a great demagogue. From the time of his first drawing the sword he shewed no wavering, no inclination to sheathe it, no faint-hearted tendency to make terms with the enemy. He shook off the dust of his feet against the gates of England, and once excluded, never deigned to approach them again, but to call down the fires of popular hatred upon their battlements. Even at this distance of time, and with the deepest condemnation of Swift's abuse of his talents, it is difficult to look upon him without the reluctant admiration given to singular ability, and inflexible and inexorable resolve, let the cause be what it may. For good or evil he stood completely between the government and the nation. The shadow of this insolent and daring dictator extinguished the light of every measure of British benevolence, or transmitted it to the people distorted, and in colours of tyranny and blood and unquestionably, if popular idolatry could repay a human heart for this perpetual paroxysm of revenge, no idol ever enjoyed a thicker cloud of popular incense. Swift was the virtual viceroy, in whose presence the English representative of the monarch dwindled down into a cipher. And this extraordinary superiority was not a mere passing caprice of fortune. Among a people memorable for the giddiness of their public attachments, his popularity continued unshaken through life. To the last he enjoyed his criminal indulgence in thwarting the British government;

exulted in filling with his own gall the bosoms of the generous, yet rash and inflammable race, whom he alternately insulted and flattered, but whom, in the midst of his panegyrics, he scorned; libelled the throne, while he bore the sentence of court exile as the keenest suffering of his nature; solaced his last interval of reason by an epitaph, which was a libel on the human species; and died, revenging his imaginary wrongs, by bequeathing to the people a fierce and still unexpired inheritance of hatred against the laws, the institutions, and the name of England.

Jackson, in 1809, finding age coming heavy upon him, resigned his deanery at sixty-four, and then had the merit, which deserves to be acknowledged, of feeling that there is a time for all things, and that man should interpose some space between public life and the grave. Refusing a bishopric, offered to him by his former pupil, the Prince Regent, the old man wisely and decorously retired to prepare himself for the great change. He lived ten years longer, chiefly in the village of Felpham, in Sussex, amusing himself by occasional visits to his old friends in London, or to the prince at Brighton, by whom he was always received with scarcely less than filial respect; and then returning to his obscure, but amiable and meritorious life of study, charity, and prayer. He died of a brief illness in 1819.

CHAPTER IV.

THE PRINCE'S ESTABLISHMENT.

THE lavish distribution of patronage among the successive tutors and servants of the prince excited some angry remark, and much ridicule, at the time. But the minister rapidly overwhelmed this topic of public irritation by supplying the empire with injuries on a larger scale. North's propensity to govern by favours was the weakness of his nature; and this weakness was soon urged into a diseased prodigality by the trials of his government.

America had just taken the bold but guilty step of declaring her independence; France was almost openly preparing for war. Every lurking bitterness of fancied wrong, or hopeless rivalry, throughout Europe, was starting into sudden life at the summons of America. The beacon burning on the American shores was reflected across the Atlantic, and answered by a similar blaze in every corner of the continent. Even at home, rebellion seemed to be rising, scarcely less in the measured hostility of the great English parties, than in the haughty defiance and spiendid menace of Ireland, then half-frenzied with a sense of young vigour, and glittering in her first mail.

Lord North was now at the head of the Treasury, and on him rested the whole weight of the British administration; a burden too heavy for the powers of any one man, and in this instance less solicited by his own ambition than urged upon him by the royal command. The king, abandoned by the Duke of Grafton, insulted by Chatham, tyrannised over by the great party of the nobility, and harassed by the perpetual irritation of the people, had soon felt the severe tenure of authority; and there were times when, in mingled scorn and indignation, he was said to have thought of laying down the galling circle of an English crown, and retiring to Hanover. In this emergency his choice had fallen upon North, a man of rank, of parliamentary experience, and probably of the full measure of zeal for the public service, consistent with a personal career essentially of caution, suspicion, and struggle ;—but of undoubted respect for his royal master, and loyal attachment to the throne.

North had been all but born in the legislature, and all his efforts had been early directed to legislatorial distinction. "Here comes blubbering North," was the observation of some official person to George Grenville, as they saw the future premier in the Park, evidently in deep study. "I'll be hanged if he's not getting some harangue by heart for the House." He added: He added: "that he was so dull a dog, that it could be nothing of his

own." The latter remark, however, Grenville more sagaciously repelled by giving tribute to North's parliamentary qualities, and saying, that, "If he laboured with his customary diligence, he might one day lead the councils of the country." But the injurious yet natural result of North's official education was, his conceiving that the empire must be prosperous so long as the minister was secure, and that the grand secret of human government was a majority.

At a distance of time, in which the clouds that then covered public affairs with utter mystery have melted away, we can discover that the minister, with all his intrepidity, would gladly have taken refuge under any protection from the storm that was already announcing itself, as if by thunderclaps, round the whole national horizon. But the competitors for his power were too certain of possession to suffer him to take shelter among them; and his only alternative was to resign his place, or make a desperate use of the prerogative. Whatever may be the virtue of later ministers, the temptation would have been irresistible by any administration of the last century; and we can scarcely blame North, so much as human nature in his day, if he embraced the evil opportunity in all its plenitude.

Ten peers at once were called up to the English house. But it was in Ireland, a country then as much famed for the rapid production of