and offensively profligate of men; to the indomitable selfishness of Mansfield; to the avarice of Bedford, the suspicious negotiator of the scandalous treaty of 1763; or to the slippered and drivelling ambition of North, sacrificing an empire to his covetousness of power?

CHAPTER VIII.

The King's Illness.

THE prince's adoption of whig politics had deeply offended his royal father; for the coalition ministry had made Fox person: ly obnoxious to the monarch, who remembered its power by a series of mortifications, so keen that they had inspired the desperate idea of abandoning England for a time, and seeking refuge for his broken spirit and insulted authority in Hanover. This conception the king was said to have so far matured as to have communicated to Thurlow; who, however, repelled it in the most direct manner, telling his majesty,-that "though it might be easy to go to Hanover, it might be difficult to return to England; that James the Second's was a case in point; and that the best plan was, to let the coalition take their way for a while, as they were sure to plunge themselves into some embarrassment, and then he might have them at his disposal."

The advice was solid and successful. The king thenceforth exhibited his aversion to the ministry in the most open manner, by steadily refusing to bestow a single English peerage, while they were in power; and it was surmised, that Fox was driven by his consciousness of this total alienation, to the rash and defying measure of the India bill, as a support against

the throne. The game was a bold one; for its success would have made Fox king of lords, commons, and people; and George the Third, king of masters of the stag-hounds, gentlemen of the bed-chamber, and canons of Windsor. But it failed, and its failure was ruin. It not merely overthrew Fox, but it spread the ruin to every thing that bore the name. His banner was not simply borne down in the casual fortunes.of the fight; but it was broken, trampled on, and extinguished. By the India bill the languors of political warfare were turned into the fierceness of personal combat; and whiggism, pressed by the newarmed wrath of the monarch, and losing its old refuge in the popular sympathy, hated by the throne, and repelled by the nation, feebly dispersed on the field.

Such is the fate of the noblest parties, when the spirit that once animated them has passed away. The men of 1688 would have found it impossible to recognise their descendants, in the shifting politicians of the eighteenth century; but wo be to the people whose liberties depend upon the character of individuals! The revolution itself would have been a mockery, but for its taking refuge in the manliness and religious virtue of the nation. All the overthrows of all the tyrannies of ancient or modern days were never able to make corruption free; more than the loudest professions of principle ever made a profligate the fit trustee and champion of national freedom. The personal vice nullifies and contaminates the public profession. No revolution ever succeeded, nor ever deserved to succeed, which was not demanded by the same natural and righteous necessity which demands the defence of our fireside and which was not conducted by men unstained by the crime of individual ambition, or the deeper crime of bartering the national blood for their own avarice, licentiousness, or revenge;-men who felt themselves periling their lives for an object that dignifies

;

death; and in the impulse of holiness and faith offering up their existence a willing and solemn sacrifice to their fellow-men and their God.

The success of the first French revolution is no answer to this principle; for France had showed only the frightful rapidity with which the name of freedom can be vitiated; and the incalculable means of public explosion and misery which may exist under the surface of the most ostentatious patriotism. The second revolution is yet to display its results; but auspicious and justifiable as has been its commencement, its only security will be found in purifying the habits of the people.

If Italy, with her magnificent powers, her vivid susceptibility of character, her living genius, and her imperishable fame,-Italy, where every foot of ground was the foundation of some monument of the most illustrious supremacy of the human mind, -is now a prison, the crime and the folly are her own; her own vices have riveted the chain round her neck, her own hand has barred the dungeon; and in that dungeon she will remain for ever, if she wait until vice shall give vigour to her limbs, or superstition throw back the gates of her living sepulchre. A purer influence must descend upon her. A deliverer, not of the earth, earthy,-but an immortal visitant, shedding the light of holiness and religion from its vesture, must come upon her darkness; and, like the angel that came to Peter, bid her awake and follow.

If Spain and Portugal are still convulsed with civil discord, who can hope to see rational freedom ever existing in those lands, while the corruption of the people feeds the license of the throne; while, if the king imprisons, the peasant stabs; while, if the crown violates the privileges of the subject, the subject habitually. violates the honour of the holiest ties of our nature; while, if government is tyranny, private life is rapine, promiscuous passion,

and merciless revenge? Let the changes be as specious 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 mêsalliances 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. Epigrame