tions, which resulted in a House very similar in complexion to the last; and a miserable “insurrection" at Glasgow, known as the battle of Bonnymuir, in which several poor creatures were wounded.-Notwithstanding that the manufacturing and commercial districts were entering upon a cycle of prosperity, the agricultural interest was still under the harrow, and loud in its complaints, which the House referred to a select committee.-Sir James Mackintosh, in prosecution of the philanthropic task which he had taken upon himself in the room of Romilly, gained an encouraging modicum of success. By the passage of three out of six bills, shoplifting to the value of five shillings was at last taken from the number of capital offences; and poaching by night-except with blackened face!-mutilation of cattle, threatening with death, personal assault, and some other felonious offences, were likewise reduced to the second class of punishments. There was also abolished, by a clause in the second of these bills, a remnant of ancestral legislation, which one smiles to think should have so long cumbered the statute-book—the laws, namely, which made a gipsy liable to death for remaining one year in the country, or a known thief if found in the northern counties; which protected Westminster-bridge from injury by the fear of the gallows, and diminished the immunities of the Southwark Mint by forbidding, under the same threat, a disguised person to take refuge in its purlieus.-Mr. Brougham was not so absorbed in the Queen's defence as to relinquish for a session his educational efforts. He this year [June 27th brought forward a scheme for "the education of the poor in England and Wales," which, the first definite proposal of the kind, was wrecked upon the rock-a-head which has since proved fatal to several better plans. According to the investigations of his famous committee, the proportion of children of a fit age for instruction was ten per cent. upon the whole population; and the proportion receiving instruction, of whatever quality, only six per cent. The information on which this dismal statement was founded had been gathered exclusively from clergymen of the Establishment; and the remedial plan proposed seems to have been devised under the same auspices: we wonder at this day that its noble and liberal author could have reconciled himself to its adoption, even for the sake of the momentous work he hoped thereby to advance. The proposed national schools were all to be conducted by teachers who had been recommended by clergymen, and who, on their appointment, would take the sacrament according to the rites of the Church of England. Dissenters had not then the theoretical objection which a large proportion of them now entertain to governmental interference with education-nor were they accustomed to resolute encounters with the Church-but to this they could not submit without renouncing all their rights as religionists and as men; taxing themselves for the perversion of their own children; and sacrificing the

mental independence of the people, the essential object and highest secular blessing of education, to a system of meagre mechanical instruction, and unmitigated priestly influence. They could afford to despise the imputation of indifference to the evils of popular ignorance, since they had been the first to break in upon its reign, and had found their chiefest obstruction in the immobility or opposition of the clergy. They did, on this occasion, arouse themselves in alarm, and act with vigour. The Deputies of the Three Denominations, and other Dissenting organizations, waited on Mr. Brougham, and petitioned the House, with such effect that the bill was withdrawn after a first reading.-Meanwhile, a powerful though silent educational process was going on in the national mind. The political prisoners, with whom the gaols were crowded, sent forth a dumb but incessant appeal to a people deeply saddened rather than inflamed by what they had suffered, and to a middle class that had begun to reflect upon its own possible identity of interest with the poorer orders. The effect was seen in the great number of petitions for parliamentary reform which were presented early in the session of 1821. Mr. Lambton (afterwards Lord Durham) founded on these a motion for inquiry into the condition of the nation; which excited so little interest that it was lost upon the narrow division of fifty-five to forty-three. Lord John Russell was little more successful with a series of resolutions on the state of the representation, which were negatived by two hundred and seventy-nine to a hundred and eight; but he was compensated by carrying through both Houses a bill disfranchising Grampound. Lord Eldon, with tears and doleful predictions, urged the peers to resist this first turn of the helm towards the whirlpool of democracy; and succeeded in transferring to the county of York the two members which the Commons had resolved to confer upon the important town of Leeds. The lower House was disposed to resist this interference with its internal arrangements, but Lord John persuaded them to acquiesce in the mutilation of his measure :-an act of submission to hereditary wisdom which we may hereafter look back upon as characteristic.

There were two other matters which occupied the attention of Parliament and the country. One of these was, the proceedings of a body calling itself the Constitutional Association. Its object was the reverse of that of the societies which bore this designation forty or fifty years before. It aimed not to develop, but in its own phrase, "to uphold," the British constitution—including all those anomalies and iniquities which had grown up since the Revolution which defined and established it. And it pretended to maintain the constitution by waging systematic war upon what Englishmen are accustomed to consider its palladium-the liberty of the press. It threatened with prosecution the publishers and vendors of whatever it was pleased to consider seditious or irreligious

into

books, pamphlets, or papers. It was an extensive organization, collecting large funds, and having on its books forty peers and bishops, a number of M.P.'s, and of course numerous clergymen. The freedom of printing was no doubt more abused at this time than ever before or since ;-the most sacred subjects were treated with disgusting ribaldry, and personal character was venemously assailed, from private spleen or reckless partisanship. But the evil was obviously the product of the policy which these friends of religion, law, and order, had enabled the Government to pursue. Men, forbidden to speak their honest thoughts, gave vent to their worst feelings in anonymous print; and fair political discussion being prohibited, caricature and slander gave employment to penmen who must else have starved. The Association began its work in December, 1820; and soon terrified the poorer booksellers and newsmen avoidance of democratic or sceptical wares, while such as Hone and Carlile were but exasperated. "The Bridge-street Gang" was the nickname bestowed on the Association by one of these, from the locality of its office; and even the respectable public came in a very short time to look upon it as over zealous in its vocation, if no worse. It was felt to be intolerable that members of the highest court of appeal should, in another capacity, set the law in motion; and judges permitted defendants to set aside jurors who by their connexion with the Association were virtually prosecutors. Mr. Brougham added to his public services by calling the attention of Government to the matter in the House of Commons; and though no steps were taken to test the legality of the organization, the public was felt to be so hostile that the members quietly dropped off, and within a year, what at first seemed a very threatening foe, was virtually extinct.

The other and greater affair was, the entrance of the Catholic question upon its final stage. Grattan had come up to London in the spring of 1820, to resume his veteran leadership, but died before any Parliamentary action could be taken. That year nothing was done; but, in the summer of '21, Mr. Plunket succeeded in carrying through the Commons a bill not essentially different from that which is now known as the Catholic Relief Act. The majorities were decided, though not large-that on the third reading, nineteen; but the "intellectual preponderance" of its supporters was so manifest, that every one concluded the battle was over in the Commons. In the Lords, it was met by a very great preponderance neither of intellect nor numbers. The Duke of York decided the waverers in their following of Eldon, by an intimation that his royal brother and himself inherited the conscientious scruples of their father, and could never consent to that abrogation of the coronation oath which the admission of Catholics to Parliament would imply. So a majority of thirty-nine was found to

reject the bill on its introduction; and the old "Thank God for a House of Lords," was joined with a new loyal and religious toast-"The thirty-nine peers who saved the thirty-nine articles!" It was now a struggle between two constituent powers of the realm. How the people of England and Ireland looked upon the strife, we shall next see.

CHAPTER VII.

DEATH OF NAPOLEON-THE SECOND CONGRESS OF VIENNA THE SPANISH AND ITALIAN REVOLUTIONS THE GREEK WAR OF INDEPENDENCE-RESTORATION OF ABSOLUTISM IN ITALY BY AUSTRIA-THE CONGRESS OF VERONA-SUICIDE OF LORD LONDONDERRY-ACCESSION OF ME. CANNING TO POWER-HIS DIFFICULTIES AND TRIUMPH-INVASION OF SPAIN BY A FRENCH ARMY-THE NECESSITY OF PEACE TO ENGLAND-RECOGNITION OF THE INDEPENDENCE OF THE SPANISH COLONIES-DEATH OF LOUIS THE EIGHTEENTH AND THE CZAR ALEXANDER-REVOLUTION AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION IN PORTUGAL-MR. CANNING'S EXPOSITION AND DEFENCE OF HIS POLICY THE KINGDOM OF GREECE THE OREGON DISPUTE THE ALIEN ACT-THE ASHANTEE AND BURMESE WARS.

NAPOLEON was dead. On the 5th of May, 1821, he had quietly given up, in his island prison, that mighty spirit which had for twenty years "filled the post-horns of all Europe" at their every blast; and through six years of captivity had attracted apprehensive or regretful glances. We need not here moot the method of his treatment or demeanour -whether his gaolers added to their fears the deeper meanness of needless indignities; or whether his own bearing was that worthy of a great man in adversity— a sight for the gods." Nor will we attempt to moralize upon the spectacle of that figure, grown corpulent and diseased, gazing from an insulated rock upon the ocean that but faintly imaged his own unrest-or of the burial beneath the willow. The brief en passant record of Napoleon's death is more impressive to us who have gone over the previous pages, than could be the most elaborate éloge.

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Napoleon dead, surely the epoch of peace had come. The kings who had solemnly proclaimed him troubler of the nations, might surely congratulate each other and their subjects, with the meek gladness which became so holy a fraternity, upon the descent of the arch-foe of God and man to a prison more secure than even St. Helena. Rather might it bring a smile to the cold cheek of the dead to see himself avenged upon his victors-to see them plagued by the spirits they had raised against him, and themselves about to be gathered, like him, to the grave, but unlike him, by all unhonoured and unwept. In the summer of 1821, the members of the Holy Alliance were in dismay and perplexity—within five or six years they had nearly all been

smitten with violent or sudden death.-The great events of that period we will endeavour to narrate in a single chapter.

We have brought down [chap. i. p. 92,] continental affairs to the Congress of Carlsbad, held in the summer of 1819, in consequence of that intense discontent which took its fiercest shape in the assassination of Kotzebue. The resolutions then adopted-including the appointment of a sort of central committee of vigilance, at Mayence—were so little effectual in the suppression of German liberalism, now strengthened by sympathy with that of France, in mutual forgetfulness of the war of 1813, that Prince Metternich convened another Congress of Vienna at the close of the year, intending to draw yet closer the bonds which united the minor states in obedience to the determined absolutism of Austria, by restricting the power of the provincial diets, and increasing their obligations to federal action. While the Congress was sitting [on the 1st of January, 1820] an insurrection broke out near Cadiz, which, suppressed at first, revived and rapidly spread over all Spain. It took the form of an armed demand for the constitution of 1812. The army, officers and men, generally siding with the insurgents, the King did not hold out long. On the morning of the 10th of March, he convoked the Cortes-in the evening, a prisoner in his palace, he proclaimed the constitution: it would abolish the Inquisition, but scarcely interrupt his favourite occupation of embroidering petticoats for the Virgin. In August the Portuguese claimed and obtained from John the Sixth a similar boon. The Italian peninsula next upheaved with the shock of the Iberian. First the subjects of old Ferdinand of Naples wrested from him just such a constitution as Ferdinand of Spain had conceded. Then the liberals of Piedmont and Lombardy prepared to rise, but trusting to Charles Albert, were betrayed by him then, as Prince of Casignano, as they have since been betrayed by him as King of Sardinia. Yet further south and east, sea and land were vibrating to the impulse that seemed to have quickened the most downtrodden peoples into strength and indignation. Greece had risen against her ancient foe and cruel oppressor-with the sympathies of all Christendom on her side; and with special expectation of help from the Czar, though his brother was then torturing the nobles of Poland in the streets of Warsaw. Alexander was actually preparing to assist the Greeks, when Metternich-who had a double objection to Russia's interference; the fear of her aggrandisement, and the danger of encouraging resistance to the legitimate tyranny of even the Grand Turk — checked his benevolence by disclosing the existence of a conspiracy amongst the officers of his own Guard. The streets of every university town in Germany every night echoed with the revolutionary strains of students and young burghers, and from Hamburg to Frankfort-on-the-Maine were displayed the symbols of Teutonic freedom and unity. The King of Prussia was improvising in his yet youthful king