never

peculiar department of the First Lord of the Treasury, were marked in connexion with any name but Mr. Vansittart's. The boast of prosperity,-the schemes of Bank discount which accompanied it, exacerbating the malady of speculation one year, and the misery of panic the next,-were as much Lord Liverpool's as Mr. Robinson's; but the latter alone was blamed, or ever named in reference to these great calamities. Nay, even the violent revolution suddenly effected in the currency, and effected without the least precaution to guard against the country repaying twenty-five shillings for every twenty shillings borrowed,-was reckoned exclusively the work of Mr. Peel, as if he, being out of office altogether, had been at the head of the Government; while the Whigs stept in to claim their share of the public gratitude and applause for this great, but not very well-considered, operation.

It was curious to observe the care with which, all the while, these selections were made of parties on whom to lay the blame. No popular outcry ever assailed Lord Liverpool. While others were the objects of alternate execration and scorn, he was generally respected, never assailed. The fate that befel him was that which might have mortified others, but well suited his tastes, to be little thought of, less talked about or if, in debate, any measure was to be exposedany minister to be attacked-means were ever found, nay, pains were taken, to " assure the House that nothing was meant against the respected nobleman at the head of His Majesty's Government, for whom we all entertain feelings of et cetera, and of et cetera, and of et cetera."

Such was the happy lot of Lord Liverpool; such are the comforts which a respectable mediocrity of talents, with its almost constant companion, an extreme measure of discretion in the use of them, confers upon its possessor in lieu of brilliant reputation, with its attendant detraction and hate. While the conqueror mounts his triumphal car, and hears the air rent with the shouts of his name, he hears, too, the malignant whisper appointed to remind him, that the trumpet of fame blunts not the tooth of calumny; nay, he descends from his eminence when the splendid day is over, to be made the victim of never-ending envy, and of slander which is immortal, as the price of that day's delirious enjoyment: and all the time safety and peace is the lot of the humbler companion, who shared his labours without partaking of his renown, and who, if he has enjoyed little, has paid and suffered less.

Accordingly, it is fit that one thing should be added to what has been recorded of the general forbearance exercised towards this fortunate minister: it was nearly akin to neglect or indifference, though certainly not at all savouring of contempt. There was nothing striking or shining in his qualities, which were the solid,

useful, well-wearing ones of business-like habits and information. While great measures were executed, no one thought of Lord Liverpool. When men came to reflect, they found he was still Prime Minister; but he retired so much from public view that he was seldom thought of. Thus, if he had no blame when faults were committed, or things went wrong, so he had no praise for what was well done, or gratitude for many signal successes. He was, in truth, hardly ever considered in the matter.

He was a plain, every-day kind of speaker, who never rose above the range either of his audience or his topic; and chose his topic so as to require no strength of persuasion beyond what he possessed. He was clear and distinct enough, without even, in that first essential of business speaking, being distinguished for his excellence above almost any one who is accustomed to state a case or take part in a debate. His diction was on a level with his matter: it had nothing rare, or adorned, or happy; but though plain enough, it was not pure, or more pure than the sources from which he derived it -the Parliamentary debates, the official dispatches, and the newspapers of the day. If, adopting the middle style, or even the humile genus dicendi, he had maintained in his language the standard purity, he would have passed, and justly, for a considerable artist in that kind ;-as Swift is always praised for being a model of one style of writing. But it would be very wide, indeed, of the truth to say that the threefold nature of Mr. Jenkinson, Lord Hawkesbury, and Lord Liverpool, ever presented a model of any thing, except perhaps safe mediocrity: of a pure or correct style, he assuredly was no sample. He met the question"-when "on his legs" he would take upon himself" to assert, as he had caught the Speaker's eye,” that no "influential person" of " his Majesty's actual government," had ever "advocated liberalism," less than the humble individual who now addressed them," and whose duty it was "to justify the proposed bill." In short, he showed plainly enough that a man might avoid lofty flights, and stick to his native earth, without habitually walking in clean places; and that he who is not bold enough to face the perils of the deep, may hug the shore too close, and make shipwreck upon its inequalities.

In council he was safe if not fertile of expedient. He seldom roused his courage up to bold measures; and was one of the narrow minds whom Lord Wellesley quitted, when he found them resolved neither to make peace nor to wage war with any reasonable chance of success; and whom the prodigious achievements of his illustrious brother, contrary to all probability, and beyond every rational hope, united, with the madness of Napoleon and the severity of a northern winter, to rescue from the position which their puny councils had so well earned, and so richly deserved. He had not the spirit or the

political courage required for great emergencies; yet could he be driven, by the fear of losing office, to patronise the most disgraceful attempt ever made in this country by Royal caprice; and thus encountered the imminent peril of civil war. This is, indeed, the darkest spot in his history; and another is connected with it. He lost his head entirely when the people had defeated a body of the troops at the Queen's funeral; and is understood to have given orders for resorting to extremities-orders to which the cooler courage of the military commanders happily postponed their obedience.

The candour which he ever displayed in debate has been already marked. It was a part of the natural honesty of his character, which power had not 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 though 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 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. Every thing 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 any thing 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.

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 motive, 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