Not a dinner for your pains, And long to see them drowned or hanged." Then before their spell-bound view Rolled from cloud, and sea, and shore. The consternation of the ministerial deserters in Ireland was boundless, and for once they were not disappointed. They were cashiered in all directions. Office was cleared of every timeserver of the whole tribe; and the minister was justly said to have "made more patriots in a day than patriotism had ever made in a year." Sheridan's brother Charles, the Irish secretary of war, was among the culprits, and was cast out like the rest. But his fall was softened by some unaccountable job, which gave him a pension of 1200l. a-year, with a reversion of 300l. to his wife! In England the king's recovery broke up as many dreams of office as were ever engendered between vanity and selfishness. Opposition had cut royal patronage into suits of every shape. Every partisan, and every partisan's partisan, was to be provided for; and the whole loose and pauper mob who hang on the skirts of politics, were each to find a covering for his multitude of sins. To take the single instance of Sheridan himself; he was to have the treasurership of the navy; an office totally unfit for his careless habits. But this was not the limit; his brother-in-law, Tickell, an idler, was to have a seat in parliament; and his associate, Richardson, another idler, was to have a commissionership of stamps. Who can regret that those caterpillars were shaken off the public tree; or that the objects of a party, which thus linked itself with avarice and intrigue, were defeated? The man must be fertile in tears who could grieve that an association for the purposes of plunder should be deprived of the public spoil; or that mercenaries should be stripped of the honours due only to patriotism and virtue. CHAPTER IX. The Prince's Marriage. THE regency question drove the prince from politics. No experiment could have been more disheartening. Fond of popularity, he saw it crush his last hope; relying on the wisdom of his friends, he saw their councils ignominiously baffled, their connexion threatened by personal jealousy, and the great antagonist of both prince and party raised into undisputed power; while, attached to his royal father by duty, he found his personal conduct the object of reproof, and his defence answered only by more open displeasure. The result was disastrous to himself, to the kingdom, and to the king. It abandoned him to pursuits still more obnoxious than those of public ambition. It encouraged his natural taste for those indulgences which, however common to wealth and rank, are in all their shapes hostile to the practical values and high-minded purposes of life; and it embarrassed his circumstances, until, pressed by creditors, and entangled by a multitude of nameless perplexities, he suffered himself to be urged into a marriage, formed without respect or attachment, and endured in bitterness and vexation until its close. It was said, that at this period a proposal was made to ministers by the prince to accept the viceroyalty of Ireland; a situation for which he would have been highly fitted, by his attachment to its people, and his general knowledge of its habits and interests: but the proposal, if ever made, was discountenanced. An application was next forwarded to the king for military rank: but the prince still remained a colonel of dragoons, while all his royal relatives were advanced to the highest stations of the service. Chagrin might not unnaturally have seized upon the mind of any man thus in early life stopped in all his efforts for distinction; and no trivial blame must fall upon the councils by which the heir of the crown was virtually consigned to either indolence or error. For some years he abjured all appearance of political feeling. He received the nobility and public persons sumptuously; but with something like a determination to forget on what political side they ranged. He spent the chief part of his time at Brighton; came occasionally to Carlton House; signalized his presence by a ball or a dinner; and then, having done his share as a leader of the fashionable world, galloped back to Brighton, and amused himself with pursuits that cost less trouble. Here he was not companionless, though the times had changed in which his table was the scene of the highest discussions of public life. With political hope the leading names of opposition had disappeared, and their places were filled up by individuals chiefly remarkable for their submission to the tastes of their royal entertainer, or their personal eccentricity. Occasionally guests of a higher rank appeared; and among those were the late Duke of Orleans, the Prince de Leury, and other foreign noblemen. The Duke of Orleans had visited England some P years before, nominally on a tour of pleasure, but more probably by an order from the French cabinet, which had already suspected him of sowing disaffection in the court. He had been summoned back to France by an order of the king, after a few months' absence, and returned, laden with English fashions, and followed by a train of race-horses, English jockeys, and a whole travelling establishment; which he displayed, to the horror of the ancient régime of jackboots and diligences; to the infinite delight of the Parisians, who read liberty in this invasion of Newmarket caps and dock-tailed horses; and to the universal popularity of the Anglomanie, which in the Parisian intellect implied English bootmaking, betting, prize-fighting, and the constitution. In return, the duke had assisted the prince with his knowledge of play; and considerable sums were lost at the Pavilion. From this, a transaction arose, in which, under the various names of a loan, a debt, and a present, the duke was said to have made an offer of a large sum to his royal highness: but the offer was finally declined, by the advice of Sheridan and the Duke of Portland. In 1789 the duke visited England for the last time. France was exhibiting symptoms of disturbance, which made his presence hazardous to the court; and under the pretext of a mission from the king, he was ordered to leave Paris. But the national assembly were already kings of France, and their passport too was necessary. It was at length granted; with no slight astonishment that the leading regenerator should leave his country at the moment when she was on the wing, ascending to the third heaven of political perfection. But France had another race of kings, higher than even the national assembly, -the poissardes of Boulogne. Those legislators seized the royal envoy, nullified the king's commission on the spot, put his passport in their pockets, and marched him to the hotel, where they placed a guard over him, until they should send a deputation from their own body to the national assembly. The deputation returned, bearing the national sanction. The fishwomen expressed themselves satisfied; the prisoner was let loose,-fortunate if he had been taught by this example the madness of popular license; and was received in London with great distinction by the prince and the chief nobility. The bewildered career and unhappy fate of the Duke of Orleans are now matter of history. He was born in a hazardous time for a man of weak understanding, strong passions, and libertine principles. -The monarch but a grown child: the queen, estimable but imperious, full of Austrian "right divine," and openly contemptuous of the people: the court jealous, feeble, and finding no resource for its weakness but in obsolete artifice and temporary expedient: the nobility a mass of haughty idlers, a hundred and twenty thousand gamesters and intriguers, public despisers of religion and the common moral obligations by which society is held together; chiefly poor, and living on the mendicant bounty of the court; worthless consumers of the fruits of the earth, yet monopolists of all situations of honour and emolument; and by their foolish pride in the most accidental of all distinctions, birth,-by their open meanness of solicitation for that last livelihood which a man of true dignity of mind would seek, a dependence on the public purse,-and by their utter uselessness for any purpose but that of filling up the ranks of the army,—rendered at once weary of themselves and odious to the nation. But beyond those central projecting points in the aspect of France, those fragments of the old system of the monarchy, the politician saw a wilderness of living waves, a boundless and sullen expanse of stormy passions, furious aspirations, daring ambition, and popular thirst of slaugh ter; a deluge, rising hourly round the final, desperate refuge of the state, and soon to overtop its last pinnacle, |