But cheering as is the tone of English opinion, when we recollect the follies in which a few years ago large bodies of sane men acquiesced, we must not blind ourselves to the dangers by which we are still encompassed. The authors of the delusions from which the nation has just escaped are still among us, ready to take advantage of any moment of weakness or neglect. It seems almost incredible that, with the warnings before their eyes which each mail from America brings home, there should still be men eager to travel along the same fatal path and court the same fearful destiny. But no failures discourage the genuine fanatic. Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Bright, the fervent neophyte vieing with the veteran confessor, are still labouring as indefatigably, though perhaps not so hopefully as ever, to pull down in faithful imitation of their great exemplar all that exalts itself above the dead democratic level. What object Mr. Gladstone may be consciously pursuing we do not, of course, venture to decide. No psychologist that ever existed could solve such a problem. But the connexion between the object to which he persuades himself he is looking, and the direction in which he is really tending, has always been of the slenderest kind. Sometimes he confides to the world his intentions, so that we have a basis for calculating the relation which they bear to the course he actually pursues. Last year he told the House that ten thousand men, together with several batteries of Armstrong guns, constituted an expedition 'bearing peaceful remonstrances to the mouth of the Peiho.' This year he informed the House that his proposal for insulting the House of Lords and subsidizing out of the Exchequer the newspapers belonging to his new allies, was meant as a 'proposal of conciliation to the Opposition.' In the same way he constantly replies to the despairing complaints of the rural members, that his policy has always been peculiarly favourable to the landed interest. With such specimens before us of the process by which he interprets his own acts to his own mind, it is impossible for us to pretend to say whether he considers himself a Democrat or a Conservative. In judging, however, of public men, we must not accept their own estimate of themselves; for even Mr. Bright is fond of calling himself 'a true Conservative.' We must judge by acts, not words.

During the last ten years Mr. Gladstone has dealt with taxation, with expenditure, with the constitution of the House of Commons, and with the powers of the House of Lords. Upon all these subjects he has laboured to assimilate Old England to New England, and to follow the path which our most enthusiastic demagogues have marked out. His finance has ever tended to accumulate upon the holders of fixed property every

public burden-just as is done in Massachusetts and New York. It may suit him now, when he sees that further progress is impracticable, to say that he intends to go no further, and to leave our finance just as it stands. But last year, when the intoxication of a fancied popularity laid bare for a moment his real inclinations to the world, he was not so modest in his anticipations. In both his Budget speeches he strongly laid down the doctrine that a stationary policy in finance was a retrograde policy, and that in the removal of indirect taxation it was our duty to be constantly moving onwards. He has been equally faithful to Mr. Bright in the matter of expenditure. He has even gone so far in his devotion to the Peace party, that he has denounced and decried again and again the very estimates that he himself in his official capacity was moving. These are, however, comparatively minor matters. They were imitations of America in non-essentials, though they indicated sufficiently the general tendency of his policy. He and Mr. Bright have worked together to Americanize our institutions in points of far more moment. Two barriers stand between us and the uncurbed dominion of the multitude. One of them is the restricted number of those who elect the House of Commons, and the other is the independence of the House of Lords. Mr. Gladstone has been eager and active in the work of tearing down both these barriers. Last year he delivered one of the few speeches that came from the Treasury bench in favour of the degradation of the suffrage. This year, pressing into his service an unwilling Cabinet, he led the way in attempting to take away all independent power from the House of Lords. On the gravity of this last step we will not enlarge ourselves, or quote from any of those who urged the House of Commons to forbear. The fairest way of describing its real purpose and meaning is by quoting from the Io Paan, which, when the measure had been carried, those who had urged it the most strongly sang over the humbled House of Peers. In the original it is printed in the spaced type of an official communication:

"Their lordships must by this time be abundantly conscious that they made a great mistake in grasping at functions from which centuries of constitutional usage have hedged them off. They have sustained not only defeat, but humiliation. They have tried to become masters in the State, only to prove that they are the servants of servants. They have forced upon their own experience and the popular observation the disagreeable truth that, as regards finance, they have merely to register the resolutions of the Commons, have no more power of initiation, alteration, or even rejection, than the seal which will presently be affixed upon the act they would have liked to tear in pieces.'-Morning Star, June 12th, 1861.

In

In this spirit fresh attacks are constantly directed from the same quarter against the scanty remains of power left to the House of Lords. They were threatened with a renewal of the same process as that which has humiliated them upon the Paper Duty, if they should venture to throw out the Church Rate Bill. Even their modification of the Bankruptcy Bill is inveighed against as a ‘patrician usurpation.' Mr. Gladstone's success in humbling the Lords has furnished a fulcrum for future operations which will not be slackly used. It may have suited him on the eve of a division, in which the suspicion of partnership with Mr. Bright might have cost him fifty votes, to disavow his odious comrade. But no one who-setting aside indefinite professions-takes a broad view of his acts, observes the results to which they tend, and notes the character of the adherents by whom they have been the most enthusiastically received, will doubt that Mr. Gladstone is at once Mr. Bright's truest and most formidable ally.

teract.

It is an accession of strength to the demagogue's band which all friends of the constitution must deplore. We can only trust that he will be as outspoken as his new associate. His great power for evil in recent years has lain in the disguise which a vague and copious verbiage threw around his change of creed. The recollection of his old Conservatism, not formally disavowed, still retained some slight hold upon the sympathies of a few. But the alliance of Mr. Bright has been an advertisement of Radicalism which no indistinctness of language can counWe cherish hopes, therefore, that he will be less dangerous as an open foe than as a half-friend. But whatever danger he or his allies may threaten, it is only an additional motive to the friends of the constitution to be watchful and united. We know the stake we are playing for, and the perils which it rests on this generation to avert. No doubt the attempts will be renewed ere long to lower the electoral suffrage in the House of Commons and to extinguish the House of Lords. The fanatic devotees of democracy will not relax their efforts to bring us under its obedience. But at least we now know the character of the master to whose yoke we are to bend. Theories of perfectibility, dreams of popular infallibility, have now been scattered to the winds. The simple ones who will accept the prosperity of mechanics' institutes and the circulation of cheap books as an argument for democracy are reduced to a very scanty flock. Fine phrases about confidence in the English people will no longer conceal from the eyes of the most sentimental the insanity of seating hungry ignorance upon a despotic throne. If now we submit to democratic changes, with our eyes open, we do it in despite of all the warning that the most ample experience can

afford.

afford. It is at our own peril if we persist in straying down the slippery slopes over which we have already seen the guide we were following disappear. We know now all that is implied in the apparently innocent proposal to admit the people within the pale of the constitution.' We have learnt what is the end of. that beginning. We have seen the drama acted through before our eyes its boastful opening, its fair-seeming progress, and its tragic close. We have watched that small germ of evil develop bit by bit the suffrage once relaxed lead to greater relaxations; the restraints which the law imposed upon the multitude one by one torn down; until every organ of the State, legislative, executive, and judicial, has successively become the passive mouthpiece of mob-law; and at last the reckless and needy partisans who rule under a government of mob-law have goaded each other into civil war. It is a spectacle which we should study deeply, for so striking a warning is rarely granted to a nation. If, in spite of it, we suffer the intrigues of politicians to lure us into democracy, we shall deserve our downfall, for we shall have perished by that wilful infatuation which no warning can dispel.

NOTE to last Vol., Art. IV., p. 447.- Spiritual Destitution
in the Metropolis.'

We are informed by Mr. Bazely that he has never had a decorated altar nor an intoned service; that the late Mr. Green never attended his church, although he did sometimes attend another church at Poplar; and that Mr. Green was all along strongly connected with dissent. We hasten to acknowledge our mistake; and we have heard with regret that Mr. Bazely's zealous pastoral labours have proved too much for his strength and compelled him to go into retirement.

THE

QUARTERLY REVIEW.

ART. I.-1. The Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Edited by Mrs. Shelley. One Volume. London, 1854.

2. Life of P. B. Shelley. By Thomas Jefferson Hogg. London, 1858. Vols. I. and II.

3. Shelley Memorials from Authentic Sources. Edited by Lady Shelley. London, 1859.

4. Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron. By E. J. Trelawney. London, 1858.

5. Fraser's Magazine, Nos. 342 and 361, Memoir of Percy Bysshe Shelley. By T. L. Peacock.

HELLEY has been unfortunate in his biographers.

SHE

His

widow interspersed her edition of his works with very interesting biographical notes; but they were only notes; she was not permitted to speak out. Mr. Hogg's two bulky volumes contain some lively descriptions of the poet's life at Oxford; but of their remaining contents it is hardly possible to speak with patience. Mr. Hogg is a clever man, and a lawyer, and, as he is constantly assuring us, a very fastidious person to boot; and yet he has less notion of what the things are which a biographer ought to relate, and of the order in which they should be told, than might have been expected from the clumsiest hack. His materials were valuable. Of the indiscretion with which some of them have been made public, we shall have something to say by-and-by; but those which are innocuous are so awkwardly arranged, that any. but the most cautious reader is almost certain to be misled, both as to dates and still more important matters. Mr. Hogg has overlaid his book with autobiographical details which have no connexion whatever with his hero; and when he does condescend to tell us about Shelley, instead of telling us about himself, he is so unhappily destitute of the dramatic faculty which is indispensable to a biographer, that, while he talks of his friend as a Divine Poet, he represents him as a silly, conceited, half-crazy buffoon. We have no doubt that he began his task of describing Shelley with every amiable feeling, but we are just as little surprised that Shelley's nearest relations should have thought his portrait a caricature, and hastened to resume the family papers which they had intrusted to an artist so Vol. 110.-No. 220. unlucky.

U