and merciless revenge? Let the changes be as spe cious as they may, the political suffering will only deepen, until the personal reform comes to redeem the land; until faith is more than an intolerant superstition, courage than assassination, and virtue than confession to a monk. Till then, freedom will be but a name; and the fall of a Spanish or Portuguese tyrant but a signal for his assailants to bury their poniards in each other's bosoms; constitution will be but an upbreaking of the elements of society; and the plunging of despotism into the gulf, but a summons to every gloomy and furious shape of evil below, to rise upon the wing, and darken and poison the moral atmosphere of mankind.

The India bill gave the final blow to the existence of the old whigs. The name had long survived the reality; but now even the name perished. When the fragments of the party were collected, in the course of years, after their almost desperate dispersion; they were known by another name; and the new whigs, however they might claim the honours of the old, were never recognised as successors to the estate. From this period, Pitt and toryism were paramount. Fox, defeated in his ambition of being a monarch, was henceforth limited to such glories as were to be found in perpetual discomfiture. Unequalled in debate, he talked for twenty years, and delighted the senate; was the idol of Westminster, the clubs, and the conversations at Devonshire House; but saw himself in an inexorable minority in the only place where triumph was worthy of his abilities or dear to his ambition. Perhaps, too, if Fox had never existed, his rival might never have risen to eminence; for even great powers require great opportunities, and the struggle with the colossal frame and muscle of Fox's genius might be essential to mature the vigour of his young antagonist and conqueror. Still, when all hope of wresting the supremacy out of Pitt's hand was past, the exercise

was useful; and Fox, for the rest of his days, had the infelicitous honour of keeping those powers in practice, whose inaction might have dropped the sceptre. He was the noblest captive linked to Pitt's chariot-wheel, but to that chariot-wheel he was linked for life; and no other arm could have so powerfully dragged his rival's triumphal car up the steeps of fame.

The prince unhappily soon created a new grievance, that came home more directly to the royal bosom than even his politics. Rolle's allusion to his marriage with Mrs. Fitzherbert* was believed by the king to be true, and no act could be calculated to give deeper offence to the monarch, as a parent, a Protestant, or a man of virtue. The lady was highbred and handsome; and, though by seven years the prince's elder, and with the formidable drawback of having been twice a widow, her attractions might justify the civilities of fashion. But her rank and her religion were barriers, which she must have known to be impassable.

The king was peculiarly sensitive to mésalliances in the blood royal. The Marriage Act of 1772, had originated in the royal displeasure at the marriages of his brothers the Dukes of Cumberland and Gloucester, with subjects;† and the determination with

Mrs. Fitzherbert was the daughter of Wm. Smythe, Esq., of Tonge Castle, and niece of Sir E. Smythe, Bart., of Acton Burnel, Salop. Her sister was married to Sir Carnaby Haggerstone, Bart. At an early age she married Weld, of Lulworth Castle, Dorset. On his death she married Fitzherbert, of Swinnerton, Leicestershire, a remarkably striking person, who died of either over-exertion in a walk from Bath to town, or some imprudence at the burning of Lord Mansfield's house, in the riots of 1780. The lady was a Roman Catholic.

†The Duke of Cumberland had married Mrs. Horton, Lord Irnhain's daughter; the Duke of Gloucester the Countess Dowager of Waldegrave, but this marriage was not acknowledged for some time after, The bill passed rapidly through parliament, yet was debated with unusual perseverance in all its stages. With the public it was highly unpopular, and was assailed by every weapon of seriousness and ridicule. It was described as intolerably aristocratical; as insulting to English birth and beauty; as violating one of the first laws of our being; and even as giving a direct encouragement to crime. Epigrams

which the bill was urged through the legislature against the strongest resistance, showed the interest which his majesty took in preserving the succession clear.

But the prince's error had gone further than the passionate violation of an unpopular law; for the marriage of the heir-apparent with a Roman Catholic must have defeated his claim to the throne.

To this hour the marriage has been neither proved nor disproved. It was rumoured that the lady's scruples were soothed by having the ceremonial performed according to the rites of her own church. But no Roman Catholic dispensation, guiltily facile as such license is in that church, could have acquitted the parties of the crime of sustaining a connexion notoriously void by the laws of the land. Fox's declaration in the house admits of no subterfuge; language could not have been found more distinctly repelling the charge; and that Mrs. Fitzherbert felt it to be decisive, is palpable from the anger and alienation with which she, for years after, affected to treat him. However, she still enjoys at least the gains of the connexion; and up to the hoary age of

and satires innumerable were showered upon the bill, and its opponents certainly had all the wit and all the women on their side. One of those jeux d'esprit was

THE ROYAL MARRIAGE ACT.

Says Dick to Tom, "This Act appears
The oddest thing alive;

To take the crown at eighteen years,
The wife at twenty-five.

The thing a puzzle must remain ;

For, as old Dowdeswell* said,

'So early if one's fit to reign,
One must be fit to wed.""

Says Tom to Dick, "The man's a fool,
Or knows no rubs of life;

Good friend, 't is easier far to rule

A kingdom than a wife !"

* An opponent of the bill.

seventy-five, calmly draws her salary of ten thousand pounds a-year!

The theme is repulsive. But the writer degrades his moral honour, and does injustice to the general cause of truth, who softens down such topics into the simplicity of romance. Yet, between the individuals in question there can be no comparison. The princc was in the giddiest period of youth and inexperience; he was surrounded by temptation; it was laid in his way by individuals craftily accomplished in every art of extravagance and ruin. For him to have escaped the snare would have been not less than the most fortunate of accidents, or an exhibition of the manliest sense and virtue. But for those who ministered to his errors, or shared in them, the condemnation must be altogether of a deeper die.

In this most unhappy intercourse originated all the serious calamities of the prince's life. From its commencement it openly drew down the indignation of his excellent father; it alienated his general popularity in an immediate and an extraordinary degree; it shook the confidence of the wise and good in those hopes of recovery and reformation which such minds are the most generous to conceive, and the most unwilling to cast away; the cold gravity of this unloverlike connexion gave it the appearance of a system; and its equivocal and offensive bondage was obviously a fixture for life. It embarrassed him with the waste of a double household, when he was already sinking under the expenses of one; and precipitated him into bankruptcy. It entangled him more and more inextricably with the lower members of that cabal who gathered round him in the mask of politics only to plunder; and who, incapable of the dignified and honourable feelings that may attach to party, cared nothing for the nation, or for political life, beyond what they could filch for their daily bread from the most pitiful sources of a contemptible popularity. It disheartened all his higher friends, the

Duke of Portland, Fox, Grey, Burke, and the other leaders of opposition; while it betrayed the prince's name and cause into the hands of men who could not touch even royalty without leaving a stain. Finally, it destroyed all chance of happiness in his subsequent marriage; and was the chief ingredient in that cup of personal anxiety and public evil which was so sternly forced to his lips almost to the close of his days.

Fox's declaration in the house had given the first example of the pangs which the prince was to feel. It unquestionably threw dishonour on the connexion. Yet, to expect Fox to retract his words, and this too when their object was gained by the payment of the prince's debts, was utterly hopeless. Grey was then sounded; but he declined this singular office. Sheridan was the next resource; and, with that miserable pliancy, which, in him, resulted less from a casual deference to the will of others, than from a total want of moral elevation, a guilty callousness to the principle of self-respect, he undertook to equivocate the house into sufferance. In allusion to the prince's offer, through Fox, to undergo an examination in the lords, he affectedly said," that the house deserved credit for decorum, in not taking advantage of the offer, and demanding such an inquiry. But while his royal highness's feelings had been, doubtless, considered on the occasion, he must take the liberty of saying, however some might think it a subordinate consideration, that there was another person, entitled, in every delicate and honourable mind, to the same attention; one whom he would not otherwise venture to describe, or allude to, but by saying it was a name which malice or ignorance alone could attempt to injure, and whose character and conduct claimed and were entitled to the truest respect."

*Moore's Life of Sheridan.