If any bounds are set to the rapacious demands of this sort of people, revenge and envy soon fill up the craving void left in their avarice. Confounded by the complication of distempered passions, their reason is disturbed, their views become vast and perplexed, to others inexplicable, to themselves uncertain. They find on all sides bounds to their unprincipled ambition in any fixed order of things. But in the fog and haze of confusion all is enlarged and appears without limit." Burke was here palpably holding up to national scorn the principles attributed at that period to Francis Duke of Bedford. The Russell family had grown by royal confiscations, and had long been obnoxious for this growth. The Duke, however, had suddenly broken off the old connexion of his family with public service, and figured at this period as a first-rate Tribune of the people. The penetration of the great writer could not have been mistaken in his estimate of that noble person's abilities; but he had seen too much of the evil that might be wrought by the example of birth and rank in the person of the profligate, vain, and feeble-minded Duke of Orleans, to find any security against his constitutional alarms in the nature of the Duke of Bedford's understanding.

The result, however, showed that he had misconceived the Duke's intentions. No man was more intensely aristocratic; no man less prepared for the extremities of overthrow. A childish popularity was the wooden idol before which the English peer bowed down. He cannot be supposed a convert to the more recondite doc

trines.

The mysteries of the shrine were still veiled to him. The deeper prostration and wilder orgies that belonged to the living image of all ferocity, erected upon the French altar, would probably have startled him too much, to be disclosed. He was simply a man of fashion, who, weary of indulgence in the vapid paths of luxury, sought for new excitement in the caprices of the multitude; knew nothing in the clamours of the populace, but their echo in the ears of party; and, in his harmless and sincere folly, was contented with the holiday parade of that turbid and fevered multitude which men of worse hearts, but bolder spirits and more masculine understandings, would have rejoiced to be marshalling for the field.

From sketching this outline of a lover of change, conspicuous only by the accidents of ancestry, Burke turns to characters more congenial, in all their nobler configuration, to the soaring and creative grandeur of his own mind. The pencil here but touches the canvass, but the touch is fire." Other revolutions have been conducted by persons, who, while they attempted changes in the Commonwealth, sanctified their ambition by advancing the dignity of the people, whose peace they troubled. They had long views. They aimed at the rule, not at the destruction of their country. They were men of great civil and great military talents; and if the terror, the ornament of their age, they were not like Jew brokers contending with each other who could best remedy with fraudulent circulation and depreciated paper, the wretchedness and ruin brought

upon their country by their degenerate counsels. The compliment paid to one of the great bad men of the old stamp, Cromwell, by his kinsman, a favourite poet of the time, shows what it was he proposed, and what, indeed, to a great degree he accomplished in the success of his ambition

'Still, as you rise, the State, exalted too,

Finds no distemper, while 'tis changed by you.

Changed, like the World's great scene, when, without noise,
The rising Sun night's vulgar light destroys !'

"Those disturbers were not so much like men usurping power, as asserting their natural place in society. Their rising was to illuminate and beautify the world. Their conquest over their competitors was by outshining them. The hand, that like a destroying angel smote the country, communicated to it the force and energy under which it suffered. I do not say (Heaven forbid) that the virtues of such men were to be taken as a balance to their crimes; but they were some corrective of their effects. Such was our Cromwell. Such were your whole race of Guises, Condes, and Colignis. Such the Richlieus, who in more quiet times acted in the spirit of a civil war. Such, as better men and in a less dubious cause, were your Henry the Fourth, and your Sully, though nursed in civil confusions, and not without some of their taint. It is a thing to be wondered at, to see how very soon France, when she had a moment to respire, recovered and emerged from the longest and

most dreadful civil war that was ever known in any nation. Why? because, in all their massacres, they had not slain the mind in their country. A conscious dignity, a noble pride, a generous sense of glory and emulation was not extinguished. On the contrary, it was kindled and inflamed. The organs, also, of the state, however shattered, existed. All the prizes of honour and virtue, all the rewards, all the distinctions remained."

CHAPTER II.

Clubs in England-Dr Price-Memorable description of the
Queen of France.

THE clamour of the time, as it has been renewed among ourselves, was that the great quality for representation was personal talent. The wild plea for change in the Legislature was,-why is sluggish property to place a merely honest senator in that seat which should be filled only by distinguished ability? Why keep the doors of Parliament shut to the free circulation of that intellect which comes up so perpetually renewed, from the open expanse of the public mind? The answer is obvious. Let both be represented.

But, let us hear the words of wisdom again from the true oracle, "As ability is a vigorous and active principle, and as property is inert and timid, it can never be safe from the invasions of ability, unless it be, out of all proportion, predominant in the representation. It must be represented, too, in great masses of accumulation, or it is not rightly protected. The characte