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given, by a double and most gross anachronism, even a worse colour to this anecdote than Lord Holland himself ventured to do. He states that Scott had sung a trium, hal song of "running the Fox to earth over the coffin of a minister whom he had flattered in his life-time.' Now the song was sung, as we have said, on the 27th June, before any one could have forescen Mr. Fox's death three months later; and the supposed flat

The allegation of ingratitude towards Mr. Fox is at once cut away by the fact that Scott had no reason to suppose (but indeed the contrary) that he had any obligation to the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. He knew of no obligation in the matter buttery of the living minister was that graceto Lord Spencer-who, in the same audience, heard and granted the request; and it appears from his other letters that it was on him, Lord Grenville, Lord Sidmouth, and Mr. Windham-the old Pittite section of the new Cabinet-that he had built his hopes of justice, if, which he did not believe, he should meet any difficulty.

About four months after this matter had been settled, the impeachment (moved by Mr. Whitbread and supported by Mr. Fox) of Scott's friend and patron, Lord Melville -to whom and to whose family he had the earliest and deepest obligations-terminated in an acquittal; and this was celebrated in Edinburgh by a public dinner on the 27th of June, at which was sung a very partial and not very poetical song, composed by Scott, of which one verse is the ground of Lord Holland's complaint:--

'In Grenville and Spencer, And some few good men, sir,

ful, generous, and glowing tribute which, within a few months after Mr. Fox's death, Scott-in the introduction to the first canto of Marmion-paid to his genius, his amiability, and all that could with truth be said of his public services. Lord Holland, when he chose to remember and misrepresent the tavern-song, ought not to have forgotten this warm yet judicious eulogy, which places all that was admirable in the fullest light, and spreads the most delicate veil over all that might have provoked dissent. It leaves and will leave to posterity an impression infinitely more favourable to Mr. Fox's memory than all the injudicious and inconsistent panegyrics of his narrow-minded nephew

'Whose praise is censure, and whose censure praise.'

In fine-The whole and sole object of this work is as we originally said, and we think have now shown-to applaud the French

High talents we honour-slight difference for- Revolution and to decry and misrepresent

give!

But the Brewer we'll hoax,
Tally ho! to the Fox,

And drink Melville for ever! as long as we live.'

all that opposed it. We agree with some judicious writers and all intelligent politicians, that if Fox had been in office and Pitt in opposition when that Revolution broke To our ears this doggrel seems poor revolutionist, as he became afterwards, for out, Fox would have been a zealous antienough, even for such an occasion; but it cannot be called ungrateful, indecent, and cruel the short time he was in office. It would lampooning; it was meant to be affection-be idle to conjecture what Mr. Pitt might ate to his earliest friend, grateful and res- have been if in opposition at that crisispectful to Lords Grenville and Spencer-well disciplined, too grave, too elevated, to but we are confident that his mind was too whose conduct on the Melville trial greatly have been perverted into a revolutionary displeased the Whig enemies of that friend*and no more than an after-dinner joke on the opposition, for which an idle and loose pritwo persons most prominent in the prosecu-vate and political life, strong passions, a tion of Lord Melville, and to neither of long course of self-indulgence, and no fixed whom Scott had any reason to suppose that principles had prepared Mr. Fox. Be that he had the slightest personal obligation. Mr. W. Savage Landor has, in one of his dull and malignant essays (Works, i. 339),

*Lord Holland bitterly reproaches Lords Grenville and Spencer for having absented themselves on the third day of the trial from an unwillingness to convict equivalent to a disposition to screen an old Colleague. Mem., p. 385. It is proper to notice this, as showing additionally that Scott's compliment was not the expression of his own mere personal gratitude.

as it may, Mr. Fox took up the French Revolution as he had just before taken up the Russian cause at Oczsacoff and the Spanish case about Nootka, both against England, for no other reason than that Mr. Pitt was minister, and that an Opposition must oppose.

Moreover, Mr. Fox was in 1790 in his forty-first year of life and the twenty-second of his varied but generally disappointed parliamentary career. The American war,

POSTSCRIPT.

on both sides of which he had been, had end-, either of these despotisms. To contradict ed in the triumph of the democratic repub- and refute them was the first political incenlic and given his mind a strong tendency to tive of the Quarterly Review, and it was receive those principles. At last, his course not, we hope, to be expected that we should of opposition, which had been at first per- abandon to Lord Holland's posthumous sonal pique against Lord North, became slander the persons and the principles to party against Mr. Pitt, and ended in being which we have been so long and so zealously an extravagant passion for Revolution. In associated. pursuit of this latter object, the only line which had even a colour of plausibility or popularity was an opposition to war-war in the abstract, and, as Mr. Canning said in, we think, his maiden speech, 10th April, 1794, 'general declamations upon the calamities of war, which applied equally to all other instances of war as in the present.'(Hansard, loco.) War-however just or necessary, or involuntary, or inevitable-pending crisis-the most momentous, we cannot be maintained without taxes, waged without blood, or prosecuted without risk; it is therefore in naturâ rerum an inexhaustible reservoir of popular grievance and excitement; and so Mr. Fox made it and employed it-zealously-factiously, till, by the death of Mr. Pitt, he himself was called into office, and then we find him as unable to make peace and as committed to a prosecution of the war as Mr. Pitt had been.

Mr. Fox had blamed either the insincerity or inability of all Mr. Pitt's attempts at peace, which had been crossed and impeded in addition to the hostile spirit of France -by his own factious conduct: while his subsequent attempt at peace, without any impediment at home, was taxed by the French with equal insincerity, and was marked by a degree of inability and ill success at least as great as he ever imputed to Mr. Pitt. Mr. Fox and his party had censured Mr. Pitt's conduct of the war, and had blazoned and almost triumphed in our failures at Dunkirk, Toulon, and the Texel. Their own conduct of the war was still more calamitous, and Buenos Ayres, the Dardanelles, and Egypt rivalled the worst mishaps of their predecessors. But Lord Holland, though all this passed before his eyes, sees nothing of it; he had learned and stuck by his first parrot note of 'no war'-' peace at any price-which meant, in fact, acknowledge the French Republic-acknowledge Robespierre - Barras - Buonaparte, any body whom Mr. Pitt will not-and let Mr. Fox and me into power even at the cost of revolutionizing England.' Of this spirit, we repeat, the Reminiscences and these Memoirs are the natural product-or rather indeed the echoes of the long series of misrepresentations, mis-statements, and libels, with which the revolutionary press-whether Republican or Buonapartist, at home or abroad-pursued all those who resisted

6

WE fear that we might be reproached with the desertion of a duty we have inculcated upon others if we did not, weak as our voice may be, say a few words on the im

believe, which has occurred since Lord John Russell's Reform-Revolution-of the worst consequences of which the ensuing elections promise to be either a salutary check or a fatal aggravation.

Our last Number entered pretty fully both into the original claims of Lord Derby's ministry to public confidence and support, and into the main-we might say the sole principle which in our view ought to guide the constituencies in the exercise of their electoral power. Those claims and that duty may be recapitulated in one short phrase-Resistance to the Revolutionary tendencies of all the various parties in the State-save only that which, thank God, is still, if it will put forth its strength, the strongest of all-the Constitutional Conservatives.

Nothing we think need be added to our former statement of the danger, but it may not be useless, in the midst of so much activity and artifice as has been employed to distract the attention and divide the opinions of the Conservative party, to press upon them the imperious necessity of union-of merging all minor differences in one unhesitating and energetic effort for the CHURCH and the MONARCHY ! These with the most considerable classes of the Opposition are the avowed objects of attack, and the small remainder who may not be zealously hostile will tacitly sacrifice them to their private piques or personal ambition. Motley and discordant as the separate groups may be, we shall find them sufficiently combined and disciplined for this short but vital struggle. Old Whigs, young Whigs, and ultraWhigs-Radicals, Balloteers, and Chartists— Tenant-Leaguers and Catholic Associators— Jews and Papists-anti-Churchmen, ultra and no-Churchmen-apostate Tories-Puseyites, Peelites, Cobdenites, Humites, and all the other ites and mites of dissent and

disaffection-all the constituents of that anti-constitutional conglomeration which was imperfectly and indeed ridiculously represented in the synod of Chesham Place-all will be seen arrayed in formidable force and activity at the impending conflict. If, however, to that formidable force the Conservatives will only oppose an equal unity of purpose and energy of action, there can be no doubt of their numerical majority, nor of course of their success. Let not Protectionists hang back because Lord Derby cannot do all they might desire. Let not Protestants become lukewarm because Lord Derby has neither the power nor the wish to reverse sixty years of legislation. He has given to both these great divisions of the Conservative party indubitable proofs of his sympathy-the Constituencies themselves must do the rest! We ourselves have always considered Free Trade as an experiment, and we are so satisfied that ex perience must be the ultimate arbiter, that we have, we confess, a very moderate anxiety as to the result of the elections on that point. A Free-trade majority in the next House of Commons as there is in this, would not affect the final result of the grand problem which time only can bring to a solution, and which will then, and not till then, be settled by the force of facts-commanding and compelling an universal conviction and consent.

The question of Popish Aggression is more pressing. The concession of all, and more than all the reasonable claims of the Roman Catholics during the last sixty years-so far from producing the results which they themselves promised and swore, and promised and swore again as each boon was successively sought and granted-has been of late so abused by the most illegal auda

cities, that although no one desires to return (as such abuses would justify) to the old restrictive laws, it is not too much to require that the law of indulgence should be impartially administered according to the original compact, as well in its protection to our Church as in its tolerance of theirs. We ourselves were favourable to the experiment of trying whether Popery in Ireland might not be rendered less noxious by a more elevated system of education: but the endowment of Maynooth seems, like every other boon, to produce the very opposite effects from what the Imperial Government anticipated; and the ultramontane insolence of bigotry of late promulgated by the Popish hierarchy in Ireland on the whole question of schools, colleges, and education in general, and the impudent-and, we think, treasonable-aggression lately made and still making on the Church and Crown of England, not only justify, but absolutely require, the revision of measures which have so lamentably failed.

But our chief hope and most anxious wish for Lord Derby's success rests on the expectation that he will oppose a prudent, but firm and systematic, resistance to the inroads of democracy on our religious and civil institutions. That is the danger that absorbs all others. It has appeared and will recur in such a variety of forms that it cannot be guarded against by any specific pledges to be obtained from individual candidates, but only by a general profession of confidence in Lord Derby. Strengthen his hands, but leave them free. With whatever power the elections may arm him, we may be well assured that he will do all that he can, and more than any one else can, forwhat we again pronounce as the war-cry of our party--the Church and the Monarchy.

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