting in its stead a peerage to be elected by the sovereign nominally, but by the minister and the Chamber of Deputies in reality. The project for the suppression of the peerage having been submitted to the consideration of a committee of the Upper Chamber, called a general commission, consisting of fourteen members, they were divided in opinion, seven being in favour of the project and seven opposed to it. The report which they presented to the Chamber under these peculiar circumstances, was drawn up by the Duke de Cazes, and is supposed to contain all the arguments for and against the measure. We beg leave |