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corrupted, and no eagerness of Parliamentary warfare could interrupt His general worth as a man was always acknowledged; and this added very justly to the prevailing good opinion which he enjoyed among his countrymen, almost without distinction of party. It may be gathered from our former observations that we regard this good opinion to have been somewhat overdone; and that justice did not at all sanction the distribution of praise and of blame which the country made between him and his colleagues.

MR. TIERNEY.

AMONG the supporters of the Addington ministry, though never a member of it, was one who, far enough from filling a first-rate place among statesmen, was still farther from being an inconsiderable person in debate, where he had his own particular line, and in that eminently excelled-Mr. Tierney. He had been bred to the law, was called to the bar, and for a short time frequented the Western circuit, on which he succeeded Mr. Pitt in the office of Recorder, or keeper of the circuit books and funds; a situation filled by the youngest member of the profession on the several circuits each successive year. He soon, however, like his illustrious predecessor, left the hard and dull, and for many years cheerless path, which ends in the highest places in the State, and the most important functions of the Constitution; and devoted himself to the more inviting, but more thorny and even more precarious pursuit of politics; in which merit, if it never fails of earning fame and distinction, very often secures nothing more solid to its possessor; and which has the further disadvantage of leading to power, or to disappointment, according to the conduct or the caprice of others, as much as of the candidate himself. No man more than Mr. Tierney lived to experience the truth of this remark; and no man more constantly advised his younger friends to avoid the fascinations which concealed such snares and led to those rocks. In truth, no one had a better right to give this warning; for his talents were peculiarly fitted for the contentions of the legal profession, and must have secured him great eminence had he remained at the bar; but

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they were accompanied with some defects which proved exceedingly injurious to his success as a statesman. He possessed sufficient industry to master any subject, and, until his health failed, to undergo any labour. His understanding was of that plain and solid description which wears well, and is always more at the command of its possessor than the brilliant qualities that dazzle the vulgar. To any extraordinary quickness of apprehension he laid no claim; but he saw with perfect clearness, and if he did not take a very wide range, yet, within his appointed scope, his ideas were strongly formed, and when he stated them, luminously expressed. Everything refined he habitually rejected; partly as above his comprehension, partly as beneath his regard; and he was wont to value the efforts of fancy still lower than the feats of subtilty; so that there was something extremely comical in witnessing the contrast of his homely and somewhat literal understanding with the imaginative nature of Erskine, when they chanced to meet in conversation. But if refinement and fancy, when tried upon him apart, met with this indifferent reception, their combination in anything romantic, especially when it was propounded as a guide of conduct, fared still worse at his hands; and if he ever found such views erected into a test or standard for deciding either on public or on private affairs, he was apt to treat the fabric rather as the work of an unsound mind, than as a structure to be seriously exposed and taken to pieces by argument.

Nevertheless, with all this shunning of fanciful matter, no one's mind was more accessible to groundless imaginations; provided they entered by one quarter, on which certainly lay his weak side as a politician. A man undeniably of cool personal courage; a debater of as unquestioned boldness and vigour-he was timid in council; always saw the gloomy side of things; could scarcely ever be induced to look at any other

aspect; and tormented both himself and others with endless doubts and difficulties, and apprehensions of events barely possible, as if in human affairs, from the crossing of a street to the governing of a kingdom, men were not compelled either to stand stock-still, or to expose themselves to innumerable risks,-acting, of course, only on probabilities, and these often not very high ones. It was a singular thing to observe how complete a change the same individual had undergone in passing from the consultation to the debate. The difference was not greater between Erskine out of Court and in his professional garb. He was firm in the line once taken, against which he had raised a host of objections, and around which he had thrown a cloud of doubts; he was as bold in meeting real enemies as he had been timid in conjuring up imaginary risks; prompt, vigorous, determined he carried on the debate; and he who in a distant view of it could only descry difficulties and create confusion, when the tug of war approached, and he came to close quarters, displayed an abundance of resources which astonished all who had been harassed with his hesitation, or confounded by his perplexities, or vexed with his apprehensions. He was now found to have no eyes but for the adversary whom his whole soul was bent upon meeting; nor any circumspection but for the possibility of a reply which he was resolved to cut off."

It is probable, however, that this defect in his character as a politician had greatly increased as he grew older. In early times he was among the more forward of the Reformers. When he quitted the bar he offered himself as candidate for several vacant seats, and was unsuccessful. He attended the debates at the East India House as a proprietor; and took an active part in them. He was an assiduous member of the Society of Friends of the People,' and drew up the much and justly celebrated petition in which that useful body laid before the House of Commons all the

more striking particulars of its defective title to the office of representing the people, which that House then, as now, but with far less reason, assumed. He contested the borough of Southwark more than once, and was seated ultimately in 1796, and by a Committee before which he conducted his own case with an ability so striking, that all who witnessed it at once augured most favourably of his prospects in the House, and confessed that his leaving the bar had alone prevented him from filling the highest place among the ornaments of Westminster Hall. In that contest, his acuteness, his plain and homely sense, his power of exposing a sophism, of ridiculing a refinement, shone conspicuous; and his inimitable manner,a manner above all others suited to his style of speaking and thinking, and singularly calculated to affect a popular audience, was added to the other qualities which he showed himself possessed of, and by which he won and kept hold of the committee's undivided attention.

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His entry into the House of Commons was made at a sufficiently remarkable period of time. The Whig Opposition had just taken the most absurd and inconsistent, as well as most unjustifiable step which ever party or public men resorted to, in order to show the bitterness of their disappointment, to justify their enemies in deducing all their actions from selfish motives, and to lend the doctrine some plausibility which the enemies of all party connexion hold, when they deny its use and regard it as a mere association for interested purposes, not dictated by any public principle, but dressing itself falsely and fraudulently in that decent garb. They had retired or seceded from their attendance in Parliament, upon the very grounds which should have chained them faster to their seats; namely, that the Government was ruining the interests and trampling upon the liberties of the country; and that the people were not sufficiently alive to the situation of their own affairs. If anything could add to the

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