Transcriber's note:

Archaic spelling and variations in spelling and hyphenation have been retained except in obvious cases of typographical error.

BLACKWOOD'S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

No. CCCLXXXIX. MARCH, 1848. Vol. LXIII.

CONTENTS.

EDINBURGH:
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, 45, GEORGE STREET;
AND 37, PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON.
To whom all Communications (post paid) must be addressed.
SOLD BY ALL THE BOOKSELLERS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM.

PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS; EDINBURGH.

MR COBDEN ON THE NATIONAL DEFENCES.

It is popularly averred by our Southern neighbours that the house of every Englishman is his castle. No doubt to a certain extent this may be true. In the modern mansion, as in the ancient fortalice, the victualing department is always a matter of prime importance, and Chubb's patent safety lock may be accepted as a convenient substitute for the portcullis. Yet, after all, we suspect that the resemblance, if the matter be closely investigated, will turn out to be rather imaginary than real. A castle, according to the ideas which we have imbibed from an early course of miscellaneous and feudal reading, must have been a sort of earthly paradise, and the possessors of it wholly exempt from that never-ending series of daily persecution to which we, unhappy moderns, are subjected. With a good eight-foot thick wall of solid masonry around, a moat broad enough to baffle the leap of Flying Childers, and deep enough to have drenched the scalping-lock of Goliath of Gath, and a few falconets and patereroes symmetrically arranged along the parapets, a man might afford to enjoy a quiet night's rest without dread of duns, or any fear of the visits of that most malignant of unexecuted ruffians, the tax-gatherer. He might give a jocular rejoinder to the summons of the pursuivant who appeared before his gates with the intelligence of a further railway call; and dismay any invading snip by the apparition of a scarecrow dangling from a gallows on the summit of the donjon-keep. Nay, if currency were absolutely indispensable for the purpose of paying the garrison, Castle Dangerous would be more effective than the bank parlour has shown itself in late times under the operation of Sir Robert Peel's Act for the perpetuation of national bankruptcy. A simple announcement in the neighbouring town of a large assortment of cast-off uniforms and rusty armour for sale, would infallibly attract to the stronghold a collection of Caucasians who adhere to the Jewish persuasion. Once within the guard-room, we should deal summarily, and after the manner of Sir Reginald Front-de-Bœuf, with these infidels. The forceps should be produced, and no ether or chloroform, upon any pretext whatever, allowed. We should negotiate with Moses or Mephibosheth at the rate of units for a stump, tens for a decayed, and hundreds for an unimpeachable grinder; and may we never shake shekel again if we do not think we could extract a reasonable amount of ransom from the jaws of the Princes of the Captivity! As to the advent of many enemies, we should be utterly and entirely fearless. Cohorn and Vauban might come with their lines, and mines, and battering-trains without disturbing our equanimity, or causing the slightest tremor in our hand as we filled out our post-prandial bumpers of Bordeaux. So long as powder lasted and shot was plentiful, we should reciprocate the hostile compliments by all manner of shell and canister; and, if the metal of the rogues proved, in the long run, too heavy for us, they should have our full permission to pound away until they were tired; and, on entering the citadel, they would find us smoking our pipe in the cartridge-room, as cool as a cucumber, or as Marius at Carthage, or General Chassé at Antwerp, or any other warrior and hero of antiquity whomsoever.

Now take that picture—compare it with the state of your present domicile—and tell us whether, in effect, the fortalice is not an Eden? What kind of existence do you lead in that Heriot Row house, for which, last year, when shares were up, you were ass enough to pay some two or three thousand pounds? You cannot go into your room after breakfast to write an article for Blackwood, or to draw a condescendence, without hearing every five minutes the dissonance of that ceaseless bell. Not unearned are poor Grizzy's eleemosynary Christmas shoes, for fully one-half of the day is that most weary wight occupied in flitting from the regions beneath to answer the summons which may bring an invitation or a fee, but which, in nine cases out of ten, is the announcement of a gaping creditor. First, in comes a document wafered, according to that beastly practice, which, for the credit of Tyre and Sidon, we hope is a modern invention. That, of course, goes into the waste basket without more remark than a passing objurgation. Then follow the prospectuses of three insurance companies, you being nearly ruined already with the amount which you are compelled to pay annually, in virtue of your marriage contract, to the Scottish Widows' Fund. Next appears a long slip, purporting to be the intimation of a police assessment. You swear savagely, having ascertained the fact, by dint of a spirited correspondence in the newspapers, that the available force of that esteemed body in the metropolis of Scotland is not much over a dozen, and having accurate personal corroboration of the statistics by walking the other day into an unmolested bicker, from which you emerged with a broken hat, and a head phrenologised by a blacking bottle. Before you have recovered from this, you receive another missive with a charge for cleaning the streets—an operation which you know, to your cost, has been performed throughout the last thaw exclusively by the petticoats of the females; and upon the back of this appear mulctures touching gas and water. A huge oblong missive, the envelope whereof bears on a corner the letters O. H. M. S., and which is sealed with a most imposing and royal escutcheon, deludes you for a moment into the belief that Lord John Russell has at last exhibited a gleam of common-sense, and has recommended you to her Majesty either for a commissionership or for a reasonable place on the pension list, in consequence of your balaamite contributions to the unsaleable Edinburgh Review. You open it, and behold, it contains nothing but a warning that you have not paid the last quarter of your compounded and thrice confounded income-tax! A gentleman next requests the honour of a moment's interview. In the hope that he may prove a Writer to the Signet, you weakly yield; and incontinently an individual with a strong Israelitish countenance, a fetid breath, and an odour of stale tobacco floating around his person, solicits the honour of your custom for a packet of sealing-wax, a gross of steel pens, or a new edition of the Pentateuch. You eject him in a tornado of wrath; but the cup of your misery is not full. Aaron is succeeded by Mendizabel—an expatriated Spanish grandee, who bears a strong recommendation from an individual whose handwriting seems to be attached to every begging petition in the country. This fellow won't choose to understand you, however frantic you may appear; so that, for the sake of peace, you violate your conscience and get rid of him at the expenditure of a shilling. Grizzy is called up, and severely reprimanded for her want of discrimination in admitting the illustrious stranger; and the consequence is that, on the very next summons, she peremptorily denies you to a Glasgow agent who has come through by special train for a consultation on a case of emergency. Last of all, just as you are settling steadily to your work, and turning over the third sheet of foolscap, in walks your friend the Haveril, on no earthly errand whatever, except to inquire how you are getting on. Of all social pests, this kind of animal is undoubtedly the worst. In intellect he is singularly weak: in disposition curious and prying. He hops about your study like a magpie, eying every letter, as though he longed to make himself master of its contents; and, notwithstanding that you believe the creature to be strictly honest, you would on no account leave him for a couple of minutes in undisturbed possession of the sanctum. He peeps into every book, indulges you with a quantity of small literary swipes, and finally fastening upon a volume of prints, entreats you to go on with your occupation, as he, the Haveril, is perfectly competent to the task of entertaining himself. Culpable homicide, say our law-books, ranges from a crime of great enormity to the smallest possible fraction of imputed guilt; and if, under such aggravating circumstances, you were to toss your acquaintance out of the window, it is not likely that your subsequent sentence would be severe. But you have at the bottom of your heart a sort of attachment to the nincompoop, whom you know to be utterly harmless, and who, moreover, to do him justice, invariably stands up for you, whenever you are assailed in your absence. Therefore you abstain from violence, and the penance which you heroically undergo is but one degree short of martyrdom. Under the visitation of these Egyptian plagues, the morning wears insensibly away; and the imp of darkness, when he calls for copy about dinner-time, is summarily exorcised, and dispatched, empty-handed, to the solitudes of his awful den! Is there, then, any feasible case of resemblance between the fortress and the modern mansion?

We have been led into this train of thought by a perusal of the speeches lately delivered at Manchester on the subject of our national defences. The question is one of undoubted interest to us all, and it is well that it should be brought forward and thoroughly discussed in time. If there is danger, either immediate or impending, let us know it, and then, to a certain extent, we shall be forwarned if not forearmed. The Duke of Wellington—a tolerable military authority, as times go—has already given us his opinion on the point, and that opinion has been immediately met and contradicted by the sapient Mr Richard Cobden. We have yet to learn the exact amount of Mr Cobden's attainments in the arts of strategy and fortification; but as he is undoubtedly a "myriad-minded" gentleman, of fair average conceit, and more than average effrontery, and as we have hitherto abstained from making special mention of him in our columns, it may, perhaps, be worth while to see how he has acquitted himself in the lists against the veteran conqueror of Napoleon. Our old friend Tomkins—he of the Ten Tumblers—used to be, if we recollect aright, rather eloquent upon this weighty topic. Tomkins, in early life, had sustained an amatory disappointment, in competition with a thwacking drum-major; and therefore always looked upon the army with somewhat of a jaundiced eye. The sound of the fife, clarion, and trumpet was ever after distasteful to his ear; and he never trotted his mare past a marching regiment of these scarlet locusts, without a spasm of righteous indignation. "They eat our bread, sir!" he would say, "and drink of our cup, and do absolutely nothing in return. The sooner we get rid of them the better. An Englishman, sir, needs no hired supernumeraries to protect his home. When was our soil ever invaded? Let the French come, and we will give them graves!" And having delivered himself of this sublime sentiment, Tomkins would incontinently ring for another tumbler. It always struck us, however, as a singular proof of the eccentricities or rather inconsistencies of genius, that our distinguished friend, when in his cups, and towards the close of the evening, invariably began to glorify himself upon his length of lineage and descent. In support of these heraldic claims, he was wont to cite the case of his great progenitor, "the founder of the family," who just about a century ago had the condescension to hold the stirrup of Lord George Murray, as he alighted from his horse when the clans marched into Derby. Tomkins, on the strength of this anecdote, had rather a kindly feeling towards the Jacobites, and would never allow that the enterprise had at any time the character of an invasion. "We were ready, sir," he would exclaim, "to have marched up, in the Reform year, from Birmingham to London; and who can doubt that, had we done so, we should have driven the household troops before us as the chaff flies out from the fanners?"

We have often deeply regretted that Tomkins did not survive to witness the consummation of the triumphs of free-trade—a cause which he contributed materially by his efforts and his writings to advance. The leading feature of his character was the total absence of every kind of prejudice or bigotry. He held it to be a fundamental principle, as old as Magna Charta, that England was to be governed mainly through the influence of cotton: that all other interests were immeasurably inferior to this, and that the settlement and maintenance of our colonies was a gross instance of reckless and frantic extravagance. "Let us thrive," he would say, "through the arts of universal peace. Let us set a bright example to the world by opening our ports to the free admission of all foreign produce, without any kind of reciprocity whatever. If our artisans and workmen cannot maintain their ground, let them go to the comfortable Unions we have provided, and pick oakum in return for their rations of wholesome bone-soup! Let us hear no more nonsense about humanity or short-time! Cram the children into the factories so soon as they can walk. Early habits are the surest means of promoting and fostering industry. Let us look to our imports, and the exports will look after themselves. Disband the army. Reduce the navy. Do away with Church establishments. Contract the currency. Flabbergast the colonies; and Great Britain must go ahead!" Such were the expressed opinions of that great and good man, who now sleeps in a premature sepulchre at Staley Bridge: and we need hardly add, that in matters of revenue, he was an uncompromising advocate of the sponge. Had his valuable existence been prolonged for a few years, he would doubtless have been at the head of the onward movement, and might have shared in the rewards which are gratefully accorded to the patriots of this latter age. Andrew Marvell, sitting incorruptible in his garret with a shoulder-blade of mutton, has ceased to be a favourite example with the new democratic school. They affect ovations and banquets, perform continental reforming tours, and demean themselves after the manner of our able correspondent, Mr Dunshunner, who, we are glad to observe, has been lately invited to a free-trade demonstration on the banks of the Bosphorus, by several of the leading Muftis of Constantinople. Dunshunner writes in great spirits, and has promised us an early paper, on the advantage of our establishing free-trade relations with the domestic Circassian market.

Failing Tomkins, we have every reason to be proud of his disciple and successor, Mr Cobden. In fact, the mantle of our lamented friend has fallen most gracefully upon his shoulders; and in nothing is the genuine likeness more displayed, than in the contempt which both of them have exhibited for the standing army of Great Britain. Yet, perhaps, in this we may be doing Mr Cobden some little wrong. Tomkins, we know, had just and natural reason for abhorring the sight of a red-coat; Cobden, so far as we are aware, has no such motive for dislike. Of the two, he is the calmer and the cooler man, and very naturally looks sedulously about him for the means of substantiating his theories. After all the fine words which Sir Robert Peel bestowed upon him, to no visible improvement of his parsnips, Mr Cobden very naturally felt a little uneasy at the non-fulfilment of several of his prophecies. It is a pity that a man cannot vaticinate in this country without undergoing a certain risk of subsequent stultification; and yet, if he does not affect the gift of prophecy, your patriot is usually at a discount. Our memory is not a very good one, and yet we have hardly forgotten certain flourishes by Mr Cobden, regarding the immense amount of employment which was to accrue to this country, immediately after the passing of his favourite measures. Bread was to be as cheap as dirt, common luxuries within the reach of every one, and the whole British nation, through its length and breadth, was to hold a perpetual jubilee and jollification, to the music of the engine and the shuttle.

"Wild dreams! but such
As Plato loved; such as, with holy zeal,
Our Milton worship'd. Blessed hopes! awhile
From man withheld, even to the latter days!"

and, were we to add, in the words of Mr Canning's imitation of the above passage, the concluding line,

"Till France shall come, and all laws be repeal'd,"

it would not, we apprehend, be entirely foreign to the subject. The result, however, so far as we have yet seen, has by no means justified the experiment. Trade, instead of improving under the stimulus of free-trade, has fallen off, and a year of commercial panic and misery has been the result of the liberal nostrum. This, no doubt, is very galling to our friends of the billy-roller. Old stagers like us, who are sometimes represented as prosy, because we reverence time-honoured principles, love the constitution of our country, and defend the memory of those who were the true founders of its greatness, are supposed to feel some triumph at the aspect of the present depression, and to exult over the slough of despond in which the Whigs are left to flounder. If there be any who, judging from their own mean nature, so think of us, it is hardly worth our while to undeceive them. Bitterly indeed have we mourned over the spectacle of fraud and imbecility which the last two years have disclosed in the higher places of the land, and most earnestly do we hope that, ere long, the true-hearted people of this country will awake to a full sense of their present perilous and by no means creditable position. All the difficulties which are just now pressing upon ministers, and which, for a longer period than we can venture to calculate, must continue to environ them, are of their own creating, and are the natural effects of that unconstitutional policy which would sacrifice every thing for the mere possession of power. Do we speak truth or not? Let the Chancellor of the Exchequer answer us. What but free-trade and its concomitant schemes has lessened the revenue and increased the pauperism of the country? What but the vicious and yet invincible desire of change, consequent on a contest for popularity, has struck a blow at the prosperity, and even the existence, of our colonies, which has already reacted with fearful effect within the centre of the mother-country?

Mr Cobden, on being twitted with the failure, or, at all events, the non-realisation of his unqualified prophecies, very naturally, but not very wisely, flies into a passion. He fixes, of course, upon the failure of the harvest of 1846 as the prime element of justification. Can I control the elements?—says he—can I regulate the seasons? Certainly not, Mr Cobden. We presume that no one, not even the stupidest operative that used to bellow in your congregation, and who believed every one of the golden promises which you were hardy enough to enunciate, ever dreamed that you were in possession of that power. Several of us, moreover, are of opinion that, upon the whole, you have been rather overrated as a conjurer, and that, having failed in your endeavours to get into an empty quart bottle, you are not a whit more likely to succeed when you come to experiment upon a pint. But let us whisper in your ear that this excuse will hardly serve your turn, and that it is wholly irreconcilable with the arguments which you used to advance. A copious supply of foreign grain was the very thing for which you and your associates primarily clamoured. You wanted an import to a prodigious extent, and you flattered yourselves that, for each quarter of American wheat, you would be able to send in exchange so many yards of that calico which you fondly maintain to be the principal fabric of the world. You were content, and you have said it over and over again, to take your chance of the home market, provided the other ones were opened to you. Now that you have them open, and now that wheat has come in such abundance as even your most sanguine anticipations could not have conceived, you have the coolness and effrontery to turn round and throw the blame upon Providence, for having speedily brought about the very thing which every charlatan in Great Britain has been shouting for since the anti-corn-law league began! Do you really think that this will go down with any portion of the community? that such deplorable wriggling will not insure you, throughout the country, the contempt of every man of average and common understanding? or that the labourer on short time, and the artisan whom you have deprived of his employment, will put up with such miserable excuses? The plain state of the fact is,—and you know it,—that your theories are crumbling beneath your feet. You cannot expect that your gross and egregious error will escape a speedy detection. You, without any previous qualification for the task, save your natural talent, which is not much, have thrust yourself forward to a prominence which you never were entitled to occupy. You may fancy yourself, if you choose, the people's man; but so were Jack Cade, and Wat Tyler, and several others, who, mistaking energy for knowledge, and ill-regulated enthusiasm for calm deliberate judgment, took upon themselves the task of misleading the English people, and either perished amidst the ruin they had caused, or sank back into their pristine obscurity. There is a favourite cant phrase very current just now, to the effect that "we are living in new times." The same thing might have been said by our common progenitor Adam, the day after his expulsion from Paradise. It is the most trite truth of the world. Every new day brings its change, but every new day does not obliterate the memory of those which have gone before. All the "new times" which this universe has seen, have not sufficed to alter in the slightest iota the original character of mankind. Human nature still remains the same; and the man who does not acknowledge and adopt this as a principle, is a crazed and dangerous visionary. Never, under any circumstances, ought such a one to gain ascendancy in the state, or to be allowed to reduce his unsound theories to practice. If he does so, woe be to the country which countenances him in the rash attempt!

History and its philosophy are the true studies for a statesman in every age. In that educational point of view, we strongly suspect that the present ministerial cabinet is sorely deficient. The Whigs, as a body, are conversant with a very small space of history indeed. They are constantly jabbering about the fundamental principles of the constitution, which they date back no further than the advent of William of Orange. Their pet historian, and the ablest man among them, cannot make a single speech without dragging in, neck and heels, some vapidity about the Revolution Settlement of 1688; and they try to be profound in their criticisms upon the policy of Walpole and of Bute. Charles James Fox, of course, still continues to be their principal fetish, and they cling to antiquated party toasts with a superstition that would disgrace a Mussulman. But of the freer and bolder regions of history—of all that is great and elevating—of the numerous lessons to be gleaned, and the examples to be gathered from the grand old records of kingly and loyal England, or of the fall and fate of nations through the imbecility of their rulers, or the ambition of ignorant demagogues, they either know nothing practically, or they fail to acknowledge their importance. Whiggery is a small machine which works according to conventional rules of its own, and will not make allowance for the great springs of human action. A cabinet of Whigs is admirably adapted for the control and legislation of the sovereign state of Pumpfernickel, or some analogous German principality; but they never can assume their place at the helm of affairs in a great empire such as that of Britain, without landing the whole of us in dangerous difficulties, and sneaking off at the last hour under a humiliating sense of their own impotence and presumption.

The case is still worse when men like Mr Cobden come forward to try their hand either as pilots or as coadjutors. We presume that Mr Cobden, if the question were put to him, would candidly admit the narrowness of the range of his peculiar historical studies. We understand that he does not pretend to be a scholar, and that the amount, of the information which he possesses, however great that may be, is limited to modern facts and premises, upon which he usually reasons. A worse kind of education for a statesman, or for the leader of a popular movement, cannot be found than this. It was this kind of partial knowledge, unilluminated by the clear lucid light which bygone history alone can shed authoritatively upon passing events, which, in the recollection of many still alive, led to the dark catastrophe and horrors of the French Revolution. There is hardly one social change, hardly one political experiment now making, for which a prototype cannot be furnished from the pages of history. And of what possible use, it may be well asked, is history, if we are not to recur to it for a solution of the difficulties which may arise in our onward progress? Are we to gain no confidence, nor take any warning from the rise and decline of nations, not much less powerful than our own, whose checkered career and the causes of it are open to our view? Is the world behind us a blank, that we should go stumbling on at the instigation of every reckless adventurer, more culpable in his attempts to guide us, than the ship-captain who should presume to thread the coral reefs of the Indian Ocean without consulting the authoritative chart? Are we always to derive our information, not from what has been done and acted in the globe before—not from an attentive examination of men and their motives, and the countless springs of action which stir them, but from statistical tables and long columns of figures, compiled by rusty officials in their dens, and brought forth for the first time to be cited as overwhelming testimony by some premier who is meditating apostasy, or seeking some palliative to cover his shameful abandonment of a party? The features of the so-called statesmanship of the present day are essentially those of bureaucracy. A drudging arithmetical clerk, with whom a unit is every thing, and who would be nearly driven to despair by the discovery of a misquoted fraction, is a leading authority with our statesmen; and his vamped-up tables of export and import are considered sounder expositions of the destinies of the human race, than all the accumulated wisdom, learning, and experience which the annals of the world can afford.

The "tables," however, are now turned, and therefore we shall not say any more for the present about the blue-book and ledger system. Let us go back to Mr Cobden, whom we still find rather uselessly employed in protesting his total inability to command the clemency of the seasons. We have already shown, by papers published in this Magazine in December last and January of the present year, that our exports have lamentably fallen off, and that the balance of trade is against us. Such, we maintained, and we continue still to maintain, must be the effect of the new theories, especially under the restricted operation of the currency. We are glad to see that upon this latter point, at all events, we are supported by a large majority of the press. Mr Cobden, however, denies the evils of the currency; so that he must fall back upon something else to account for the unexpected defalcation.

Such is our position at home and abroad; and if we have been guilty of a digression, which we cannot altogether deny, we shall plead our motive in justification. When Mr Cobden comes forward with his views of foreign policy, with his ideas of the social progress of the universe, and with his notions as to the policy which hereafter may be adopted by great and ambitious foreign states,—when, after delivering his opinion upon these very weighty matters, he arrives at the inference, not only that we require no addition to our national defences, but that our present establishment of a standing army and navy is absurd, extravagant, and superfluous, we are entitled to inquire into the success with which his first experiment in legislative agitation has been crowned. Of the abundance of good things which he promised, how many have been realised, how many are like to emerge from the dark experimental gulf? If writhing colonies, diminished exports, want of employment, distress at home, enormous failures, monetary restriction, and vast depreciation of property, have followed in the wake of free-trade—if ministry are at present racking such brains as they possess to discover some means of keeping up the revenue to its ordinary level, and if they are forced to lay on a direct additional war-tax in times of the profoundest peace,—surely we shall not incur a charge of fickleness or ingratitude, if we should receive this new oracle of the free-trading Mokanna with some symptoms of dubiety and distrust.

The whole question arose thus. It appears that the Duke of Wellington, whose illustrious reputation and great services entitle him to be heard with the deepest and most reverential respect, has long entertained great uneasiness on account of the undefended state of this country in the case of a hostile invasion. That such an event is likely to take place, no one supposes or has said—that it possibly might take place, very few will venture to deny. The idea is not a new one; for within the range of the present century, preparations have been actually made for that purpose, and that whilst the wonderful power and facilities of steam-navigation were unknown. Fulton—we have seen men who knew him when he was a humble artisan in the West of Scotland—had, despairing of success at home, submitted his models to the French government, who, fortunately for us, did not then appreciate the merits of the invention. Three years afterwards, he started his first steamer on the Hudson in America. The power which our French neighbours had once so nearly within their grasp, at a time when it might have been used to the exceeding detriment of England, became generally known and adopted, and we need not speak of its progress. It has altogether changed the tactics of naval warfare. It can conquer the old difficulties of wind and tide, and it has immensely shortened the period of transit from the continental coast to our own. The security, therefore, of our insular barriers has been materially weakened, and thus far the possibility of an invasion from abroad has been increased. We are not now speaking of the probability, which is matter for subsequent consideration.

This open and admitted fact is the foundation of the whole argument of the Duke of Wellington. In the evening of a glorious life, the greater part of which has been spent in the active service of his country, the veteran soldier has thought it his duty to remind us, for our own guidance and that of our children, of the actual existing state of our national defences, which he deems to be insufficient. It is one of the last, but not, we think, the least important of the services which the venerable Duke has rendered to the nation, with whose proudest history his name will be eternally associated. We take it—or at least we ought to take it—from his lips, as a solemn warning; as the disinterested testimony of a man alike pre-eminent in war and in council; as the deliberate opinion of the GREAT PACIFICATOR OF EUROPE. For notwithstanding the irreverent, mean, and scurrilous taunts of the Manchester gang of demagogues, it is undeniable that the Great Duke has been the chief instrument in procuring for us the blessing of that peace which for two and thirty years we have enjoyed. It was his conquest at Waterloo which hushed the world. The tranquillity of Europe was the stake for which he fought, and he nobly won it. And now, when, at the last hour, this illustrious man comes forward to offer us his advice, and to warn us against the folly of trusting too implicitly to the continuance of that tranquillity, is it wise that we should scorn his counsel?

And what is the proposal which has excited such wrath, and so sorely roused the choler of the bilious Cobden? Simply this—that the British nation should at all times maintain at home a military force sufficient to repel an invasion, should such be attempted, from our shores. The Duke believes and maintains that we cannot now, as formerly, rely solely and implicitly upon our navy for defence, but that, in the event of a war, we must provide against the contingency of an enemy's landing. Our arsenals, he thinks, and our dockyards, should be supported by a military force, and at least we ought to exhibit such a front as will hold out no temptation to a hostile attempt. These are not aggressive, but precautionary measures; and without them, according to the Duke, we cannot consider ourselves secure.

Such are the proposals which Cobden and his clique—we are sorry to observe a gentleman like Sir William Molesworth among them—are prepared to resist to the last. They want no defences at all. They are opposed to any augmentation of the army. They would rather do without it, or reduce the establishment so as to make the national saving equivalent to the diminished amount of revenue consequent upon their commercial experiments. They look upon free-trade as a universal panacea which is to cure all national and social ailments, and to remedy every grievance. War is to be no more—territorial aggressions unknown—and the advent of the millennium is to be typified by an unbounded exportation of calico!

These are the views which have been lately propounded at Manchester, and the parties are therefore at issue. Cobden has matched himself against Wellington, and Quaker Bright has volunteered to be his bottle-holder. We really wish that it had been permitted us to approach the argument without mingling with it any asperity. But this is now totally out of the question. The disgusting and vulgar language which Mr Cobden has thought fit to use towards the greatest historical character of the age—the low-minded scurrility which pervades the whole of his egotistical discourse,—put him beyond the pale of conventional courtesy, or even of dignified rebuke. The man who could stand up in his place—no matter what audience was before him—stigmatise the Duke of Wellington as being in his old age a whetter and fomenter of discord, and finally insinuate dotage as the only intelligible excuse, deserves, if there is a spark of national feeling left, to be publicly pilloried throughout Britain. "Would it not," says this disloyal prater, "have been a better employment for him to have been preaching forgiveness for, and oblivion of the past, than in reviving the recollection of Toulon, Paris, and Waterloo?" Forgiveness! and for what? For having vindicated the rights of the nations, terminated the insatiable career of Napoleon's rapine, and restored to us that peace which he is still desirous to preserve by maintaining Britain invulnerable, secure, and free!

But let us pass from a matter so deeply discreditable both to the speaker, and to the audience that applauded his sentiments. Meanly as we think of the latter, we are yet to believe that the next morning brought to many some feelings of compunction and of shame. Not so the former, who, wrapped up in the panoply of his own ridiculous conceit, a would-be Gracchus, must remain a Thersites for ever.

Irrespective of the purse argument, which, as a matter of course, is the chief motive of these gentry, the free-traders attempt to brand the Duke of Wellington with a charge of attempting to raise a hostile feeling between this country and the continental states. The accusation is as false as it is frivolous. The attitude of Britain is not, and never will be, aggressive. She is at this moment in the proud position of the mighty mediator of Europe; and it is to her strong right arm, and not to her powers of producing calico, that she owes that ascendency. Our interest clearly and incontestibly is to maintain peace, but that we cannot hope to maintain, if we abandon the power to enforce it. Among nations as among individuals, the weak cannot hope to prosper in active competition with the strong—nay, they are even in a worse position, because the law will protect individuals, whilst to nations there exists no common Court of Appeal. If we are content to renounce our position, and to give up our foreign possessions—a consummation which the free-trade theorists appear abundantly to desire—if we are to confine ourselves simply to our insular boundaries, and advertise as the workshop of the world—then, indeed, we shall surrender our supremacy, and with it the hope of maintaining peace. Can these men read no lessons from history? Does the sight of what is daily acting around them justify their anticipations of a millennium? What is the real state of the fact? Russia, having absorbed Poland, is now engaged in a territorial war with the Circassians, upon which she has already expended an enormous amount of treasure and of men; and she is prepared for a double sacrifice, if by such means she can gain possession of the passes which are the keys to southern Asia. Austria is hanging upon the skirts of Italy, concentrating her forces upon the frontier, and menacing an immediate invasion. Very lamb-like and pacific has been the conduct of America to Mexico. As for the French, whom Cobden eulogises as the most "affectionate and domesticated race on the face of the earth"—did the man ever hear of the Revolution?—they are notoriously the most aggressive of all the European nations. Did domestic feelings excite them to the conquest of Algeria? Did affection lead them to Tahiti? Was it a mania for free-trade that brought about the Montpensier marriage? Really it is difficult to know for which palm, that of ignorance or effrontery, this Manchester manufacturer is contending. Has he forgot the Joinville letter, which was hailed with such rapture on the other side of the Channel? Was Paris fortified without a purpose? Is he blind to the fact that the peace of Europe at this moment depends upon the life of a man now in his seventy-fifth year? We maintain that there never was a period, at least within our recollection, when the maintenance of general tranquillity throughout Europe was more precarious. And yet, this is the very moment which Mr Cobden selects for a crusade, or rather a tirade, against our military establishments!

Our feelings are any thing but those of dislike towards the "affectionate and domesticated" French. We admire their genius, and read their novels,—and we have a peculiar affection for their wine. In one point alone we agree with Mr Cobden. We still retain the ancient Caledonian predilection for claret in competition with port, and we should be sorry to be deprived of champagne. Still sorrier should we be to lose our annual spring trip to Paris; to be banished from the Boulevards and the Palais Royal, and to enjoy only in memory those delicious dinners at the Rocher de Cancale. We have no wish to run the risk of a compulsory detention at Verdun. Nay, we shall go further, and apprise Mr Cobden, that had our lot been cast a few centuries back, we should in all probability have been fervent maintainers of the ancient bond of alliance between King Achaius of Scotland and the Emperor Charlemagne; and nothing would have given us greater pleasure than to have visited Manchester along with a few thousand lads who swore by Saint Andrew, whilst the partisans of Denis were amusing themselves in the neighbourhood of Portsmouth. But times have changed. We have contracted an alliance with the nation of which Mr Cobden is so creditable a representative; and upon the whole, we are not altogether dissatisfied with the arrangement. We can now look upon the French with an eye undimmed by affection; and we must confess that we have very little, if any, faith in that marvellous change of their character which is sworn to by the Manchester spouters. They may be very excellent fellows, but we would rather not trust them with our keys. The tone and temper of a nation do not alter quite so rapidly as Mr Cobden seems to suppose. The history of Algeria is a very significant hint that the old ideas of the French on the score of conquest are not yet wholly obliterated; and we should rather imagine that they have not quite forgotten their pristine appetite for plunder. They deserve, however, considerable credit for the dexterous manner in which they have thrown dust into the eyes of Mr Cobden. You would think, to hear the man, that he is an inoculated Frenchman. Presume to criticise their character, and his scream is like that of a railway engine. Just hint that you consider them unscrupulous, and our calico-printer overboils "with horror and shame and indignation." We have no doubt that he considers it a great pity that history cannot be annihilated—that is, supposing he has ever condescended to notice any thing so trivial as history. Will he not favour the world with a new version of the French Revolution? We are anxious to hear his grounds for supposing the French to be an "affectionate and domestic people;" and since we are, to fraternise with them altogether, it would be comfortable to know our brethren as they really are. We want to have a true account of the Noyades. Were these really wholesale drownings, or a mere ebullition of national fun? Doubtless, there is much humour—though we have not yet been able to see it—in the clanking of the guillotine; and the expeditions to Moscow and Madrid, with their accompanying tales of rapine and butchery, may possibly be demonstrated by Mr Cobden as instances of a practical joke. Davoust, as the Hamburgians know, was a fine fellow; and so, upon examination, may prove Robespierre and Marat. Perhaps, too, he will come down a little later, and tell us the particulars of the gallant and gentleman-like behaviour of M. Dupetit-Thouars towards Queen Pomare. Or will he undertake to prove that Abd-el-Kader is an infamous scoundrel, utterly beyond the pale or security of national faith and of plighted honour?

It is plain, either that Mr Cobden has been egregiously humbugged by the acute foreigners, or that he has subsided into a state of calm, settled, and imperturbable idiocy. It is too cruel in Bright to parade in such a way his former friend and master, and to quote from his private correspondence. We wonder what is Sir Robert Peel's present opinion of the man whom he chose to bespatter with his praise, and for whose sake he was content to forfeit the elaborate reputation of a life-time. But bad as Cobden may be, he is fairly surpassed in Gallic enthusiasm by the notorious George Thompson, whose patriotism may be gathered from the tone of the following paragraph:—"Why, what were the toasts given at the sixty reform banquets of France? This has been one of their toasts at least, 'Fraternity, liberty, equality.' Let us echo from these shores the shouts that have been raised there, and I am sorry to say, stifled, so far as Paris is concerned, for the banquet did not come off there. Let us send back the echo, fraternity, liberty, equality!" And this pestilential raving has been applauded to the echo in Manchester.

Let us have peace with the French by all means, and with all the world beside; but let us not fall into the despicable and stupid blunder of supposing that human passion and human prejudice, the lust for power, and the cravings of ambition, can ever be eradicated by any system of commercial arrangement. Britain is naturally an object of envy to all the continental states. It is her strength and position which have hitherto maintained the balance of power—and of that the European states are fully and painfully aware. Every step which can tend to weaken the fidelity of her colonies, is regarded with intense interest abroad, and more especially in France. The people of that country envy us for our wealth, and dislike us for our power; and war with Britain, could the French afford it, would at any time find a host of advocates. We are not believers in the probability of such an event, if we keep ourselves reasonably prepared; but the very first relaxation upon our part would inevitably tend to accelerate it. It is quite possible that France may yet have to undergo another dynastic convulsion. The death of Louis Philippe may be the signal for intestine disorder. The Count of Paris is a mere boy, and popularity is not on the side of his uncle and guardian. A powerful party still exists, acknowledging no king save the rightful heir of St Louis; and the fanatical republican section is still strong and virulent. These are things which it would be imprudent to disregard, and of which no man living can venture to predict the result. The death of the Queen of Spain would, according to all appearances, give rise to a rupture with France, and possibly test, within a shorter period than we could have believed, the sufficiency of our national defences. There is at this moment every reason why our real strength and power should be made apparent to the world, and our weakness, where it does exist, immediately remedied and repaired.

Had the Duke of Wellington proposed, like Friar Bacon in Greene's old play,

"To girt fair England with a wall of brass,"

the outcry could not have been greater. An iron wall might perhaps have been rather popular in the mining districts. But his Grace proposes no such thing. He only suggests the propriety of a small augmentation of the regular forces at home, the strengthening of our neglected fortifications, and the gradual reimbodiment of the militia. It is for the British nation, or rather its representatives, to adopt or reject the proposal. Now, it is worth while that we should keep in mind what is our actual disposable force at present.

According to the most recent authorities, the armies of the principal European powers would rank as follows:

The disproportion of force exhibited by this list is sufficiently obvious; but when we descend to particulars, it will in reality be found much greater. Abroad, the majority of the male population are trained to the use of arms: with us it is notoriously the reverse. France, in the course of one week, could materially increase the amount of her regular army; whilst here that would be obviously impossible. Beyond Algeria, France has almost no colonies as stations for her standing force. We have to provide for the East and West Indies, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Cape, Ceylon, Hong Kong, the Mauritius, Gibraltar, Malta, the Ionian Islands, and others. The profession of the British soldier is any thing but a sinecure. A great portion of his life must be spent abroad; he may be called upon to undergo the most rapid vicissitudes of climate, to pass from one hemisphere to another in the discharge of his anxious duty. There is no service in the world more trying or severe; and it very ill becomes Mr Cobden, or any of his class, to sneer at that establishment, which is kept up for the direct promotion of our commerce. So large a portion of the territorial surface of the world is nowhere defended at so little cost either of money or of men. Indeed, as recent events have shown, we are but too apt to save the one at the expense of the other. No doubt, if the free-trade policy is carried out to the uttermost—if our colonies are to be thrown away as useless, and our foreign stations dismantled, we might submit to a still further reduction. France will be too happy to receive Gibraltar or Malta from our hands, and will cheerfully free us from the expense of maintaining garrisons there. Let us but make over to that affectionate and domesticated people the keys of the Mediterranean, and we shall soon see with what eagerness they will co-operate in the dissemination of Mr Cobden's free-trade dogmas.

Apart from the colonies, we have a serious difficulty at home. Ireland—that most wretched and ungrateful country, which no experience can improve—is as far from tranquillity as ever. The hard-working population of Britain submitted last year without a murmur to an exorbitant taxation, for the purpose of relieving the distress occasioned by the failure of the potato crop. The return is a howl of defiance from the brutal demagogue, and an immediate increase of murder and of crime. Notwithstanding every kind of remedial measure—notwithstanding their exemption, which is an injustice to us, from many of the heaviest burdens of the state—notwithstanding the mistaken policy which fostered their institutions and their schools, the Roman Catholics of Ireland stand out in bad pre-eminence, as the most cold-blooded, unthankful, and cowardly assassins of the world. In order to repress that outrage, which is so villanously rife among them, and which nothing but physical force can restrain from breaking out into open rebellion, we are compelled at all times to keep the largest portion of our remanent disposable force quartered in Ireland. The consequence is, that a mere handful of our standing army is left in Great Britain.

If Mr Cobden should like to see a little terrestrial paradise, in which few birds, with that gaudy plumage which is so offensive to his eyes, can be found, he had better come down to Scotland, and pay us another visit. He is kind enough, we observe, to make himself the mouthpiece of our sentiments upon this matter of the defences; and, certainly, if there be any truth in the adage that we are entitled at least to see what we are paying for, Scotland has no reason to be peculiarly warlike in her sentiments. Mr Cobden will find us quite as affectionate and domesticated a people as the French; and he may rely upon it, that he will not be shocked by any over-blaze of scarlet. From a turbulent, we have gradually settled down to be a quiet race; and as a natural consequence, we share in none of those benefits which are heaped so liberally upon the "persecuted Irish." Our only excitements are a Church squabble, which does not require the interference of the military, but exhausts itself in the public prints; or a bread row, which is always over, long before a detachment can be brought from the nearest station, it may be at the distance of some hundred miles. We are never noticed in Parliament, except to be praised for our good behaviour, or to have some remaining fragment of our national establishments reduced. We pay for an army and a navy which we never see; indeed, of late years the French and Danish flags have been far more frequently displayed upon our coasts than the broad pendant of Great Britain. In many of our counties a soldier is an unknown rarity; and the only drum that has been heard for the last thirty years, is in the peaceable possession of the town-crier. England, we apprehend, except in the immediate neighbourhood of the metropolis and of Manchester, is not much better supplied: in short, so far as Britain is concerned, we have a remarkably insufficient force, and one which has been declared by the highest military authority alive, wholly incompetent for our protection in the case of an attempted invasion. Cobden, who has no veneration for successful warriors, having feathered his nest very pleasantly otherwise, admits that he has not the slightest practical knowledge of the trade of war. We therefore demur to his position that this is a question for civilians to determine, and that military and naval men have nothing to do with it. His previous admission involves an inconsistency. He might as well say, that, having no acquaintance whatever with engineering, he is entitled to deliver his opinions in opposition to Walker or Stephenson, on the construction of a skew bridge, or the practicability of boring a tunnel. If one of those vessels in the Tagus, which, according to Cobden, are kept there for the sole purpose of instructing our seamen in the culture of the geranium, was to spring a leak, we should assuredly apply to Jack Chips, the carpenter, to stop it, before invoking the aid of the peripatetic apostle of free-trade. And just so is it with the state of our national defences. Manchester must excuse us, if we prefer the testimony of the Duke of Wellington upon this point to the more dubious experiences of Cobden. It is, of course, quite another question, whether the leak shall be stopped, or the vessel permitted to founder peaceably. Mr Cobden may be heard upon that point, under special reference to the magnitude of the stake which he hazards, but we decline receiving his opinion on the subject of military fortifications. He can no more pronounce a judgement on the adequate state of our defences, than he can parse a paragraph of Xenophon; and therefore, by approaching the subject, he has been guilty of presumption and impertinence.

Mr Cobden proposes that we should rely upon the maintenance of peace by removing all obstacles to invasion. He admits, indeed, that for the present he is in a minority, but he hopes very soon to change it to a majority, and until that time comes he is content to remain in the following position:—"I say this, I am for acting justly and fairly, and holding out the olive branch to the whole world; and I will then take upon myself, so far as my share goes, all the risk of any thing happening to ME, without paying for another soldier or another sailor." This is good! What a glorious insurance is here offered to the nation against the risk of foreign aggression! If every man, woman, and child in this mighty empire will remain satisfied without the means of repelling foreign invasion, the magnanimous Cobden will take his risk, so far as his share goes, of all that may happen to HIM! Why, who the deuce cares what happens to him or his? Are we all engrossed in Cobden's weal or woe? Would it matter one straw to us, or to the universe, if he and his calico print-works were wrapped in universal conflagration to-morrow? This is, without exception, the most impudent offer of guarantee which we ever remember to have heard of; and it justifies us in remarking that, if all accounts be true, Mr Cobden would be no very great loser by the immediate advent of the French. If any thing happens to him, he may be assured of this, that notwithstanding his cautious salvo, he will have no claim for damage and loss, and little commiseration from any quarter whatsoever. Is the man insane enough to suppose, that he, armed with his olive branch, stands forth as prominently in the eyes of the world as if he were a sign of the Zodiac? Curtius, who leaped into the gulf in the Forum, which would not close until the most precious thing of Rome was thrown into it, shrinks into insignificance, and becomes absolutely bashful, when compared with the emulous Cobden. According to the Man-in-the-Moon, Curtius was pronounced by the Flamen to be the most precious fool of his day, but in point of conceit he is fairly trumped by the honourable member for the West Riding of Yorkshire. In his opinion there is nothing worth protecting save an inland mill, and he does not care what becomes of our arsenals so long as there is an immunity for calico!

If there are no armaments, thinks Mr Cobden, there can be no wars; and for once he is tolerably right. If iron did not exist there could be no swords; and without gunpowder, or its modern substitute cotton, a discharge of musketry is impossible. But unfortunately there are other armaments besides ours, and no symptom whatever of their reduction. Here the reciprocity theory is once more brought into play. Let Britain be the first to set the example, and every other nation will follow in her wake. Cannons, by unanimous consent, will be spiked, banners handed over to the respectable fraternity of Odd Fellows, and the soldier condemned to the stiffing walls of the factory, never more to stand at ease. Such are the dreams of Cobden; and if he really believes in them, and in the actual regeneration of human nature by means of free-trade instead of religion, we should like to see him try the experiment on a minor scale. Let him, after having collected within his premises as much plate as he can conveniently acquire, and as much cash as he is worth, dispense with the unnecessary precautions of lock and key; let him dismiss the watchmen from his works, and put up an advertisement that the whole public are welcome to enter at any hour they please, and that not the slightest attempt at resistance will be offered. We presume that the Manchester operatives are at least as affectionate and domesticated as the French; but, notwithstanding that, we should entertain some apprehension as to the fate of Mr Cobden's spoons. The temptation would really be too great. The seeming solidity of the albata plate or purified nickel-silver would infallibly tempt the cupidity of some affectionate artisan. A midnight visit would be paid, and on the morrow there would be wail for the missing tureen! To be consistent, we should begin with municipal reforms. Let us proclaim honesty as a universal principle, do away with the police, abolish Chubb, and keep our doors wide open for ingress as well as for ventilation. If our greatcoats disappear not, if umbrellas are not less, and if the tale of our forks is complete after a reasonable lease of the experiment, we shall then have acquired some data for making a further trial, and intrusting the wealth of Great Britain to the forbearance of our foreign neighbours.

When Blucher, on his visit to this country after the war, rode through the streets of London, he was observed, amidst all the shouts of acclamation, to be peering curiously at the windows of the shops, which then, as now, exhibited a tempting and valuable display. When asked what he thought of the metropolis, the worthy veteran replied with a deep sigh, whilst a tear rolled down his venerable cheek—"Mein Gott! What a city for to sack!" Such were the first impressions of old Marshal Forwards; and, with all deference to Cobden's sagacity, we suspect that the amiable French, if they had it in their power, would not be slow to realise the sentiments. Indeed, his Royal Highness the Prince of Joinville, being of an open and candid nature, does not hesitate to acknowledge it in as many words. We do not think a whit the worse of Joinville for saying so: on the contrary, we are obliged to him, and, if wise, we shall treasure the hint. He merely speaks the sentiments of a large portion of his countrymen, who very probably have no abstract wish for war, and would rather let things rest as they are. Of all nations in the world, the French have the best possible excuse for reducing their armaments, since France is inundated with troops, and they have few foreign territorial possessions. As compared with Britain proper, France could afford to shake off nearly three-fourths of her establishment, and yet remain upon an equality; but although Algeria may now be considered as safe and tranquil, there are no demonstrations of the kind. The French army is organised and ready to act upon any emergency: ours is too small, is dispersed, and we have not an adequate reserve at home.

Whilst, therefore, the possibility of an invasion remains, we are bound on every consideration of prudence and of policy, to act as if the probability were likewise at hand. The youngest of us has seen too many changes and revolutions—too many political disagreements and jarrings among the European family, to prophesy with confidence that these shall never be renewed. Even in commerce we have not got reciprocity, and we cannot expect to get it in the more abstract point of armaments. Woodburne House was better fortified by Dominie Sampson's folios, than Britain possibly could be by bales of Cobden's cotton. Our sincere belief is, that the surest method of accelerating a war is to take the advice of the Manchester demagogues, repudiate the ideas of the Duke of Wellington, and remain in stupid inactivity. It was necessary for public safety that this matter should be laid before the country; and the Duke for doing so may yet deserve a debt of gratitude, which will amply recompense him for the vulgar contumely of a host of disloyal bagmen. But it would be preposterous to suppose that the discussion which has arisen at home has not attracted deep observation abroad. The eyes of Europe are upon us, watching what course we are to adopt; and France in particular is waiting, with indrawn breath and tremulous anxiety, the result of the coming discussion. Our weakness at home is now apparent to the world; we cannot conceal it; the sole question is, whether we shall apply the remedy.

Admit the possibility, and the question is a serious one indeed! Let us suppose that, from some unforeseen accident, some stoppage in the wheels of diplomacy, or some untoward casualty, war was declared between Great Britain and France, or even any other continental power. Such an event could not happen without dividing the nations of Europe. We could not afford to withdraw our forces from the colonies, because these would probably be made the earliest points of attack,—nor from Ireland, except at the immediate and imminent risk of a rebellion. Even should it be thought prudent to leave the colonies to their fate, the transport of the garrisons would involve a considerable period of time—a fact of which our enemy must be aware, and of which he would be foolish not to take advantage. We should be compelled to recruit immediately, and upon a large scale; and it would take some time to metamorphose Mr Cobden's operatives, or even that respectable senator himself, into any thing like the semblance of soldiers. If fifty thousand armed men were to be landed on the southern coast—and no one seems to doubt the possibility of such an occurrence—we should like to know what are our means of resistance? We have read a good many letters upon the subject, in the daily prints—some of them apparently by ex-military men, and some by politicians of the school of Tomkins and Cobden—but not one of them has been able to make out a decent case of opposition. The best, and, indeed, the only rational letters, proceed upon the supposition that there would be a general rising en masse of the English population—that every hawbuck would turn out with a musket to repel the invaders, and that the railways from London would vomit forth a cloud of intrepid musketeers. Every hedge, they think, would be manned, and every farm-house a sort of minor fortress. Now, with all submission, this is downright deplorable drivel. Ever since the English people—and that is now a very old story—have given up the use and exercise of arms, and agreed to be mulcted in purse, rather than undergo the personal fatigue and annoyance of exercise, there has been no martial spirit at all exhibited by the bulk of the population. No doubt, when an invasion was actually threatened by Napoleon, and three hundred thousand men were assembled at Boulogne, there were large demonstrations of volunteer activity; but then, it must be remembered that we were in the very height and fever of a war—the belligerent spirit and strong antipathy to France had prepared us for such a crisis, and we had not been besotted and enfeebled by more than thirty years of peace, and almost as many of gradual but sure demoralisation. We had not then adopted such men as the Manchester Jacobins for our teachers; we were then content to be national and not cosmopolitan in our ideas. We were fighting for our faith and our freedom—not truckling for calico or for yarn. The same crisis is not likely to occur again, and we cannot—dare not venture to calculate upon a similar demonstration of energy. Free-trade and liberal measures have put that utterly beyond our power. We have no more doubt than we have of our own existence, that a body of men of Mr Cobden's way of thinking could be found in this country, ready to contract with the French government for conveying over to Britain an invading army at the rate of eight shillings a-head, victuals included; and, if the weather was stormy, they would unquestionably clear a handsome profit by the speculation. Morals have nothing earthly to do with free-trade—patriotism is opposed to it—and why make any distinction between the freightage of Frenchmen and of bullocks? The contractors, of course, would take care that their own premises were sufficiently far removed from the scene of immediate action; and we cannot pitch upon a fitter locality than that which is exhibited in Manchester.

We would ask any or all of those gentlemen who depend upon a general rising, to take the trouble, for some half hour or so, to revert to history. If they do so, and seriously think over the matter, they will speedily be convinced that an invasion is by no means a difficult matter, and that no reliance whatever can be placed upon the co-operation of the undisciplined people, either of the country or the metropolis, in the event of an actual invasion. In fact, judging from history, Paris is literally impregnable compared with London, and yet it has been occupied by the Allies. In 1688, William of Orange, a foreign prince, having no claim to the crown, and against the will of the people of England, whatever may be said of the aristocracy, landed in Britain, advanced to London, and took the throne, without the slightest demonstration of hostility. The population were perfectly quiescent. It was not their business to fight: they paid for an army; and accordingly they allowed the Orangeman to march on, just as they would do to Joinville, provided he desired his troops to be reasonably accommodating and civil. Sack and rapine might undoubtedly provoke resistance; but if ordinary courtesy were used, and more especially if the French proclaimed that they came upon a free-trade errand, and a friendly visit to Mr Cobden, there would be far fewer shots fired, than at the present moment are resounding from the peaceful hedgerows of Tipperary.

The next instance we select—omitting minor efforts—is the enterprise of 1745, which peculiarly concerns Scotland, and of which we are by no means ashamed. The heir of the Stuarts landed in the North, supported by no force at all. The clans, to their immortal honour, and a portion of the best Lowland blood of Scotland, maintaining those principles of loyalty which free-trade cannot comprehend, assumed the white cockade, and after thrashing the English army effectually at Prestonpans, marched south, on the desperate errand of displacing the reigning dynasty. And how were they received? It is important to note the idea which the English people had, at that time, of the Highlanders. They considered them a race of cannibals who ate children; so that it was no uncommon matter, when a Highland officer entered a house, to find the mistress on her knees, praying for a Lenten diet, whilst the terrified urchins were all the while concealed beneath the bed. Such is the positive fact; and yet we will venture to say, that there never was, in the history of the world, an instance of a more blameless or more humane invasion. Donald, though quite ready to cleave a bearded Hanoverian to the chin, had an extreme weakness for children, and would not, on any provocation, have insulted a defenceless woman. Had Mr Cobden fallen into his hands, the Highlander, after a due estimate of his physical capabilities, would probably have put him to ransom for a quarter of a pound of tobacco. The feeling in England was not in favour of the exiled family, the antipathy to the Highlanders was extreme, and yet an irregular and ill-disciplined host of about six thousand men, with no artillery, no commissariat, and a mere handful of cavalry, penetrated into the heart of England without any show of popular opposition, and reached Derby without the loss of a single man. It is not difficult to understand why Manchester is so uproarious against the military, when we recall to mind the splendid instance of poltroonery exhibited by the manufacturing capital on that memorable occasion. The town of Manchester was captured by a Scots sergeant of the name of Walter Dickson, who, supported by a drummer and a wench, took possession of it in name of Prince Charles, four-and-twenty hours before the clans came up! Not a magistrate was to be found bold enough to issue his warrant against the intruder, nor a constable to execute it, nor a single operative to support it. There was no talk then about finding graves for the invaders: the invaded were quite content with finding cellars for their own particular shelter. Gentlemen who had talked big enough when the danger was at a distance, recoiled at the idea of personal peril, whenever the danger drew nigh; and, being unsupported by a regular force, very prudently abstained from opposing their persons to the terrible sweep of the claymore. But for internal dissensions and some infirmity of purpose, it is now beyond a doubt that the clans might have penetrated, without any opposition, to London. So little martial spirit was exhibited in the capital, that parties were actually made and carriages engaged for Caxton, to see the Highlanders march by; and George the Second was in full preparation for removing, and had stowed away his valuables in his yachts. As it was, the invaders returned back to their own country almost as scaithless as they came, without any experience of that fiery and patriotic spirit which the correspondents of the newspapers profess to discover blazing within the bosom of every Briton at the mere idea of an invasion.

In fact, it is mere trash to maintain that raw levies or extempore guerilla resistance can be of the slightest use in opposition to a disciplined force. For ourselves, we do not believe that such resistance would be attempted. Men require to be brought together and trained before their individual stanchness can be relied on; and we know perfectly well that a mob has no chance, at any time, against an immeasurably smaller body, if properly organised and directed. Let the people of this country be disciplined and accustomed to the use of arms, and you may search the world in vain for braver or better soldiers. But the power is still latent, and, according to Cobden, it never must be called forth. This is mischievous and stupid folly. If any thing is to be done at all, it must be done regularly and effectively. Let us have the knowledge, the certainty that, at a few hours' notice, a formidable body of troops, well disciplined and prepared, can be concentrated at any given point of the island,—let this fact be made known to the world, and we have a far better security for the maintenance of peace than if we were to adopt the stupid and pragmatical notions of Mr Cobden. Mr Disraeli took a sound view of the case, when he reminded the honourable member, "that although the profound peace which he had announced might come within the time of those who heard him, still there was something in the catastrophes of nations sœvior armis,—catastrophes from other causes leading to their decay. Happily in those causes the limited experience of the Roman empire had not included the rapacity of rival industry, and the quackery of economic science." We are afraid that the lesson which Mr Disraeli attempted to inculcate—one which, of late years, we have repeatedly insisted on in these pages—was somewhat thrown away upon his pupil. Gentlemen of the Cobden school set little store upon the philosophy of history, and prefer to reason within the limits of their own experience. They can as little explain the causes of the decline of ancient empires, as they can account for the palpable falling off in the amount of our exports; and it is idle to remind men of things which they have never heard. It is not to them, but to the intelligent classes of the community, that we would fain address our argument. There is a remarkable and striking analogy between the present state of the country, and the position of England at the time of the Highland descent in 1745. The nation had become accustomed to peace at home, and was therefore proportionally enervated. The use of arms, and the training of the militia had been abandoned; a false economy had reduced the numbers of the regular forces; and the greater proportion of those which remained were abroad. Under those circumstances the expedition took place: the weakness of the front exhibited by England was the temptation, and we have already seen the consequences. It is now seriously proposed that we shall remain liable to a similar assault, when the stake at issue is incomparably greater. What would be the result of a swoop upon London according to the published Joinville plan? and yet there is hardly another capital in Europe, which has not during the last fifty years been occupied by a hostile force.

We have all an interest in this question, for a descent may be made any where. We have not even the benefit of ships to protect us here in the North; and three or four French frigates would, we apprehend, find little difficulty in effecting a landing in the Forth. Will Mr Cobden be good enough to favour us with his opinion as to the course we should pursue, supposing such a calamity to happen? A simultaneous attack may be made on the south of England, and the Castle and Piershill barracks emptied for the purpose of reinforcing Portsmouth, too weak to maintain itself without their aid. Would he advise us to resist or succumb? Shall we throw ourselves under the protection of our friend George M'Whirter, W.S., and the Edinburgh squadron of the Royal Mid-Lothian Yeomanry? Shall we sound the tocsin of war, and call out Captain Haining with his reserved band of twenty police, all fierce and furious for battle? Shall we persuade the Archers to string their bows, and compete for the Goose medal with a fire-eating Frenchman as the butt? Shall we barricade Leith Walk, block up the Granton Railway in the teeth of a suspension and interdict, and contest, to the last drop of our blood, the possession of every house in Inverleith Row? May we calculate upon any support from the middle districts of England in the event of such a calamity? Will Mr Bright array himself in drab armour, and come to our rescue, with Welford the flower of chivalry, who has a special objection to guns? Can we depend upon Cobden himself? Will he pledge himself to back us at our need with an overpowering army from the factories, clad in calico, and armed with the tremendous and invincible billy-roller? Will George Thompson, chief of a thousand wordy fights, be there,—or Wilson, ex-monarch of the league? Shall we send them the beacon blaze, or—faster still—the telegraphic signal to the south imploring immediate succour? Or shall we trust to their own noble impulses, and hold—

Ye need not warn the Cobden clan,
That ever are stout and true;
And when they see the blazing bale,
The Brights and Thompsons never fail!

Indeed, if we are to believe the last mentioned gentleman, we have that assurance already, for he has spoken as follows:—"I may venture to foretell that the Free-Trade Hall, of Manchester will be more than a match for Apsley House and the Horse Guards put together;"—a highly satisfactory account of the town which was whilom captured by a sergeant!

Upon the whole, unless we can come to a serious understanding with Manchester, we have grave doubts as to the propriety of offering any very obstinate resistance. If we are to do it, we must send off all the women to the Trosachs by the Scottish Central Railway, and perhaps it would be as well for all of us to join the Celtic Society, and fight the battles of our country in the pass of Roderick Dhu. An honourable capitulation, on the understanding that the French were to behave themselves, would probably be the wisest course we could pursue under the circumstances. We love George M'Whirter, and have every confidence in his valour, but we could not bear to see him gasping in his gore; and therefore, unless the regulars are forthcoming, or the Manchester legion on their way, he had better fall back with his comrades upon the western warriors of Dalmahoy. The number of our guardians of the night is at present so small, that we positively cannot afford to spare even one of them as food for powder. It would, we fear, be imprudent to risk the fate of the Scottish capital upon the issue of a combat between our dashing Toxophilites and a body of French artillery, and we are reluctantly compelled to admit that there was some truth in Major Dalgetty's sarcasm against bows and arrows. And now, having gone over the catalogue of our available native forces, which is not quite so long as the Homeric muster-roll of the ships, will any body tell us what we are to do? It would be a sore humiliation were we compelled to illuminate Holyrood, and give a grand ball in honour of the Duc D'Aumale, and our other ancient and now redintegrated allies. But if you abolish the British uniform, and allow the French to supersede it, what else can you expect? We want to be loyal if you will only tell us how—if not, we see nothing for it but the illumination and the ball.

Mr Cobden is pleased to be especially bitter upon the "horrid trade" of soldiering. He characterises it as barbarous and damnable, and would be rid of it at all risks. Now, setting aside the idiocy of his remarks, there is a monstrous deal of ingratitude in this language of the free-trade apostle. Had it not been for our arms, where would our market have been? If we had succumbed to France instead of humbling her at Waterloo—and we presume that Mr Cobden would have preferred the former alternative, since he thinks that the Duke should now be preaching forgiveness for the past—where would have been our trade, and where our exportations of calico? Hindostan is an acquired country, and British arms have opened up the markets of China; and are these commercial evils? Really it is throwing away language to attempt enforcing a point so clear as this. Commerce owes every thing to the exertions and protection of that military power which these purblind theorists complain of; and were our armaments abolished to-morrow, we should look round us in vain for a customer.

And pray what does the arrogant upstart mean by characterising the honourable profession of a soldier as a damnable trade? Does he intend to disgorge his contempt and contumely upon the graves of those who fell on the field of battle fighting nobly for their king and country? Are we now to be told that the names which we have written in our annals, and embalmed in our memories, are detestable and odious as those of homicides and of robbers? If it has come to this, and if public scorn is not roused to overwhelm the man who can conceive and utter such ignoble sentiments, then indeed we may believe that demoralisation has partially done its work, and that the mean ethics of Manchester are henceforward to influence the nation. Not damnable nor horrid, unless justice and freedom be so, is the profession of those who have drawn the sword in the service of Britain, and died for the maintenance of order, liberty, and religion. Other trades there are far more liable to such epithets, but with these, thank heaven! we have but little practical acquaintance. The trade of the greedy taskmaster, who rears infants for his mills, and grinds them to their task until the sinews shrivel up and the limbs are warped into early decrepitude—of him who will not recognise the existence of an imperishable soul within the tender framework of the children whom he makes the victims of his avarice—of the advocate of long hours, because thereby he may keep his human machinery under the complete control of exhaustion,—the trade of that man, we say, though it may be tolerated in a Christian land, is but one shade less horrid, and not a whit less damnable, than that of the slave-trader, who is now chuckling over his living cargoes on the African coast—cargoes for which he is indebted to the enlightened legislation of Mr Cobden and his liberal confederates! Are these the men who are to revile and traduce our army? Faugh! The leprosy of mammon is upon them, and our nature recoils from their breath.

In conclusion, let us express a fervent hope that we have heard the last of this dull and deplorable drivelling. It is to the credit of the Whigs, that, far as they have been led astray by adopting the newfangled political doctrines, rather, as we believe, for the sake of maintaining power than from any belief in their efficacy, they have declined all participation with the Manchester crew in their recent attempt to lower the position and diminish the influence of Great Britain. The chiefs of that party know full well how much we have at stake, and what a responsibility would rest upon their heads, were they to reject the advice of the great captain who has already saved his country, and who again comes forward at the close of life to warn that country of its danger. Mr Cobden likewise is furious with the public press, and charges a large portion of it for refusing to be dragged through the Manchester mire, with having abrogated their duties on this question. We apprehend that the editors of the journals to which he alludes are perfectly competent to the discharge of their duties, without submitting to the dictatorial interference of this very much over-rated and extremely shallow personage. As for the Duke of Wellington, he is not likely to suffer in health or reputation from any want of respect or veneration on the part of Mr Cobden. His fame is too bright to be polluted by such dirty missiles; and the veriest vagabond who broke the windows of Apsley House would shrink from repeating the insults which fell from the lips of the calico-printer.

In short, our impression in rising from the perusal of this notable speech, is deep surprise that such a man should ever have been made the leader of a popular party, or the representative of a fixed opinion. That it should have been so, is a reflection that cannot be flattering to many of his followers, and least of all to those who threw aside their opinions to undertake the advocacy of his. But the spell is now broken, the mask removed, and we behold the egotist, the railer, and the fanatic. Let us sum up in a few words, for the benefit of posterity, the great free-trader's opinion of the Duke of Wellington, and then take leave of the most discreditable subject which for a long time we have been called upon to notice.

Mr Cobden does not share in the general veneration for the Duke. Mr Cobden thinks that the Duke ought to preach forgiveness for Waterloo. Mr Cobden thinks that every man, possessing the ordinary feelings of humanity, must condemn the Duke for having stated that, in his opinion, the defences of the country are insufficient. Mr Cobden thinks it a lamentable spectacle that the Duke should have written such a letter. Mr Cobden hints that the Duke is a dotard, because he has ventured to express, on a military subject, an opinion contrary to that of Cobden. And Cobden further maintains, that there is not a more affectionate nor domesticated race on the face of the earth than the French.

After this we need add nothing more. Our opinion of Mr Cobden could be thoroughly expressed in a much shorter sentence.

ROMANISM IN ROME.

CATECHISM IN THE MINERVA.

"Occidit miseros crambe repetita magistros."—Juvenal.
"Et qui parlant beaucoup ne disent jamais rien."—Boileau.

Visitors to Rome are ofttimes puzzled and surprised at hearing the very unusual affix, della Minerva, applied to one of the Christian churches of that city; more especially when they find it also familiarly known to the common people, not so well read as their priests in the calendar of the saints, as La Sta. Minerva; but the apparent misnomer originates in an ellipsis of the full title, which runs thus, Sta. Maria sopra Minerva—the church in question having supplanted a temple formerly dedicated to Pallas, upon the ruins of which it has been reared. But though the goddess of wisdom still retains a nominal interest in the edifice, certainly, to judge from the catechetical exercises of which we are about to give a specimen, her reign is past, and there remains but the nominis umbra in lieu of it. Exorcised the church, she has been fain to accept such a humiliating asylum in the library adjoining, as inquisitorial Dominicans would be likely to afford a heathen goddess, whose proceedings they must narrowly watch. There she has the mortification of hearing, from year to year, some new relay of "gray-hair'd synods damning books unread," and, club-fashion, blackballing all her friends in order to make way for their own; just as old Pope Gregory is said to have burned a whole library of Pagan literature, that the Christian Fathers and Roman Catholic Saints might have more elbow-room; and also that, in the absence of rivals, their authority might not be disputed. "Fertur beatus Gregorius bibliothecam combussisse gentilum, quo divinæ paginæ gratior esset locus et major auctoritas et diligentia studiosior."[A]

At Easter-tide, those who have any curiosity on the subject may hear Bellarmine's Catechism, as it is squealed, bawled, or otherwise intonated by the young children of the different Riones, and commented on and explained for their edification by the pedagogue priest of the district. He is generally surrounded at such times by a bevy of from forty to fifty scholars, gamins or gamines as the case may be; and to work they set with such earnestness of vociferation that all Bedlam and Parnassus, raving and reciting together, could not well surpass the discord: the shrill diapason, peeling through nave and aisle, shakes the floating Baldaquino, and makes the trembling walls bellow again, furnishing an apt and lively illustration of the "convulsaque marmora clamant" of the poet.

Though we had often frequented the churches at this season, and had scores of times heard questions both asked and answered therein, yet, generally intent on the marbles or monuments of the edifice, we had not hitherto given ear to the proceedings of these obstreperous young bull-calves: but, before leaving Rome definitely, it seemed fair to give them an hour's attention on some convenient opportunity, in order to form an unbiassed judgment of how their early religious education was carried on. One soon presented itself in the above-named church of the Minerva; for, chancing to be there at the right hour on an examination-day, in crossing in front of the black-columned chapel of St Dominick, we came suddenly upon a covey of little girls nestling in one of its corners, under the sumptuous tomb of the thirteenth Benedict, and waiting, all primed, for their instructor. Some, absorbed in the contemplation of the silver crown and faded finery of St Philomel—we trust, at so tender an age, without infringement of the tenth commandment—were delighting themselves in anticipating the day when they too might become saints, and wear similar decorations; others, too young for such speculations, were staring with intense vacancy at the flickering of a tiny lamp, in front of a very dingy-looking madonna, to which one or two, in baby simplicity, were repeating Latin creeds, paternosters, and aves. Not knowing exactly how long the preceptor of these small folk might keep them waiting, we left them, and proceeded to the body of the building, where a detachment of boys was already drawn up for action, with their padre in the midst. Approaching as softly as might be, we stood against a neighbouring pilaster to hear what might be required of such young pupils, and how they were prepared to acquit themselves. Their incessant movements did not promise a very sustained attention, whatever might be the business in hand: many of them were evidently plagued with fleas—all with fidgets; some shrugged up their shoulders, others swung themselves by their hands on the form; these were buttoning, those unbuttoning their dress; and not a few warmed their feet by kicking the sounding pavement, and then listening to the echoes from the vaults. Every boy carried a book in his hand; but on these no wandering eye ever looked, not even for an instant, in its numerous glancings round. As soon as the additional commotion, occasioned by the approach of a stranger, had subsided, the priest, harking back to what he had just been saying, and not quite sure of his whereabouts, asks his class touching the last question. "You asked that boy," said one, pointing to a comrade near him, "how he supposed he ought to come to church." "Well," said the priest, resuming his cue, and reverting to the last examinee; "and how did you tell me you were to come?" "Colle mani giunte così," said the boy, locking his hands, and standing up as he did so. "Niente avanti?" said the priest, glancing at two very dirty paws. "Oh yes! I was to wash them." "Poi?" "I was to cross myself as I came out of my room, and to cast down my eyes, like the Mater Indolorata yonder." "And then?" "As I came to church, besides looking grave, I was to walk, not così"—and he walked a few paces as he ought not to walk,—"but così"—changing the rhythm of his march—"as if I were following my brother's funeral. E poi finalmente," (as he resumed his place with a jerk,) "I was to be seated so, and hold my tongue till the padre should address me." "Well, my little man," (to another of the motley class,) "were we not talking about the sacrament?" "Oh yes! no one may receive that who has been guilty of any mortal sin." "Bene, that's quite right; but why not?" The following gabble, to which it was quite obvious that none were of an age to attach any meaning, served for a reply, and was received as perfectly satisfactory by the priest:—"Siccome il pane naturale non può dare vita ad un corpo morto; così il pane della Santissima, Eucaristia non può dare vita ad un anima morta." "And what may mortal sins be?" turning to the next scholar. "Eh! chi lo sa; who is to tell you that?" said a young butcher's boy, turning off the question, and freely offering it to any one who would take it up. Upon this the boys made much noise, and laughed out lustily, not encountering any reprimand from the padre, or so gentle a one as to prove no check to their mirth. At length, quiet being partially restored, he resumed his task, and asked a child of six years old to give him an example of mortal sin! Not receiving an answer, this question travelled nearly to the end of the first line before any one would take upon himself to venture even a random response; then, at last, by dint of prompting, one boy suggested, that the tasting food before receiving the sacrament was of such a kind; and having been first much commended for his erudition, was next subjected to a long list of suppositions from the examiner; such as, "Suppose I were to drink a little water merely?" "Niente! no, you mus'nt." "Well; but suppose I only took a small piece of consecrated wafer?" "Ne anchè; not that neither." "What! would even these small indulgences be infringing the rule?" But as the boy had received an approving "bene" for his first negative, he had no difficulty in keeping to his text; and at last the whole class, enjoying the joke of punishing their padre by cutting him off from all supplies at every fresh demand, roared out in chorus, "Niente, niente—you mus'nt touch a bit;" till, tired of the shouting, the good man proceeded to the next interrogatory. We were tiring too; but being really desirous of hearing, if possible, something more to the purpose, remained, notwithstanding, yet another half hour at our post—indeed quite long enough to be sure that "niente" was all we were likely to get for our pains. Some of the questions were simply frivolous, many jesuitical, others deeply profound; and whatever their character, all were answered in the same careless and irreverent tone; à tort et à travers, according to the fancy of the young respondent. In a word, a more complete waste of time for both teacher and taught could not have been easily devised. The instruction of this and similar classes—for we have no reason to suppose that others differ from it—seems about as intellectual and useful (and no more so) than that of an aviary of parrots in the town of Havre, where the young French psittaci chiefly learn their χαιρης, and their "petits dejeuners." Alike in quality, it is not very dissimilar neither in the mode of its administration. The shopman proposes the first word of a sentence to the whole community, and the greater or less accuracy with which it is taken up and completed, evinces the relative aptitudes of his tyros; and though great allowance is always made, in the case of both boy and bird, for transpositions or leavings out, yet the priest, like the parrot-merchant, keeps an eye on the pupil who promises to do most credit to his training, and brings him forward on every public occasion. "In all labour," says Solomon, "there is profit, but the talk of the lips tendeth only to poverty." It requires no Solomon to see how completely this is the case here; but there is one particular in which the padre really deserves praise, and we cheerfully accord it. The forbearance, the patience, meekness, and bonhomie which he exercises in proposing the dull routine of questions, and in listening while the pupils "ring round the same unvaried chimes" in reply, cannot be too much admired. Like the patient schoolmaster in Juvenal, he puts up with all their idleness and inattention—in the very doubtful proficiency of many of his scholars, gives them the favour of the doubt—and, above all, never loses his temper! This drilling and preparation of the district classes has for ulterior object a general field-day,[B] which occurs once a-year; when the congregated schools, in the presence of the canons and other dignitaries of the church, being now supposed fully supplied

"With stores of spiritual provision,
And magazines of ammunition,"

for the warfare, are expected

"To rise and start the ready wherefore,
To all that sceptic may inquire for;
Then raise their scruples dark and nice,
And solve them after in a trice;
As if divinity had catch'd,
The itch, on purpose to be scratch'd!"

In short, these living fantoccini are taught to expose heresies, and expound the dogmas of their faith, in words found for them by their priests; and he who best retains the lesson, and proves himself most loud and overbearing in the exercise, receives, for reward, a crown and royal robe, and is metamorphosed out of the imp, which he was an hour before, into the imperator; more fortunate by half, in the undisputed tenure of his title for a twelvemonth, than many of his Roman predecessors in the laurel. The little girls have an exhibition somewhat similar, but still more theatric in its character. At Christmas they assemble in the churches, dressed out by their parents (who delight in making them as fine as possible) very much, it must be admitted, like ballet-dancers; but supposed to represent, in their habiliments, youthful Christian virgins and martyrs. Thus apparelled, they hold forth on a platform in front of some favourite Præsepe, and sustain, with Pagan rivals, long dialogues on the Nativity, syllogising, in the shrill thin voice of childhood, upon all the sublime mysteries of our faith, till the Pagans abandon the scornful air with which they are taught to commence the discussion, and confess themselves vanquished by the arguments brought against them. The chief spokeswoman is then rewarded, like the head-boy, with robe and crown, and retains her regal dignity for the same period. Of all such education, what shall we say? Why, truly, in Hudibrastic plainness of speech, that it is

"More fitted for the cloudy night
Of Popery, than Gospel light."

Are our British infant schools quite free from participation in the defects just noticed? By no means; and though the subject is far too important to be dismissed with a few words at the end of a slight sketch like the present, (especially since we hope to return to it later,) yet, even here, we must glance at one or two blemishes, that lie so immediately on the surface as to strike even the most casual observer, when once his attention is called to them. In such seminaries, it is known, the ages of the children usually vary from eighteen months to six years, at which tender period of life it is almost impossible to exercise too much discretion not to over-burden the memory, or to obscure the dawning reason; but alas! in the always well-meant, but certainly not always judicious, zeal for beginning education betimes, how often is it begun too early and pushed too far! In an over-anxiety to prevent, by pre-occupation of the ground, the arch-enemy of mankind from sowing his tares, how often is the good seed thrown in before it can have a chance of quickening! Festinare lente should be the motto, in moral and religious, as it is in all other branches of education; since neither in religion nor morals can we hope to arrive at the full stature of perfection, but by slow degrees and long training. The Bible, to be sure, (the only true source of either,) is the Book for all mankind; but as it contains "strong meat for men," as well as "milk for babes," great judgment is necessary, in separating these diets, to give to each age the food particularly adapted for it. We have the apostolic injunction for such discrimination,—"Every one that uses milk is unskilful in the word of righteousness: for he is a babe. But strong meat belongeth to them that are of full age; even those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil."[C] It is further obvious, from St Paul's catalogue of the armour which is to resist all the attacks of the world, the flesh, and the devil, that it comprises many pieces of which young children can neither be made to comprehend the design, nor, at their time of life, to require the use. How unskilful, then, and abortive must be the attempt to put into the hands of instinct the weapons of mature reason; to seek to explain the "beauty of holiness" to a child who does not "know his right hand from his left," and to invest an unbreeched urchin in the whole Christian panoply at once! With all due respect, too, to the pains-taking compilers of some of the manuals used in these classes, we cannot help thinking that their labour has been at times worse than thrown away; and it has excited our surprise to hear really judicious[D] persons speak of these lesson-books as "perfectly suited" to the purpose of infant education, and as requiring no amendment. Surely they cannot have read them; or they must have forgotten, when doing so, the age and condition of those for whom they are intended. Not to be thought captious for nothing, we will let that "farrago libelli"—that sausage of all the sciences—that "Teacher's Assistant," speak for itself. It has gone through we know not how many editions, and continues to perpetuate in each succeeding one all the blunders of its predecessors. To begin at the beginning,—The scholars have to learn therefrom as many alphabets as there are letters; a historical, a geographical, a profane, and a biblical alphabet, &c., &c., not to attempt an enumeration of the whole. In the biblical, each letter is put opposite to some proper or improper person mentioned in Scripture, for whom it is said to stand representative—(leaving it to be supposed that it has been called into existence for no other purpose.) By this means the written character of course becomes associated in the child's mind with the moral character of the individual whose initial it is; and thus a certain prejudice is apt to arise against certain letters. For instance, the letter H is rendered fearfully significant,—

"H stands for Herod, who spilt infants' blood!"

A theorist might, perhaps, trace the absence of the aspirate in the speech of maturer years to the awe created by that dread tetrarch's name in infancy, when it is first feebly articulated, then dropped, and not recovered afterwards.[E] But we are not theatrical; in proof whereof, we observe that a child's natural aspirations are for tarts, dolls, or marbles; while, to counteract such propensities, these little hypocrites, before their time, are taught to sing out, among other Scripture wishes, the following formulary, which must, of course, act as a specific:—

"May Isaiah's hallow'd fire,
All my fervent heart inspire;
Joseph's purity impart!
Isaac's meditative heart!!!"

A rhythmical dispute between two children, entitled a "Sabbath Dialogue," brings to our mind a similar farce at Ferrara, which we have formerly described. In this lively piece of absurdity, the naughty boy invites the good one to play instead of going to church, and, waxing warm as the other proves intractable, at length becomes absolutely abusive on finding he is not to prevail.

Once again. Behold a class of children with the picture of a sheep before them—to be taught, one would have supposed, the natural history of that animal, and to learn something about the material of which their little flannel petticoats and worsted stockings are made; when lo! in place of this, they are informed that "though their sins are red as crimson, they shall be as wool!!" If it were necessary to use any interjection here, surely a loud ovine bah! would be the most appropriate and natural. But revenons à nos moutons, for presently afterwards occurs this question—"What does the Bible tell us about wool?" Answer: "Gideon wrung a fleece!" Bah! again, for what other commentary can be made on such instruction as this? Why, Jason filched one; and the Lord Chancellor sits upon a woolsack; and either of these answers would convey as much useful knowledge to a child's mind, though they are not to be met with in the Bible.

These unfortunate babes are to know a little of every thing: so, after going through versified weights and measures—arithmetic, including the higher branches—geometry—we hardly know what is omitted in this most comprehensive miscellany—they arrive at philosophy, and learn a great deal to the tune of "Miss Bailley." We give one stanza out of many, as an example:—

"The wondrous globe on which we live,
Is close surrounded every where
By something quite invisible,
And callèd atmospheric air!

This air is fluid, light and thin,
And formed of gases well combined!
It carries sound and odour well,
But put in motion it is wind!"

At the end of each verse, the infant chorus repeats with enthusiasm, not "Poor Miss Bailley! unfortunate Miss Bailley!" &c., but—

"Oh how curious,—wonderfully curious,
The laws of nature are indeed
Most wonderfully curious!"

The geography is as good as the physics:—

"A channel is a passage wide
That flows from sea to sea;
When narrow it is call'd a strait,—
Thanks to Geography!"

. . . . .

"When wise and older I am grown,
I'll try and tell you more,
But Teacher says enough is known
An infant's mind to store!"

No doubt of it! enough and to spare! This is a fine specimen of the class of truths called unquestionable. There is, moreover, a pleasing enjouement about this last line, which recommends it to our regard. The teacher seems to be expostulating with her young charge, and saying, "My dear little four-year-old, eager for instruction beyond your years, but fearful of learning up every thing at school,—don't be frightened; the world will always find science sufficient to employ all good little boys like you." But though this truth be unquestionable, we doubt whether the line which conveys it be genuine; and rather fancy, should the original manuscript turn up, it would be found to run—

"Enough's enough an infant's mind to store!"

which, though somewhat harsh to the ear, conveys an excellent meaning. Should this be thought to make the verse too rugged, we have yet a second various reading to propose, and that is simply to change the last word into bore, by which means the easy flow of the verse is preserved, and the significatio prœgnans of the original, though somewhat modified, is maintained.

Notwithstanding these blemishes—which, after our strictures on foreign classes, we felt bound to point out—our English schools are very far superior to the Italian for the same rank. With us, the attention of government and of the public is roused, and directed to their improvement; laymen join with the clergy in forwarding the same scheme; great part of the tuition devolves upon females—and who so fitted as woman to form the mind at an early age? It is no small advantage, too, that authoresses of talent and judgment should have devoted their time to the composition of exclusively moral and religious tales and histories for the young. Lastly, with us, there is none of that masquerading and display, which we reprobate as forming so prominent a part in all Italian tuition. In these schools, women are excluded from their natural office of teaching; there are no books adapted to infant minds; the whole business is vested in the hands of the priests; and they, in strict compliance with the spirit of their Church, train the pupils in passive obedience to authority, and teach them very little besides. We fear it will be long before any revolution can reach these seminaries. The sense of personal importance attaching—not only to the children themselves, but to their parents—from these contemptible yearly exhibitions, added to the interested motives which induce the Church to foster such vanity, would render any considerable alteration for the better extremely difficult, even were the evil more generally felt than we fear it is likely to be under the present system of things. We state this opinion with regret; for what is the tendency of such education? Can it inculcate that real humility, not abasement of mind, which should characterise the true disciples of our blessed Saviour? Nay, must it not rather, by holding out, as it does, a premium to natural quickness and a superficial acquaintance with the dogmas of theology, tend to foster pride and selfishness—those monster evils which it is the prime object of religion to eradicate—whilst the heart remains untouched and the moral sense unexercised? and will not the poor children, who are its victims, learn to prize a few dry leaves from the Tree of Knowledge, beyond the fair fruit of the Tree of Life?

LA CARA VITA.
"Mais où sont les vertus qui dementent les tiennes?
Pour éclipser ton jour quel nouveau jour parait?
Toi qui les remplaças,[F] qui te remplacerait?"

De Lamartine, Harmonies, Hymne au Christ.

The Cara Vita is a small church situated in the Corso, and not possessing within itself any thing to attract the stranger's particular attention. It is interesting, however, from the solemn services which take place there every Friday in Lent. On these occasions, after an exciting harangue from the officiating priest, the lights are extinguished, knotted scourges are handed round by the sacristan, and each individual of the congregation takes one and begins to flagellate himself. We have been told—for we were never present at these exhibitions—that the noise and excitement are terrible—every penitent seeking to ease his inner at the expense of his outer man, and proportioning the amount of his physical suffering to that of the moral evil which it is intended to counteract. But all the ceremonies in the Cara Vita are not of this character; and the same friend who described the above, informed us that the preaching there was often eloquent, and the music always fine; so, when we read in the Diario di Roma, that at twelve o'clock on Good Friday there was to be a solemn funzione, or Service in commemoration of our Saviour's Passion, and that in all probability the church would be crowded, we repaired thither on that day an hour before the time mentioned in the paper, in order to secure a place. Doubtful of the propriety of witnessing, as a pageant, a representation of the most awful and affecting scene that the mind of man can contemplate, yet fearing, from some experience in Roman ceremonies, that our visit might issue merely in that, we lingered some time about the porch; then, pushing aside the heavy curtain, irresolutely entered; and what a contrast presented itself between the two sides of that matted door! It seemed the portal between life and death: light, noise, confusion, reigned without; within, all was dark, solemn, still. The ear that had been stunned by the babel of the streets, was startled at the unwonted calm; and the eye, dazzled by the splendour of the meridian sun upon the pavement, experienced a temporary blindness, and required some time before it could accommodate its powers to the obscurity of the interior. By degrees, however, it was, apparent that the church, notwithstanding the voiceless quiet which prevailed, was full. The whole assembly sat as if spell-bound; not a whisper was to be heard; an awful curiosity tied every tongue. The business and pleasures of life were forgotten; the sexes exchanged no furtive glances; men and women, alike unobservant of their neighbours, counted their beads and bent their eyes upon the ground; while each new comer, awed by the deep silence, entered with cautious tread, and took his seat noiselessly. When our eyes had become somewhat familiarised with the artificial light, they were attracted to two elevated extempore side-boxes, brilliantly illuminated with wax, and filled with choristers in full costume. Between them was stretched a voluminous curtain, not so opaque but that a number of tapers might be seen faintly glimmering through it; and before this curtain a dark temporary stage was erected. The, religious calm that prevailed around was at length gently broken by some soft and plaintive notes, proceeding from the white-robed choir. In a few minutes these died away again upon the ear, and a figure, suddenly rising from the stage, exclaimed in a voice of strenuous emotion—"Once again, ye faithful ones! ye are assembled here to accompany me to Calvary! Yes! another Good Friday has come round, another anniversary of the day announced by God himself for man's deliverance from the wages of his sin; this is the great day when typical sacrifice was done away with, and our blessed Lord made of 'himself a full and sufficient sacrifice for the sins of the' faithful. But in order to triumph, my brethren, we must conquer—to conquer we must contend; there is no warfare without wounds, and our Saviour, while in the flesh, must partake of our infirmities: he must be 'the man of sorrows and acquainted with grief,' before he can 'lead captivity captive, and receive gifts' for his holy Church; the ransom of his faithful followers must be at the expense of his own blood. He bled, as you know, on Good Friday; and accordingly, we are met here—not to celebrate a triumph, but to learn humility, patience, and forgiveness of injuries at the foot of the cross, in order that we, like our great Head, may become perfect through suffering. Permit me, then, to ask you, with the Psalmist, 'Are your hearts set upon righteousness, O ye congregation?' and are your minds prepared to follow the Lord to Calvary? Have you, for instance, been studying lately his sufferings at the different stations of the cross? have you been thinking at all upon his passion? thinking what it must have been to be hooted at, spit upon, reviled, buffeted, and friendless upon earth? If not, ponder well these things now; now, at this moment; for are we not arrived at the most sacred hour of this most sacred but sad and solemn day? About this hour was the Saviour condemned by his unjust judge, delivered up to the rabble to be crucified. Go back in your minds to that moment; see him crowned with thorns, and bearing the cross upon his shoulder, till, lo! he faints under its weight, and his persecutors compel a stranger to carry it to the fatal spot. Then see him toiling onward, surrounded by his deadly enemies; his chosen friends have forsaken him and fled! a few women follow him afar off, bewailing his fate; he turns and speaks; listen to his words—'Daughters of Jerusalem! weep not for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children!' Well might the merciful Saviour speak thus, when he had just heard the mad shout of the multitude, 'his blood be upon us and upon our children.' The crowd approaches Golgotha! they halt to rear the fatal tree; methinks I hear the exulting outcries of his vindictive murderers as they fix it in the ground!" Here the curtain drawn between the preacher and the back of the stage fell, revealing three wooden crucifixes lit up by a lurid red light from above. The effect was startling, and produced a shudder of horror throughout the whole auditory. After a breathless pause, the preacher, turning towards the cross, exclaimed, "What! are we too late for the beginning of this tragedy! Is the Redeemer of mankind already nailed to the cross? Oh, cruel and fiendlike man, is this your triumph! surely he who came to save will reject you now! Such might be our feelings, but they were not Christ's. No, my brethren, far from it. Oh, let us contemplate, for our own future guidance, the behaviour of Jesus to his murderers, not after but at the moment of his extreme torture; and may the Holy Spirit give us grace to profit by the exercise. Look on your crucified Redeemer writhing and maddened with suffering; and listen to the first words uttered in the depth of his agony: he imprecates no curse upon these guilty men, but exclaims, 'Father, forgive them; they know not what they do!' Caro Jesu!" Here there was much emotion both in the preacher and in the congregation; when it had subsided, he added persuasively, "You have heard Christ pray that his murderers may be forgiven, and shall you hesitate to forgive one another?" Then, taking the words of our Saviour for a text, he delivered a short animated sermon upon the forgiveness of injuries; after which came a prayer for grace to perform this duty; the pause which succeeded being filled with music and chanting. Then again the dark form of the preacher rose up. "What, my brethren! did not Christ pass three hours in his agony, and shall we leave him in the midst? He has still more gracious words in store. My dear brethren and fellow sinners, now hear his dying address to the penitent thief, 'Verily I say unto thee, to-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise!' Ladro felice! but was he then predestinated to salvation, and his companion to be the victim of God's wrath? Niente, niente; believe, not a word of this false and heretical creed." Then followed a second discourse, with a diatribe against Calvin (who deserved it!) and all heretics (who might not deserve it), with an anathema against heresy in general, and a prayer for the pardon and acceptance of the true Catholic, id est Roman, Church. In like manner the preacher continued to set before his hearers all the circumstances of our Saviour's passion; pronouncing a short discourse upon every sentence uttered by him in his agony. Each sermonette was succeeded by prayer; and that by an interlude of music and chanting, which enabled him to recover himself, and proceed with undiminished energy during a three hours' service. We had listened attentively, not always agreeing with his doctrine, but without any great shock to our Protestant principles, when, in conclusion, he exclaimed, "Now, brethren, before we disperse, let us do homage to the blessed Virgin, and sympathise with the afflicted and inconsolable Mother of our Lord. Think of her sufferings to-day; think and weep over them; and forget not the worship due to her holy name; whom Christ honoured, shall not we honour too? Sons of the blessed Virgin! is not your brother Christ her son also? make her then your friend; propitiate her, in order to obtain pardon from him! Let us all, then, fall down upon our knees before the Indolorata." A long prayer to the Madonna followed, then a hymn in her honour; and after a last glorious outburst of the organ, accompanying the ardent and sustained Hallelujahs of both choir and congregation, the curtain falls, the doors are thrown open, daylight rushes in through the no longer darkened windows; and presently the thronged and noisy Corso has absorbed the last member of the much moved, slowly dispersing crowd.

A heartfelt and affecting ceremony was that we had just witnessed; every body had shed tears, and there had been evidently great attrition, and probably some contrition also. The strong appeals of the priest had told, though they were not legitimate; for what could be less so than, in the end, his misdirecting the thoughts from the true object of worship, to her, who was, after all, but a mere mortal like ourselves?

Yet devotional feelings had been called forth, and in this it was unlike, and surely better than, the ordinary cold, formal, glittering, shifting pantomimic service of Te-Deums, and high masses, which, instead of "filling the hungry with good things," send all "empty away;" or worse, satisfied with "that which is not bread." Could piety really be appealed to through the senses, then might the ceremonies of the Romish Church hope to reach it, captivating as they are to most of them. The ear is pleased with exquisite music; the eye is dazzled with pictures, processions, scenic representations, glittering colours, gorgeous robes, rich laces, and embroidery; and even the nostril is propitiated by the grateful odour of frankincense; but the only address to the heart and intellect is a barbarous Latin prayer, unintelligible (were it to be heard) to most of the congregation, and rendered so to all by the mode in which it is gone through. On returning from such exhibitions as these, we feel more forcibly than ever, how much reason we have to thank those pious compilers of our expurgated English prayer-book, who, renouncing an unknown tongue, and rejecting all unscriptural interpolations, drew from the rich stores of Rome herself, and from the primitive Church, an almost faultless Liturgy,[G] where every desire of the human heart is anticipated, and every expression so carefully weighed, that not an unbecoming phrase can be found in it.

It is impossible for any one who has been much in Roman Catholic countries, to avoid drawing comparisons between the two services; and especially at this time, when many of our countrymen are halting between two opinions, and almost persuading themselves that there was no need of a Reformation, it behoves those not under the influence of

"That dark lanthorn of the Spirit
Which none see by but those that bear it;"

nor yet led away

"By crosses, relics, crucifixes,
Beads, pictures, rosaries, and pyxes;
Those tools for working out salvation
By mere mechanic operation,"

to protest against the return of Popery to this land, to the surrender of our consciences and our Bibles again into the hands of a fellow sinner.[H] "Quis custodet custodem?"—who shall watch our watcher?—was a question that men had been asking themselves for many years in England, but hitherto without result; till our pious Reformers, addressing themselves to the study of the Scriptures, received the sword of the Spirit, with which they were enabled to wage successful war against that wily serpent, coiled now for centuries round the Church of Christ, and waiting but a little further development to crush her in his inextricable folds. Alike unallured by concessions and unterrified by threats, they boldly denounced the heretical usurpation of Rome; opposing an honest conscience, and Christ the only mediator, to the caprice of councils, and the false unity of a pseudo-infallible head;[I] refusing to purchase their lives by rendering homage to any Phalaris of the Triple Crown.

Their perjured faith, though zealot Popes command,
Point to their Bull, and raise the threatening hand:
They deem'd those souls consummate guilt incurr'd,
At conscience' fearful price, who life preferr'd:
No length of days for bartered peace can pay,
And what were life, take life's great end away?[J]

THE BEATIFICATION.

"Sanctis Roma, suis jam tollere gestit ad astra,
Et cupit ad superos evehere usque deos."
Milton's Sonnets.

To receive Beatification, which is the first step towards Canonisation, and may in time lead to a fellowship with the saints,—to be pronounced "blessed" by him who arrogates to himself the title of Holy, and must therefore know the full value of the dignity he confers—sic laudari a laudato, and that too in the finest church in Christendom, before the eyes of a countless assembly of all the nations of Europe,—is an honour indeed! No wonder, then, that every promotion should be jealously canvassed, and that sometimes the rumour of "unfairness," or "favouritism," should be heard among the people, when each fresh brevet comes out. For example—"Who's this third St Anthony? Are not two enough in the Calendar? The great St Antonio, and he of the pig!—(del porco,)—another will only create confusion;" or else, "Surely the Beata Ernestina has not been long enough dead to have attained to such an 'odour of sanctity;'" or, "Though the good Pasquale might deserve the title, the pious Teodoro's miracles are as well attested, and much more numerous, and should therefore have been first recognised." Of such sort are the comments of the crowd. All this grumbling, however, is at an end, when once the Festa comes round; the Church, by the brilliancy of her exhibitions, wins over her discontented children, and the installation is sure to be well attended. Sometimes the saint expectant stops short of true canonisation; and, having gained one step, finds himself like a yellow admiral, placed on the shelf without chance of further promotion. (This by the way.) No one can say precisely what entitles the dead to these honours. Large bequests alone are not always sufficient; witness the rejection of a certain distinguished Begum, who left much of her enormous wealth to the Pope, with a well-known view to this distinction. Some imagine that eminent piety is a necessary condition; but no! there is very little talk of religion. It seems chiefly to be the attestation of a sufficient number of miracles at a tomb, which confers the title of Beatus on its tenant, and converts it into a shrine, sure ever after to be profusely hung with glass eyes, wax fœtuses, silver hearts, discarded crutches, votive shipwrecks, &c., &c.,[K] in token of cures and deliverances which have emanated from it. Next to miracles, perhaps, we may reckon dates—seniores priores—first buried, first beatified, and no superannuation here: on the contrary, holiness, like many other good things, requires time to ripen its virtues and to bring it to perfection; and it is a rule of the Church that chemistry must disintegrate the mortal before she can build up the saint. Thus it happens of two candidates of equal merit; he whose dissolution took place half a century or so before his rival, obtains the preference. The first steps are taken by the lawyers; one being retained to advance the merits of the aspirant saint, another to asperse them if possible. Should the election be contested, much special pleading is then resorted to. Both sides are paid by the Church, but he who opposes the nomination is termed the devil's counsel. This title, however, is a legal or rather a theological fiction; the miracles alleged to have been performed by the defunct being only more triumphantly established and set off by the apparent disposition of the rival pleader to deny their reality; who, after a proper show of resistance and incredulity, allows himself to be foiled. This is indeed beating Satan with his own weapons; but the advocates of saints belong to that party who

"E'en to the Devil himself will go,
If they have motive thereunto;
And think, as there is war between
The Devil and them, it is no sin
If they by subtle stratagem
Make use of him as he does them."

We had never witnessed a Beatification: so, when the Pope, in his character of umpire, had pronounced his fiat in favour of "good sister Frances," and all that remained to be done was the church ceremonial necessary to admit her to piety's peerage, we procured one of the many thousand tickets printed for the occasion, and followed the crowd to St Peter's. Here all was prepared to give due effect to the scene: the interior was studiously darkened, that the rich upholstery might be set off by a grove of countless wax lights, thick and tall as young pine trees. The workmen, after a whole fortnight of bustle and activity, had done their part well. Curtains had been hung and carpets spread; organs wheeled up towards the throne of St Peter; and a whole gallery of villanously painted historical pictures, blasphemous and absurd, were suspended round, representing the miracles for which the new "beatified" was to receive her first degree towards sainthood; and showing amongst other wonders, how in one case her blood, in another her image, restored a blind man to sight, and so completely cured the palsy of one Salvator di Sales, that he is dancing a hornpipe on his recovery, while a priest is looking on approvingly. We were too early for the ceremony; and after curiously scanning these preparations, our attention was attracted to a group near, eagerly listening to the recital of a bare-footed Capuchin. On approaching, we found that he was discoursing on the virtues of a picture of the Virgin, known by the name of Sta Maria del Pianto, a fresco daub, painted in a very dirty back street. He was affirming that it had lately taken to winking, and had also been seen to shed tears over the body of a man recently found murdered under the lamp. "Who saw her weep?" inquired one of his hearers. "Do you doubt the miracle, my son?" said the friar. "No indeed, father," returned he; "but why did she not call out to the assassin; and what is the use of weeping over a dead man?" "It was owing to the gentleness of her sex," said another, who appeared interested in proclaiming the notoriety of the shrine: he proceeded, therefore, to inform the attentive listeners, that he had the face newly painted some months back, since which operation there was no end to the miracles performed by it. Several persons round hereon testified to having heard repeatedly of these wonders. "Ah!" said a sceptical craftsman, "I dare say you live in another quarter of the city, for it is well known that those at a distance see these things more clearly than the neighbours, unless, like our friend here," nodding to the restorer of the shrine, "they hope to attract customers to the shop by drawing votaries to the shrine." "I don't believe a word of it," said we, taking part in the colloquy. "Caro lei—who can help that? we can only pity your unbelief," said the good-humoured Capuchin, offering us, however, a pinch out of his snuff-box. "You," continued he, "should call to mind 'in dubiis fides;' and we, in compassion to your being a heretic, will remember 'in omnibus caritas.'" We accepted the good man's courtesy, albeit no snuff-taker; and he was resuming the interrupted narrative, when a stir among the crowd outside announced the near approach of the procession, and every one hastened to secure a good seat. Presently the Swiss guards enter, the choristers take their places, in come priests, bishops, cardinals, all sumptuously arrayed; at length the Pope himself arrives and assumes his throne. Mass commences.

And here the reader doubtless expects, if not a full description of the ceremony of canonisation, at least an accurate detail of the various steps of the process by which it was effected; but, as we have stated above, the incubation had been completed six weeks before in a private Eccaleiobion, and the pageant to-day was merely to give publicity to the metamorphosis—to read in, and to enrol among the saints the Beata Francesca. As we cannot give a particular account of the funzione, we give a general one of all masses:—

High mass! The stall'd and banner'd quire—
White canons—priests in quaint attire—
The unfamiliar prayer:
The fumes that practised hands dispense,
The tinkling bells, the jingling pence,
The tax'd but welcome chair:
The beams from ruby panes that glow,
Of rhythmal chant the ebb and flow:
The organ, that from boundless stores
Its trembling inspiration pours
O'er all the sons of care;
Now joyous as the festal lyre,
When torch and song and wine inspire;
Now tender as Cremona's shell,
When hush'd orchestras own the spell
And watch the ductile bow—
Now rolling from its thunder-cloud,
Dark peals o'er that retiring crowd,
And now has ceased to blow.

CRIMES AND REMARKABLE TRIALS IN SCOTLAND.

INCIDENTS OF THE EARLIER REIGNS—AN INQUIRY INTO THE CHARACTER OF MACBETH.

The sunshine and the green leaves embrace not all that we should know of physical nature. Storm and darkness have their signs, which we do well to study; and in the tempests of the tropics, or the long winter darkness of the poles, we have types of the character of different sections of the globe, more marked than the varying warmth of the sun, or the character of the vegetation—but not perhaps so pleasing. Even so, the storm and darkness of the human soul—the criminal nature of man, provide their peculiar food for the thinker and inquirer. The annals of virtue have their own elevations and delights; but those of vice are no more to be passed over than the dark and stormy hours in the history of each revolution round the sun. "While some affect the sun, and some the shade," there may even be those whose most deeply cherished associations are with these unlit hours—who prefer the night thoughts to the day dreams. But to all, the crimes peculiar to different nations are a large part of the knowledge which man may profitably have of his race. In the history of its great criminals, a nation's character is drawn, as it were, colossally, with the broadest brush, and in the deepest shadows. National virtues have delicate and subtle tints, and exquisitely minute shadings, inviting to a nearer view—like Carlo Dolci's Madonnas, or Constable's forest landscapes: the crimes of a nation present the character of its people, as they rise from the dead in Michael Angelo's Last Judgment. The ordinary vices of men have a certain vulgar air of uniformity; but each great crime is a broad dash of the national character of the people among whom it was committed. The Cenci, and Joanna of Naples were of Italy. It was in Holland that two great and virtuous statesmen were torn to pieces by the mob. The dirk, long buried beyond the Grampians, has re-appeared across the Atlantic in the shape of the bowie-knife. The country of Woldemar and the sorrows of Werther produced that most amiable and sentimental of murderesses, Madame Zwanziger, who loved and was beloved wherever she went; so sensitive, so sympathising, so sedulous, so studious of the wants of those by whom she was surrounded, so disinterestedly patient; she had but one peculiarity to distinguish her from an angel of light—it was an unfortunate propensity to poison people! We read in the Causes Célèbres, of a Bluebeard who slew a succession of wives by tickling them till they died in convulsions; and at once we are reminded of that populace who are said to partake of the natures of the ape and the tiger. The people who, for more centuries than are included in the events of European history, have been resolved into the mysterious classification of castes, produced those equally mysterious criminals the Thugs, for whose deeds our so utterly different habits and ideas are quite incapable of finding or conceiving a motive. Our own country produced the assassinations of Rizzio, Regent Murray, and Archbishop Sharpe—all pregnant with marked national characteristics; aristocratic pride, revenge of wrong, and fanatical fury. We propose to offer for the amusement or instruction—which he pleases—of our reader, a few more records of Scottish crimes, not probably all so conspicuously known to the general reader as the three we have just alluded to, yet not, we trust, without something to commend them to notice, as characteristic of the country and the age in which they were respectively enacted.

The raw materials from which we propose to work out our little groups, are the records of our criminal trials; and yet we feel an insuperable inclination to begin with a name not certainly unknown, yet not to be found in the proceedings of the Court of Justiciary—Macbeth, King of Scotland. Perhaps we might consider it a sufficient reason for holding his case equivalent to a trial, that before a tribunal called the Public Opinion, he has been tried, and that at the instance of such a public prosecutor as never opened his lips in any court of law—one whose accusation has carried a conviction deep into the very heart of literature, whence no archæological evidence, and no critical pleading will ever eradicate it. Nor would we desire to touch it: let Macbeth the murderer remain to all time the most powerful picture of temptation, leading its victim through crime into the hideous shadows of remorse, that human pen has ever drawn. But there was an actual prose Macbeth, as different from the ideal as the canvass bought by Raphael of some respectable dealer in the soft line, was from the Transfiguration which he afterwards painted on it. With him, being but a simple historical king, we may take liberties; and the liberty we propose to take on the present occasion is that of vindicating his character. Vindications are fashionable; and since Catiline and Machiavelli, Richard III., and Philip II. have been vindicated, why not Macbeth? We shall say 'tis our humour to whiten him, and no man can say it is a criminal or mischievous one.

The main question is, did Macbeth murder Duncan? It was an older story in Shakspeare's time than the murder of Darnley is now, and he may have taken a false view of it. We shall approach the question by an inquiry who Duncan and Macbeth were, and in what relation they stood to each other. About the end of the eleventh century, there reigned in Scotland a king called Kenneth III. Like all the other Scottish monarchs of the period, the chroniclers have given him his own peculiar tragic history, in this wise: he was induced to poison the young prince Malcolm Duff, who might possibly show a title to the throne enabling him to compete with Kenneth's own offspring. This troubled his conscience. He "ever dreaded in his mind," in the expressive words of old Bellenden, that it "should come some time to light: and was so full of suspicion, that he believed when any man rounded to his fellow, that they spake evil of him; for it is given by nature to ilk creature, when he is guilty of any horrible crime, by impulsion of his conscience, to interpret every thing that he sees to some terror of himself." He was one night appalled by a terrific vision, and next morning making his confession, he was sentenced to a pilgrimage to the tomb of St Palladius at Fordun. When the pilgrimage was over, he was invited to partake of the hospitalities of a lady named Fenella—a very neat name for a romance—at her fortalice of Fettercairn. In the civil conflicts or the administration of justice during his reign, some of the relations of this lady had been slain; among the rest her son. Having got the king into her toils, she resolved to put him to death; and the method which the chroniclers make her adopt, shows a superfluous ingenuity ridiculous enough to strip a murder of all its horrors. Kenneth was taken to see a tower of the castle "quhilk was theeket with copper, and hewn with maist subtle mouldry of sundry flowers and imageries, the werk so curious, that it exceeded all the stuff thereof." In the middle of this tower stood an image of Kenneth himself, in brass, holding in his hand a golden apple studded with costly gems. "That image," said the lady, "is set up in honour of thee, to show the world how much I honour my king; the precious apple is intended for a gift for the king, who will honour his poor subject by taking it from the hand of the image." Now matters were so arranged, that the removal of the apple caused certain springs to touch the triggers of a series of bent cross-bows pointed to the spot, and so, when the unsuspecting monarch went to take the gift, a whole sheaf of arrows penetrated to his heart. On the death of this king, though he left a son called Malcolm, the succession went to a rival line. His immediate successor was Constantine, who was killed by another Kenneth, called IV., who in his turn was killed by Malcolm, who thus regained the throne his father had filled. "The gracious Duncan" was the son of a daughter of this Malcolm. His father, strangely enough, appears to have been a priest; he is called in the old dry chronicles, which are the only ones to be depended on, Duncan the son of Trini, or Trivi, abbot of Dunkeld. Now the Kenneth IV. of the rival line, who had been slain by Duncan's grandfather, left behind him a son, and that son left a daughter, whose name was Gruach, and in whom the reader, though certainly in an unusual shape, must welcome Lady Macbeth herself. There being thus two rival races, alternately seizing the throne: while Duncan was the son of a daughter of one king, she was the daughter of the son of another. This gave her no contemptible title to the throne, and when she married Macbeth, or Machaboedth, as he is called by the chroniclers, she had a husband who, possessing the almost independent principality of Ross, might be able to fight her battles. It is somewhat remarkable that, in an ecclesiastical record still preserved, in which a royal grant is made to a religious house, dedicated to St Servanus, Macbeth's wife appears along with himself, as granter of the deed; and they are called, "Machabet filius Finlach, et Gruach filia Bodhae—Rex et Regina Scotorum;"[L] an equal juxtaposition, only to be accounted for by the supposition that Macbeth was king in right of his wife. As to Macbeth himself, his origin, save in the supernatural legend we shall hereafter notice, appears not to have been known; but Fordun seems to intimate, that he was a descendant of that same Fenella who had so curiously murdered Duncan's great-grandfather. If we were disposed, indeed, to take a proper antiquarian partisanship of the one dynasty against the other, we might speak of Duncan as a treacherous usurper, and Lady Macbeth as an injured and insulted queen, whose cause is heroically adopted and vindicated by a true knight, who, while redressing her wrongs, wins her heart and hand.

Let us now look to the manner in which the death of Duncan is spoken of by the most ancient authorities. Old Andrew Wyntoun, Prior of St Serfs on Lochleven, who has never yet, to our great wonder, been upheld as one of the greatest poets of his own or any other age,—perhaps we may undertake the task some day, let our readers judge by the extracts on the present occasion with what prospect of success:—Wyntoun narrates the event with the true simplicity of genius, in these two lines:—

"He murthrified him in Elgyne,
His Kynrik he usurped syne."

This is distinct enough, in all truth: there is no ambiguity, or room for critical doubt; nor is his fellow annalist, Fordun, less distinct, for he speaks of the slain monarch as occisus scelere. But these chroniclers wrote between three and four centuries after the event they commemorate, standing chronologically almost as near our own day as Macbeth's; and when we look into those far older, if not contemporary, annals, which narrate successive events in the briefest possible shape, we find that they contain nothing to indicate that Duncan's death took place in any more atrocious manner than the multitudinous slaughters of kings, with which their narratives are often as crowded as a Peninsular campaign gazette with killed officers. Thus, the register of the Priory of St Andrews simply states, that Duncan interfectus est. It is true that the Latin language is deficient in any word to express murder as distinguished from other kinds of slaughter. Trucido is the verb we have been accustomed to associate most nearly with the idea of assassination; but in one of the most circumspect and prosaic of the old annals, that of Tighernac, this very word is applied to the death of Macbeth himself. Blackstone notices the circumstance that the English lawyers had to coin, for their own special use, the substantive murdrum and the verb murdrare; equally creditable to their good taste in Latinity and to the social condition of their country. In fact, the Romans looked upon death, in any form, as so bad a business, that they cared little for making nice distinctions about the motive that had occasioned it, or the manner in which it was effected; and it was a condition so generally disliked, that, if any man was absurd enough voluntarily to place himself in it, neither the law nor public opinion troubled itself to express disapproval, either by driving a stake through the body or in any other way. Undoubtedly there were justifiable slaughters and unjustifiable; but the practice of single combat had not arisen to draw a strong and distinct line between death in a fair tournament or duel, and secret assassination. A recollection that this was also the social state of Scotland in the days of Macbeth, will help us far better towards the truth than a criticism on the ambiguous Latin words. It was between that age and the period of Wyntoun and Fordun that single-combat chivalry and the laws of honour had grown up; so, while the older chroniclers had simply to say that the man was killed, without troubling themselves about the manner, those of later date were moved to divide the deaths into two departments—the killed in combat and the murdered. More, probably, by chance than design, the fate of Duncan was put into the latter category; and then a super-structure of particulars was raised upon it—for it must be observed, that the romantic incidents of the slaughter were added at a still later period than that of Fordun or Wyntoun—by Boece and Hollinshed. Here, then, is our case, as lawyers say: Macbeth, in right of his wife, was a claimant of the crown. He kills the existing holder; but there is nothing in the older accounts of the affair to show that he did so otherwise than in the fair course of war. It was what the old civilians would have called a casus belli,—an expression which, by the way, we find some accomplished editors using as the Latin for a justification of war. The murder is found only in the later chronicles, which, in all parts of their narrative, have covered their more sober predecessors with a coating of fabulous details like the stalactites of a dripping cave. However the real fact may have stood, we have no statement of Macbeth having murdered Duncan until between three and four centuries after the event. Why,—the case looks vastly better than we thought it did when we began with it; we have some thoughts of believing our own theory, which is more than ever we knew a historical critic do, within the range of our personal observation.

Having so disposed of this question, we are inclined to amuse our readers with some further notices—real and unreal—about Macbeth. Wyntoun gives us a strange wild legend of his supernatural parentage, beginning

"Bot, as we fynd be some stories,
Gotten he was in fairly wys;
His modyr to woods made oft repaire,
For the delyte of halesome air;
Swa sho passed upon a day
'Til a wood her for to play,
Scho met of cas with a fair man
(Never nane so fair as sho thought than
Before than had sho seen with sight)
Of beauty pleasand, and of hycht
Proportioned wele in all measure,
Of limb and lyth a fair figure."

Such is the description of the putative father of Macbeth. In the sententious explanation of Wyntoun, who scorned expletives, "he the devil was;" and so he told the wandering damsel—

"And bade her nought fleyed to be of that,
But said that her son should be
A man of great state and bounty;
And na man sould be born of wife
Of power to reve him of his life.
And of that deed in taknyng,
He gave his leman then a ring,
And bade her that sho sould keep that wele,
And hald for his love that jewel."

Wyntoun's melodious verses were lying in a dusty parchment manuscript when Shakspeare wrote; we know not if he had access to the volume, nor have we any strong reason for presuming that he would have perused it if he had. It would be too adventurous to predict whether, knowing the legend, he would have considered any reference to it as consistent with the character of his drama; but it is curious to observe, that the tale appears to have been in the eye of Sir Walter Scott, when he wrote the history of Brian the Hermit, in the Lady of the Lake, beginning—

"Of Brian's birth strange tales were told:
His mother watch'd a midnight fold."

We shall now indulge our readers with a glance at a totally different feature in the career of Macbeth. It appears that he was a very able financier. We presume that he was his own First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer: yet in his days there was no pressure on the money-market; there was no drain of gold; there was no restriction of issue; no great houses suspended payment; there were no rumours of turns-out and distress in the manufacturing districts; there was no Highland destitution. Our proof of this position lies in two lines of our illustrious poet Wyntoun, which contain as much as a smaller genius could have crowded into a volume on "The state and progress of Scotland during the reign of Macbeth; with an account of the arts, industry, and manufactures of the country; returns of the exports and imports, and of the goods entered for home consumption, with the annual gross and net revenue from customs and excise, post-office, assessed taxes, hereditary revenue, and other miscellaneous sources, during that reign: dedicated, by permission, to the Statistical Society." Wyntoun's simple statement is—

"All his time was great plenté,
Abundant both by land and sea."

What more is necessary? It is true, that on another occasion we have repudiated Wyntoun as an authority; but it is the privilege of the antiquarian speculator to found on an author when he is right, and repudiate him when he is wrong.

We now come to a subject on which really, jocularity apart, we stand upon firm and secure ground—the spot where Macbeth fell. All the chroniclers with one voice state that it was at a place called Lunfanan. Even Raphael Hollinshed, whose version, it is universally admitted, was the one perused by Shakspeare,—after he tells how the beleaguered fugitive beheld the miraculous forest with which his doom was involved approaching him, continues to say—"Nevertheless, he brought his men in order of battle, and exhorted them to do valiantly: howbeit, his enemies had scarcely cast from them their boughs, when Macbeth, perceiving their numbers, betook him straight to flight, whom Macduff pursued with great hatred, even till he came to Lunfannane." Perhaps Shakspeare, not knowing precisely where Lunfanan lay, supposed that it was some spot close to Dunsinane, and did not wish to burden his action with the particularity of an unimportant movement. Lunfanan is, however, north of the Dee, and distant full fifty miles in a straight line from Dunsinane, the rough mountains of the Braes of Angus lying between the two places; so that the two parties must have had a pretty long running fight, and Macbeth stood out even harder game than he has generally credit for. Our favourite poet describes the chase across the broad valley of Strathmore, through the rocky glens of Clova, over the Isla and the Esk, down through the hoary forest of Glentanner, across the raging Dee, and up again through mountain and forest, in this sententious and emphatic couplet,

"And our the Month they chaised him than
'Till the wood of Lunfanan."

When the victory was completed, we are told that they cut off his head, and bore it to King Malcolm at Kincardine—a pleasant village on the banks of the Dee, about ten miles from Lunfanan.

This same Lunfanan is a spot which it requires particular taste to love, and yet we have perambulated it not without interest. The Chroniclers speak of it as a forest, but the highest elevations are now generally bare of trees, save where in a few sheltered hollows the birches cling to the rocks. The hills are of considerable height, but round and bare, with few precipices, and little character of outline; but the glens between the hills are sheltered and well cultivated, each is enlivened by a small stream, and still more enlivened by the scanty population seeking the shelter of the recesses of the glen, and making it populous amid the waste. But we shall afford a better description than our own, in a few lines from "The Fortunate Shepherdess," by a poet who lived in a glen not far distant—Alexander Ross. It will be admitted, by the way, that our poetical quotations to-day are not of a hackneyed kind, whatever other censure they may incur.

"The water keely on a level sleed,
Wi' little din, but couthy what it made:
On ilka side the trees grew thick and strang,
And wi' the birds they a' were in a sang;
On ev'ry side, a full bow-shot and mair,
The green was even, gowany, and fair;
With easy sklent, on ev'ry hand, the braes,
To right well up, wi' scattered busses raise,
Wi' goats and sheep aboon, and ky below,
The bonny braes a' in a swarm did go."

Occasionally, when the new earth is turned up, strange uncouth warlike instruments are found in this district—remnants of ancient strife, so unlike any weapons recorded in the genuine history of the military art, that it were hard to say whether they belong to the age of Macbeth, or to unknown anterior centuries. Flint arrow-heads, stone hammers and axes,—such is their general character, though we have also seen among these mysterious discoveries, such a thing as a long flat mass of decomposed iron, which may have once been the blade of a dagger, or short sword. Here the knowing reader, who has been induced, on the field of Waterloo, to purchase a ball-perforated cuirass and helmet, which he afterwards discovers to have been made at a manufactory of Waterloo relics, will curl his lip in scorn; but he is wrong. Lunfanan is no relic-collecting district. We question if the inhabitants ever made a shilling of any one, the present company excepted, by the military stores discovered by them when ploughing their tough peat soil. We did not require there to practise the method of self-defence which we adopted on a visit to the field of Waterloo; and by the way—as we are inclined to recommend it strongly to our friends, as an effectual preservative from the main annoyance to which the hero-worshipper is subjected—we may here describe our method. On hiring our guide, we desired him to procure for us a fragment of an old kettle. Carrying this conspicuously in our hard, to each band of relic-sellers who came up, we stated that we were in the trade ourselves, that we had just acquired a very valuable article, and were willing to part with it at a moderate price. The cuirassiers did not look more ridiculous, when they attempted to storm the squares, than our assailants, when we fortified ourselves behind this piece of defensive armour. But to return to Lunfanan.

In one of the narrow glens, near the old parish-church, there is an oblong solid turf bank, or mound, of considerable height, and regular construction, as clean and sharp in its outline as the glacis of a modern fortification. A neighbouring stream has been diverted round it, or rather the waters have been divided and distributed on either side, so as to surround it with a fosse. This curious antiquity is called "the Peel Bog," or Castle Bog. "The course," says the author of the statistical account of the parish, "by which the water was conveyed from the burn of Lunphanan may still be traced; the measure of the circumvallation by which the water was confined may still be made; the situation of the drawbridge is still discernible; the path leading from the fosse to the top of the mound may still be trodden; and the sluice by which the water issued from the moat, was laid bare by the flood of 1829."[M] Even the sceptical Lord Hailes ventured to associate Macbeth's name with the spot; "as no remains of buildings," he says, "are to be seen, it is probable that the fortress was composed of timber and sod. In this solitary place, we may conjecture that Macbeth sought an asylum." At some distance from the Peel Bog, a low thin rampart of earth and stone encircles the summit of a conical hill; it is an inferior specimen of the old British hill-fort, well known both in Scotland and the north of England. But on the brow of one of the hills, there is a still more emphatic memorial of the monarch's fate. There a heap of gray stones, considerably larger than many others surrounding it, is still called, and is represented in the county maps as Cairn Beth. We must admit that, were it in a tourist's district, or were it the spot which popular literature, of any kind had marked as the grave of Macbeth, this would be suspicious. But no tourist's footstep seeks the quiet uninviting wilds of Lunfanan. There is no railway line, not even a stage-coach communication, between it and the world. You have but to see the rough, primitive, granitic air of the Lunfananers assembled at the parish church, to know that they are incapable of any imposition. Legends we always distrust, especially when they are connected with any spot sanctified by poetry. At Dunsinane, we believe, some vestiges are shown as marking the spot of the usurper's death, the "genuine" spot, "all others being spurious imitations;" but we suspect this legend is not even so old as Shakspeare's day, that it is no older than the revival of Shakspearean literature, and the rise of a general public interest in the spots illuminated by his genius.[N] For more than one castle, Cawdor included, has the merit been claimed of being the identical edifice in which Duncan was slain, and undoubted four-posted bedsteads have been shown in actual existence to put scepticism to scorn. But any popular association of the actual events of Macbeth's career with quiet remote Lunfanan has been barred by the silence of Shakspeare, and the unwillingness of topographical critics to break the spell of the accepted localities. Though legends spring up like rumours, with a breath, the names of places which they have received from historical incidents are generally of long standing, and, indeed, a large proportion of the lowlands of Scotland is full of places which to this day bear Celtic names, given them by tribes who cannot have inhabited the districts for a thousand years at least. The old chroniclers, without exception, lay Macbeth's death in Lunfanan; the people of the spot, who never read these chronicles, and never, perhaps, heard of Macbeth, or if they did, heard the popular account of his death in Dunsinane, call a certain monumental tumulus Cairn Beth—this, we think, is very nearly conclusive.[O] And yet, sitting on that Cairn, with the fresh breeze blowing round one, and the blue heavens above, and the blooming heather-bells around, or reclining on the smooth green turf of the Peel Bog, on a summer day, with the sun shining hot upon the hills, and the babbling brook singing its "quiet tune," it is not easy to associate the spot with that history of blood and horror, or to feel that its features are ancient, or that they ever were connected with warfare. In the gloomy, galleries of Glammis or Cawdor, with their grim old portraits, their armour, their secret staircases, their mysterious hidden chambers, and iron hooks in the wall—the idea of the haggard murderer, and all the associations of his deeds and his remorse creep more vividly on that imaginative conscience, which more or less makes cowards of us all in such places. Yet the history of the arts tells us that not one stone of these edifices, ancient though they be, can have stood upon another till the history of Macbeth was as old as that of Queen Mary is now. Why, then, should they retain their hold on us? They are contemporary with Shakspeare's Macbeth, though not with the historians', and are the style of edifice in which he cast his tragedy. It must be a feudal stronghold, heavily arched, buttressed, fortified, and gloomy,—where the lady in a vaulted half-lighted chamber may say:

"The raven himself is hoarse
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements."

The timber edifice on such an eminence as the Peel Bog—probably, as the sagacious Lord Hailes imagines, the true character of the edifices possessed by Macbeth—would no more fill up the true architectural wants of the drama, than a marble Grecian temple, or a Canadian settler's log-house.

Crimes briefly told without details have no interest, unless they can be put in the shape of statistics—some people will be inclined to deny that the exception is the reverse of the rule. We are not writing history, and if we were, the historical details which go no further than that A stabbed B, and C poisoned D, and E mutilated F, are not such as we are inclined to believe our readers would thank us for. It is very clear that the death of Duncan, if we had no more than authentic annals to deal with—if it had been a question merely of history, and not in some measure incidentally connected with the highest rank of human intellectual effort—would have formed a very meagre object of comment. The society of antiquaries might have endured a paper on it—for such endurance is the martyrdom they have chosen—but no other person would. In looking, then, down through Scottish history from the accession of Macbeth's successor, we find little that can be noticed with any applicability to our particular purpose, until we reach the time when the records provide us with some of the details.

Yet there is one very early tragic incident, which appears to us to have considerable interest, as one of the first striking instances where the fierce spirit of clan animosity—the burning desire to avenge the wrongs of the chief—was exhibited by the Highlanders. It occurred about the year 1242. A tournament was held on the English Border, at which two young knights, Patrick Earl of Athole, and Walter de Bysset, a cadet of the family who were lords of the great northern districts, subsequently the patrimony of Lord Lovat, encountered each other. Bysset was unhorsed. Not long afterwards, the building in which the Earl of Athole lived, in Haddington, was burned to the ground, and he, with several of his followers, died in the flames. By some accounts the Earl was previously murdered, and the house was burned to conceal the deed. Let us here have recourse to the distinct and considerate account of the incident in our favourite poet:—

"Whether it was of recklessness,
Or it of forethought felony was,
Into the Inns, lang ere day,
Quhare that the Earl of Athole lay
A fell fire him to coals brynt,
Thus suddenly was that Earl tynt.
And with him mony ma
There houses and men were brunt alswa."

Some Highland gillies from Bysset's country had been seen in the neighbourhood, and suspicion immediately fell upon the head of that house. He tried to prove an alibi—that he was, at the time of the tragedy, in Forfar, some eighty miles distant from Haddington, doing the honours of hospitality to the Queen. As our historical poet says:

"But this Sir William at Forfar
That night was late at the supper
With the Queen, and her to chamber led,
And in his own chamber yhed till his bed,"

like a good old country gentleman. But an alibi went for little in a Highland feud.

"To purge him for this the Queen
Profered her to swear bodily,
But that assythed not the party,
That was stout and of great might,
They said—Wherever he was that night
Bathe his armouries and his men
Intil Haddington were seen then,
When this earl was brynt with fire:
They said the Byssets in their ire
Of auld feud and great discord
That was between them and that lord,
Did that in forethought felony."

It was still the age of ordeals. The hot ploughshares were, perhaps, obsolete, but single combat was in full practice; and even jury trial was considered a species of ordeal rather than a deliberate judgment upon evidence. The accused party in the one case appealed to the chances of war—or, taking the reference in its more solemn aspect, he left his cause to be vindicated by the God of battles: in the other, he threw himself upon the suffrages of his peers. Both ordeals were considered about equally reasonable and fair; and if the man who preferred the ordeal of battle were a gigantic warrior, unconquered, and terrible in the lists, he was, to the true believer in ordeals, not more formidable than the feeblest of his contemporaries, for a just Deity might wither his uplifted arm; and if he retained the physical superiority he had previously indicated, it was because the All-seeing Eye knew of the justice of his cause. Now Bysset, who seems to have been somewhat of a sceptic in ordeals, had no objection to trust the issue to single combat, and challenged whomsoever would dare to stand forth against him. But he would not submit to an assize or jury, for he said the whole country had prejudged him. His opponents had, somehow or other, greater faith in the ordeal of an assize than that of battle, and would not accept his challenge. In the meantime, to show his sincerity, he requested the northern clergy to curse and excommunicate the perpetrators of the deed.

"Sir William Bysset gert for thi,
His chaplain in his chapel,
Denounce cursed with book and bell,
All they that had part
Of that brynnin, or any art.
The Bishop of Aberdeen alswa,
He gart cursed denounce all tha
That either by art or part, or swike,
Gart burn this time that Earl Patricke,
In all the kirks halely
Of Aberdeen's diocesy.
Sir William Bysset this process
Gart be done."

Wild justice began to be enforced in the country of the Byssets, which was overrun by their enemies: in the pathetic language of our poet—

"His landis quite,
Was for that burning all herryet,
Bathe of nowt, and sheap, and kye,
And all other goods halely."

At length, the Byssets agreed "to come into the king's will," or abide by his arbitration. They came under an obligation to depart to the Holy Land, and there for the remainder of their days pray for the soul of the murdered man. Their broad estates were forfeited, and a portion of them coming into the hands of a family named Frezelier or Frazer, they planted the roof-tree of the great chiefship of that name in the northern Highlands.

There is little doubt that the murder of Athole was a piece of clannish vengeance over which the chief had no control. His wild Highland followers saw him unhorsed: it was enough. Into such puerile refinements as the law of chivalry, which bound him to take the unhorsing with the meekness of those who turn the left cheek when the right is smitten, they could not enter. The more they believed in the high spirit of their chief, the more they would be confident, that he would exult in a signal vengeance for the insult. Of course, when the vengeance was accomplished, it would rouse an unquenchable desire of retaliation in the men of Athole; and indeed it may be conjectured from the circumstances of the whole proceeding, that the king believed the Byssets personally innocent, but dared not, for the peace of the country, allow them to remain in Scotland. And yet, what is on the whole the most remarkable feature of the Highland feuds of the day,—neither the Athole nor the Bysset family were old hereditary patriarchs of the people. They were foreign adventurers, but recently rooted in the country. The Celtic races seem to have at once rallied round such intruders, in the strongest and fiercest spirit of devotion. When a chief had descendants, his race held, of course, generally a position which a stranger could not shake. But if the people had quarrelled with their chief, or if from other circumstances the headship were vacant, they clung with instantaneous tenacity to the first Norman adventurer to whom the monarch assigned their territory; and the descendants of these refined sons of chivalry by degrees assimilated themselves to the people among whom they were cast; becoming ostensibly of the same race as that over which they held rule.

The banishment of Bysset was connected with important historical results. Instead of going to Palestine, per agreement, to pray for the soul of the slaughtered Earl of Athole, he went, according to Matthew Paris, to a nearer and more agreeable place, the court of England. There he fostered in Henry III., those notions of the feudal vassalage of the Scottish kings to England, which produced the invasion of his successor, Edward I. Bysset had a considerable personal interest in this question; for, if the king of England had a paramount superiority over Scotland, his banishment and forfeiture might be reversed. Such conduct shocks all historical notions of patriotism; but what better claim had Scottish nationality on the Norman adventurer, than the respectability of Juggernaut has on a member of the supreme council of Calcutta? The ancestors of the house probably came over with William, a century and a half earlier; the banished lord was perhaps brought over from England with his father or grandfather, to accept the chiefship of a portion of the Highland wastes, over which the King of Scots professed to hold sovereignty. Aggrandisement was the sole object among the barbarians of the north; and when they ceased to derive a territorial revenue within Scotland, their connexion with the country where they lived was as completely closed, as that of the governor of a colony when he is recalled.

The subsequent history of this race was as strange and eventful as their first appearance in the Scottish annals. They became great lords in Ulster; and early in the fifteenth century they were again represented by a Scotsman, Donald Balloch, the hero of the battle of Inverlochy, whose mother was the heiress of the Byssets. For some time after this, we might trace their descent, like the track of a wild beast, by the marks of rapine and disorder; and at a later period we finally lose sight of the pedigree of the Byssets, in Montrose's celebrated ally, Kilkittoch.

Few of the incidental notices connected with those minor offences which mark the general character of the people, can be found anterior to the commencement of the criminal records. Hector Boece and our friend the poet occasionally tell wondrous incidents; but they are not to be depended on, and few of them have enough of dramatic spirit to be interesting as fables. We are inclined, however, to mention, in passing, the judicial feats of stout old Regent Randolph, whom the poet maintains to have been the greatest of law reformers; in testimony whereof, he adduces a case in point, far beyond the nicety of modern juridical philosophy. The regent hanged a man for stealing his own property. There was a law, that the community should make good every theft, the perpetrator of which could not be discovered. Founding on this law, a husbandman secreted his plough-irons, and received compensation.

"A gready earl soon after was,
Burnin' in sik greediness,
That his plough irons himself stall,
And hid them in a peet pot all.
He playned to the sheriff sare,
That stolen his plough irons were;
The sheriff than paid him shillings twa,
And after that he done had sa,
Soon a great court he gart set,
Wytting of that stelth to get."

The fraud was discovered, and the perpetrator of it hanged.

The murder of James I. is one of the few crimes anterior to the commencement of the records, of which a contemporary account, circumstantial and truthlike, has been preserved.[P] Few historical tragedies bear comparison with this, either in the audacity with which the assassination was planned, or the relentless atrocity with which it was perpetrated. Nothing can afford so lively an illustration of the perilous tenure of the Scottish crown in the fifteenth century. We would fain have had the telling of this story, and of that part, especially, where, after the household traitor had removed the great iron bolt, a young damsel, a daughter of the house of Douglas, thrust her arm in the socket. "She was but young," says Hector Boece, "and her bones not solid, and therefore her arm was soon broken in sunder, and the door dung open by force." Poor child! few have been the acts of loyal devotion so heroic as hers; but the whole narrative has been so fully and minutely incorporated with history, as to afford us no excuse for here repeating it.[Q]

There are, on the other hand, among the early criminal records, two instances of conspiracy against the life of the monarch, of which the particulars are not sufficiently ample to give them the interest of mystery. To excite curiosity, we must see a certain way, while we are unable to see so far as we desire: but in these cases we have little more than the accusation and the condemnation. One of the sufferers was Janet Lady Glammis, condemned to be burned on the 17th of July 1537; we find her name in the criminal record five years earlier, charged with "art and part of the intoxication of John Lord Glammis her husband." The charge has not a very formidable sound, but it doubtless meant either poisoning or sorcery or both; for they were then held to be one concern, as the Romans showed that they deemed them by the title they conferred on the witch, "venefica." This trial is remarkable from the circumstance of a number of gentlemen having preferred paying a penalty to acting on the jury. Perhaps they were inclined, as a later bulwark of our constitution is said to have done, to find a verdict of 'sarved him right.' It was through the instrumentality of poison that the unfortunate lady was charged with intending to effect her design against the life of the king; but of her motive, or ultimate object there is no indication, beyond her relationship to the Douglas family, and probable connexion with their intrigues. The other charge of treason occurred so closely at the same juncture, that for this reason alone historians have supposed that they had both some untraced connexion with a common plot. The culprit in this instance was John Master of Forbes, who was charged with a design to shoot the king as he passed through the town of Aberdeen. It was a service which he was likely to have performed as successfully as Bothwellhaugh, for he had already shown his abilities in the murder of his neighbour, Seton of Meldrum. In those days, the people who took upon them to fire at kings—very different from the maudlin wretches whose diseased brains conceive such horrid projects in a civilised age—knew what they were about, and were generally successful. They were well accustomed to "break into the bloody house of life;" and the attempt on a crowned monarch was merely a higher range of practice, tasking their best abilities. The simple truth is this: that in the present age we are not accustomed to shooting people, and therefore, when any wretch takes into his frenzied brain a design to fire at a Louis Philippe, he gets confused and makes a bungle of it. It is not a practice suited to the age, and no man of any sense would adopt it.

The earliest of the Scottish criminal records that have been preserved begin in the reign of James IV., about the year 1488. Mr Pitcairn, who has generously laid these early records before the public, not at the expense of the record commission but at his own, says of them,—"The books of adjournal and minute books of the supreme criminal tribunal of Scotland, as well as the records of the Justice Aires, &c. at these remote periods, were kept in an obscure forensic Latin. This circumstance, added to the well-known difficulty of deciphering the ordinary MSS. of these centuries, and the fact of the books now preserved being generally mere scrolls and memoranda, written with many contractions and evidently during the hurry of the court proceedings, have hitherto rendered the task of examining them, and presenting the public with the more important cases, a labour of a peculiarly irksome and repulsive kind." We do not doubt it, and hence our gratitude to Mr Pitcairn, for not only deciphering these discouraging manuscripts, but translating the Latin into English. Those indeed who, like ourselves, have perused his volumes—if any other person has perused them—owe a double debt of gratitude to Mr Pitcairn; for he has enabled us to read, in excellent type, what we would otherwise have had to decipher in distressing MS., and he has given us the means of pursuing the task of research by our own fireside, instead of in the interior of the Register House; while we have the satisfaction to feel, in perusing his quartos, that the number of people to whom, in common with ourselves, they have laid the field open, is a very limited one indeed—so limited, that we shall consider every quotation we make from his volumes as select and valuable as if we were able to subjoin MS. penes auct. to it.

The earliest of these translations from the old Latin records contain the minutes of circuit courts on the Borders. The entries are as like each other as those of a police charge book. Plunder of cattle is the perpetual theme, and the quantity of business done by individuals is sometimes startling. Here is an ordinary specimen:—

"Walter Scott of Howpaslot, allowed to compound for treasonably bringing in William Scott, called Gyde, John his brother, and other traitors of Levyn, to the Hereship of Harehede. Item, for theftuously and treasonably resetting of Henry Scott and other traitors of Levyn: item, for the treasonable stouthrief of forty oxen and cows, and two hundred sheep, from the tenants of Harehede, at the same time. Robert Scott of Quhitchester became surety for his entry at the next Justice Aire."

Such were the gentry who, in the words of the namesake of Howpaslot,

"Drove the beeves that made their broth,
From England and from Scotland both."

Another entry like the former, containing more names that will sound not unfamiliar, may be given as a further specimen. The two, from their similarity, will satisfy the reader that it would tend little to edification to make a more extensive selection.

"John Scott of Dalloraine, allowed to compound for art and part of the resetting of John Rede and John Scott in Tushielaw in his theftuous deeds; and especially the time that the said John Scott stole a 'drift' of sheep from Thomas Johnson forth of Quhithop. Item, for treasonably resetting Hector Armstrong, a traitor of Levyn, in his theftuous deeds and treasons, &c., &c. Item, for common oppression of the lieges, in taking and plundering them of their horses and goods by his own authority. Item, for intercommuning with the English in treasonable manner. Item, for common reset of the thieves of Liddesdaile, Eskdale, and Ewesdale. Item, for slaughter of one called Colthride, &c., &c. Robert Scott of Quhitchester became surety to satisfy the parties."

The reader of Scottish history knows that, in the year 1530, James V., finding that by Circuit Courts of Justiciary he produced little more effect upon these Border depredators than if he had made a gratuitous distribution of Cicero de Officiis among them, made war on them, by leading an army through their country, and destroyed their strong-holds, as the German free cities destroyed the castles of their professional brethren on the Rhine. It was on this occasion that Johnny Armstrong visited him with twenty-four armed "gentlemen," according to Pitscottie, "very richly apparelled," and that the king, turning haughtily round from the freebooter's proffered courtesy said, "What wants yon knave that a king should have?" There is something sad in Armstrong's fate. He appears almost to have considered the king one of his own class,—a leader of men, but a greater leader. Somewhat pompous and conceited he appears to have been;—somewhat too trustful in the effect of his hearty hail-fellow-well-met way of approaching the royal presence. In fact, Johnny Armstrong "did not know his place," and treated the king too much like a brother freebooter, of a higher standing than himself. But, in his apprehension and execution, there is something that makes the nearest possible approach to treachery; and we can imagine a blush rising in the royal cheek, when the robber captain turned haughtily round and said, "I am but a fool to seek grace at a graceless face." The entry regarding the redoubted leader, in these records, is as brief as it is humiliating, for the lion had not the telling of the tale;—"John Armstrong, alias BlakJok, and Thomas his brother, convicted of common theft, and reset of theft, &c., hanged."

During the same reign, outbreaks in the Highlands assumed a somewhat similar character to those of the Border rievers; but the Celts conducted their operations on a much larger scale, and we intend to devote to them a separate paper.

The disturbances connected with the Reformation are essentially a part of the history of the kingdom, and in that shape too well known to have a place here: but a considerable time before these great convulsions, some smaller offences occasionally connected themselves with the priesthood, and their relation to the rest of the community. Even in the days when the church of Rome was so far Catholic as to be almost co-extensive with Christianity, Scotland was not without occasional ebullitions, in which the savage nature burst the spiritual bonds that, in its ordinary moments, held it in subjection. Boece relates an affair of this sort, and its consequences, with a rapidity almost unmatched, when we consider the quantity and the serious character of the business transacted. It was in the reign of Alexander III. that, according to his translator, "The men of Caithness burnt Adam, their bishop, after that he had cursed them for non-payment of their teinds. King Alexander hearing sic terrible cruelty done to this noble prelate, ceased not till four hundred of the principal doers thereof were hanged." "King Alexander," continues the chronicler, "for this punition was gretumly beloved by the Pope." No wonder! Nearly contemporary with the crusade of James V. against the Border rievers, was the murder of James Inglis, abbot of Culross, by Blacater baron of Tullyallan, and William Lothian, a priest, both of whom were found guilty and beheaded, while others were acquitted. The trial seems to have excited much interest, for Bishop Leslie tells us that the ceremony of the degradation of the priest, previously to his being handed over to the civil power, took place upon "ane public scaffold in the toun of Edinburgh," "the King, the Queen, and a great multitude of people being present." A year or two afterwards we find the somewhat singular circumstance of a whole list of priests charged with an act of violence;—"John Roull, prior of Pittenweem; Patrick and Bartholomew Forman, and six other canons; Mr Alexander Ramsay, rector of Muckart; Sir John Ramsay, and three other chaplains, and John Blackadder, parish clerk of Sawling." They were re-pledged to be tried by their own ecclesiastical court. It appears that, in the course of a dispute regarding the right to the produce of the land of Pittenweem, an officer of the court was appointed to reap the crop. When he repaired to the spot, the sub-prior and an assemblage of followers threatened him with violence. He found himself placed in a very curious position, and made an equally curious request. When a messenger is deforced, those who have used violence are liable to damages. The messenger on this occasion, being a shrewd and calculating man, surveyed the forces of his opponents before making a "return of deforcement." To his mortification he perceived that, to use an expression of modern origin, "they were not worth powder and shot." There were none among them "but religious men and priests, hinds' wives and bairns, which were not responsal to our sovereign lord gif he had taken deforce." He made a request that they should "send for Andrew Wood in Pittenweem, John Brown of Anstruther, the laird of Balcasky, or some other responsal persons, to stop him, so that he might indorse his deforcement and depart, which they plainly refused." The request was about as reasonable as if a gentleman, knocked down by a ragged ruffian, were to ask him to get some capitalist, able to pay respectable damages, to come and aid in the operation. The prior, meanwhile, came to the assistance of his subordinates, and put himself at the head of a truly formidable array: three hundred men, who "with hagbuts, culverings, cross-bows, hand-bows, spears, halberts, axes, and swords, came in arrayed battle, with convocation and ringing of their common bell," and, falling on the messenger's party, "shot divers pieces of artillery at them." The ecclesiastical people were removed to their own court, so that we lose trace of the proceedings against them. Some of the laymen were charged with the slaughter of the messenger's followers, and others outlawed for failing to appear.

The same Spartan brevity that characterises the early portions of the criminal records, sometimes reduces the history of bloody family feuds, the particulars of which might fill volumes of romance, to the most tantalising dimensions. They are rather inventoried or enumerated by head-mark, than even recorded, and generally present no more satisfactory detail than the following:—

"1554, Oct. 26.—Robert Henry, alias Deill amang us, convicted of art and part of the cruel slaughter of Thomas Bissate, young laird of Querrel. Beheaded."

"1532, July 3.—Rolland Lindesay, Alan Lokhart of Lee, and William Mosman, convicted of art and part of the cruel slaughter of Ralph Weir. Beheaded."

That one of the parties might be a magistrate administering the law, was no impediment to the prosecution of a feud, but rather served to give solemnity and importance to the perpetration of some act of vengeance: thus—

"1527, October 8.—George Ramsay of Clatty, John Betoune of Balfour, James Betoune Of Melgum, John Grahame of Claverhouse, and others, found caution to underly the law at the first Justice Aire of Fife, for convocation of the lieges, to the number of 80 persons, and in warlike manner invading John Lord Lindesay, Sheriff of Fife, in the execution of his office, in a fenced court within the Tolbooth of Cowper, the doors being shut, and the assize inclosed; and for breaking up the said doors."

The meagreness of these entries whets one's appetite for some detail of the stirring and tragical events of which they form the bare indexes. With the exception of the great Highland feuds, which burned on so large a scale as to be in a manner historical, the earliest detailed account of a crime arising in family animosity is connected with the feud between the Drummonds and the Blairs in the year 1554. The crime which brought the feud within the notice of the law, was the murder of George Drummond of Leadcrieff and William his son. The perpetrators, besides a long list of Blairs, include several other names still known in the Braes of Perthshire—such as Chalmers, Butter, Smyth, and Robertson. They were charged with assembling to the number of eighty, "with jacks, coats of mail, steel bonnets, lance-staffs, long culverings with lighted lints, and other weapons invasive." The day on which this tumultuous assembly proceeded to their work of vengeance was a Sunday, and the place chosen for the perpetration was the church of Blair. Being apparently afraid of the number of friends and retainers by whom their victims happened to be surrounded during the performance of divine worship, it is stated that they were obliged to postpone their purpose, and that "they passed to the Laird of Gormok's place, and their dyned with him:" a pretty large dinner-party, certainly. Leaving spies to watch the enemy's motions, they were soon afterwards summoned to their task, and their victims became an easy prey. The occupation of Drummond and his son—when we remember that it was a Sabbath afternoon—might, perhaps, be scarcely considered so characteristic of Scottish habits as their assassination. They were "alane, at their pastime-play, at the row-bowles, in the high market-gate, beside the kirk of Blair, in sober manner, trusting na trouble nor harm to have been done to them, but to have lived under God's peace."

The retribution on the offenders is certainly not the least curious part of the affair. That eighty armed men should seize, and put to death, two individuals, either in or out of a church, appears to have been a matter with which the law and the public were under no obligation to interfere, if the parties immediately interested could come to terms. Accordingly, we find on the record some fragments of a negotiation between the head of the Drummonds and the murderers. Some of them, among other more substantial offers, agree "to gang, or cause to gang," the four head pilgrimages of Scotland; to do penance for the souls of the dead for any reasonable number of years; and, thirdly, "to do honour to the kin and friends" by kneeling and offering the handle of a naked sword held by the point. These offers are treated with some disdain, as too "general and simple" to require an answer. A further offer of a thousand merks is treated with more attention; but the kin declare that it is far too small a fine "for the committing of so high, cruell, and abominable slaughters and mutilations of set purpose." To heighten the picture, the deed of the murderers is set in contrast with the peaceable and inoffensive conduct of the deceased, whose great merit was his "never offending them, neither by drawing of blood, taking kirks, tacks, steadings, or rooms, over any of their heads, or their friends'." Thus the murder would have been considered less unjustifiable, if the victim had ever been concerned in ejecting his assailants from their holdings, or offering to take them "over their head:" a doctrine of the sixteenth century in Scotland, which events of the nineteenth, in other parts of the empire, have made only too intelligible. The negotiation was not quite successful, for some of the parties were beheaded. One of them, Chalmers of Drumlochie, along with an offer to let his son marry Drummond's daughter, and his cousin marry his sister, "without any tocher,"—an arrangement which he seems to have thought might be equivalent to "lands, goods, or money," of none of which was he possessed,—proclaimed himself "ready to do any other thing quhilk is possible to him, as please my lord and friends to lay to his charge, except his life and heritage." He bound himself to Lord Drummond as a personal vassal and follower, by a "band of man-rent:" an instrument well-known in old Scottish jurisprudence, and perpetually cropping out in connexion with any historical events—such as the murder of Rizzio,—in which many persons united themselves together for the perpetration of a great crime. It was a curious feature of national character,—the form of law running down through every thing, even to the very document framed for setting law at defiance. Chalmers' bond was merely one of general partisanship and following, and he bound himself to the Drummonds, and their heirs, to "take their true and one-fold part, in all and sundry their actions and causes, and ride and gang with them therein upon their expenses, when they require me or my heirs thereto, against all and sundry persons, our sovereign lady and the authority of this realm alanerly excepted. And hereto I bind and oblige me and my heirs to the said noble and mighty lord and his heirs in the straitest form and sicker stile of band of manrent that can be devised, no remeid nor exception of law to be proponed nor alleged in the contrair." It might be no small consolation to the chief who had lost a vassal to get a slave in his stead; but the public peace would not be much benefited by this method of settlement.

Some of the precautions against turbulent offences are not less curious than this method of dealing with them when they were committed. An heiress might be compelled to find security, or enter into recognisances that she shall not give her hand and fortune to an outlaw or scapegrace. Thus, on the 13th of September 1563, Mariene Carruthers, being "ane of the twa heretrixes of Moweswald," produced two landed proprietors who became bound that she "shall not mary ane chief traiter nor other broken man of the country, nor join herself with any sic person, under the pain of ane thousand pounds."

Whatever it may have been in England, there was little divinity hedging a Scottish king of the sixteenth century. Perhaps, as a rich peer and a poor peer are very different things in popular estimation, though equal in the Lord Chamberlain's list of precedence, so it may have been with kings. The Scottish king was poor, ill-housed, parsimoniously served, meagerly guarded. His pulse might beat with the blood of a hundred monarchs; but the far-stretching palaces, the long gorgeous trains of attendants, the wealth at command, were wanting, and divine right was but a theory, that could neither give parasites rich offices, nor dazzle the eyes of worshippers. Thus it happens that, side by side with the most magnificent theoretical assumptions of regal prerogative, stand the most ludicrous instances of the crown's weakness and smallness. On the 11th July 1526, Robert Bruce of Airth and others are respited for having committed a highway robbery on his Majesty's artillery—"for art and part of the stouthrief of certain manganels and artillery coming from the castle of Stirling to the king's Majesty, at his burgh of Edinburgh, for the defence of his person; and for art and part of the stouthrief of the king's letters from his officers, and laying violent hands on them." We have not far to wander for like instances, making the monarch a simple human being, against whom one commits, not the majestic crime of high treason, but the vulgar offences of theft and robbery. Thus, in the very next entry, we find "Walter Drummond acquitted by an assize of art and part of the theft and concealment of the king's crown from his crown-room, with the precious stones therein contained, forth of the palace and monastery of Holyrood."

Every petty laird dined and slept within the walls of his thick square tower; isolated by moat or precipice, by long dark passages and iron grated door. In an age when individuals thus protected themselves, it naturally astonishes one to observe how accessible the royal person generally appears to have been—how slightly protected from contact with the people, how easily approached by the assassin. One man was able to remove all the impediments which stood in the way of the Highland band who slew James I. at Perth. The murder of Rizzio, with all its circumstances of cool premeditation, and calm, steady, bitter insult, need not be recalled to the reader, among the other incidents, which show how thin a partition separated the sovereign from rude violence. The various forms in which that turbulent and most pertinacious of rebels, Francis Earl of Bothwell, assailed King James, are fraught with a ludicrous versatility in the art of haunting and tormenting a king. The official act of forfeiture characterised it as "invading, assieging, and persuing of his Majesty's most noble person, by fire and sword, breaking up his chalmer doors with fore hammers, and cruelly slaying his Highness' servants coming to his Majesty's rescue." "Ane treason and cruelty," continues the indignant document, "not heard nor seen committed by subjects so highly obliged to their native king and prince." The contemporary chronicler, Birrel, characterised the outrage as "a stoure," which the rebel created by striking "with ane hammer at his Majesty's chamber door." In his more renowned and successful attempt, the pathway to the person of royalty was so completely cleared for him by a courageous female, the Duchess of Athole, whose house was next door to the palace, that the weapons of the guard were removed; the queen's bed-room, to which the beleaguered monarch might have fled, was locked; and the prime conspirator and his assistant were comfortably lodged behind the arras of the ante-room to the king's sleeping apartment. What might not a boy Jones have accomplished in those days? Should we, however, pursue this subject further, we would be trespassing on that ground of established history which it is our desire on the present occasion to avoid.

SIR SIDNEY SMITH.

[R]

A glance at the history of European fleets would give, perhaps, the highest conception of human powers in the whole progress of mankind. Philosophy, literature, and legislation, of course, have attained illustrious distinctions. But the naval service combines every thing: personal intrepidity, the strongest demand upon personal resources, the quickest decision, the most vigorous exertion of manual and mechanical skill, the sternest hardihood, and the most practical and continual application of science.

The unrivalled triumph of human invention is the instrument by which all those powerful qualities are brought into play: a ship of the line, with all its stores, its crew, and its guns on board, is the wonder of the world. What must be the dexterity of the arrangement by which a thousand men can be victualled, at the rate of three meals a-day, for four months; a thousand men housed, bedded, clothed, and accoutred; a battery of a hundred and twenty guns—the complement of an army of fifty thousand men, and two or three times the weight of field-guns—fought; this mighty vessel navigated through every weather, and the profoundest practical science applied to her management, through night and day, for years together? No combination of human force and intellectual power can contest the palm with one of those floating castles, of all fortresses the most magnificent, the most effective, and the most astonishing.

The history of the British navy, in its present form, begins with that vigorous and sagacious prince, Henry VII., who was the first builder of ships, calculated not merely for the defence of the coast, but as an establishment of national warfare. The strong common-sense of his rough, but clear-headed son, Henry VIII., saw the necessity for introducing order into the navy; and he became the legislator of the new establishment. He first constructed an admiralty, a Trinity-board for the furtherance of scientific navigation; appointed Woolwich, Deptford, and Portsmouth as dockyards, and declared the naval service a profession.

Elizabeth, who had all the sagacity of Henry VII., and all the determination of his successor, paid especial attention to the navy; and the national interest was the more strongly turned to its efficacy by the preparations of Spain, which was then the paramount power of Europe. When the Armada approached the English shores, she met it with a navy of one hundred and seventy-six ships, manned with fourteen thousand men. And in that spirit of wise generosity, which always marked her sense of public service, she doubled the pay of the sailor, making it ten shillings a-month. The defeat of the Armada gave a still stronger impulse to the popular feeling for the sea; signals were formed into a kind of system, and all the adventurous spirits of her chivalric court sought fame in naval enterprise.

From that period a powerful fleet became an essential of British supremacy; and the well-known struggle of parties, in the time of the unfortunate Charles, began in the refusal of a tax to build a fleet. In the early part of his reign, Charles had built the largest ship of his time, "The Sovereign of the Seas," carrying one hundred guns.

The civil war ruined every thing, and the navy was the first to suffer. Cromwell found it dilapidated, but his energy was employed to restore it. Blake, by his victories, immortalised himself, and raised the name of the British fleet to the highest point of renown; and Cromwell, at his death, left it amounting to one hundred and fifty-four sail, of which one-third were of the line. The Protector was the first who proposed naval estimates, and procured a regular sum for the annual support of the fleet.

The Dutch war, in the reign of Charles, compelled further attention to the navy; and when William ascended the throne, he found one hundred and fifty-four vessels, carrying nearly six thousand guns; but the French still exceeded us by one thousand guns.

In the reigns of George I. and II. the fleet continued to increase in size, strength, and discipline. Much of this was owing to the Spanish and French wars. In the war of 1744 we had taken thirty-five sail of the French line! But the incessant treachery of French politics was soon to be still more strikingly exhibited, and more severely punished.

The revolt of the American colonies stimulated the French government to join the rebels. The hope of doing evil to England has always been enough to excite the hostility of foreigners. France was in alliance with us; but what was good faith to the temptation of inflicting an injury on England? An act of intolerable treachery was committed; France, unprovoked, suddenly sent a fleet and army to the aid of America, and the French war began, to the utter astonishment of Europe.

But there is sometimes a palpable retribution even here. In that war, which was wholly naval on the part of France, her fleets were constantly beaten; and the defeat of De Grasse, in the West Indies, finished the naval contest by the most brilliant victory of the period. Another vengeance was reserved for England in Europe. The siege of Gibraltar, if not undertaken directly at the suggestion of France, at least a favourite project of hers, and attended by French officers and princes, became one of the most gallant and glorious defences on record; the besiegers were defeated with frightful loss, and the war closed in a European acknowledgment of English superiority.

But the retribution had not yet wrought its whole work. Rebellion broke out in France. The French troops returning from America had brought back with them republican views and vices. The treaty-breaking court was destroyed at the first explosion; the treaty-breaking ministers were either slain, or forced to take refuge in England: the treaty-breaking king was sent to the scaffold; and the treaty-breaking nation was shattered by civil and foreign war; until, after a quarter of a century of fruitless blood, of temporary successes, and of permanent defeats, the empire was torn in pieces; France was conquered, Paris was twice seized by the Allies, and Napoleon died a prisoner in English hands.

The naval combats of the American war had a remarkable result. They formed a preparation for the still more desperate combats of the French naval war. They trained the English officers to effective discipline; they accustomed the English sailors to victory, and the French to defeat; and the consequence was, a succession of English triumphs and French defeats in the war of 1793, to which history affords no parallel.

The French republican declaration of war was issued on the memorable first of February 1793. Orders were instantly sent to the ports for the fleet to put to sea. Such was its high state of preparation, that almost immediately fifty-four sail of the line, and a hundred and forty-six smaller vessels, were ready for sea. The republican activity of France had already determined on contending for naval empire; and a fleet of eighty-two sail of the line were under orders, besides nearly as many more on the stocks. But all was unavailing. The defeats suffered in the ten years previous to the peace of Amiens in 1803, stripped France of no less than thirty-two ships of the line captured, and eleven destroyed; and her allies, Holland, Spain, and Denmark, of twenty-six of the line, with five hundred and nineteen smaller ships of war taken or destroyed, besides eight hundred and seven French privateers also taken or destroyed. The French had become builders for the English. Of their ships of the line fifty were added to the English navy.

On the recommencement of the war in 1804, the British fleet numbered nearly double that of the enemy; but the French ships were generally larger and finer vessels. It is difficult to understand from what circumstance the French, and even the Americans, seem always to have the superiority in ship-building. Our mechanical skill seems always to desert us in the dockyard.

During the war, our naval armament continued to increase from year to year, until, in 1810, it had reached the prodigious number of five hundred pennants, of which one hundred were of the line, with one hundred and forty-five thousand seamen and marines!

Since the peace, a good deal of attention has been paid to the construction of ships of war. But it appears to have been more successful in the economical arrangement of the interior than in the figure, which is the essential point for sailing. The names of Seppings, Symonds, Hayes, Inman, and others, have attained some distinction; but we have not yet obtained any certain model of a good sailing ship. Some vessels have succeeded tolerably, and others have been total failures, though built on the same stocks and by the same surveyor. Yet the strength, the stowage, and the safety, have been improved. It is rather extraordinary that government has never offered a handsome reward for the invention of the best sailing model; as was done so long since, and with such effect, in the instance of the time-keepers. Five thousand pounds for a certain approach to the object, and five thousand more for complete success, would set all the private builders on the pursuit; and it can scarcely be doubted that they would ultimately succeed. Even now, the private yacht-builders produce some of the fastest sailing vessels in the world; the merchant ship-builders send out fine ships, of the frigate size, and the private steam-ship builders are unrivalled; while we have continual complaints of the deficiencies of the vessels built in the royal dockyards.

Some of those complaints may be fictitious, and some ignorant; but the constant changes in their structure, and their perpetual repairs, imply inferiority in our naval schools of architecture. The chief attention of the royal dockyards, within these few years, has been turned to the building of large steam-ships, armed with guns of the heaviest calibre. But the attempt is evidently in a wrong direction. The effort to make fighting ships of steamers, ruins them in both capacities. It destroys their great quality, speed; and it exposes them with an inadequate power to the line-of-battle ship. They are incomparable as tugs to a fleet, as conveying troops, as outlying vessels, as every thing but men-of-war. A shot would break up their whole machinery, and leave them at the mercy of the first frigate that brought its broadside to bear upon them in their helpless condition. In all the trials of the fleet during the last two years, the heavy armed steamers were invariably left behind in a gale, while one of the light steamers ran before every frigate.

We have now two fleets on service, one in the Tagus, and another at Malta; but both are weak in point of numbers, though in a high state of equipment. A few rasee guardships are scattered round the coast. Some large steamers remain at Portsmouth and Plymouth ready for service; but, from all accounts, there is nothing of that active and vigorous preparation which ought to be the essential object of the country, while France is menacing us from day to day, while she has an immense naval conscription, is building powerful ships, is talking of invasion, and hates us with all the hatred of Frenchmen. In such emergencies, to think of sparing expense is almost a public crime; and no public execration could be too deep, as no public punishment could be too severe, if neglect of preparation should ever leave us at the mercy of the most mischievous of mankind. But no time is to be thrown away.

Whether we shall be prepared to meet and punish aggression, ought no longer to be left dependent on the will of individuals. The nation must bestir itself. It must have meetings, and subscriptions, and musters. We must be ready to give up a part of our superfluities to save the rest. Whether France intends to attack us, without provocation, and through a mere rage of aggression, we know not; but the language of her journals is malignant, and it is the part of wise and brave men to be prepared.

We shall now give an outline of the gallant career of one of those remarkable men, who, uniting courage and conduct, achieved an imperishable name in our naval annals.

William Sidney Smith was born on the 21st of June 1764. He began his naval career before he was twelve years old. All his family, for four generations, had been naval or military. His great-grandfather was Captain Cornelius Smith. His grandfather was Captain Edward Smith, who commanded a frigate, in which he was severely wounded in an attack on one of the Spanish settlements in the West Indies, where he died shortly after. His father was the Captain Smith of the Guards, whose name became so conspicuous on the trial of Lord George Germaine, to whom he was aide-de-camp at the battle of Minden, and who after that trial retired from the army in disgust. Sir Sidney's uncle was a general, and his two brothers were Lieut.-Colonel Douglas Smith, governor of Prince Edward's Island, and John Spencer Smith, who held a commission in the Guards, but afterwards exchanged the service for diplomacy, in which his name became distinguished as an envoy to several Continental courts during the war of the Revolution. Sir Sidney's mother was the daughter of a Mr Wilkinson, an opulent London merchant, who, however, seems to have disinherited his daughter from discontent at her match, and left the chief part, if not the entire, of his property to her sister, who was married to Lord Camelford. Sir Sidney was for a few years at Tunbridge School, from which, however, he was withdrawn at an age so early that nothing but strong natural talent could have enabled him to exhibit in after-life the fluency, and even the occasional eloquence, which distinguished his pen. His first rating on the books of the Admiralty was in the Tortoise, in June 1777. In the beginning of the next year he was appointed to the Unicorn, and began his career by a gallant action, in which his ship captured an American frigate. He was then but fourteen. In 1779 he joined the Sandwich, the flag-ship of Rodney, in which he was present at the victory obtained over the Spaniards in the next year.

Those were stirring times. In the same year he was appointed lieutenant of the Alcide. And in this ship he was present at Graves' action with the French, off the Chesapeake.

In the following year he was in the greatest naval action of the war—the famous battle of the 12th of April 1782, off the Leeward Islands, when Rodney defeated the French fleet, commanded by the Comte de Grasse. In the following May, he was appointed to the command of the Fury sloop, by Rodney; and in the October following was promoted to the rank of captain into the Alcmene, having been on the list of commanders only five months.

Thus he was a captain at the age of eighteen! The war was now at an end; his ship was paid off, and he went to reside at Caen, for the purpose of acquiring a knowledge of the French language. There he spent a well-employed and agreeable time. Many of the French families of condition resided in the neighbourhood; and the young captain, having brought letters to the Duc de Harcourt, governor of the province, was hospitably received. The French were then a polished people; they knew nothing of republicanism, and were not proud of their ferocity; they had none of that frantic hatred of England which is the folly and the fashion of our day, and might be regarded as a civilised people. The duke invited him to his country-seat, and there showed him the improvements in his grounds, and introduced him to his visitors.

Like most men destined to distinction, Sir Sidney Smith was constantly preparing himself for useful service, by the acquisition of knowledge. The Mediterranean is naturally presumed to be the great theatre of naval exploits. He obtained leave of absence, and went to the Mediterranean. While at Gibraltar, thinking, from the violent language of the Emperor of Morocco, that there might be a Moorish war, he made a journey along the coast of Morocco, for the purpose of acquainting himself with the condition of its naval force and harbours. Having obtained the necessary information, which obviously required considerable exertion and no slight expense, he stated its results in a manly and intelligent letter to the Admiralty, offering his services in case of hostilities, and suggesting the appointment of a squadron to be stationed outside the Straits, for the prevention of any naval enterprise on the part of the Moors.

Among the most accessible ports, he mentions Mogadore, which, as not being a bar harbour, is easily approachable by ships of force; and though the works contained many guns, yet they were so ill-placed, that in all probability they could not resist an attack. We recollect that the cannonade of this town was one of the exploits on which the Prince de Joinville plumed his heroism, and of which all France talked as if it were the capture of a second Gibraltar.

The same spirit of inquiry and preparation for probable service led him to Sweden, during the war of the brave and unfortunate Gustavus with the Empress Catherine.

We may pause a moment on the memory of one of the most remarkable princes of his time. Gustavus, born in 1746, in 1771 ascended the throne of Sweden, on the death of his father Frederic.

The Swedish nobility were poor, and affected a singular habit of following the fashions of France, of whose government, probably, the chiefs of their body were pensioners. The lower orders were ignorant, and probably not less corrupted by the gold of Russia. Gustavus found his throne utterly powerless between both,—a States-General possessing the actual power of the throne, and even that assembly itself under the control of a Russian and a French faction, designated as the hats and caps. Gustavus, a man of remarkable talent, great ardour of character, and much personal pride, naturally found this usurpation an insult, and took immediate means for its overthrow. He lost no time; his first efforts were exerted to attach the national militia to his cause. When all was ready, the explosion came. The governor of one of the towns suddenly issued a violent diatribe against the States-General. The king was applied to to punish the contumacious rebel. He instantly sent a large military force, with his brother at its head, to punish the governor. By secret instructions it joined him. The plan was now ripening. In all that follows, we are partly reminded of Charles I., of Cromwell, and of Napoleon. Like Charles, the king entered the assembly of the States and demanded some of the members. Like Napoleon, he had the regiments of the garrison ready on parade, and rushing out of the assembly, he was received by the troops with shouts. The oath of allegiance was renewed to him with boundless acclamation. Several of the chiefs of the States-General were immediately put under arrest, and the whole body were completely intimidated. On the next day, the States-General were once more invited to assemble. The king, at the head of his military staff, like Cromwell, entered the hall, and presented them with the "new constitution." The troops had already settled the question. On its being put to the vote of the assembly, a majority appeared in its favour. The States-General sank into a cipher, and the revolution was triumphant.

The new constitution had given great joy to the people, long disgusted with the arrogance of the States-General. But the nobles, whose powers had been curtailed, nourished a passion for vengeance. The war of 1788 with Russia, in which the finances of the kingdom began to be severely pressed, gave them the opportunity. The States still existed; and the disaffected nobles, influenced their votes, to the extent of refusing the supplies, though the Danes were in the Swedish territory, and actually besieging Gothenburg at the moment. The king must have been undone, but for the patriotism of the mountaineers of Dalecarlia; who, if they could not give him money, gave him men. Gustavus, indignant at his palpable injuries, now determined on extinguishing the power which had thus thwarted him in his career. In 1788, he suddenly arrested the chiefs of the opposition, and introduced a law, still more controlling the power of the nobles. But this act was regarded as doubly tyrannical, and deserving of double vengeance.

On the conclusion of the war within two years after, the malcontents, fearful that the leisure of peace would produce further assaults on their privileges, resolved to take the decision into their own hands.

The period began to be troubled. The French revolution had just broken out, and it had at once filled all the Continental sovereigns with alarm, and all the population with vague theories of wealth, enjoyment, and freedom. The king of Sweden, known for his talents, distinguished in war, and loud in his hatred of France and her furies, had been chosen by the allied monarchs to head the invasion of the republic. Whether the councils of the nobles partook more of fear, or hatred, or the hope of political overthrow, can now be scarcely ascertained; but they issued in an atrocious conspiracy against the royal life.

It is remarkable that there is scarcely an instance of conspiracy against the lives of eminent personages, in which the design was not previously discovered, and was successful only through an unwise and contemptuous disregard of the intelligence. This seems to have been the course of things, from the days of Cæsar. The King of Sweden was informed of his danger; and even that the attempt was deferred only until the period of some fêtes, to be given at court. But the king, accustomed to danger, and probably refusing to believe in the existence of a crime rare among his countrymen, disdained all measures of precaution, and even appears not to have taken any further notice of the conspiracy. This might have been the conduct of a brave man, but the consequence showed that it was not the conduct of a wise one.

On the 16th of March 1792, the ball was given: the king appeared among the maskers: he was evidently careless of all hazard, and was conversing with a group, when, Ankerstrom, the intended assassin, entered the Salle. This traitor had been a captain in the service, but had been dismissed, or had conceived himself to be insulted by the king. Gustavus was pointed out to him by one of the conspirators: he stole behind the king, and fired at his back a pistol loaded with slugs and nails. Gustavus fell mortally wounded, and was carried to his chamber in agony. The assassin coolly walked out of the Salle, unobserved in the confusion, but was arrested next day. He was brought to trial, and died the death of a regicide. The chief conspirators were banished. The king languished until the end of the month, when he died, with great firmness and resignation.

On the pistol of Ankerstrom may have turned the fortunes of the French Revolution. Gustavus, a king, a man of military genius, and ardent in all that he undertook, would have escaped all the errors of the Duke of Brunswick. His personal rank would have rendered him independent of the wavering politics of the allies; his talent would have rectified the obsolete notions of their statesmen; and his spirit of enterprise would have rescued his army from the most fatal of all dangers to an invader—delay. He would have overruled the prejudices of the Aulic Council, and the artifices of the Prussian cabinet; and hoisted the allied flag in Paris, before the first levy of the Republic could have taken the field.

France can scarcely be regarded as having an army until 1795. The old royal army, though consisting of 180,000 men, was scattered in position and doubtful in principle. The Republican levies were yet but peasantry. The King of Sweden, at the head of 150,000 Prussians and Austrians, then the first troops in Europe in point of equipment and discipline, would have walked over all resistance; and France would have been spared the most miserable, and Europe the bloodiest, page of its annals.

The fall of Gustavus was also fatal to his dynasty. His son, Gustavus IV., inheriting his passions without his talents, and quarrelling with his allies without being able to repel his enemies, was expelled from the throne, after a series of eccentricities almost amounting to frenzy. He was arrested in the streets by General Alderkreutz, by order of the Diet. His uncle, the Duke of Sudermania, was appointed regent; and, on the king's subsequent abdication, was proclaimed king, by the title of Charles XIII.

On his death, Bernadotte was elected to the throne, which he retained through life;—the solitary instance of permanent power among all the generals of the French empire; but an instance justified by high character, by his acquirement of the throne without crime, and by its possession without tyranny.

There may be no royal road to fame, but there are some habits which naturally lead to it; one of those, activity of spirit, Sir Sidney Smith possessed in a remarkable degree. Wherever any thing new or exciting in his profession was to be seen, there he was certain to be. In 1789, the Swedish and Russian fleets were fighting in the Baltic. England was at peace,—his ship had been paid off; relaxation, the London balls, the Parisian theatres, rambles through the German watering-places, were before him. Ten thousand idlers of the navy would have enjoyed them all without delay. But the young captain was determined to rise in his profession; and, as the time might come when a Swedish or a Russian war might be on the hands of England herself, he felt that it might be advantageous for an English officer to have some knowledge of the Baltic.

Unluckily, the chief portion of his correspondence in Sweden has been lost. It was very voluminous; but, with all his documents on the subject of his Swedish service, it had been left in Camelford House, to the care of its proprietor, Lord Grenville. The house was subsequently let for the residence of the Princess Charlotte, and the papers were removed to the care of a tradesman near Cavendish Square, whose premises were destroyed by fire, and the MSS. were almost wholly consumed. If there is no other moral in the story, it should at least be a warning to diplomatic and warlike authorship, to apply to the press as speedily as possible.

But, from his Swedish expedition is certainly to be dated the whole distinction of his subsequent career. He might otherwise have lingered through life on half-pay, or have been suffered merely to follow the routine of his profession, and been known only by the Navy List.

In 1789, he applied for six months' leave of absence to go to the Baltic, but without any intention to serve. There he was introduced to the King of Sweden, and attracted so much interest by his evident ability and animation of manner, that the king was desirous of fixing him in his service, and of giving him an important command. The temptation was strong, but we need scarcely say, that even if leave were given, it ought not to have been accepted. No man has a right to shed the blood of man but in defence of his own country, or by command of his own sovereign. But in the next year he received the following flattering request from the king.

"Captain Sidney Smith,—The great reputation you have acquired in serving your own country with equal success and valour, and the profound calm which England enjoys not affording you any opportunity to display your talents at present, induce me to propose to you to enter into my service during the war, and principally for the approaching campaign.

"To offer you the same rank and appointments which you enjoy in your own country, is only to offer you what you have a right to expect; but to offer you opportunities of distinguishing yourself anew, and of augmenting your reputation, by making yourself known in these northern seas as the élève of Rodney, Pigot, Howe, and Hood, is, I believe, to offer you a situation worthy of them and yourself, which you will not resist; and the means of acquitting yourself towards your masters in the art of war, by extending their reputation, and the estimate in which they are held already here.

"I have destined a particular command for you, if you accept my offer, concerning which I will explain myself more in detail when I have your definitive answer. I pray God to have you in his holy keeping. Your very affectionate

Gustavus.

"Haga, January 17, 1790."

This showy offer overcame Sir Sidney's reluctance at once; but as he could not enter into the Swedish service without leave from home, he took advantage of the opportunity of bringing home despatches from the minister in Stockholm, and thus became the bearer of his own request. The Duke of Sudermania, the king's second in command, also wrote to him a most friendly letter, entreating of him to return as speedily as possible, and bidding him bring some of his brave English friends along with him.

The offer to him had been the command of the light squadron. Sir Sidney set out on the wings of hope accordingly, and expected to be received with open arms by the ministers; but he was seriously disappointed in the expected ardour of his reception. It was with extreme difficulty that he could find any one to listen to him. At last he obtained an audience of the Duke of Leeds, who, however, would give no answer, until the whole matter had been laid before a cabinet council. The gallant sailor now began to experience some of those trials to which every man in public life is probably subjected, at one time or another. He now determined to wait with patience, and his patience was amply tried. In this state he remained for six weeks, until at last he determined to write to the King of Sweden, proposing to give up his appointment, but stating that he was determined to return to join the Duke of Sudermania as a volunteer. Sir Sidney now offered to be the bearer of despatches to Sweden, but the offer was declined with official politeness. He immediately sailed for Sweden, when the King placed him on board a yacht which followed the royal galley in action.

We must now take leave of this war of row-boats, in which, however, several desperate actions were fought; but though row-boats or galleys were the chief warriors, both fleets exhibited a large number of heavy frigates or line-of-battle ships. Those, however, were scarcely more than buoys, among the narrow channels of the Baltic, obstructed as they were by islands, headlands, and small defensible harbours. Sir Sidney was active on all occasions. In one instance, where an attack on the Russian fleet was proposed, and the objection made by the captains was the difficulty of proceeding by night through an intricate channel, he rode across a neck of land, took a peasant's boat from the shore, sounded the channel during the night, and made himself master of the landmarks, settling the signals with the advanced post on shore.

He was soon after engaged in a desperate action, in which he, with his little troop, having been abandoned by the divisions ordered to attack on other points, was beaten, after a most gallant resistance.

But the King knew how to feel for brave men, however unlucky, and sent him a complimentary letter, on the gallantry and zeal which "he had the faculty of communicating to those who accompanied him." The King, in several communications, remarks on this quality of exciting the spirit of activity and enterprise in others, which seems to have been Sir Sidney's characteristic in almost every period of his naval career; and which doubtless proceeded from peculiar ardour and animation in himself.

The war closed by an armistice and treaty, in 1792. But Sir Sidney then received the reward of his gallant zeal, in his investiture with the Grand Cross of the Swedish Order of the Sword, by George III. himself; which we believe to have been an unusual distinction in the instance of foreign orders, and to have been at the request of the late King of Sweden.

Though Sir Sidney Smith had apparent reason to complain of the coldness of his reception on his first return to England, it is evident that his conduct in Sweden had attracted the attention of ministers. As a simple English captain, attracting the notice of the most warlike monarch of Europe, evidently holding a high place in his confidence, offered a distinguished command, and receiving one of the highest marks of honour that could be conferred by Gustavus, he was regarded as having done honour to his country. But we have heard from those who were intimate with him in early life, that he was also a remarkably striking personage in person and manners; his countenance singularly expressive, his manner full of life, and his language vivid and intelligent. His person was then thin and active, which in after-life changed into heaviness and corpulency—a most complete transformation; but if the countenance had lost all its fire, it retained its good sense and its good nature.

From an early period of the Revolutionary war, the eyes of France had been turned on Egypt, a country which the extravagant descriptions of Savary had represented as capable of "being turned into a terrestrial paradise, if in possession of France." There her men of science were to reveal all the mysteries of the Pyramids, her philosophers were to investigate human nature in its most famous cradle, her soldiers were to colonise in patriarchal ease and plenty; and even her belles and beaux were to luxuriate in gilded galleys on the waters of the inscrutable Nile, and revel in painted palaces in the shade of tropical gardens, and bowers that knew no winter! Further collision with England led to further objects; and in time, when the Republic had assumed a shape of direct hostility with all Europe, with England at its head, the seizure of Egypt tempted France in another form, as the first step to the conquest of India.

But long before this period, the sagacity of the English cabinet had seen the probable direction of French enterprise, and felt the necessity of obtaining all possible information relative to the coasts of Asiatic Turkey and Syria. For this important purpose Sir Sidney Smith was chosen, and sent on a secret mission to Constantinople; partly, perhaps, from the circumstance that his brother, Mr Spencer Smith, who was then our ambassador there, would communicate with him more advantageously than with a stranger; but undoubtedly much more for his qualifications for a service of such interest and importance.

Nothing is left of those memorials, further than a few notes of the expenses of his journeys; from which he appears to have examined the coasts of the Black Sea, the Bosphorus, the Dardanelles, the Archipelago, and the Ionian Islands. But he was now to distinguish himself on a higher scene of action.

In September 1793, the officers of the French navy at Toulon, and the chief inhabitants, disgusted with the Revolution, and alarmed by the cruelties of the Revolutionary tribunals; hoisted the white flag, and proposed to Lord Hood, commanding the British squadron off the coast, that he should take possession of the city and shipping, in the name of Louis XVII.

It must be confessed, that there never was a great military prize, more utterly thrown away, nor an effort of loyalty more unlucky. The whole transaction only gives the lesson, that what the diplomatists call "delicacy" is wholly misplaced when men come to blows, and that in war promptitude is every thing. The first act of Lord Hood ought to have been to remove the fleet, strip the arsenals, and send the whole to England, there to be kept secure for its rightful king. The next ought to have been, to give every inhabitant the means of escaping to some safer quarter, with his property. The third ought to have been, to garrison the forts with every soldier who could be sent from Gibraltar and England; from which we could have sent 50,000 men within three weeks. Toulon then might have been made the stronghold of a loyal insurrection in the south, and the garrison of all the foreign troops, which the French princes could muster.

Not one of these things was done. The ships were left until the last moment, through "delicacy" to the people; the people were left to the last moment, through a perilous confidence in the chances of war; and Toulon was lost by an attack of ragamuffins, and the battery of Lieutenant Buonaparte, which an English regiment would have flung into the sea, and sent its commandant to an English prison.

But, even in the midst of these instances of ill-luck, Sir Sidney Smith made himself conspicuous by his services. When returning from his Mediterranean survey, he happened to stop at Smyrna; and there observing a number of British sailors loitering about the streets, he offered them service; and purchasing a small lateen-rigged vessel, about forty feet long, which he manned with forty sailors, and steering for Toulon, he turned over his little vessel and its crew to Lord Hood.

This was another example of that activity of mind and ready attention to circumstances, which characterised his career. A hundred other officers might have seen those sailors wandering about Smyrna, without thinking of the purchase of a vessel to make them useful to their country; or might have been too impatient to return to England, for a detour to Toulon.

Lord Hood, though a brave man, was a dull one, and had all the formality of a formal time. Sir Sidney's gallant volunteering was forgotten, and the defence of Toulon was carried on under every possible species of blundering. At length the enemies' guns began to play from the heights, and the order was given for the fleet to retire. Whether even this order was not premature may still be doubted; for the French batteries, few and weak, could scarcely have made an impression on so powerful a fleet; and the British broadsides might have made it impossible for the enemy to hold the town, especially after all its works had been dismantled. But the order was given, and was about to be executed, when Sir Sidney asked the question which seems to have occurred to no one else: "What do you mean to do with all those fine ships: do you mean to leave them behind?" Some one called out,—"Why, what do you mean to do with them?" The prompt answer was,—"Burn them, to be sure." By some chance, the answer reached Lord Hood's ears; he immediately sent for Sir Sidney, and to him, though on half pay, and then irregularly employed, was given this important duty.

The employment was highly perilous, not only from the hazards of being blown up, or buried in the conflagration, but from the resistance of the populace and galley-slaves, besides that of the troops, who, on the retreat of the English, were ready to pour into the town. His force, too, was trifling, consisting only of the little vessel which he had purchased at Smyrna, three British gun-boats, and three Spanish. But the operation was gallantly performed. The stores of the arsenal were set on fire; a fireship was towed into the middle of the French fleet, and all was soon one immense mass of flame: perhaps war never exhibited a scene more terribly sublime. Thirteen sail of the line, with all the storehouses, were blazing together. The French, too, began to fire from the hills, and the English gun-boats returned the fire with discharges of grapeshot on the troops as they came rushing down to the gates of the arsenal. All was uproar and explosion.

The most melancholy part of the whole narrative is the atrocious vengeance of the Republicans on gaining possession. An anecdote of this scene of horror, and of the especial treachery of Napoleon, is given on the authority of Sir Sidney.

"The Royalist inhabitants, or the chief portion of them, had been driven into the great square of the town, and compressed there into one huge mass. Napoleon then discharged his artillery upon them, and mowed them down. But as many had thrown themselves on the ground to escape the grapeshot, and many were only wounded, this villain of villains cried out aloud,—'The vengeance of the Republic is satisfied, rise and go to your homes.' But the wretched people no sooner stood up than they received another discharge of his guns, and were all massacred. If any one act of man ever emulated the work of the devil, this act, by its mingled perfidy and cruelty, was the one."

It is impossible to read the life of this intrepid and active officer, without seeing the encouragement which it holds forth to enterprise. In this sense it ought to have a part in the recollections of every soldier and sailor of England. Sir Sidney had perhaps rivals by the thousand in point of personal valour and personal intelligence; but the source of all his distinctions was, his never losing sight of his profession, and never losing an opportunity of service. On this principle we may account for every step of his career, and on no other. He appears to have had no parliamentary interest, no ministerial favour, no connexion of any kind which could essentially promote his interest, and even to have been somewhat neglected by admirals under whom he served. But he never lost an opportunity of being present where any thing was to be done, and of doing his best. It was this which produced even from the formal English admiral a note of this order, written on the evening of the conflagration,—

"My dear Sir Sidney,—You must burn every French ship you possibly can, and consult the governor on the proper method of doing it, on account of bringing off the troops.

"Very faithfully yours,

"Hood."

This was written at three in the afternoon. It would appear that Sir Sidney, in his answer, made some observation with reference to the smallness of the force put under his command. His Lordship, in a note dated at six in the evening, thus replied:—

"I am sorry you are so apprehensive of difficulty in the service you volunteered for. It must be undertaken; and if it does not succeed to my wishes, it will very probably facilitate the getting off the governor and the troops in safety, which is an object. The conflagration may be advantageous to us. No enterprise of war is void of danger and difficulty; both must be submitted to.

"Ever faithfully yours,

"Hood."

The remonstrance of Sir Sidney must evidently have been with respect to the inadequacy of preparation, for he remarks,—"I volunteered the service under the disadvantage of there being no previous preparation for it whatever;" and the only failure arose from the want of force; for he was unable to burn the ships in the basin; while it argues extraordinary skill and daring, to have effected the burning of the rest with a few gun-boats and a felucca.

But this service, executed at the right time, and in the right spirit, immediately fixed upon him the eyes of the fleet; and the admiral, on sending home the despatches from Toulon, made Sir Sidney their bearer. He was received with great attention by ministers; and Lord Spencer, then at the head of the Admiralty, particularly complimented him on the promptness and energy of his services at Toulon.

As it was now determined to fit out a light squadron for the purpose of disturbing the enemy's coasts on the Channel, Sir Sidney Smith was selected for the command; and he was appointed to the Diamond frigate, with which he immediately made sail for the coast of Holland. This little fleet consisted of thirty-two vessels of various sizes, from the frigate to the gun-boat. With this fleet he kept watch on the enemy's harbours, hunted privateers, made landings on the shore, carried off signal-posts, and kept the whole coast in perpetual alarm. One of those services shows the activity and intelligence required on this duty. It being rumoured that a French expedition had sailed from Brest, Sir Sidney was ordered to execute the difficult task of ascertaining the state of the harbour. He disguised his ship so as to look like a French vessel, hoisted French colours, and ran into the road. Unluckily, a large French ship of war was working in at the same time, but which took no notice of him, probably from the boldness of his navigation. At sunset the Frenchman anchored, as the tide set strong out of the harbour, and Sir Sidney was compelled to do the same. He had hoped that, on the turning of the tide, she would have gone up the harbour, but there she lay in the moonlight, a formidable obstacle. The question was now whether to leave the attempt incomplete, or to run the hazard of passing the French line-of-battle ship. The latter course was determined on, and she was fortunately passed. As they advanced up the road, two other ships, one of which was a frigate, were seen at anchor. Those, too, must be passed, and even the dawn must be waited for before a good view of the road could be obtained. The crew were ordered to be silent: the French ships were passed without notice. As morning broke, a full view of the road was obtained, and it was evident that the enemy's fleet had put to sea. The task was performed, but the difficulty was now to escape. On the first attempt to move towards the sea, a corvette, which was steering out in the same direction, began to give the alarm by making signals. The two vessels at anchor immediately prepared to follow, and the line-of-battle ship made a movement so as completely to obstruct the course. There seemed to be now no alternative but to be sunk or taken. These are the emergencies which try the abilities of men, and the dexterity on this occasion was equal to the difficulty. As resistance was hopeless, Sir Sidney tried stratagem. Running directly down to the line-of-battle ship, which he now perceived to be in a disabled state, pumping from leaks and under jury topmasts, he hailed the captain in French, which he fortunately spoke like a native, offering him assistance. The captain thanked him, but said that he required none, as he had men enough; but on this occasion Sir Sidney exhibited a feeling of humanity which did him still higher honour than his skill. As he lay under the stern of the Frenchman he might have poured in a raking fire, and, of course, committed great slaughter among the crew, who were crowded on the gunwale and quarter, looking at his ship. The guns were double loaded, and his crew were ready and willing. But, considering that, even if the enemy's vessel had been captured, it would be impossible to bring her off, and that the only result could be the havoc of life; and, to use the language of his despatch, "conceiving it both unmanly and treacherous to make such havoc while speaking in friendly terms and offering our assistance, I trusted that my country, though it might be benefited in a trifling degree by it, would gladly relinquish an advantage to be purchased at the expense of humanity and the national character; and I hope, for these reasons, I shall stand justified in not having made use of the accidental advantage in my power for the moment."

And even then this act of generosity may not have been without its reward; for the other ships, seeing that he was spoken to by the French vessel, discontinued the pursuit. The exploit was finished, and the harbour was left behind. If he had fired a shot into the exposed line-of-battle ship, he would inevitably have been chased by the others and probably taken. From this period scarcely any of the smaller convoys, conveying ammunition or provisions to the enemy's ports, could escape.

Yet, in the midst of this warlike vigilance and vigour, humanity was not overlooked; the British vessels were forbidden to fire at patrols on shore, and were ordered to spare fishing-boats, villages, and private dwellings.

The winter was spent in hunting along the shore every French flotilla that ventured to peep out. But one action deserves peculiar remembrance, from its mingled daring and perseverance. A convoy, consisting of a corvette of 16 guns, four brigs, and two sloops, had been chased into, Herqui. As they, of course, were likely to take the first opportunity to escape, Sir Sidney determined not to wait for the rest of his squadron, but to attempt their capture in the Diamond frigate alone. While he was preparing for this adventure, two other armed vessels joined him. The attempt was hazardous, for the bay was fortified. Two batteries were placed on a high promontory, and the coast troops were ready to oppose a landing.

The Diamond dashed into the bay, but the fire from the batteries began to be heavy, and could be returned only with slight effect, from the commanding nature of their position. It was, therefore, necessary to try another style of attack. This was done by ordering the marines and boarders into the boats, and sending them to attack the batteries in the rear. This movement, however, was met by a heavy fire of musketry on the boats, from the troops drawn up to oppose their landing. The frigate, too, was suffering from the fire of the batteries, and the navigation was intricate. At this critical moment Sir Sidney pointed out to Lieutenant Pine, one of his officers, that it might be possible to climb the precipice in front of the batteries! The gallant officer and his men started immediately, landed under the enemy's cannon, climbed the precipice, and made themselves masters of the guns, before the troops on the beach could regain the heights. The frigate continued her fire to check the advance of the troops. The guns were spiked, and the re-embarkation was effected. It might have been expected that this brilliant little assault could not have been effected without serious loss; but such is the advantage of promptitude and gallantry, that the whole party returned safe, with the exception of one officer wounded.

But the enemy's vessels still remained. To get them out was impossible, for the rocks around were covered with troops, who kept up an incessant fire of musketry. It was, therefore, determined to burn them. The corvette and a merchant ship were set on fire: but the tide falling, the troops poured down close to the vessels, and the party in possession of them returned on board.

Here Sir Sidney might have stopped. He had done enough to signalise his own talent and the bravery of his people. But this success was not enough for him. The convoy were still before him, though still under the protection of the troops. He determined on attacking them again. The boats were manned and rowed to the shore. The troops poured in a heavy fire. But the vessels were finally all boarded and burnt, with the exception of one armed lugger.

Enterprises of this order are the true school of the naval officer. They may seem slight, but they call out all the talent and activity of the profession. They might also have had an important influence on the naval war, for these convoys generally carried naval stores to the principal French dockyards, and the loss of a convoy might prevent the sailing of a fleet.

Lieutenant Pine was sent to the Admiralty with the colours which he had captured on the heights, and with a strong recommendation from his gallant captain. The whole affair was regarded in England as remarkably well conceived and well done. The exploits of the Diamond were the popular theme, and Sir Sidney rose into high favour with the Admiralty and the nation.

These are the opportunities which distinguish the frigate service. An officer in a line-of-battle ship must wait for a general engagement. An officer on land must wait for the lapse of twenty years at least before he can expect the command of a regiment, or the chance of seeing his name connected with any distinguished achievement. But the youngest captain, in command of a frigate, may bring the eyes of the nation upon him. The young lieutenant, even the boy midshipman, by some independent display of intrepidity, may fix his name in the annals of the empire.

But the caprices of fortune are doubly capricious in war. While the captain of the Diamond was receiving plaudits from all sides, the mortifying intelligence arrived, that he had fallen into the enemy's hands.

The origin of this casualty was his zeal to capture a lugger, which had done considerable damage among our Channel convoys. Its stratagem was, to follow the convoys, until it could throw men on board, then to let the prize continue her course, to avoid attracting the vigilance of the escorting frigate, and, when night fell, to slip off to a French port. Sir Sidney determined to cut short the lugger's career. At length the opportunity seemed to have come. The vessel was discovered at anchor in the inner fort of Havre under a ten-gun battery. The Diamond's boats were instantly manned and armed; but, on the inquiry who was to command, it was found that the first lieutenant was ill and in bed, and the second and third lieutenants were on shore. Sir Sidney then took the command himself. The attacking party proceeded in four boats and a Thames wherry, in which was Sir Sidney, to the pier of Havre, where the lugger lay. It was night, and the vessel was gallantly boarded on both sides at once, the crew of the wherry boarding over the stern. The Frenchmen on deck were beaten after a short struggle. Sir Sidney, rushing down into the cabin, found the four officers starting from their sleep and loading their pistols. He coolly told them that the vessel was no longer theirs; ordered them to surrender, and they gave up their arms.

But the flood-tide was running strong, and it drove the vessel above the town, there being no wind. At day-light the lugger became the centre of a general attack of the armed vessels of the port. The Diamond could not move from want of wind; and, after a desperate resistance of three quarters of an hour, Sir Sidney and his companions were forced to surrender. Six officers and nineteen seamen were taken.

Sir Sidney's capture was a national triumph, and he was instantly ordered to be sent to Paris. No exchange could be obtained; his name was too well known. He was charged with incendiarism for the burning of Toulon; and it was even hinted that his being found so close to Havre was for the purpose of burning the town.

Sir Sidney's imprisonment was at first in the Abbaye, which had been made so infamously memorable by the slaughters of September 1793. He was afterwards placed in the prison of the Temple. In all probability, the first object was to exhibit him to the Parisians. An English captain as a prisoner was a rare exhibition, and his detention also saved them from the most active disturber of their Norman and Breton navigation. But his confinement was not strict, and he was even suffered occasionally to walk about Paris on giving his parole to the jailer. At length, after various British offers of exchange, which were all rejected by the French, he escaped by a counterfeit order of liberation; and, encountering several hair-breadth hazards, reached Havre, seized a boat, put off, and was taken up at sea by the Argo frigate, commanded by Captain Bowen, who landed him at Portsmouth, and he arrived in London in April 1798, having been in France about two years and a month.

It is sometimes difficult to know, respecting any event, peculiarly in early life, whether it is a misfortune or the contrary. Sir Sidney's capture must have been often felt by him as the severest of calamities, by stopping a career which had already made him one of the national favourites, and had given him promise of still higher distinction. From the command of the Diamond to the dreary chambers of the Temple was a formidable contrast; yet the event which placed him there may have been an instance of something more than what the world terms "good luck." If he had remained in command of his frigate, he might have fallen in some of those fights with the batteries and corvettes which he was constantly provoking. But in his French prison he was safe for the time, and yet not less before the public eye. In reality, the sympathy felt for him there, and the fruitless attempts of the Admiralty to effect his exchange, kept him more the Lion than before; and he returned just in time, to be employed on a service of the first importance, and which, by its novelty, adventure, and romantic peril, seemed to have been expressly made for his genius.

The French expedition, under Napoleon, had taken possession of Egypt; the Turks were a rabble, and were beaten at the first onset. The Mamelukes, though the finest cavalry in the world as individual horsemen, were beaten before the French infantry, as all irregular troops will be beaten by regulars. At this period, the object of the ministry was to excite the indolence of the Turkish government to attempt the reconquest of Egypt, and Sir Sidney was appointed to the command of Le Tigre, a French eighty gun-ship, which had been captured by Lord Bridport three years before. If it be said that he owed this command in any degree to his having been sent on a mission to Turkey some years before, which is perfectly probable; let it be remembered, that that mission itself was owing to the gallantry and intelligence which he had displayed in his volunteer expedition to Sweden. Sir Sidney's present appointment was a mixture of diplomacy with a naval command; for he was appointed joint-plenipotentiary with his brother Spencer Smith, then our minister at Constantinople. But this junction of offices produced much dissatisfaction in both Lord St Vincent and Nelson; and it required no slight address, on the part of Sir Sidney, to reconcile, those distinguished officers to his employment. However, his sword soon showed itself a more effectual reconciler than his pen, and the siege of Acre proved him a warrior worthy of their companionship. After the siege, Nelson, as impetuous in his admiration as he was in his dislikes, wrote, to Sir Sidney the following high acknowledgment:—

"My dear Sir,—I have received, with the truest satisfaction, all your very interesting letters, to July. The immense fatigue you have had in defending Acre against such a chosen army of French villains, headed by that arch-villain Buonaparte, has never been exceeded; and the bravery shown by you and your brave companions is such as to merit every encomium which all the civilised world can bestow. As an individual, and as an admiral, will you accept of my feeble tribute of praise and admiration, and make them acceptable to all those under your command?

"Nelson.

"Palermo, Aug. 20, 1799."

Sir Sidney found the Sultaun willing to exert all the force of his dominions, but wretchedly provided with the means of exertion—a disorganised army, an infant navy, empty arsenals, and all the resources of the state in barbaric confusion. Two bomb-vessels and seven gun-boats were all that he could procure for the coast service. He ordered five more gun-boats to be laid down, waiting for guns from England. But he was soon called from Constantinople. Advice had been received by the governor of Acre, Achmet Pasha, that Buonaparte, at the head of an army of twelve or thirteen thousand men, was about to march on Acre. The position of this fortress renders it the key of the chief commerce in corn at the head of the Levant, and its possessor has always been powerful. Its possession by the French would have given them the command of all the cities on the coast, and probably made them masters of Syria, if not of Constantinople. Buonaparte, utterly reckless in his cruelties, provided they gained his object, had announced his approach by the following dashing epistle to the Pasha:—"The provinces of Gaza, Ramleh, and Jaffa are in my power. I have treated with generosity those of your troops who placed themselves at my discretion. I have been severe towards those who have violated the rights of war. I shall march in a few days against Acre." His severity had already been exhibited on an unexampled scale. Having taken Jaffa by assault, and put part of the garrison to the sword, he marched his prisoners, to the number of three thousand seven hundred, to an open space outside the town. As they were disarmed in the town, they could make no resistance; and, as Turks, they submitted to the will of Fate. There they were fired on, until they all fell! When this act of horrid cruelty was reported in Europe by Sir Robert Wilson, its very atrocity made the honourable feelings of England incredulous; but it has since been acknowledged in the memoir by Napoleon's commissary, M. Miot, and the massacre is denied no longer. The excuse which the French general subsequently offered was, that many of the Turks had been captured before, and liberated on parole; that having thus violated the laws of war, he could neither take them with him, nor leave them behind. But the hollowness of this excuse is evident. The Turks knew nothing of our European parole; they felt that it was their duty to fight for their Pasha; they might have been liberated with perfect impunity, for, once deprived of arms, and stript of all means of military movement, they must have lingered among the ruins of an open town, or dispersed about the country. The stronger probability is, that the massacre was meant for the purposes of intimidation, and that on the blood of Jaffa the French flag was to float above the gates of Acre.

It is satisfactory to our natural sense of justice, to believe that this very act was the ruin of the expedition. Achmet Pasha was an independent prince, and might have felt little difficulty in arranging a treaty with the invader, or receiving a province in exchange for the temporary use of his fortress. But the bloodshed of Jaffa must have awakened at once his abhorrence and his fears. The massacre also excited Sir Sidney's feelings so much, that he instantly weighed anchor, and arrived at Acre two days before the French vanguard. They were first discovered by Le Tigre's gun-boats, as the heads of the column moved round the foot of Mount Carmel. There they were stopt by the fire of the boats, and driven in full flight up the mountains.

But another event of more importance occurred almost immediately after. A flotilla was seen from the mast-head of Le Tigre, consisting of a corvette and nine sail of gun-vessels. The flotilla was instantly attacked, and seven struck, the other three escaped, it being justly considered of most importance to secure the prizes, they containing the whole battery of artillery, ammunition, &c., intended for the siege. Previously to his arrival, Sir Sidney had sent Captain Miller of the Theseus, a most gallant officer, and Colonel Phelypeaux, to rebuild the walls, and altogether to put the place in a better defensive order. Nothing could be more fortunate than this capture, for it at once gave Sir Sidney a little fleet, supplied him with guns and ammunition for the defence of the place, and, of course, deprived the French of the means of attack in proportion. But it is not to be supposed that Napoleon was destitute of guns. He had already on shore four twelve-pounders, eight howitzers, a battery of thirty-two pieces, and about thirty four-pounders. The siege commenced on the 20th of March, and from that day, for sixty days, was a constant repetition of assaults, the bursting of mines, and the breaching of the old and crumbling walls.

At length Buonaparte, conscious that his character was sinking, that he was hourly exposed to Egyptian insurrection, that the tribes of the Desert were arriving, and that every day increased the peril of an attack on his rear by an army from Constantinople, resolved to risk all upon a final assault. After fifty days of open trenches, the Turkish flotilla had been seen from the walls. The rest deserves to be told only in the language of their gallant defender.

"The constant fire of the besiegers was suddenly increased tenfold. Our flanking fire from afloat was, as usual, plied to the utmost, but with less effect than heretofore, as the enemy had thrown up epaulements of sufficient thickness to protect them from the fire. The French advanced, and their standard was seen at daylight on the outer angle of the town, which they had assaulted. Hassan Bey's troops were preparing to land, but their boats were still only halfway to the shore."

It was at this moment that the spirit and talents of Sir Sidney had their full effect. If he had continued to depend on the fire of his boats, the place would have been taken. The French were already masters of a part of the works, and they would probably have rushed into the town before the troops of Hassan Bey could have reached the shore.

"This," says the despatch, "was a most critical point, and an effort was necessary to preserve the place until their arrival. I accordingly landed the boats at the mole, and took the crews up to the breach, armed with pikes. The enthusiastic gratitude of the Turks, men, women, and children, at the sight of such a reinforcement, at such a time, is not to be described; many fugitives returned with us to the breach, which we found defended by a few brave Turks, whose most destructive weapons were heavy stones.

"Djezzar Pasha, hearing that the English were on the breach, quitted his station, where, according to ancient Turkish custom, he was sitting to reward such as should bring him the heads of the enemy, and distributing musket cartridges with his own hands. The energetic old man, coming behind us, pulled us down with violence, saying, that if any thing happened to his English friends, all was lost.

"A sortie was now proposed by Sir Sidney, but the Turkish regiment which made it was repulsed. A new breach was made, and it was evident that a new assault in superior force was intended.

"Buonaparte, with a group of generals, was seen on Cœur-de-Lion's Mount, and by his gesticulation, and his despatching an aide-de-camp to the camp, he showed that he only waited for a reinforcement. A little before sunset, a massive column was seen advancing to the breach with solemn step." The Pasha now reverted to his native style of fighting, and with capital effect. "His idea was, not to defend the breach this time, but to let a certain number in, and then close with them, according to the Turkish mode of war. The column thus mounted the breach unmolested, and descended from the rampart into the Pasha's garden, where, in a very few minutes, the most advanced among them lay headless; the sabre, with the addition of a dagger in the other hand, proving more than a match for the bayonet. In this attack, General Lannes, commanding the assault, was wounded, and General Rambaut, with a hundred and fifty men, were killed. The rest retreated precipitately.

"Buonaparte will, no doubt, renew the attack, the breach being perfectly practicable for fifty men abreast! Indeed, the town is not, nor ever has been, defensible by the rules of art. But, according to every other rule, it must and shall be defended. Not that it is worth defending, but we feel that it is by this breach Buonaparte means to march to further conquest.

"'Tis on the issue of this conflict that depends the opinion of the multitude of spectators on the surrounding hills, who wait only to see how it ends, to join the victor. And with such a reinforcement for the execution of his well-known projects, Constantinople, and even Vienna, must feel the shock."

The siege continued, perhaps as no other siege ever continued before; it was a succession of assaults, frequently by night. From the 2d of May to the 9th, there were no less than nine of those assaults! In another letter he writes:—

"Our labour is excessive; many of us, among whom is our active, zealous friend, Phelypeaux, have died of fatigue. I am but half dead; but Buonaparte brings fresh troops to the assault two or three times in the night, while we are obliged to be always under arms. He has lost the flower of his army in these desperate attempts to storm, as appears by the certificates of service which they had in their pockets, and eight generals."

From this period the desperation of Buonaparte was evident. Besides the eight generals killed, he had lost eighty officers, all his guides, carabineers, and most of his artillerymen,—in all, upwards of four thousand soldiers. But the desperation was in vain. All the assaults were repulsed with slaughter. The French grenadiers mounted the breach, only to be shot or sabred. At length, the division of Kleber was sent for. It had gone to the fords of the Jordan to watch the movements of the Turkish army, and had acquired distinction in the Egyptian campaign by the character of its general, and by its successes against the irregular horse of the Desert. On its arrival, it was instantly ordered to the assault. But the attempt was met with the usual bravery of the garrison; and Kleber, after a struggle of three hours, was repulsed. All was now hopeless on the part of the enemy. The French grenadiers absolutely refused to mount to the assault again. Buonaparte was furious at his failure, but where force was useless, he still had a resource in treachery. He sent a flag of truce into the town to propose an armistice for the burial of the dead, whose remains were already poisoning the air. This might naturally produce some relaxation of vigilance; and while the proposal was under consideration, a volley of shot and shells was fired. This was the preliminary to an assault. It, however, was repulsed; and the Turks, indignant at the treachery, were about to sacrifice the messenger who bore the flag. But Sir Sidney humanely interposed, carried him to his ship, and sent him back to the French general with a message of contempt and shame.

Retreat was now the only measure available, and it began on the night of the 20th of May. The battering-train of twenty-three pieces was left behind. The wounded and field-guns had been suddenly embarked in country vessels, and sent towards Jaffa. Sir Sidney put to sea to follow them, and the vessels containing the wounded, instead of attempting to continue their flight, steered down at once to their pursuers, and solicited water and provisions. They received both, and were sent to Damietta. "Their expressions of gratitude were mingled with execrations against their general, who had thus," they said, "exposed them to perish."

As the garrison was without cavalry, the pursuit of the flying enemy could not be followed with any decisive effect. But the gun-boats of the English and Turks continued constantly discharging grapeshot on them, so long as they moved within reach of the shore, and the Turkish infantry fired on them when their march turned inland. Their loss was formidable; the whole tract, between Acre and Gaza, was strewed with the bodies of those who died either of fatigue or wounds. At length two thousand cavalry were put in motion by the Turkish governor of Jaffa, making prisoners all the French who were left on the road, with their guns; and nothing but the want of a strong body of fresh troops to fall on the enemy seems to have prevented the capture of every battalion of that army, which, but two months before, had boasted of marching to Constantinople.

It ought to be remembered, as the crowning honour to his human honours, that the man who had gained those successes, was not forgetful of the true source of all victories which deserve the name. Sir Sidney had gone to Nazareth, and there made this expressive memorandum:—

"I am just returned from the Cave of the Annunciation, where, secretly and alone, I have been returning thanks to the Almighty for our late wonderful success. Well may we exclaim, 'the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong.' W. S. S."

It may naturally be presumed that the whole progress of the siege had interested the fleet and army of England in the highest degree. There had been nothing like the defence of Acre in all the history of European war. A siege is pronounced, by military authorities, to be the most certain operation in war; with a fixed number of troops, and a fixed number of guns in the trenches, the strongest place must fall within a prescribed time. But here was a town almost open, and with no other garrison, for the first six weeks of the siege, than a battalion of half-disciplined Mussulmans, headed by such men as could be spared from two British ships of war.

The whole defence was justly regarded by the nation, less as a bold military service, than as an exploit—one of those singular achievements which are exhibited from time to time, as if to show how far intrepidity and talent combined can go; a splendid example and encouragement to the brave never to doubt, and to the intelligent never to suppose that the resources of a resolute heart can be exhausted.

But the siege of Acre did more. It certainly relieved the Sultaun from a pressure which might have endangered his throne. It may have saved India from an expedition down the Red Sea, for which the native princes looked, with their habitual hatred of their British masters; and above all, it told England that her people were as invincible on shore as on the waves, and prepared her soldiery for those triumphs which were to make the renown of the Peninsular war imperishable.

On the meeting of parliament in September 1799, George III. opened the session with an energetic speech, in which the siege of Acre held a prominent part. The speech said—"The French expedition to Egypt has continued to be productive of calamity and disgrace to our enemies, while its ultimate views against our Eastern possessions have been utterly confounded. The desperate attempt which they have lately made to extricate themselves from their difficulties, has been defeated by the courage of the Turkish forces, directed by the skill, and animated by the courage of the British officer, with the small portion of my naval force under his command."

In the discussion, a few days after, the thanks of the Lords to Sir Sidney Smith, and the seamen and officers under his command, were moved by Lord Spencer, the first Lord of the Admiralty, in terms of the highest compliment.

His lordship said, that he had now to take notice of an exploit which had never been surpassed, and had scarcely ever been equalled;—he meant the defence of St Jean d' Acre by Sir Sidney Smith. He had no occasion to impress upon their lordships a higher sense than they already entertained of the brilliancy, utility, and distinction of an achievement, in which a general of great celebrity, and a veteran and victorious army, were, after a desperate and obstinate engagement, which lasted almost without intermission for sixty days, not only repulsed, but totally defeated by the heroism of this British officer, and the small number of troops under his command.

Lord Hood said, that he could not give a vote on the present occasion without bearing his testimony to the skill and valour of Sir Sidney Smith, which had been so conspicuously and brilliantly exerted, when he had the honour and the benefit of having him under his command (at Toulon).