mastery of the air, will despise the barriers of mountain, desert, and ocean.

But the most important distinction between the material of British strength and that of the old commercial republics, is in the diversity of the population. The land is not all a dock-yard, nor a manufactory, nor a barrack, nor a ploughed field the national ship has a sail for every breeze. With a manufacturing population of three millions, we have a professional population, a naval population, and a most powerful, healthy, and superabundant agricultural population, which supplies the drain of them all. Of this last and most indispensable class, the famous commercial republics were wholly destitute, and they therefore fell. While England has been an independent and ruling kingdom since 1066, a period already longer than the duration of the Roman empire from Cæsar, and equal to its whole duration from the consulate.

But, if the population of our settlements be taken into account, the King of England, at this hour, commands a more numerous people than that of any other sceptre on the globe; excepting the probably exaggerated, and the certainly ineffective, multitudes of China. He is monarch over one hundred millions of men! With him the old Spanish boast is true: "On his dominions the sun never sets." But the most illustrious attribute of this unexampled empire is,

that its principle is Benevolence! that knowledge goes forth with it, that tyranny sinks before it, that in its magnificent progress it abates the calamities of nature, that it plants the desert, that it civilises the savage, that it strikes off the fetters of the slave, that its spirit is at once glory to God, and good-will to man!"

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CHAPTER XVII.

QUEEN CAROLINE.

No rank can expect to be free from the common visitations of life; and George the Fourth, always much attached to his relatives, had suffered, within a few years, the loss of his royal mother ;* of his brother, the Duke of Kent,† but a week before the death of his father; and of his daughter, the Princess Charlotte;+-all regretted by the nation; but the loss of the last creating an unexampled sorrow.

The Princess Charlotte, with a spirit of independence unusual in her rank, making her own choice, and marrying Prince Leopold of SaxeCobourg, had increased the popular affection for the heiress of the throne, by the remarkable propriety and domestic nature of her life during the year of her marriage. But her constitution was feeble; and when she was about to become a mother, it seems to have been unable to resist that perilous time. She gave birth to a still-born child, and, in a few hours after, unhappily sank into a state of exhaustion, and died. The nation

* 17th Nov. 1818. † 23d Jan. 1820. 6th Nov. 1817.

received the unexpected and painful intelligence, as if every family had lost a daughter and an heir. Before the customary orders for mourning and the other marks of public respect, could be issued, all England exhibited the deepest signs of spontaneous homage and sorrow. All public places were voluntarily closed; all entertainments laid aside; the churches hung with black by the people, and funeral sermons preached every where at their request the streets deserted; marriages suspended; journeys put off; the whole system of society stopped, as if it had received an irreparable blow. The English residents abroad all put on mourning; and as the intelligence passed through the world, every spot, where an Englishman was to be found, witnessed the same evidence of the sincerest national sorrow.

If such were the loss to the people, what must it have been to him, who added his feelings as a father to those for the broken hope of his line; and, lamenting over an innocent and fond being, dead in the most exulting moment of a woman's and a wife's existence; saw before him the deathbed of two royal generations!

But he had scarcely ascended the throne, when perplexities, if of a less painful kind, of a more harassing one, awaited him, The Princess Caroline, his consort, who had long resided in Italy, announced her determination of returning to England, and demanding the appointments

and rank of queen. Her life abroad had given rise to the grossest imputations; and her presiding at the Court of England, while those imputions continued, would have been intolerable. But the means adopted to abate the offence argued a singular ignorance of human nature. If we must not subscribe to the poetic extravaganza, that

"Hell has no fury like a woman scorned,"

it ought to have been remembered, that woman, once thoroughly irritated, sets no bounds to her vengeance. The "furens quid fœmina possit," is as old as human nature: yet this violent woman had been insulted by the conduct of every English functionary abroad.

The announcement of her approach to a city where an English ambassador resided, instantly threw his entire microcosm into a state of chaos; diplomacy forswore her dances and dinners; the whole accomplished tribe of attachés were in dismay; the chief functionary shut up his doors and windows, ordered post-horses, and giving himself only time to pen a hurried despatch to the foreign office, detailing the vigour with which he had performed this national duty, fled as if he were flying from a pestilence. Foreigners, of course, with their usual adoption of the ambassadorial tone, added their laughter; until, stung by universal offence, she no sooner received the announcement of the death of George the

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