At the council Sir Spencer took Walpole aside, and begged of him, as a speech would be necessary for the King in Council, that, as Sir Robert was more accustomed to that sort of composition than himself, he should go into another room, and make a draft of the speech. Sir Robert retired to draw up his paper, and Sir Spencer went to Leicester Fields, where the King and Queen were already, followed by all who had any thing to ask, or any thing to hope-a definition which seems to have included the whole of what, in later parlance, are called the fashionable world. Whether the present sincerity of court life is purer than of old may be doubtful, but the older manners were certainly the more barefaced. When the new premier was returning to his coach he walked through a lane of bowers," all shouldering each other to pay adoration to the new idol.

66

During the four days of the King's remaining in town, Leicester House, which used to be a desert, was "thronged from morning till night, like the 'Change at noon." But Walpole walked through those rooms "as if they had been empty." The same people who were officiously, a week before, crowding the way to flatter his prosperity, were now getting out of it to avoid sharing his disgrace. Horace Walpole says, that his mother could not make her way to pay her respects to the King and Queen between the scornful backs and elbows of her late devotees, nor could approach nearer to the Queen than the third or fourth row, until the Queen cried out, "There, I am sure I see a friend." The torrent then divided, and shrank to either side. In short, Walpole, with his brother Horace, ambassador to France, the Duke of Newcastle and Lord Townshend, the two Secretaries of State, were all conceived to be as much undone, as a pasha on the arrival of the janizary with the bowstring.

The evidences, it must be owned, seemed remarkably strong. The King had openly, and more than once, called Walpole rogue and rascal;" he had called the ambassador" a scoundrel and a fool;" he had declared his utter contempt for the Duke, and his determination never to forgive him. Town

fared still worse. The King

looked on him to be no more an honest man than an able minister, and attributed all the confusion in foreign affairs to the heat of his temper and his scanty genius, to the strength of his passions and the weakness of his understanding. There can be no doubt that a minister of foreign affairs, with those qualities, might become a very mischievous animal.

On Compton's receiving the speech drawn up by Walpole, he carried it, in his own handwriting, to the King. The King objected to a paragraph, which Sir Spencer Compton was either unwilling or unable to amend; and not being satisfied of his own powers of persuasion, he actually solicited Walpole to go to the King, and persuade him to leave it as it was! The Queen, who was the friend of Walpole, instantly took advantage of this singular acknowledgment of inferiority, and advised the King to retain the man whom his intended successor so clearly acknowledged to be his superior.

Nothing can be more evident than that Sir Spencer played the fool egregiously. To place a rival in immediate communication with the King was, at least, an unusual way of supplanting him; while, to give him the advantage of his authorship, by sending him to explain it to the King, would have been ridiculous under any circumstances. But there are no miracles in politics; and he was evidently so far convinced of his own security, that the idea of a rival was out of the question. Compton had been all his life a political personage. He had been Paymaster; he had been Speaker in three Parliaments; he was au fait in the routine of office; and he had evidently received the King's order to make a ministry. But we have had such sufficient proof in our own time that princes and kings are different persons according to circumstances, that we can perfectly comprehend the cessation of the royal favouritism on one side, and of the royal aversion on the other. The civil list was still to be voted-the subject dearest to the royal heart. Walpole was noted for financial management, and Compton's awkwardness in the preceding transaction might well have startled the monarch. The general result

was, that Walpole remained minister, Compton was quietly put out of the way with a peerage, as Lord Wilmington, and an enormous civil list was carried, with but a single vote, that of Mr William Shippen, against it. The civil list was little less than £900,000 a-year, an immense revenue, when we consider that the value of money at that time probably made it equal to double the sum now. The present civil list would be practically not much more than a fourth of the amount in 1777. The Queen's jointure was equally exorbitant; it was £100,000 a-year, besides Somerset House and Richmond Lodge, a sum amounting to double what any Queen of England had before.

Walpole was now paramount; he had purchased his supremacy by his official prodigality. Lord Hervey thinks that he was still hurt by two mortifications-the displacement of his son-in-law, Lord Malpas, and of Sir William Yonge, a Lord of the Treasury, and his notorious tool. But, contrasting those trifling changes with the plenitude of Walpole's power, and recollecting the extraordinary wiliness of his nature, it seems not improbable that he either counselled or countenanced those dismissals, to escape the invidiousness of absolute power; for both Malpas and Yonge clung to the court, and, after a decent interval, were replaced in office. Walpole was, perhaps, one of the most singular instances of personal dexterity in the annals of statesmanship. Without eloquence in the House, or character out of it; without manners in the court, or virtue any where, he continued to hold supreme ministerial power for nearly a quarter of a century, under the most jealous of kings, with the weakest of cabinets, against the most powerful Opposition, and in the midst of the most contemptuous people. His power seems even to have grown out of those sinister elements. By constantly balancing them against each other, by at once awaking fears and exciting hopes, he deluded all the fools, and enlisted all the knaves of public life in his cause. The permanency of his office, however, wholly rested upon the Queen; and he had the dexterity to discover, from the moment of the Royal accession, that, insulted as she

was by the King's conduct, she was the true source of ministerial power. He accordingly adhered to her, in all the fluctuations of the court, appeared to consult her on all occasions, studied her opinions, and provided for her expenses. The want of money, or its possession, seem to have exerted an extraordinary influence on the higher ranks in those days; and one of the first acts of Walpole was to offer the Queen £60,000 a-year. Sir Spencer Compton had been impolitic enough to propose but £40,000, on the ground that this sum had been sufficient for Charles II.'s queen. The sum was at last settled at £50,000, and the donor was not forgotten.

But it seems impossible to doubt, that Walpole's character was essentially corrupt; that he regarded corruption as a legitimate source of power; that he bribed every man whom he had the opportunity to bribe: that he laughed at political integrity, and did his best to extinguish the little that existed; that no minister ever went further to degrade the character of public life; and that the period of his supremacy is a general blot upon the reign, the time, and the people.

The celebrated Burke, in that magnanimous partiality which disposed him to overlook the vices of individuals in the effect of their measures, has given a high-flown panegyric on the administration of Walpole; but the whole is a brilliant paradox. He looked only to the strength of the Brunswick succession, and, taking his stand upon that height, from which he surveyed grand results alone, neglected or disdained to examine into the repulsive detail. Seeing before him a national harvest of peace and plenty, he never condescended to look to the gross and offensive material by which the furrow was fertilised. Nothing is more certain, than that the daily acts of Walpole would now stamp a ministry with shamethat no man would dare now to express the sentiments which form the maxims of the minister; and that any one of the acts which, though they passed with many a sneer, yet passed with practical impunity, in the days of George II., would have ruined the proudest individual, and extinguished

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 of 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.' His actions 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 any body else, and to have no more joy in being King, than his people had advantage in being his subjects.

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 tranquillising 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 "You may strut, dapper George, but 'twill all be in vain,

We know 'tis Queen Caroline, not you, that 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 "mismanagement in 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