has not with astonishment reflected on the difference between a real committer of a murder, and the idea of one which he has been collecting and heightening all his life out of books, dreams, &c. The fellow, perhaps, is a sleek, smug-looking man, with light hair and eye-brows, the latter by no means jutting out or like a crag, and with none of those marks which our fancy had pre-bestowed upon him.

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I find I am getting unawares too serious; the best way on such occasions is, to leave off, which I shall do by generally récom mending to all prosecuting advertisers not to confound crimes with ugliness; or rather, to distinguish between that physiognos mical deformity, which I am willing to grant always accompa nies crime, and mere physical ugliness, which signifies nothing, is the exponent of nothing, and may exist in a good or bad per son indifferently.

CRITO.

ART. XVI.-On the probable Effects of the Gunpowder Trea son in this country if the Conspirators had accomplished their Object.

MR. REFLECTOR,

THE Gunpowder Treason was the subject which called forth the earliest specimen which is left us of the pulpit eloquence of Jeremy Taylor, When he preached the Sermon on that anniver. sary, which is printed at the end of the folio edition of his Sermons, he was a young man just commencing his ministry, under the auspices of Archbishop Laud, From the amazing research of learning, and powers of maturest oratory, which it manifests, one should rather have conjectured it to have proceeded from the same person after he was ripened by time into a Bishop and Fa ther of the Church. The conclusion of his discourse is so pertinent to my subject, that I must beg your patience while I transcribe it. He has been drawing a parallel between the fire which Vaux and his accomplices meditated, and that which James and John were willing to have called down from heaven upon the heads of the Samaritans who would not receive our Saviour into their houses. "Lastly," he says, "it (the powder treason) was a fire so strange that it had no example. The apostles, indeed, pleaded a mistaken precedent for the reasonableness of their demand, they desired leave to do but even as Elias did. The Greeks only retain this clause, it is not in the Bibles of the Church

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Church of Rome. And, really, these Romano-burbari could never pretend any precedent for an act so barbarous as theirs. Adrimeleck, indeed, killed a king, but he spared the people. Haman would have killed the people, but spared the king. But that both king and people, princes and judges, branch and rush and root, should die at once (as if Caligula's wish were actuated, and all England upon one head) was never known till now, that all the malice of the world met in this as in a center. The Sicilian even-song, the matins of St. Bartholomew, known for the pitiless and damned massacres, were but náπve oxías övag, the dream of the shadow of smoke, if compared with this great fire. In tum, occupato sæculo fabulas vulgaris nequitia non invenit. This was a busy age; Herostratus must have invented a more sublimed malice than the burning of one temple, or not have been so much as spoke of since the discovery of the powder treason. But I must make more haste, I shall not else climb the sublimity of this impiety. Nero was sometimes the populare odium, was po pularly hated, and deserved it too, for he slew his master, and his wife, and all his family, once or twice over,-opened his mother's womb,-fired the city,-laughed at it,-slandered the Christians for it; but yet all these were but principia malorum, the very first rudiments of evil. Add, then, to these, Herod's master-piece at Ramah, as it was decyphered by the tears and sad threnes of the matrons in an universal mourning for the loss of their pretty infants; yet this of Herod will prove but an infant wickedness, and that of Nero the evil but of one city. I would willingly have found out an example, but see I cannot ; should I put into the scale the extract of all the old tyrants in antique stories,

Bistonii stabulum Regis, Busiridis aras,

Antiphata mensas, et Taurica regna Thoantis ;

should I take for true story the highest cruelty as it was fancied by the most hieroglyphical Egyptian, this alone would weigh them down, as if the Alps were put in scale against the dust of a balance. For had this accursed treason prospered, we should have had the whole kingdom mourn for the inestimable loss of its chiefest glory, its life, its present joy, and all its very hopes for the future. For such was their destined malice, that they would not only have inflicted so cruel a blow, but have made it incur. able, by cutting off our supplies of joy, the whole succession of the Line Royal. Not only the vine itself, but all the gemmula, and the tender olive branches, should either have been bent to their intentions, and made to grow crooked, or else been broken.

"And now, after such sublimity of malice, I will not instance

in

in the sacrilegious ruin of the neighbouring temples, which needs must have perished in the flame, nor in the disturbing the ashes of our intombed kings, devouring their dead ruins like sepulchral dogs,-these are but minutes, in respect of the ruin prepared for the living temples:

Stragem sed istam non tulit

Christus cadentum Principum
Impune, ne forsan sui

Patris periret fabrica.

Ergo quæ poterit lingua retexere

Laudes, Christe, tuas, qui domitum struis
Infidum populum cum Duce perfido !"

In such strains of eloquent indignation did Jeremy Taylor's young oratory inveigh against that stupendous attempt, which he truly says had no parallel in ancient or modern times. A century and a half of European crimes has elapsed since he made the assertion, and his position remains in its strength. He wrote near the time in which the nefarious project had like to have been completed. Men's minds still were shuddering from the recentness of the escape. It must have been within his memory, or have been sounded in his ears so young by his parents, that he would seem, in his maturer years, to have remembered it. No wonder then that he describes it in words that burn. But to us, Mr. Reflector, to whom the tradition has come slowly down, and has had time to cool, the story of Guido Vaux sounds rather like a tale, a fable, and an invention, than true history. It supposes such gigantic audacity of daring, combined with such more than infantile stupidity in the motive,—such a combination of the fiend and the monkey,-that credulity is almost swallowed up in contemplating the singularity of the attempt. It has accordingly, in some degree, shared the fate of fiction. It is familiarized to us in a kind of serio-ludicrous way, like the story of Guy of Warwick, or Valentine and Orson. The way which we take to per petuate the memory of this deliverance (out of church) is well adapted to keep up this fabular notion. Boys go about the streets annually with a beggarly scarecrow drest up, which is to be burnt, indeed, at night, with holy zeal; but, meantime, they beg a penny for poor Guy: this periodical petition, which we have heard from our infancy,-combined with the dress and appearance of the effigy, so well calculated to move compassion, -have the effect of quite removing from our fancy the horrid circumstances of the story which is thus commemorated; and in poor Guy vainly should we try to recognise any of the features of that tremendous madman in iniquity, Guido Vaux, with his horrid crew of accomplices, that sought to emulate earthquakes and bursting volcanoes in their more than mortal mischief. Indeed,

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Indeed, the whole ceremony of burning Guy Faux, or the Pope, as he is indifferently called, is a sort of Treason Travestie, and admirably adapted to lower our feelings upon this memorable subject. The printers of the little duodecimo Prayer Book, which I dare say you have seen, Mr. Reflector, printed by T. Baskett* in 1749, which has the effigy of his sacred Majesty George II. piously prefixed; have illustrated the service (a very fine one in itself) which is appointed for the Anniversary of this Day, with a print, which it is not very easy to describe, but the contents appear to be these:The scene is a room, I conjecture, in the king's palace. Two persons, one of whom I take to be James himself, from his wearing his hat while the other stands bareheaded, are intently surveying a sort of speculum, or magic mirror, which stands upon a pedestal in the midst of the room, in which a little figure of Guy Faux with his dark lantern approaching the door of the Parliament House, is made discernible by the light proceeding from a great eye which shines in from the topmost corner of the apartment, by which eye the pious artist no doubt meant to designate Providence. On the other side of the mirror, is a figure doing something, which puzzled me when a child, and continues to puzzle me now. The best I can make of it is, that it is a conspirator busy laying the train, but then, why is he represented in the king's chamber 3-Conjecture upon so fantastical a design is vain, and I only notice the print as be ing one of the earliest graphic representations which woke my childhood into wonder, and doubtless combined with the mum. mery before mentioned, to take off the edge of that horror which the naked historical mention of Guido's conspiracy could not have failed of exciting.

Now that so many years are past since that abominable ma. chination was happily frustrated, it will not, I hope, be considered a profane sporting with the subject, if we take no very serious survey of the consequences that would have flowed from this plot if it had had a successful issue. The first thing that strikes us, in a selfish point of view, is the material change which it must have produced in the course of the nobility. All the ancient peerage being extinguished, as it was intended, at one blow, the Red-Book must have been closed for ever, or a new race of peers must have been created to supply the deficiency; as the first

part

*The same, I presume, upon whom the clergyman in the song of the Vicar and Moses, not without judgment, passes this memorable censure,

Here, Moses, the King,

'Tis a scandalous thing

That this Baskett should print for the Crown.

part of this dilemma is a deal too shocking to think of, what a fund of mouth-watering reflections does this give rise to in the breast of us plebeians of A. D. 1811-Why you or I, Mr. Re, flector, might have been Duke of or Earl of : I particularize no titles, to avoid the least suspicion of intention to. usurp the dignities of the two noblemen whom I have in my eye: —but a feeling more dignified than envy sometimes excites a sigh, when I think how the posterity of Guido's Legion of Honour (among whom you or I might have been) might have rolled down, ઠે. dulcified," as Burke expresses it, "by an exposure to the influence of heaven in a long flow of generations, from the hard, acidulous, metallic tincture of the spring." "* What new orders of merit, think you, this English Napoleon would have chosen? Knights of the Barrel, or Lords of the Tub, Grand Almoners of the Cellar, or Ministers of Explosion?-We should have given the Train couchant, and the Fire rampant, in our arms; we should have quartered the dozen white matches in our coats ;—the Shal、 lows would have been nothing to us.

Turning away from these mortifying reflections, let us contem plate its effects upon the other house, for they were all to have gone together,-King, Lords, Commons

To assist our imagination, let us take leave, Mr. Reflector, to suppose, and we do it it in the harmless wantonness of fancy,to suppose that the tremendous explosion had taken place in our days; we better know what a House of Commons is in our days, and can better estimate our loss; let us image, then, to our selves, the United Parliament sitting in full conclave above→→→ Faux just ready with his train and matches below; in his hand a "reed tipt with fire"-he applies the fatal engine

To assist our notions still further, let us suppose that some lucky dog of a reporter, who had escaped by miracle upon some plank of St. Stephen's benches, and came plump upon the roof of the adjacent Abbey, from whence descending, at some neigh bouring coffee-house, first wiping his clothes and calling for a glass of lemonade, he sits down and reports what he had heard and seen (quorum pars magna fuit) for the Morning Post or the Courier, we can scarcely imagine him describing the event in any other words but some such as these:

"A Motion was put and carried, That this House do adjourn: That the Speaker do quit the Chair. The House ROSE amid clamours for Order."

In

* Letter to a Noble Lord.