upon a nature originally good; and, although the sacred rules of morality forbid us to exonerate from censure even the admitted victim of circumstances so unfriendly to virtue, charity, as well as candour, permits us to add, that those circumstances should bear a far larger share of the reprehension than the individual, who may well claim our pity, while he incurs our censure.

It is impossible to close the sketch of these two exalted personages without a reflection suggested by the effects which were produced upon the public mind by the two most remarkable events connected with their personal history-the death of the Princess Charlotte, and the persecution of the Queen.

To those who witnessed the universal and deep affliction into which the nation was plunged by the former event, no description of the scene is necessary -to those who saw it not, all description would fail in conveying an adequate idea of the truth. It was as if each house had been suddenly bereaved of a favourite child. The whole country felt the blow, as if it had been levelled at every family within its bounds. While the tears of all classes flowed, and the manlier sex itself was softened to pity, the female imagination was occupied, bewildered, distracted, and the labours of child-bearing caused innumerable victims among those whom the incident had struck down to the ground. Yet the fact of a young woman dying in childbed was anything rather than out of the course of nature; certainly not a town in which it did not happen every month-possibly not a parish of any extent in which it did not occur every year; and in neither town nor parish had the event ever produced the least sensation beyond the walls of the house in which the mournful scene took place.

So the maltreatment, however gross, of a wife by her husband is unhappily by no means an event of rare occurrence. It is not often, certainly, that so

cruel and arbitrary a course of conduct has been pursued as that of George IV. towards his consort; but then cases of even greater brutality frequently occur, and pass with but little notice beyond the very small circle of those immediately connected with the parties. But the case of Queen Caroline flung the whole country into a state of excitement only equalled in universality and intenseness by the pangs of grief felt for her daughter's death two years before. Every family made the cause its own. Every man, every woman, took part in the fray. Party animosities, personal differences, were suspended, to join with an injured wife against her tyrant husband. The power of sovereignty itself was shaken to its centre.

The military and the civil powers bore their part in the struggle which threatened the monarchy with destruction. The people were so much exasperated that they refused to the injured party herself the right to judge of her own injuries. When she intimated a wish to withdraw from endless persecution, and put a period to incessant annoyance, by retiring from the country, the multitude were roused to frenzy by the bare mention of such a movement, and would have sacrificed to their infuriated sense of the Queen's injuries those advisers who should have honestly counselled her retirement, nay, the Queen herself, who really wished to go away, and restore the peace of the kingdom, while she consulted her own repose. So great was the diversity in the public consideration of a royal and a private family quarrel!

The treatment experienced by the King himself affords an additional illustration of the extreme favour in which kings are holden by their subjects in these realms. Than George IV. no prince was ever more unpopular while his father lived and reigned; nor could any one have been astonished more than that father would have been could he have seen the different eyes with which his son was regarded, when

successor.

heir apparent to his throne, and when filling it as his He would then have learnt how much of his own popularity depended upon his station, how little upon his personal fitness for the office. The Regency began: it was the period of our greatest military glory; all our warlike enterprises were crowned with success; the invincible Napoleon was overthrown, and banished as a criminal to a colony made penal for his special reception. Still the Regent gained no popular favour. At length his father, who had long ceased to reign, and, for any purposes of our rational nature, to exist, ceased also to live. The Regent now only changed his name and style; for he had eight years before succeeded to the whole powers of the Crown. They who remember the winter of 1820 must be aware that the same individual who a week before the death of George III. had travelled to and fro on the Brighton and Windsor roads without attracting more notice than any ordinary wayfaring man, was now, merely because his name was changed to King from Regent, greeted by crowds of loyal and curious subjects, anxious to satiate their longing eyes with the sight of a king in name; the reality of the regal office having been before the same eyes for eight years, and passed before them absolutely unnoticed.

In a few months came the Queen, and her trial speedily followed. The unpopularity of the Monarch was now renewed in more than its former generality and virulence. Nor was any prince, in any age or country, ever more universally or more deeply hated than George IV. during the year 1820. The course of the proceeding-his discomfiture in an attempt more tyrannical than any of Henry VIII.'s, and carried on by more base contrivances-his subsequent oppression of his consort in every way-her melancholy end, the victim of his continued persecution-were assuredly ill calculated to lessen the popular indigna

tion, or to turn well-merited scorn into even sufferance, far less respect. Yet such is the native force of reaction in favour of Royal personages, that he who a few months before durst as soon have walked into the flames as into an assembly of his subjects in any part of the empire, was well received in public wherever he chose to go, and was hailed by his Irish subjects rather as a god than a man, he having notoriously abandoned the principles he once professed in favour of that Irish people and their rights.

The accession of the present Queen was supposed by some to be rather a rude trial of the monarchical principle, inasmuch as a young lady of eighteen, suddenly transplanted from the nursery to the throne, might, how great soever her qualifications, be deemed hardly fit at once to hold the sceptre of such a kingdom in such times. But all apprehensions on the subject must have instantly ceased, when it was observed that there broke out all over the country an ungovernable paroxysm of loyal affection towards the illustrious lady, such as no people ever showed even to monarchs endeared by long and glorious reigns over subjects upon whom their wisdom or their valour had showered down innumerable benefits. The expectation bore the place of reality. The Queen was believed to have every good quality that it was desirable she should possess. There was a physical impossibility of her ever having done anything to earn the gratitude of her subjects, because she had only reigned a day; and yet the most extravagant professions of attachment to her person and zeal for her character burst forth from the whole country, as if she had ruled half a century and had never suffered a day to pass without conferring some benefit upon her people, nor ever fallen into any of the errors incident to human weakness. It is true that the best friends both of the sovereign and of the monarchy viewed this unreflecting loyalty with distrust, and suspected

that a people, thus ready to worship idols made with their own hands, might one day break their handywork-that they who could be so very grateful for nothing, might hereafter show ingratitude for real favours, and that, having, without any grounds beyond the creation of their fancy, professed their veneration for an unknown individual, they might afterwards, with just as little reason, show neglect or dislike. But at any rate the feeling of enthusiastic loyalty and devotion to the sovereign, merely because she was a sovereign, could not be doubted, and it could not be exceeded.*

And can it, after all these passages in our recent history, be said that the English people are of a republican tendency-that they care little for the affairs of princes or their smiles-that they are indifferent to, or impatient of, kingly government? Rather let it be asked if there is on the face of the globe any other people to whom the fortunes and the favour of kings and queens are so dear an object of concern. The people of France, under their Grand Monarque, may have made themselves ridiculous by changing the gender of a word permanently, when their prince by mistake called for "mon carrosse ;" the Romans may have affected a twisted neck to imitate the personal defect of Augustus; these were rather the base flatteries of courtly parasites than the expression of feelings in which the public at large bore any part. The barbarians of Russia flocking to be murdered by their savage Czar, or the slaves of Eastern tyrants kissing the bowstring that is to end their existence, act under the immediate influence of strong and

*It is hardly necessary to observe that no opinions whatever disrespectful or unkind towards the illustrious persons mentioned in these three paragraphs can be intended to be conveyed. What is said of the Queen's persecutions sufficiently proves this. In regard to the present Sovereign, it may be added that the above passage was written early in February, 1838, and before the harsh and unjust treatment which was soon after shown towards her.