the unreformed House of Commons but ill represented the country; it must also be confessed that Mr. Pitt's conduct gains as little glory from the retrospect. How could he, who never suffered any of his coadjutors, much less his underlings in office, to thwart his will even in trivial matters-he who would have cleared any of the departments of half their occupants, had they presumed to have an opinion of their own upon a single item of any budget, or an article in the year's estimates-how could he, after shaking the walls of the Senate with the thunders of his majestic eloquence, exerted with a zeal which set at defiance all suspicions of his entire sincerity, quietly suffer, that the object, just before declared the dearest to his heart, should be ravished from him when within his sight, nay, within his reach, by the votes of the secretaries and under-secretaries, the puisne lords and the other fry of mere placemen,-the pawns of his boards? It is a question often anxiously put by the friends of the Abolition, never satisfactorily answered by those of the Minister; and if any additional comment were wanting on the darkest passage of his life, it is supplied by the ease with which he cut off the Slave traffic of the conquered colonies, an importation of thirty thousand yearly, which he had so long suffered to exist, though an order in Council could any day have extinguished it. This he never thought of till 1805, and then, of course, the instant he chose, he destroyed it for ever with a stroke of his pen. Again, when the Whigs were in power, they found the total abolition of the traffic so easy, that the measure in pursuing which Mr. Pitt had for so many long years allowed himself to be baffled, was carried by them with only sixteen dissentient voices

in a house of 250 members. There can then, unhappily, be but one answer to the question regarding Mr. Pitt's conduct on this great measure. He was, no doubt, quite sincere, but he was not so zealous as to risk anything, to sacrifice anything, or even to give himself any extraordinary trouble for the accomplishment of his purpose. The Court was decidedly against abolition; George III. always regarded the question with abhorrence, as savouring of innovation,-and innovation in a part of his empire, connected with his earliest and most rooted prejudices,-the Colonies. The courtiers took, as is their wont, the colour of their sentiments from him. The Peers were of the same opinion. Mr. Pitt had not the enthusiasm for right and justice, to risk in their behalf losing the friendship of the mammon of unrighteousness, and he left to his rivals, when they became his successors, the glory of that triumph in the sacred cause of humanity, which should have illustrated his name, who in its defence had raised all the strains of his eloquence to their very highest pitch.