"I sits with my feet in a brook; Write as you write in Friends of Bohemia, and you cannot fail to write well, but if you are tempted to write another such book, this Court will treat you as it ought to treat you, and remember that our maxim is expressed in that wise Italian saying which, like all Italian sayings is good and true when not rascally, "Non v'è il peggior ladro d'un cattivo libro "-No WORSE ROBBER THAN A BAD BOOK. " Do not again declare that we; men, want men's books. No body dare write a man's book-a novel, or a poem, or a memoir. When a fellow writes, he considers what can go into a family-what virgin sisters can read; so, because our virgin sisters are idiots, we get idiotic books;" this is bad sense, and bad philosophy, and bad morality, and without religion. Consider that without the "families" at which you sneer you could not have "virgin" sisters such as you despise:-would you have the "men's books," at the risk of having a bride not idiotic and not a virgin? Would you play over again the farce of Godwin and Mary Wollstoncraft? We think not, but you must remember that "laxity of talk " may be harmless: "laxity" of writing may become a deadly evil. As Robert Pollok has it, in The Course of Time, a novel was, and is, a book, "Oft crammed full Of poisonous error, blackening every page; With nature, with itself and truth at war." Not much of this applies to you, Whitty, as the Court has already shown; but, beware, lest the world, the Court, the "families," and the virtuous sisters, may consider that "men's books," are but "old, diseased, and putrid thought." ART. VI. PRINCIPLES AND PARTIES-THE YOUNG PARLIAMENT. 1. Memorials and Correspondence of Charles James Fox. Edited by Lord John Russell. 3 vols., 8 vo. London: Bentley. 1854. 1 Contributions to the Edinburgh Review. By Henry Lord Brougham, F.R.S., &c. London and Glasgow: Griffin. 1856. 3. Memoirs of the Right Hon. Sir Robert Peel, Bart., M.P. Published by the Trustees of his Papers, Lord Mahon (now Earl Stanhope) and the Right Hon. Edwd. Cardwell, M.P, Parts II. and III. London: Murray. 1857. 4. Speech delivered by James Anthony Lawson, LL.D., Q.C., at the Election of Members to serve in Parliament for the University of Dublin, held on the 30th of March, 1857, and five following days. Dublin: Hodges and Smith. 1857. The sovereign and the people have been in travail together, and we are now to congratulate the country on the simultaneous birth of a Princess and of a Parliament. From long clothes to crinoline, and from leading strings to the valse à deux temps, the Princess will, no doubt, be trained in the way in which she is to go, and we are happy in the belief that when she is old she will not depart from it. Can this, or anything like it, be presumed in favour of the young Parliament? Her Royal Highness will pass from rosy nurses to serious governesses, and from saints in crape to saints in lawn. From her father she will learn to score music, and from her mother to practise virtue; but what far-reaching conjecture can hit the destiny of the new Parliament? True, it will have its share of nursing, and teaching, and preaching, and of maternal discipline, less gentle, however, than would be sufficient to sustain the comparison between its own training and that of the Princess. Its parent, the Country, has a loud and, truth to say, a masculine voice; an uncommon flow of free and not seldom of abusive speech; a sturdy will, and a broad and heavy hand withal. But we have in this no guarantee that the present Parliament will prove more dutiful or reasonable than its prede cessor. It may be that, at the end of its course, the constituencies will have to say, we have piped to you, and you have not danced; we have mourned to you, and you have not wept. The present House of Commons may be taken as evidence of national feeling, but not of national purpose. It means confidence in Palmerston, and nothing more. Possibly the country may have intended to give expression to its eagerness for reform; but, if so, it has failed to convey its meaning in the precise way which a minister is most likely to understand. The failure, however, admits of explanation. The disturbing influences that affect an election are many and powerful, commonly well known and well understood, but often capricious and inscrutable; so that constituencies the best affected towards a measure frequently return either cold friends or avowed enemies. It is fortunate indeed that the people have other modes of expressing their wishes and their purposes than one which private interests and ambition are so largely concerned in appropriating and perverting. The present Parliament is not itself the expression of a purpose; but, if the people have a real purpose, Parliament will be obedient. The easiest Parliament will yield nothing to popular preference, but the most obstinate will bow to the popular will. And it is in this our hope of Reform lies; for otherwise there never sat in Westminster an assembly less likely to deal largely with the question of reform. It contains hardly a score of members bound to a decided course, or whose discretion within certain easy limits is not quite unfettered. Parliament has seldom been so deficient in heart or freshness. A very undue proportion of its new members has been taken from that class of all others which has done most to dishonor the British character. Corn has been perverse, selfish, impracticable, bigoted, stupid; Cotton has been crotchetty, visionary, conceited, and unpatriotic; but Money has been altogether infamous. And yet money was never so largely represented in Parliament. Its martyrs and confessors the Sadleirs, Pauls, Strahans, Redpaths, and Hudsons-have not died, and suffered in vain. English constituencies by the dozen have committed their interests to men who love and cherish that one only interest which accrues upon principal; whose hearts beat time to the fluctuations of the market; whose colour obeys the panic or rally of the funds, and who look forward to no more distant future than the maturity of their bills. But, even were Parliament less favourably constituted than it is, and were its leader far less sagacious of the popular mind than we know him to be, there could be no doubt of the permanent supremacy of reform. Reform has no longer to wage an equal battle against this or that inveterate abuse. She has already won her decision victories and established her title. Henceforward she rules without dispute, subject only, like any other sensible ruler, to constitutional restraints. No one is disposed to question a moderate, even if not strictly regular exercise of her prerogative, but if she finds it necessary to upset an institution or two, no matter how ricketty or vicious, it must be done after the old English fashion, in the proper manner, with stately delay, and decent ceremonial, in form of law agreeably to precedent, and perhaps in Norman French, but with a redeeming nationality of accent. Under these mild restrictions, the power of reform is unlimited, because the principle is sound, has won its way gradually, and having gained the ascendant is precisely the same that it was on the horizon. In other countries reform is a name for revolution, in this country, reform isitself. A really great principle fairly before the world is certain to triumph. The men who advance it may not believe in it-they may imagine they are merely turning it to account, or that it is a clever invention of their own; possibly they may hate and fear it, and once they have attained their ends, it is the most usual thing in the world that they should disown and decry the means. It is the experience of all ages, that men who have acquired power by the profession of a principle or set of principles, often employ their power to defeat or at least to delay the operation of the principle they advocated. We do not here allude to the threadbare topic of ministerial shortcomings as compared with opposition engagements. Opposition leaders do certainly protest too much, and minister are undoubtedly too forgetful of their promises, but it is extremely probable that no well-informed Court of Equity, if government could for its vices be thrown into Chancery, would decree specific performance of opposition contracts against a man in office. We refer to those who, having obtained power under favour of a principle, employ that power to defeat, and if a possible to extinguish the principle. The English Revolution furnishes more instances of the kind alluded to than any other event in history; but it also furnishes the most remarkable instance of the vitality of a great principle, resisting every effort to silence and appress it. The Revolution has eventuated in very limited monarchy upon the basis of civil and religious liberty. The principle is excellent, but this limited monarchy was established by regicides in the person of a man who loved unlimited monarchy as dearly as ever did Tudoror Stuart. Civil liberty was taken under the patronage of aristocratic families, much as an heir expectant is favoured by a money lender; and religious liberty inaugurated the reign of persecution for a century and a half. The fathers of the Revolution were traitors, perjurers and parricides; soldiers who betrayed their flag, churchmen who denied their vows, and children who forswore their nature. Their political profligacy was only to be equalled by their private wickedness, and such as were not greatly bad were profoundly mean. The kings they set upon the throne soon found them to love their own barns better than the house of Brunswick, and had early notice that the prince's prerogative was in fact the prerogative of his ministers, under the sanction of principles which he and they alike despised. The Georges were unwilling to be Doges;" the governing classes were resolved to be "Patricians," but of the people there was no account. Meanwhile, civil and religious liberty were unknown, unless by name; but that name was in itself a power, and once exalted, drew all things after it. This it may be said is declamation, loose rhetoric, blind slashing, or, at best, random hitting. Nevertheless the facts are as we stated. Our limited monarchy was the work of the regicides; for Hampden, the associate of Russell and Sydney in the Council of Six, declared after the Revolution, that it was only a continuation of the Commonwealth, and that the Revolution itself began fourteen years before its nominal date. That absolute monarchy was the creed and the ambition of William no one offers to question. We have Whig authority forsaying that the Whigs of 1688 "had no notion of freedom beyond their sect or party," and that "with liberty upon the lip, monopoly and persecution were in their hearts." Another Whig authority, in speaking of |