confident that your royal highness possesses qualities to win and secure to you the attachment and devotion of private friendship, in spite of your being a sovereign."* He felt for the situation in which the regent must find himself, with masters, who had exhibited such a disposition to have all, even before they could call themselves servants. On a similar attempt, the year before, he had let loose the following lines, in imitation of Rochester's to Charles : ADDRESS TO THE PRINCE. In all humility we crave, Our Regent may become our slave; Will thank us for our loyalty. Then, if he'll help us to pull down His father's dignity and crown, We'll make him, in some time to come, The demand of the household was so obviously in the spirit of political extortion, that all the prince's immediate friends were indignant against it. "You shall never part with one of them," was the chivalric declaration of the Marquis of Hastings. Sheridan took an equally characteristic way, and which, by its very form, he clearly intended to cover the whole transaction with ridicule. The household, as a matter of etiquette, had offered their resignations; and Sheridan, armed with this intelligence, went out to take his daily walk in St. James's-street. Some rumour of it had transpired, and Mr. Tierney, then high in the whig councils, stopped him, and asked whether the news were true. "What will you bet that it is?" said Sheridan, "for I will bet any man five hundred guineas that it is not." versation was carried without delay to The hook was completely swallowed. * Moore The conthe party. The treaty was broken off, and when the eyes of those noble persons were at last opened, they found that they had been repulsed by an imaginary obstacle, and outwitted by a wager, and even a fictitious wager! Their next intelligence was of a more solid kind. The Earl of Liverpool stated in the house of lords that the prince regent had appointed him first lord of the treasury.* CHAPTER XVI. The British Empire. ÁFTER ten years of solitude and mental privation, the good king, George the Third, was called from the world. His last hours were without pain, and. fortunately, without a return of that understanding which could have shown him only the long state of suffering in which he had lain. His death excited universal sympathy, and the day on which his honoured remains were committed to the grave, was observed with unfeigned reverence and sorrow throughout his empire. The prince regent was now summoned to his inheritance, and George the Fourth was enthroned king of England, the noblest dominion that the sun looks upon! The immense magnitude of the Roman empire might well have justified the Roman pride. It covered a million and a half of square miles of the finest portion of the globe. Stretching three thousand miles, from the Atlantic to the Euphrates; and two thousand miles, from the northern borders of Dacia to the tropic of Cancer; it was the seat of all the * 8th of June, 1812. 129th January, 1820 choicest fertility, beauty and wealth, of the world. Imagination sinks under the idea of this prodigious power in the hands of a single nation, and that nation in the hands of a single man, It might be difficult, on human grounds, to discover the ultimate causes of this mighty donative of supremacy to an Italian peninsula. But in the government of the Great Disposer of events nothing is done without a reason, and that the wisest reason. The reduction of so vast a portion of the earth under one sceptre was among the providential means of extending Christianity. The easier intercourse, the similarity of law, the more complete security of life and property, the general pacification of nations, which, under separate authority, would have filled the earth with blood,-all the results of melting down the scattered diadems of Europe and Asia into one,-palpably corresponded with the purpose of propagating the last and greatest revelation. This purpose of the Roman empire accounts for its sudden breaking up, and the absence of all probability that it will ever have a successor. When Christianity was once firmly fixed, the use of this superb accumulation of power was at an end. None like itself shall follow it, because its use cannot re turn. Society has been, for the wisest purposes, reduced into fragments; and the peaceful rivalry_of nations in arts and civilization is to accomplish that illustrious progress, which, under the pressure of a vast, uniform dominion, must have been looked for in vain. But another paramount dominion was yet to be created, of a totally different nature; less compact, yet not less permanent; less directly wearing the shape of authority, yet perhaps still more irresistible; and in extent throwing the power of Rome out of all comparison-the British empire. Its sceptre is Influence. The old policy brought force into the field against force; it tore down the opposing king doms by main strength; it chained to the ground the neck of the barbarian, whom it had first discomfited by the sword. This was the rude discipline of times, when the sternness of savage human nature was to be tamed only by the dexterous and resolute sternness of civilization. But a nobler and more softened state of our being has followed, and for it a more lofty and humane discipline has been provi-, dentially given. England is now the actual governor of the earth; if true dominion is to be found in being the common source of appeal in all the injuries and conflicts of rival nations, the common succour against the calamities of nature, the great ally which every power threatened with war labours first to secure or to appease, the centre on which is suspended the peace of nations, the defender of the wronged, and, highest praise of all, the acknowledged origin and example to which every rising nation looks for laws and constitution! For whose opulence and enjoyment are the ends of the earth labouring at this hour? For whom does the Polish peasant run his plough through the ground? For whom does the American, with half a world between, hunt down his cattle, or plant his cotton? For whom does the Chinese gather in his teas, or the Brazilian his gold and precious stones? England is before the eyes of all. To whose market does every merchant of the remotest corners of the world look? To whose cabinet does every power, from America to India, turn with an interest surpassing all other? Whose public feeling does every people, struggling to raise itself in the rank of nations, supplicate? The answer is suggested at once, England's. At this hour, a British cannon fired would be the signal for plunging every kingdom of Europe into war. This sovereignty contains all the essentials of the old dominion without its evils. It is empire, without the charges, the hazards, the profligacy, and the tyranny of empire. Nothing but despotism could have kept together the mass of the Roman state. The nature of its parts was repulsion, and the common band a chain of iron. The supremacy of England is of a more elevated kind, the supremacy of a magnificent central luminary, round which all the rest revolve, urged by impulses suitable to their various frames, and following their common course with a feeling that it is the course of nature. If we glance at British India, we shall find it the most important foreign possession ever ruled by an European power. The Spanish colonies in South America were more extensive, but they were, in a boundless proportion, wilderness-regions of forest, swamp, and sand. In the peninsula of Hindostan, England governs an immense realm of extraordinary fertility; for the chief part, crowded with population, and the ancient seat of wealth to the world By a gradual progress of combined policy and conquest, she has advanced from a factory to an empire. Of all revolutions of power, this was the happiest for India. No country of earth had been, from the earliest periods of authentic history, so habitually the object of invasion and plunder. Its wealth, its diversity of government, and the harmless and unwarlike habits of its people, at once excited the cupidity and encouraged the violence of all the barbarian tribes of Asia. From the days of Alexander India was overflowed by the resistless depredations of Tartar and Turcoman, on east, north, and west; the early Persian, the Saracens under Mahomet's generals and successors, the Mogul under Zingis and Tamerlane, the Persian again under Nadir Shah. While the Western empire was sinking under the perpetual influx of the Scythian tribes, the same scene was going on in the East; but with the distinction that the Italian invader became a settler on the soil, and, gradually, a bulwark ägainst invasion. The Indian Bb |