any such dainty consideration as elegance of expression; but in Billingsgate itself sneers of a coarser quality could not be heard than those which this nobleman has vented upon the respectable middle classes of this great city. To be sure, the people of Billingsgate have the reputation of clothing their ideas in a language apter to their quality, and therein they bear away the palm of propriety and of eloquence from the Duke.

BRUTALITIES OF THE HIGH AND LOW COMPARED.

"Plate Sin with gold,

And the strong lance of Justice, hurtless, breaks;
Clothe it in rags, a pigmy's rush doth pierce it."

THE Duke of Wellington made a parade of his person in the City on the 18th of June, in the hope that the anniversary of Waterloo would procure for him some signs of favour, which might be represented as proofs of general popularity. In this experiment he has suffered the common fate of vastly cunning persons, and pitiably miscarried of

his object. It is thus that the "little Isaac" race of politicians, "roguish but devilish keen," are ever plotting themselves into difficulties and disasters. Most unfortunate it is that men of this sort, beset with flatterers and parasites, and besotted with self-conceit, will never believe themselves in bad obour with the multitude till dead dogs and cats bring conviction to their noses. They go home wiser and dirtier men; but their assailants are depraved by the indulgence of their savage passions. This last is a very evil consequence; and we put it to the magistracy, whether the Duke of Wellington should not be brought under the libel law, and held to bail for publishing his person with a tendency to provoke a breach of the peace? With what propriety can a man show himself about the streets who ostentatiously exhibits bullet-proof iron blinds to the windows of his house, signifying the necessity for constant preparation against assault or assassination in the best guarded and most peaceable quarter of the metropolis? A man who uses iron blinds at home, and puts his mansion in a state of siege, should not make a sortie into the streets without a mask. Notwithstanding the imprudence of the Duke, every one regretted that he was dirtied, and condemned the outrage. The rabble ought to set a better example to the Aristocracy. Our state would be hopeless indeed were the brutality of the Many to equal the brutality of the Few. Why do we hold up to view the piti

less sentiment, the truculent threats, the wanton outrages, the thoughtless cruelty of members of the Aristocracy? Not surely for imitation, but that power may be wrested from those so ill qualified for the exercise of it. When the Duke of Wellington told Mr Potter that if the people were not quiet, "there was a way of making them so," he did not think of putting dead cats and dead dogs into the hands of the soldiers, and ordering them, together with discharges of dirt, to be hurled at the discontented, amidst yells and hisses; but he doubtless had in contemplation charges with sharp bayonets, and the murderous volleys of round lumps of lead, which are the favourite State sedatives and anodynes in all cases of irritability. The rabble did not push and discharge at the Duke things so hurtful as the Duke would push and discharge at the rabble if he saw occasion; yet were they guilty of a great brutality in committing the violence which they did. The people cannot retaliate upon their enemies without utterly brutalizing themselves.

Once upon a time a dog flew at a serjeant, who thrust his halberd through the animal's body. A woman exclaimed, "Oh, you cruel wretch! why "did you not beat the poor brute off with the butt "end of your halberd?" "So I would," answered the savage, "if he had run at me with his tail." Retaliation is a vile principle, and one to be renounced by the people altogether.

Indeed, they

never do retaliate strictly, for the severity of the means for their coercion, always exceeds the measure returned; and when they have run with their tails at their serjeants, they have been met with the tooth instead of the blunt end of the halberd. In the Standard's account of this very outrage on the Duke, we find this instance.

"A rascally butcher having the impudence to "hoot at and hiss him, received such a right and

left facer, from a spirited young barrister, as "made him measure his length on the pavement.'

Hissing and hooting are not the only expressions of contempt. The populace are reviled, vilified, insulted, calumniated in the House of Lords or Commons, and occasionally they resent the affront too much in the brutal way of this "spirited young barrister," not indeed by knocking down the offender, but by pelting with dead dogs and cats and dirt. All this is very wrong, and decidedly to be condemned; but who set the example? Have the outrages of the people ever, in our time, equalled the outrages committed against them? Have they ever perpetrated a Manchester massacre? And was the treatment of the Duke of Wellington, in the hands of a rabble on the 18th, harsher than the treatment of the soldier Sommerville, at Birmingham, in the hands of his officer? The Duke did not get 200 lashes. The cat which visited his offences against opinion, was of a more harmless sort than that which flayed Sommerville.

The mob did not say, "My lad, you are now where you will repent of your conduct." Observe how much more savage and unmeasured is the revenge of displeased authority than that of a riotous populace. Yet Mr Hume's statement of this case, so honourable to one and so infamous to others, was heard in the House of Commons without one expression of abhorrence, or appearing to excite enough interest to induce an inquiry into the facts. Contrast this apathy with the indignation at the dirtying and hooting of the Duke of Wellington, -yet what is fouling a man's clothes to flaying his back! Our surprise is not at any occasional outbreaking of a brutal spirit on the part of the populace; but we are amazed that they are not more brutalized by the provoking examples constantly before them. Canning's jocose description of rup. tured bowels was received with roars of laughter in that House, where the case of Sommerville was heard with the silence of indifference. In the Lords', but a few months ago, a Nobleman, notorious for his profession of religious zeal, declared his eagerness to put to death, with his own hand, an anonymous writer, who had uttered certain offensive remarks on the Queen. Did one word of rebuke follow? Had the Bishops a syllable to say in condemnation of the thirst for blood? No.

Let us suppose a thousand Winchilseas in a mob, with this rabid appetite for vengeance, and imagine the crimes to which their brutal passions