The British review and London critical journal

1. Henry the Eighth and George the Fourth, or the Case fairly stated, in Five Parts. By Thomas Harrall. Second Edition. C. and H. Baldwyn. London, 1820.

2. Speeches of Mr. Brougham, Mr. Denman, and Dr. Lushington, containing the Defence of her Majesty, the Queen. Sherwood, and Co. London, 1820.

3. Speeches of his Majesty's Attorney and Solicitor General, before the House of Lords, on Friday, October 27, 1820. Maxwell. London.

4. Speech of the Right Honourable the Earl of Liverpool, on Nov. 3, 1820, and the following Day, on the Bill of Pains and Penalties. Maxwell. London.

5. A Letter from the King to his People. Seventh Edition. Turner. London, 1820.

6. Selections from the Queen's Answers to the various Addresses presented to her, together with her Majesty's extraordinary Letter to the King, and an Introduction and Observations illustrative of their Tendency. Hatchard. London, 1821.

7. The Declaration of the People of England to their Sovereign Lord the King. Hatchard. London, 1821.

IT seems to have been the general policy of other journals of any dignity or influence in the country, to leave untouched the painful topic to which the publications at the head of this article relate. It may be said, perhaps, even after we have broken the ground, that still no Quarterly Review of any dignity or

VOL. XVII. NO. XXXIII,

influence has intermeddled with it. One characteristic of dignity, however, we do most assuredly possess.-We have no body to fear or compliment-no man of any party of the state contributes to our pages, no patronage circumseribes our freedom,-we are absolutely unobstructed by any interest, pledge, or obligation. But our readers need not be apprehensive that we are intending to drag them along that miry way, so lately trodden by the whole nation, and from which it has not been possible to come out undefiled. We shall not even enter upon the question of royal guilt or innocence; and although it may, peradventure, be pretty easy to infer from the tenour of our remarks to what opinion we incline on this distressing subject, yet it is our purpose to consider rather the conduct and designs of parties and individuals connected with it, and the general development it has produced of the moral, political, and religious state of the nation, than the merits or the proofs of the great case itself. With respect to the queen, there can be no doubt that it would have been greatly more for the interests of her reputation, to have lived down what she and her friends have designated as the persecution of confederated malice; to have assumed the demeanour which best corresponds with the character of calumniated innocence; to have consulted the dignity of truth and the selfrespect of virtue, by keeping herself and her cause at an equal distance from the misguiding and misguided enemies of order and authority. In this has consisted the Queen's cardinal mistake. In an evil hour she has condescended to become an instrument, and to be prevented from seeing the real people. She has been hindered from seeing who are the depositaries of the mind and sense of the nation,-from seeing that the only strong things in the moral system are virtue and intelligence, that the clamour which follows her through the streets is hostility in disguise,that to rise as a queen, she must first be extricated and then exalted as a woman. She does not see, poor lady! and there is no one to tell her, that many among her most clamorous adherents were once the clamorous adherents of her royal husband also;-the very authors, promoters, and encouragers of that conduct, which now they exaggerate as the ground of their libellous abuse ;-that were she to rise out of this contagious atmosphere a queen indeed, she would find the memories best - stored with whatever tended to degrade her, and the hearts most disposed to fling all her conduct in her face, among those who now can see nothing in her case but persecuted innocence, nothing in the monarch but the similitude of a Nero, or a Henry the Eighth, nothing in the tribunals of justice, or the chambers of legislation, but plots against virtue, and the arts of confederated oppression.

The queen, with an utter ignorance of the real character of

the British people, ignorant too of the real amount of good sense in the country, which, but for the wilful blindness of faction is such, that there lives not in it the being so uninformed as not to see through and appreciate the views and motives of our present political agitators, has placed herself in the hands of persons, who, to serve their own purposes, have persuaded her to think that the best confutation of the charges against her would be to out-face them. Their own interests, as disturbers and destroyers, required that she should act upon this view of things: without anticipating the too natural inference, that to look with a face of adamant upon the world under the imputation of such delinquencies, could be possible only to one who was capable of committing them. What it may have cost her Majesty to suppress the feelings natural to her situation we cannot know, but we are quite sure that to seem to be above the shame of a suspicion so foul affecting one's character is to give countenance to the suspicion itself, upon the ordinary grounds and analogies according to which human character and conduct are estimated. There may be, indeed, a conspicuous integrity of life imparting a conscious security, and exalting innocence above the fear of reproach; but it does unfortunately happen that the nature of her Majesty's case is not such as to permit any inference to be drawn in her favour, from the aspect of boldness which she turns towards her accusers. An unbroken spirit under charges so heavy may be the bravery of innocence, or the bravado of guilt; and before legal examination, and the disclosure of attested facts, the fearlessness with which inquiry is challenged and met, affords, in varying degrees, according to circumstances, a moral argument of innocence; but after judicial investigation, this previous courage can add nothing to innocence proved, and may deepen the depravity of established guilt. It is, therefore, the worst policy imaginable industriously to assume this aspect of defiance before our trial, not only because there is always something in this pains-taking to appear innocent altogether different from those signs of inward satisfaction which belong to a self-acquitting conscience, but because, especially in a case where the crime imputed implies the want of shame, as soon as the tide of evidence turns against the accused, all the hardihood displayed before the trial runs, so to speak, in the very current of conviction. What this royal person has been accused of, does, in short, suppose the very effrontery with which the charges were encountered; the very principle of shame must have been extinguished before the acts imputed to her, with the attendant circumstances, could have been committed.

We cannot help thinking that the Queen has been her own. great enemy in the course she has been persuaded to take, since

the accession of his present Majesty. A darkness has overspread her faculties in relation to her own permanent interest, from the moment she was taught to mistake for a personal feeling towards herself an unprincipled hostility towards Government-in some engendered by delusion and passion, and in others by the lust of power or plunder. It has been the great policy of the factious and seditious, to make her steps irretrievable, and as soon as possible to involve her in an irreconcileable quarrel with all the dignities and authorities of the land; to degrade her first among all persons capable, by their situation and opportunities, of weighing evidence and judging by the analogies of human conduct, and then to present her a persecuted and calumniated woman to that part of society which believe or disbelieve every thing as their prejudices or passions dispose them. The result has been, that the higher orders of society, and in general the soberer and sounder part of the nation, have seen and heard enough to induce them to stand aloof; and her Majesty's dependence is necessarily upon that flux body usually called the common people; who, unless she is enabled to support her credit, by a continued series of excitements, will let her drop into obscurity and neglect; happy to have escaped the fate of those idols which are wont to be destroyed by their worshippers for being worshipped in vain.

The Queen's case has not been without its political and moral compensations. It has disclosed the real condition of the country. By an operation not unlike the agency of chemical attraction, a new sorting has taken place among the various classes of society; deceptious combinations have been dissolved; and the kindred parts of the human character have presented themselves in their true affinities. It is to the community, as it is to the individual, a vast advantage to be brought acquainted with its actual and interior state; and it looks as if late events were at least fraught with one wholesome tendency-that of precipitating from its solution the whole mass of poisonous ingredients which have been long accumulating with a progress neither slow nor unobserved; but not sufficiently manifest to turn a slumbering and speculative fear into a vital and vigorous counteraction. Every secret mischief dispersed through the system has been obsequious to this new test; and, deserting their assumed bases, have run into a more natural union. A crisis has occurred, so auspicious to revolutionary and jacobinical hopes, that, for the purpose of a great and combined effort, every resource of hostility has been simultaneously employed; revealing at once the whole projected mischief in all the comprehensiveness of its methods. It is around the Queen's case that every art, and shift, and pretext-every libel, imposture, and distortion

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