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be no more than a long-continued, and therefore an aggravated injustice. Such are their ideas, such their religion, and such their law. But as to our country and our race, as long as the well-compacted structure of our church and state, the sanctuary, the holy of holies of that ancient law, defended by reverence, defended by power, a fortress at once and a temple, shall stand inviolate on the brow of the British Sionas long as the British monarchy, not more limited than fenced by the orders of the state, shall. like the prond keep of Windsor, rising in the majesty of proportion, and girt with the double belt of its kindred and coeval towers-as long as this awful structure shall oversee and guard the subjected land, so long the mounds and dikes of the low fat Bedford Level will have nothing to fear from all the pickaxes of all the levellers of France. As long as our sovereign lord the king, and his faithful subjects, the lords and commons of this realm-the triple cord which no man can break; the solemn, sworn constitutional frankpledge of this nation; the firm guarantee of each other's being and each other's rights; the joint and several securities, cach in its place and order for every kind and every quality of property and of dignity-as long as these endure, so long the Duke of Bedford is safe; and we are all safe together-the high from the blights of envy and the spoliations of rapacity; the low from the iron hand of oppression and the insolent spurn of contempt.

The Difference between Mr. Burke and the Duke of Bedford.*

I was not, like his Grace of Bedford, swaddled, and rocked, and dandled into a legislator-Nitor in adversum is the motto for a man like me. I possessed not one of the qualities, nor cultivated one of the arts, that recommend men to the favour and protection of the great. I was not made for a minion or a tool. As little did I follow the trade of winning the hearts by imposing on the understandings of the people. At every step of my progress in life-for in every step was I traversed and opposed-and at every turnpike I met, I was obliged to shew my passport, and again and again to prove my sole title to the honour of being useful to my country, by a proof that I was not wholly unacquainted with its laws, and the whole system of its interests both abroad and at hoine. Otherwise, no rank, no toleration even for me. I had no arts but manly arts. On them I have stood, and, please God. in spite of the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Lauderdale, to the last gasp will I stand.

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I know not how it has happened, but it really seems that, whilst his Grace was meditating his well-considered censure upon me, he fell into a sort of sleep. Homer nods, and the Duke of Bedford may dream; and as dreams-even his golden dreamsare apt to be ill-pieced and incongruously put together, his Grace preserved his idea of reproach to ine, but took the subject-matter from the crown-grants to his own family. This is the stuff of which his dreams are made.' In that way of putting things together, his Grace is perfectly in the right, The grants to the house of Russell were so enormous, as not only to outrage economy, but even to stagger credibility. The Duke of Bedford is the leviathan among all the creatures of the crown. He tumbles about his unwieldy bulk; he plays and frolics in the ocean of the royal bounty. Huge as he is, and whilst he lies floating many a rood,' he is still a creature. His ribs, his fins, his whalebone, his blubber, the very spiracles through which he spouts a torrent of brine against his origin, and covers me all over with the spray -everything of him and about him is from the throne. Is it for him to question the dispensation of the royal favour?

I really am at a loss to draw any sort of parallel between the public merits of his Grace, by which he justifies the grants he holds, and these services of mine, on the favourable construction of which I have obtained what his Grace so much disapproves. In private life, I have not at all the honour of acquaintance with the noble Duke. But I ought to presume, and it costs me nothing to do so, that he abundantly deserves the love and esteem of all who live with him. But as to public service, why, truly, it would not be more ridiculous for me to compare myself in rank, in fortune, in splendid descent, in youth, strength, or figure, with the Duke of Bedford, than to make a parallel between his services and my attempts to be

The Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Lauderdale attacked Mr. Burke and his pension in their place in the House of Lords, and Burke replied in his Letter to a Noble Lord (1796), one of the most sarcastic and most able of all his productions.

useful to my country. It would not be gross adulation, but uncivil irony, to say that he has any public merit of his own, to keep alive the idea of the services by which his vast landed pensions were obtained. My merits, whatever they are, are original and personal; his, are derivative. It is his ancestor, the original pensioner, that has laid up this inexhaustible fund of merit, which makes his grace so very delicate and exceptious about the merit of all other grantees of the crown. Had he permitted me to remain in quiet, I should have said:Tis his estate; that's enough. It is his by law; what have I to do with it or its history? ' He would naturally have said on his side: "Tis this man's fortune. He is as good now as my ancestor was two hundred and fifty years ago. I am a young man with very old pensions: he is an old man with very young pensions-that's all.'

Why will his Grac, by attacking me, force me reluctantly to compare my little merit with that which obtained from the crown those prodigies of profuse donation by which he tramples on the mediocrity of humble and laborious individuals ? . Since the new grantees have war made on them by the old, and that the word of the sovereign is not to be taken, let us turn our eyes to history, in which great men have always a pleasure in contemplating the heroic origin of their house.

The first peer of the name, the first purchaser of the grants, was a Mr. Russell. a person of an ancient gentleman's family, raised by being a minion of Henry VIII. As there generally is some resemblance of character to create these relations, the favourite was in all likelihood much such another as his master. The first of those immoderate grants was not taken from the ancient demesne of the crown, but from the recent confiscation of the ancient nobility of the land. The lion having sucked the blood of his prey, threw the offal carcass to the jackal in waiting. Having tasted once the food of confiscation, the favourites became fierce and ravenous. This worthy favourite's first grant was from the lay nobility. The second, infinitely improving on enormity of the first, was from the plunder of the church. In truth, his Grace is somewhat excusable for his dislike to a grant like mine, not only in its quantity, but in its kind. so different from his own.

Mine was from a mild and benevolent sovereign; his, from Henry VIII. Mine had not its fund in the murder of any innocent person of illustrious rank, or in the pillage of any body of unoffending men; his grants were from the aggregate and consolidated funds of judgments iniquitously legal, and from possessions voluntarily surrendered by the lawful proprietors with the gibbet at their door.

The merit of the grantee whom he derives from, was that of being a prompt and greedy instrument of a levelling tyrant, who oppressed all descriptions of his people, but who fell with particular fury on everything that was great and noble. Mine has been in endeavouring to screen every man, in every class, from oppression, and particularly in defending the high and eminent, who in the bad times of confiscating princes, confiscating chief-governors, or confiscating demagogues, are the most exposed to jealousy, avarice, and envy.

The merit of the original grantee of his Grace's pensions was in giving his hand to the work, and partaking the spoil with a prince who plundered a part of the national church of his time and country. Mine was in defending the whole of the national church of my own time and my own country, and the whole of the national churches of all countries, from the principles and the examples which lead to ecclesiastical pillage, thence to a contempt of all prescriptive titles, thence to the pillage of all property, and thence to universal desolation.

The merit of the origin of his Grace's fortune was in being a favourite and chief adviser to a prince who left no liberty to his native country. My endeavour was to obtain liberty for the municipal country in which I was born, and for all descriptions and denominations in it. Mine was to support, with unrelaxing vigilance, every right, every privilege, every franchise, in this my adopted, my dearer, and more comprehensive country; and not only to preserve those rights in this chief seat of empire, but in every nation, in every land, in every climate, language, and religion in the vast domain that still is under the protection, and the larger that was once under the protection, of the British crown.

Burke's Account of his Son.

Had it pleased God to continue to me the hopes of succession, I should have been, according to my mediocrity, and the mediocrity of the age I live in, a sort of founder of a family; I should have left a son, who, in all the points in which per

sonal merit can be viewed, in science, in erudition, in genius, in taste, in honour, in generosity, in humanity, in every liberal sentiment and every liberal accomplish. ment, would not have shewn himself inferior to the Duke of Bedford, or to any of those whom he traces in his line. His Grace very soon would have wanted all plausibility in his attack upon that provision which belonged more to mine than to me. He would soon have supplied every deficiency, and symmetrised every disproportion. It would not have been for that successor to resort to any stagnant wasting reservoir of merit in me, or in any ancestry. He had in himself a salient living spring of generous and manly action. Every day he lived, he would have repurchased the bounty of the crown, and ten times more, if ten times more he had received. He was made a public creature, and had no enjoyment whatever but in the performance of some duty. At this exigent moment the loss of a finished man is not easily supplied.

But a Disposer, whose power we are little liable to resist, and whose wisdom it behoves us not at all to dispute, has ordained it in another manner, and-whatever my querulous weakness might suggest a far better. The storm has gone over me, and I lie like one of those old oaks which the late hurricane has scattered about me. I am stripped of all my honours; I am torn up by the roots, and lie prostrate on the earth! There, and prostrate there, I most unfeignedly recognise the divine justice, and in some degree submit to it. But whilst I humble myself before God I do not know that it is forbidden to repel the attacks of unjust and inconsiderate men. The patience of Job is proverbial. After some of the convulsive struggles of our irritable nature, he submitted himself, and repented in dust and ashes. But even so, I do not find him blamed for reprehending, and with a considerable degree of verbal asperity, those ill-natured neighbours of his who v sited his dunghill to read moral, political, and economical lectures on his m sery. I am alone. I have none to meet iny enemies in the gate. Indeed, my lord, I greatly deceive myself, if in this hard season I would give a peck of refuse wheat for all that is called fame and honour in the world. This is the appetite but of a few. It is a luxury; it is a privilege; it is an indulgence for those who are at their case. But we are all of us made to shun disgrace, as we are made to shrink from pain, and poverty and disease. It is an instinct; and under the direction of reason. instinct is always in the right. I live in an inverted order. They who ought to have succeeded me are gone before me: they who should have been to me as posterity are in the place of ancestors. I owe to the dearest relation-which ever must subsist in memory-that act of piety which he would have performed to me; I owe it to him to shew, that he was not descended, as the Duke of Bedford would have it, from an unworthy parent.

REYNOLDS-PENNANT.

The 'Discourses on Painting,' by SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS (17231792), are elegant and agreeable compositions, containing a variety of literary illustration, and suggestive thought, but they are not always correct or definite in their criticism and rules for artists. Sir Joshua was elected president of the Royal Academy on its institution in 1769, and from that time to 1790, he delivered fifteen lectures or discourses on the principles and practice of painting. The readers of Johnson and Goldsmith need not be told how much Reynolds was beloved and respected by his associates, while his exquisite taste and skill as a portrait-painter have preserved to us, as Macaulay remarks, the thoughtful foreheads of many writers and statesmen, and the sweet smiles of many noble matrons.'

THOMAS PENNANT (1726-1798) commenced in 1761 a body of British zoology, originally published in four volumes folio, and after.. wards gave to the world treatises on quadrupeds, birds, arctic zoology, and other departments of natural science. He made tours into Scotland and Wales, of which he published copious accounts; but

though a lively and pleasant traveller, and diligent antiquary, Pennant was neither correct nor profound. The popularity of his works stimulated others, and had the effect of greatly promoting the extension of his favourite studies.

THOMAS AMORY.

THOMAS AMORY (1692-1789) was an eccentric miscellaneous writer, a humorist of an extreme stamp. He was most probably a native of Ireland, where his father, a counsellor, acquired considerable property as secretary for the confiscated estates. Thomas is said to have been bred a physician, but it is not known to have practised. He is found residing in Westminster in 1757. Previous to this, in 1755, he published Memoirs: containing the Lives of several Ladies of Great Britain;' and afterwards he issued the Life of John Buncle, Esq.' 1756-66. The 'Ladies' whose charms and virtues Amory commemorates, appear to have been fictitious characters. The object of the author, in this work, as well as in the Life of Buncle,' was to extol and propagate unitarian opinions. He describes himself as travelling among the hills of Northumberland, and meeting there, in a secluded spot (which he invests with all the beauty and softness of a scene in Kent or Devon), a young lady, the daughter of a deceased college friend, who had been disinherited for refusing to sign the Thirtynine Articles. The young lady entertains her father's friend, and introduces him to other ladies. They undertake a visit to the Western Islands, and encounter various adventures and vicissitudes, besides indulging in philosophical and polemical discussions. The

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Life of John Buncle' is of a similar complexion, but in the form of an autobiography. Buncle has seven wives, all wooed and won upon his peculiar Christian principles.' To such reviewers as should attempt to raise the laugh against him, he replies: "I think it unreasonable and impious to grieve immoderately for the dead. A decent and proper tribute of tears and sorrow, humanity requires; but when that duty has been paid, we must remember that to lament a dead woman is not to lament a wife. A wife must be a living

woman.'

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And in the spirit of this philosophy, John Buncle proceeds after each bereavement, always in high animal spirits, relishing good cheer, and making fresh converts to his views and opinions. The character, appearance, and acquirements of each wife, with her family history, are related at length. The progeny he casts into shade. As I mention nothing of any children by so many wives,' he explains, readers may perhaps wonder at this; and therefore, to give a general answer once for all, I think it sufficient to observe, that I had a great many to carry on the succession; but as they never were concerned in any extraordinary affairs, nor ever did any remarkable things, that I ever heard of-only rise and breakfast, read and saunter, drink and cat, it would not be fair, in my opinion, to make any one pay for their

history. In lieu of this, the reader is treated to dissertations on the origin of earthquakes, on muscular motion, of phlogiston, fluxions, the Athanasian creed, and fifty other topics brought together in heroic contempt of the unities of time and place. Such a fantastic and desultory work would be intolerable if it were not, like Rabelais and Burton's ' Anatomy of Melancholy'-though in a greatly inferior degree-redolent of wit, scholarship, and quaint original thought. Amory promised to give the world an account of Dean Swift. 'I knew him well,' he says, though I never was within sight of his house, because I could not fiatter, cringe, or meanly humour the extravagances of any man. I had him often to myself in his rides and walks, and have studied his soul when he little thought what I was about. As I lodged for a year within a few doors of him, I knew his time of going out to a minute, and generally nicked the opportunity.' Unfortunately, though Amory lived thirty years after making this declaration, he never redeemed his promise.

Portrait of Marinda Bruce.

I

In the year 1739, I travelled many hundred miles to visit ancient monuments, and discover curious things; and as I wandered, to this purpose, among the vast hills of Northumberland, fortune conducted me one evening, in the month of June, when I knew not where to rest, to the sweetest retirement my eyes have ever beheld. This is Hali-farm. It is a beautiful vale surrounded with rocks, forest, and water. found at the upper end of it the prettiest thatched house in the world, and a garden of the most artful confusion I had ever seen. The little mansion was covered on every side with the finest flowery greens. The streams all round were murmuring and falling a thousand ways. All the kind of singing-birds were here collected, and in high harmony on the sprays. The ruins of an abbey enhance the beauties of this place; they appear at the distance of four hundred yards from the house; and as some great trees are now grown up among the remains, and a river winds between the broken walls, the view is solemn, the picture fine.

When I came up to the house, the first figure I saw was the lady whose story I am going to relate. She had the charms of an angel, but her dress was quite plain and elean as a country-maid. Her person appeared faultless, and of the middle size, between the disagreeable extremes; her face, a sweet oval, and her complexion the brunette of the bright rich kind; her mouth, like a rose-bud that is just beginning to blow; and a fugitive dimple, by fits, would lighten and disappear. The finest passions were always passing in her face; and in her long, even chestnut eyes, there was a fluid fire, suflici nt for half-a-dozen pair.

She had a volume of Shakspeare in her hand as I came softly towards her, having left my horse at a distance with my servant; and her attention was so much engaged with the extremely poetical and fine lines which Titania speaks in the third act of the Midsummer Night's Dream,' that she did not see me till I was quite near her She scemed then in great amazement. She could not be much more surprised if I had dropped from the clouds But this was soon over, upon my asking her if she was not the daughter of Mr John Bruce, as I supposed, from a similitude of faces, and informing her that her father, if I was right was my near friend and would be glad to see his chum in that part of the world. Marinda replied: You are not wrong,' and immediately asked me in. She conducted me to a parlour that was quite beautiful in the rural way, and welcomed me to Hali-farm, as her father would have done she said had I arrived before his removal to a better world. She then left me for a while, and I had time to look over the room I was in The floor was covered with rushes wrought into the prettiest mat, and the walls decorated all round with the finest flowers and shells. Robins and nightingales, the finch and the linnet, were in the neatest reed cages of her own making. and at the upper end of the chamber, in a charming little open grotto, was the finest strix capite durito, corpore rufo, that I have seen, that

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