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CORONATION OF CHARLES THE TENTH AND OF THE

KINGS OF DAWKEY.

Pageants on pageants in long order drawn,
Peers, heralds, bishops, ermine, gold, and lawn.

WHAT is a coronation? Ask Garter King at Arms, and he will, perhaps, tell you, that it is to the divine right of monarchy what baptism is to religion. Ask any other human being, and the probability is you will be answered, that it is the rehearsal of a melo-drame, much better given at the minor theatres. It is passing strange that processions and state spectacles should succeed so well on the stage, and should so totally fail in real life; that this most sight-seeing age should, in political matters, be, of all others, the least moved through the instrumentality of its eyes, and that the holy oil should fall less efficaciously on the Lord's anointed than if it were bestowed on an old lock. There is nothing, indeed, in which the sublime approaches nearer to the ridiculous than in a public ceremony, in which the thin line of demarkation between meaning and mummery, pageant and puppet-show, rests wholly on the imagination of the spectator. We shall not easily forget the question of a little boy who was taken to see one of these public funzioni, the day after his first introduction to Harlequin, and who, as the glittering procession passed, asked if what he saw was "in earnest, or only a thing to laugh at ?" The answer to this question is a matter of no small importance to statesmen and ministers, (the terms are not always synonymous); for if they persist in thinking themselves in earnest, when the people they govern regard their pageants as things "to laugh at," they and their places are in more immediate danger than if they had committed a great crime. Yet there are few riddles so difficult to solve with precision: an association of ideas, more or less germane to the matter, constitutes all the difference, and will make or mar the fortune of the best-conceived combinations of scarlet, purple and gold, that ever passed through the (brain?) of a Herald. The practical inference to be drawn from this consideration is wholly against revivals. My Lord Mayor's show, which has passed annually before our eyes since the days of our infancy, and is deeply associated with Whittington and his cat, still maintains something of its mystic influence in our riper years, and is not viewed without a pleasing reflection on the commercial prosperity of which it is a type. The city marshal is as respectable an officer, in our estimation, as if he were a Russian field marshal in "off" or "ski ;" the state coach, if not handsome, is at least venerable; and the men in armour by no means suggest the idea of a copper tea-kettle. Not so the case in which an attempt is made to reproduce by-gone combinations, and to strike on the imagination of the people by associations which have been broken up and dissipated. As well might we hope to bring back the illusions. of love at sixty, as to influence an adult nation by the playthings of its infancy. The attempt at imposition forms the prominent idea in men's minds on such occasions; and they take a malignant pleasure in substituting for each hallowed notion, connected with the visible type, some burlesque and ridiculous image, to defeat the object and annihilate the effect intended to be produced by the ceremony. On this account a

coronation stands a better chance of success in England than in France, although in the former it is merely "upheld by old repute," and is in total discrepance with the semi-republican institutes of the government. Among the English it is regarded simply as an ancient custom; but nobody is interested in knocking an old custom on the head; and, like the chimney-sweeper's May-day majesty, a coronation takes place on the proper occasion, and the next day is forgotten by every body except Mr. Dymocke and the Barons of the Cinque Ports. The thing itself leads to no consequence; or if it should tend to inspire false ideas of conclusions yet to coine, a single stormy debate in the Commons will completely dissipate the illusion. In France the case is materially different. When Napoleon defined a throne to be a crimson chair studded with gilt nails, he put an extinguisher on the moral effect of coronations. In reviving the worn-out ceremony, the Bourbons have only given a handle to ridicule, and invited the mocking spirit of Parisian wit to a tournay of epigram and calemburg. The best, therefore, that could rationally be expected from such an exhibition, was that it should pass off smoothly, and without observation; and those who were no well-wishers to the throne, turned every accident into an ill augury, and looked out for the false move of a knight or a bishop, as a sure preliminary to a future check-mate to the king.

The anointing of kings is a ceremony that naturally arose among the Jews, where monarchy sprang out of a theocracy; and every government which has adopted this ceremony, is, for one day at least in each reign, purely theocratic. At the coronation at Rheims the clergy decidedly assumed the pas of royalty. Bonaparte had taken good care, in gratifying his own and his people's false taste for raree show, not to degrade himself in the eyes of his subjects, but boldly snatched, and himself put on, the iron crown of Lombardy, instead of receiving it by a feudal investiture from the hands of the archbishop. The pious successor of St. Louis remained for hours prostrate at the feet of the clergy, before he could obtain the golden circle; from which, eventually, he will be in greater danger than from the running away of his post-horses. In the whole of this ceremony there was nothing more amusing than the anointing. Every body knows that in former times the eldest son of the church was anointed from an holy phial that came direct from heaven, where oil continued miraculously renewed in sæcula sæculorum. This phial the Jacobins (those eternal enemies of social order) broke to pieces in the market-place, to show that royalty was for ever cut up by the roots and extirpated from France. But, notwithstanding this event, kings, somehow or other, did come back; and, as good luck would have it, the oil jar along with them. For a loyal subject, who was an eyewitness of the demolition of the ci-devant jar, fortunately slipped a fragment into his pocket, oil and all, to the great and manifest danger of his inexpressibles, through which the chain of transubstantiation has been preserved unbroken; and those who are aware of the infinite divisibility of matter, cannot doubt that Charles the Tenth has as efficacious a part in the original miracle as the remote ancestor, for whose especial use the angel brought the sacred ampoule from heaven. In this piece of stage trick, the breaking of the phial is indeed admirably typical of the rude process which monarchy underwent in the hands of the Sans Culottes; but it remains to be

proved, whether its resuscitation as satisfactorily foreshews the perpetuity of royal and sacerdotal despotism; or whether the cracked vessel may not figure rather the state of the royal intellects, and the disjointed condition of the restored government.

Without, however, pausing to estimate how much church and state will take by this episode in the ceremony, we must beg our readers to remember that, to the parties concerned, a coronation is a matter of vast importance. Philosophers may sneer as they please at the proceedings of our Court of Claims, but the vanity which seeks gratification in precedence, or, with the Baron of Bradwardine, delights in pulling off the king's boots, is by no means out of keeping. In matters of form, form is every thing; and if majesty itself, without its externals, be but a jest, the outward man of even a Burleigh or a Leicester must not be disregarded. We remember rebuking an ungracious wight for laughing at a privy counsellor who walked with great gravity into the king's tailor's, to know whether he should appear with red or with blue heels at George the Fourth's inauguration. Nothing could be mote displaced than such ridicule; for if one single privy counsellor (though it had been Mr. Canning himself) had sported his talons rouges while the rest had been blue, not even the Quarterly Review could have justified the incongruity. The cabinet, indeed, may be as arrant a piece of patchwork as it pleases, "chequered with a white and a black square" in every direction,-here a papist, and there an ascendency man,—here an Eldon, and there a Robinson, and things are none the worse for the difference. But in the case of feet, c'est tout une autre chose; and a discrepancy of colour in the shoes would be enough to trip up the heels of an entire administration.

It appears by the public papers that this anointing of kings, which came into Europe from the East, has taken a second flight, and has passed over to Otaheite. The journals, however, have committed a great oversight in neglecting to inform us how the ceremony took among the dingy politicians of the islands. Neither have they condescended to relate the order and arrangement of the processions, the splendid costume of the peers, nor the ceremonial adopted by the missionaries upon the important occasion and this is the more to be regretted, inasmuch as there is, most likely, no Sir G. Naylor at hand to record the fleeting honours of the day, and to preserve, in illuminated plates, the splendour and taste which were lavished on the dresses. This is an event which naturally inspires many weighty re flections. In the first place, a doubt suggests itself how far these same missionaries were justified in arrogating to themselves a function which is proper to the prelacy; and this consideration leads to another doubt, how far a potentate, thus irregularly anointed, is indeed "every inch a king." But these are scruples which I leave to graver heads to unravel. Query-will such a king's flag protect a vessel, or is his commission available against the statute of Piracy? Is he entitled, ex virtute officii, to convert the waters which flow round his dominions into a mare clausum ? and, lastly, can he cure the evil? A point more immediately connected with the present paper concerns the policy of permitting such exhibitions, even as far off as Otaheite. For if people are encouraged to laugh at the coronation of the King of Otaheite, they will soon laugh at that of Charles the Tenth. Nothing in

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the world can be more contagious than laughter, or more dangerous to social order and good government. Away, then, with such odious comparisons. The King of Otaheite has no saint in his lineage, no holy oil vessel in his cellar, and (since he has turned Christian) no family god of his own to pit against the great God of nature and to sanctify his usurpations. Then, again, he has no cathedral to be crowned in, and no descendant of the apostles to confer a divine right upon him. In short, the whole thing was a burlesque, and a pure blasphemy against kingly government; and folks will be but too apt to remark, that when the King of Otaheite takes up,such toys, it is high time for the kings of civilized Europe to have done with them for ever. Fortune, who is never more pertinacious, “ludum insolentem ludere,” than when she meddles with royal heads,—while she has thus revived the ceremony of coronation in the South Sea, has been equally busy in abolishing it in the West. Very few years have passed over our heads since the sun set for ever upon the royal festivities of Dawkey; and the fatal rébellion of ninety-eight, among the many other evils which it inflicted upon Ireland, has placed the splendid coronation of the kings of Dawkey among the things which have been. The gaiety of nations is eclipsed, and the innocent amusements of the citizens of Dublin have been ill-exchanged for Orange processions and party violence. Irish affairs are, for the most part, less known in England than those of Loo Choo; and the London cockney, who would be ashamed of not understanding the geography of Behring's Straits, very likely never heard of any other place in Ireland except the Giant's Causeway or the Lakes of Killarney. It may be as well therefore to state, that the kingdom of Dawkey is an island in the bay of Dublin, a few miles distant from that capital. Of its government and people it is at present unnecessary to say more than that the king held his office durante bene placito, and was elected from among the choicest and most spirited bon-vivants of the metropolis of the mother-country. For many years the inthronization of the King of Dawkey, which took place in the halcyon days of summer, when not a breeze was at hand "the blue wave to curl," was the signal for mirth and jollity, for frolic, and for fun. Unlike the Mayor of Garratt, who was chosen for his personal deformities, the King of Dawkey was selected for the splendour of his intellectual endowments. The head which could bear the most wine and punch was the head inevitably destined to bear the crown: and he who was possessed of the dryest humour, sung the drollest song, and went nearest to the unextinguishable laughter of the immortal gods, was the man who united all suffrages. The election was wholly undegraded by that corruption which sends so many blockheads to graver assemblies, and it was not subject to the chances which often commit the affairs of hereditary monarchies to the superintendence of the greatest dolt in the kingdom. In this alone he resembled the crowned heads of certain other countries, that he was a decided enemy to thinking, had a dislike to "daylight," and tolerated no open dissent from the "sentiments" which he chose to promulgate. Next in talents, as next in place to the king, were his state officers, his chancellor, his attorneygeneral, his chancellor of the exchequer, his secretaries of state, &c. &c. The keeper of his conscience never doubted-when another bottle was in question :-his chancellor of the exchequer was as careless of debt as William Pitt himself; and what may seem extraordinary,

his law-officers were men of good-nature and common sense. With the first dawnings of day, the gingle, the noddy, the glass-coach, and the jarvey, were in requisition, the cold pies and the hams, the porter, the punch, and the black strap, all securely packed. The worthy citizens, every thought of bankruptcy ("by particular desire and for that day only") banished from their minds, and their best clothes aired and adjusted, were in readiness for the solemn procession which was to carry the debonnaire monarch to the seat of his authority. On the shore of the main land opposite to the island, the boats awaited their arrival to transport them (there was then no insurrection act) to the opposite shore. The platform was set out, the tent erected, the arm-chair of state dusted and in readiness. Numerous and motley was the assemblage of personages collected on these exhilarating occasions. First, there was honest Stephen Armitage, somewhile King of Dawkey, a fellow of infinite jest. Then there was Sir Thomas Brittleware, an eminent and facetious dealer in delf and porcelain ; there were also those two capital rivals, Sir W. Felt and Sir Luke Beaver, (Jewster and Cassidy the hatters) of course at the head of affairs. There was Jemmy Allspice the grocer, and the Prince of Inishowen, an eminent spirit-merchant: with a thousand others remarkable for whim, oddity, good spirits, and good fellowship: every man his title derived, not like the vain honours of feudal aristocracy from plunder and bloodshed, nor like those of modern times from favour or accident, but each imposed in allusion to qualifications and attributes strictly personal. Nor were there wanting among these jovial sons of commerce names of an higher interest. Curran and Bush, Lord Downes and Yelverton, if we mistake not, have not disdained to mingle in the mirth of the day. The costumes, though inferior in splendour to those of the coronators of Rheims, were marked by a more sober propriety. A plain brown coat, with a single gold button at the collar, and a white wand, indicated the person of a high officer, without sinking the personage into a playhouse "king of shreds and patches." The great business of the day (the officers being all duly installed) was the holding a special assize for the trial of such grievous offences as the state of the times brought to the surface; such as "eating the cat's tail without salt," "sleeping with the eyes shut," &c. &c. And not even Lord Norbury's far celebrated "racket-court,' -as the Irish court of Common Pleas has long been called-ever echoed with half the fun, or was enlivened by half the brilliance of repartee, that distinguished this court of Momus. Eating and drinking there were "galore;" but eating and drinking were not the sole ends of this ceremony. There was none of the silent gravity of a swan-hopping voyage; the national vivacity and flow of spirits poured forth unrestricted, save by good humour and the politeness of the heart. The rocks echoed to songs which might have raised a smile on the melancholy cheek of the bewitched prince in the tale of the three Pomegranates; and the very oysters in the adjacent beds, however "crossed by love," gaped synipathetic to the puns and quips and quiddities of the court, and for once in their lives threw off their proverbial dulness. There is something in the hilarity of an Irishman, which when he chooses to be merry, is peculiar to him. His animal spirits are more bounding, more humorous, more "creaming" (to borrow a metaphor from cham

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