those whom he traces in his line. His Grace very soon would have wanted all plausibility in his attack upon that provision, which belonged more to mine than to me. He would soon have supplied every deficiency and symmetrized every disproportion. It would not have been for that successor to resort to any stagnant, wasting reservoir of merit in me or any ancestry. He had in himself a salient, living spring of generous and manly action. Every day he lived he would have repurchased the bounty of the Crown, and ten times more, if ten times more he had received. He was made a public creature, and had no enjoyment whatever but in the performance of some duty. At this exigent moment the loss of a finished man is not easily supplied. But a Disposer whose power we are little able to resist, and whose wisdom it behooves us not at all to dispute, has ordered it in another manner, and (whatever my querulous weakness might suggest) a far better. The storm has gone over me, and I lie like one of those old oaks which the late hurricane has scattered about me. I am stripped of all my honors; I am torn up by the roots and lie prostrate on the earth. There, and prostrate there, I most unfeignedly recognize the Divine justice, and in some degree submit to it. But whilst I humble myself before God, I do not know that it is forbidden to repel the attacks of unjust and inconsiderate men. The patience of Job is proverbial. After some of the convulsive struggles of our irritable nature, he submitted himself, and repented in dust and ashes. But even so, I do not find him blamed for reprehending and with a considerable degree of verbal asperity-those ill-conditioned neighbors of his who visited his dunghill to read moral, political, and economical lectures on his misery. I am alone! I have none to meet my enemies in the gate. Indeed, my Lord, I greatly deceive myself, if in this hard season, I would give a peck of refuse wheat for all that is called fame and honor in the world. This is the appetite but of a few. It is a luxury; it is a privilege; it is an indulgence for those who are at their ease. But we are all of us made to shun disgrace as we are made to shrink from pain and poverty and disease. : It is an instinct and under the direction of reason instinct is always in the right. I live in an inverted order. They who ought to have succeeded me are gone before me. They who should have been to me as posterity are in the place of ancestors. I owe to the dearest relation (which ever must subsist in memory) that act of piety which he would have performed for me: I owe it to him to show that he was not descended, as the Duke of Bedford would have it, from an unworthy parent. In 1790, Burke put forth a book-or rather a large pamphlet-entitled Reflections on the Revolu tion in France, in which occurs the glowing description of Marie Antoinette, who was then in prison, and three years later was to die by the guillotine. Burke more than hints at the hope that, should need be, she would save herself by suicide from a shameful execution. He rejoices to hear that "she feels with the dignity of a Roman matron; that in the last extremity she will save herself from the last disgrace and that, if she must fall, she will fall by no ignoble hand." MARIE ANTOINETTE OF FRANCE. It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France, then the Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like the morning star, full of life, of splendor, and joy. O! what a revolution! and what a heart must I have to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream, when she added titles of veneration to that enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such dis asters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men—in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calumniators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defense of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness. PERPETUITY OF THE BRITISH MONARCHY. The learned professors of the Rights of Man regard prescription not as a title to bar all claim set up against old possession, but they take prescription itself as a bar against the possessor and proprietor. They hold an immemorial possession to be no more than a long-continued, and therefore an aggravated, injustice. Such are their ideas, such is their religion, and such their law. But as to our country, and our race, as long as the well-compacted structure of our Church and State-the sanctuary, the holy of holies of that ancient law, defended by reverence, defended by power, a fortress at once and a temple-shall stand inviolate on the brow of the British Sion-as long as the British Monarchy, not more limited than fenced by the Orders of the State, shall, like the proud Keep of Windsor, rising in the majesty of proportion, and girt with the double belt of its kindred and coeval towers-as long as this awful structure shall oversee and guard the subjected land, so long the mounds and dikes of the low, flat Bedford Level will have nothing to fear from all the pickaxes of the levellers of France. As long as our Sovereign Lord the |