commended; but there may be some doubt if to the latter praise he was justly entitled. His personal gallantry, indeed, was quite unquestionable, and it was severely tried in the painful surgical operations to which he submitted with an ease that showed how little the risk and the suffering cost him. But the peculiarity of his character that made him so wise in his own conceit, and lessened the value of his counsels, also detracted much from the merit of his moral courage, by keeping him blind to difficulties and dangers, the presence or the approach of which could be discovered by all eyes but his own.

Such was the counsellor whom the Regent trusted, and who was as sure to mislead him as ever man was that undertook to advise another. The wishes of his great client were well known to him; his disrelish for the caution, and the doubts, and the fears of Lord Eldon had been oftentimes freely expressed; Sir John Leach easily saw every part of the case as the Regent wished-quickly made up his mind on the pleasing side-set himself in the same advantageous contrast with the Chancellor on this, as he delighted to do on more ordinary occasions and, because he perceived that he delighted the royal consulter at present, never doubted that his successful conduct of the affair would enable him to supplant his superior, and to clutch the Great Seal itself. The possibility of royal ingratitude never entered his narrow mind, any more than that of his own opinion being erroneous; nor did he conceive it within the nature of things, that in one respect the client should resemble his adviser, namely, in retaining his predilection only so long as measures were found to succeed, and in making the counsellor responsible in his own person for the failure of all from whom anything had ever been expected. Under these hopeful auspices, the most difficult and delicate affair ever yet undertaken by statesmen was approached; and while, under the sanguine counsels of Sir John, no one of the

conspirators ever thought of questioning the success of their case, another question was just as little asked among them, which yet was by far the most important of all-Whether, supposing the case proved against the Princess, the conspirators were one hair's-breadth nearer the mark of effecting her ruin, or whether that first success would not bring them only the nearer to their own.

The Milan Commission proceeded under this superintendence, and as its labours, so were its fruits exactly what might have been expected. It is among foreigners the first impression always arising from any work undertaken by English hands and paid for by English money, that an inexhaustible fund is employed, and with boundless profusion; and a thirst of gold is straightway excited which no extravagance of liberality can slake. The knowledge that a Board was sitting to collect evidence against the Queen immediately gave such testimony a high value in the market of Italian perjury; and happy was the individual who had ever been in her house or admitted to her presence; his fortune was counted to be made. Nor were they who had viewed her mansion, or had only known the arrangements of her villa, without hopes of sharing in the golden prize. To have even seen her pass, and to have noted who attended her person, was a piece of good luck. In short, nothing, however remotely connected with herself, or her family, or her residence, or her habits, was without its value among a poor, a sanguine, and an imaginative people. It is certain that no more ready way of proving a case, like the charge of criminal intercourse, can be found, than to have it first broadly asserted for a fact; because, this being once believed, every motion, gesture, and look is at once taken as proof of the accusation, and the two most innocent of human beings may be overwhelmed with a mass of circumstances, almost all of which, as well as the inferences drawn from them, are

really believed to be true by those who recount or record them. As the treachery of servants was the portion of this testimony which bore the highest value, that, of course, was not difficult to procure; and the accusers soon possessed what, in such a case, may most truly be deemed accusatori maxime optandum-not, indeed, confitentis reos, but the man-servant of the one, and the maid-servant of the other supposed paramour. Nor can we look back upon these scenes without some little wonder how they should not have added even the confitentem reum; for surely in a country so fertile of intriguing men and abandoned women-where false oaths, too, grow naturally, or with only the culture of a gross ignorance and a superstitious faith-it might have been easy, we should imagine, to find some youth like Smeaton in the original Harry the Eighth's time, ready to make his fortune, both in money and female favours, by pretending to have enjoyed the affections of one whose good nature and easy manners made the approach to her person no difficult matter at any time. This defect in the case can only be accounted for by supposing that the production of such a witness before the English public might have appeared somewhat perilous, both to himself and to the cause he was brought to prop with his perjuries.

Accordingly, recourse was had to spies, who watched all the parties did, and, when they could not find a circumstance, would make one; men who chronicled the dinners and the suppers that were eaten, the walks and the sails that were enjoyed, the arrangements of rooms and the position of bowers, and who, never doubting that these were the occasions and the scenes of endearment and of enjoyment, pretended to have witnessed the one, in order that the other might be supposed; but with that inattention to particulars which Providence has appointed as the snare for the false witness, and the safeguard of innocence, pretended to have seen in such directions as would have required

the rays of light to move not straightforward, but roundabout. Couriers that pryed into carriages where the travellers were asleep at grey daylight, or saw in the dusk of dewy eve what their own fancy pictured,sailors who believed that all persons could gratify their animal appetites on the public deck, where themselves had so often played the beast's part,-lying waitingwomen, capable of repaying the kindness and charity that had laid the foundation of their fortune, with the treachery that could rear it to the height of their sordid desires, chambermaids, the refuse of the streets and the common food of wayfaring licentiousness, whose foul fancy could devour every mark that beds might, but did not, present to their practised eye,-lechers of either sex, who would fain have gloated over the realities of what their liquorish imagination alone bodied forth,-pimps of hideous aspect, whose prurient glance could penetrate through the keyhole of rooms where the rat shared with the bug the silence of the deserted place-these were the performers whose exploits the Milan Commissioners chronicled, whose narratives they collected, and whose exhibition upon the great stage of the first tribunal of all the earth they sedulously and zealously prepared by frequent rehearsal. Yet, with all these helps to success, with the unlimited supply of fancy and of falsehood, which the character of the people furnished, with the very body-servants of the parties hired by their wages, if not bought with a price-such an array only could be produced as the whole world at once pronounced insufficient to support any case, and as even the most prejudiced of assemblies in the accuser's favour turned from with scorn and disgust.

The arrival of the Queen in this country, on the accession of George IV., was the signal for proceeding against her. A green bag was immediately sent down to the two Houses of Parliament, containing the fruits of the Milanese researches; and a Bill of Pains and

Penalties was prepared for her destruction. Such was the proceeding of the Court, remarkable enough, certainly, in itself-sufficiently prompt-abundantly daring and unquestionably pregnant with grave consequences. The proceeding of the country was more prompt, more decided, and more remarkable still. The people all in one voice Demurred to the Bill. They said, "Suppose all to be true which her enemies allege, we care not: she was ill-used; she was persecuted; she was turned out of her husband's house; she was denied the rights of a wife as well as of a mother; she was condemned to live the life of the widow and the childless, that he who should have been her comforter might live the life of an adulterous libertine; and she shall not be trampled down and destroyed to satiate his vengeance or humour his caprice." This was the universal feeling that occupied the country. Had the whole facts as charged been proved by a cloud of unimpeachable witnesses, such would have been the universal verdict of that country, the real jury which was to try this great cause, and so wide of their object would the accusers have found themselves at the very moment when they might have fancied the day their own. This all men of sense and reflection saw; this the Ministers saw; this, above all, the sagacious Chancellor very clearly saw with the sure and quick eye which served his long and perspicacious head; but this Sir John Leach never could be brought for a moment even to comprehend, acute as he was, nor could his royal friend be made to conceive it; because, though both acute men, they were utterly blinded by the passions that domineered in the royal breast and the conceited arrogance that inspired the vulgar adviser.

But if the Ministers saw all these things; and if they moreover were well aware-as who was not?-that the whole country was excited to a pitch of rage and indignation bordering upon rebellion, and that the struggle, if persisted in against a people firmly resolved