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The old and sturdy Anglo-Saxon oak could not be so easily set on fire, but a smothered conflagration has long in consequence been taking place in Ireland, and the flames have openly burst and burned fiercely on the other side of the Atlantic. The danger is postponed, not removed, in that quarter; the presence of twelve thousand men, recently sent out, could not prevent revolt from again breaking forth; the spirit of disaffection is unabated; the treasonable organization is complete; drilling is openly going on in many quarters; and the American Government is only waiting the recovery of its own finances from the dreadful shock of 1837, or the immersing of England in a contest with any other power, to advance her claim to the disputed boundary, and, joining her arms to those of the Canadian rebels, drive us finally from the shores of the St Lawrence, and establish the standard of the first republic in the world on the fortresses commanding the great internal communication of the new hemisphere.

What was the only remedy which the Liberal Government had to propose for this disastrous state of matters in our North American colonies? They had recourse to their usual nostrum of suspending the constitution. They extinguished the provincial assemblies by act of Parliament, and sent out the great autocrat, Durham, with despotic powers to govern the colony, while the imperial despots at home were preparing, by his suggestion, a constitution which was finally to determine the rights and liberties of that great

and growing quarter of the globe. Here again is the most striking illustration of the way in which the liberal government prepare, in the homage which they pay in the outset to democratic transports, the final extinction of liberty throughout the empire. They first use inflammatory and dangerous language themselves; they next patronise and promote those in their interest who use similar language in their dominions; and when, in this way, they have brought the people up to open revolt, they immediately have recourse to a suspension of the constitution, and derive a temporary support to their government from the very calamities which portend the dismemberment of the empire by the numerous offices which they contrive to carve out for their greedy democratic supporters, in the establishment of despotic government over their oppressed colonial subjects.

Look at Ireland. Mystified as the returns of crime have been by the efforts of Lord Morpeth, and the police employées of Lord Normanby's government, enough has already appeared to show, that the influence of a democratic government, leaning on popery and supported by a phalanx of Catholic priests, has there been to accelerate the progress of crime to a degree unparalleled in any other part of the empire.

From the Parliamentary Returns, it appears that, while, from the year 1829, the year of Catholic emancipation, crime has advanced in England about a fourth, and in Scotland about a half, in Ireland it has DOUBLED. The con

Table showing the total number of persons committed for trial or bailed in England and Wales, in Ireland, and in Scotland, in each of the years from 1828 to 1838.

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-Parl. Papers, and M'Culloch's Statistics of the British Empire, i. 476, et seq., Moreau, ii. 290, 298.

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clusions to be drawn from this most instructive table will not be rightly appreciated, unless it is recollected that the population of England is now, according to the most approved statistical writers, about 16,000,000; so that England, even with all its vast cities and manufacturing establish. ments, exhibits considerably less than half the amount of crime, in proportion to the population, that Ireland presents with a population engaged almost entirely in rural employments. Every body knows what a frightful character a large proportion of those crimes bear; how great a number of them are murders, fire-raisings, or crimes of the most atrocious violence; and how insecure life and property have become in the sister islaud. It is equally notorious how extremely difficult it is to obtain a conviction in the disturbed parts of that country, and how large a proportion, especially of the most atrocious criminals, constantly escape altogether, from the intimidation of juries and witnesses. It may safely be affirmed that life and property is incomparably less secure in Ireland, under the liberal government of Lord Normanby, than it is in the most arbitrary or worst regulated states of Europe.

So conscious indeed, was Government of the truth of these assertions, that all that Lord Morpeth had to say in answer was, that it has always been the same, and that no period, especially under Tory government, is to be found in which prædial disturbance and agrarian bloodshed have not prevailed more or less in the Irish counties. Is it then come to this, that all that the Liberal Government can say, in support of their administration in Ireland, is, that the glorious days of Normanby liberality are NO WORSE than the execrable period of Tory misrule! We thought they were to have been a great deal better; and that, under the fair and equal-handed administration of Popery and O'Connell, the hideous difference in the crimi'nality of Ireland and Great Britain was to disappear. Now, however, the fatal secret stands admitted by Ministerial confession, that the vast change which has taken place of late

years in the government of Ireland, has had no effect whatever either in checking crime or tranquillizing the country, but that the only excuse they can now make for the immense and frightful accumulation of crime in Ireland is, that matters were no better under the Tory governments.

In truth, however, this pretence, that murder and agrarian outrage are no worse now than in the days of Tory government is decisively disproved by the statistical returns. The following is a list taken from Moreau's Statistics of the British Empire, of the number of murders committed in Ireland during six years preceding and following the accession of the Whig Administration.

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Returns like these are ngly customers, and already the liberal writers begin to wince under the statistics of crime, which at first, in the belief that they would support all their favourite dogmas, they were so industrious in procuring. Many false inferences," says Mr M'Culloch in his Statistical Account of England, "have been drawn from comparing together returns as to the state of crime in different countries, and in the same country at different periods. Such returns are obviously good for nothing, except to deceive and mislead, unless the classification of offences in the countries and periods compared together were the same, and unless the police and the laws were similar, the former possessing nearly the same vigilance, and the latter enforced with about the same precision."† We heard no complaints of these returns not being a true index to the state of crime, as long as they were thought to afford any countenance to the ruinous social and economical doc

* Moreau's Stat. de la Grand Bretagne, ii. 280-285. † M'Culloch's Statistical Account of the British Empire, ii. 468.

trines of the Whigs. But no sooner are they found, as has been decisively done, and by none more than by this miscellany, to prove how rapidly crime has increased in Ireland under the priest-ridden government of Lord Normanby, and in the manufacturing towns of Great Britain, under the influence of merely intellectual and secular education, than they turn round and exclaim that no reliance is to be placed on such documents, and that so many elements enter into their compilation that they are more calculated to mislead than to inform.

Perhaps the most fatal, though hitherto the least observed effect of the ascendency of liberal principles for the last eight years in the British government, has been the general corruption among the whole liberal party, of the character of public men, and the general spread of the fatal revolutionary principle-that no other test is to be applied to public actions but success. It used in former days to be the boast of the English nation, and unquestionably it was the safeguard of English statesmen, that no amount of talent or oratorical ability could, in public men, supply the want of private character; and that no statesmen could long retain the helm, whatever the strength of their party connexions might be, who wanted the ascendant of private morality. But among the free-and-easy ranks of the liberals, these old-fashioned prejudices have long since been discarded.

The point with them is not what is right, but what is expedient; not what is honourable, but what may be successful; not what will in the end benefit their country, but will at the moment be profitable to themselves. The motley crew of the liberals have no common bond but that of selfish interest, and, by a mutual understand ing, or instinct, they demand nothing of public men but the qualities calculated to promote their sordid motives. The sway of character, virtue, and honourable feeling accordingly, is nearly extinguished among the liberals in the empire. Not only are public men now noways esteemed by that party for their private virtues, but such qualities, if they exist, are considered rather as a clog upon them, and a fit subject for derision; from a secret apprehension that they may prove inconvenient shackles upon political

conduct. The worse a man is, the more is he liked, and the more readily is he followed by that party, because he is the more likely to be restrained by no scruples in obtaining for them the selfish objects of their common ambition. That fatal depravity of public opinion, which the historians of antiquity so frequently lamented as the immediate cause of the ruin of their flourishing commonwealths, has made unprecedented strides amongst us since the fatal era of the Reform Bill; and, if it continues to advance for ten years longer with the same rapidity, the nation will be as irrecoverably lost as a dead man.

It was a growing sense of the evils which have now been slightly and imperfectly portrayed, spreading among a nation, in a large portion of which religion still maintained its ancient sway over the human heart, and in which the foundations of public morality were still generally rested upon the only firm basis, that of Christian principle, which produced that general indignation and contempt which, on the 7th of May last, compelled Lord Melbourne's Administration to resign the helm of power. It is in vain to say that the fall of the Whig Ministry was owing to the defection of the Radicals. The transfer of ten votes, as the Morning Chronicle justly observed, never yet occasioned the fall of a ministry which was not already on the very verge of destruction from other causes. They fell before the aroused indignation of the moral and religious portion of the community-before the discontent excited by the general and scandalous neglect of all the great interests of the empire-before the contempt of the Radicals whom they had deceived, and the hatred of the Revolutionists whom they had not the courage to encounter. Censured, as they themselves tell us, by a vote of the House of Lords; deprived, as Lord John Russell admits they were, by the vote on the Jamaica bill, of the confidence of the House of Commons; abhorred by the Conservatives whom they were unable to resist; despised by the Radicals whom they affected to disregard, they fell, the object of ridicule and contempt to the whole country. They fell without any external attack, from such inherent weakness as amounted to admitted inability to hold the reins of power.

They have since been reinstated in power, not by a resolution of the Lords -not by a division in the Commonsnot by the voice of the country, or the value of their former services, but by a vote of confidence of three ladies of the Queen's household. The great Whig party, the pure and patriotic statesmen who disclaim all court influence, who despise all courtly attendants upon kings and queens, who shudder at the very thought of back-stairs influence or court intrigue-the noble, patriotic successors of Somers and Chatham, of Burke and Fox-censured by the Lords, cast off by the Commons, despised by the people-are driven to creep again into office, clinging to the tails of the petticoats of the ladies of the bed-chamber. Now, then, is the time when such dangers threaten alike the monarchy and the institutions of the country-for the Conservatives to come forward and demonstrate, both by their language and their con duct, their steady adherence to their principles, and their resolution to separate the cause of the Queen and the monarchy from that of the Popish

faction, who would render her the unconscious instrument of their designs in subverting alike the Protestant religion and established institutions of the empire. Fortunately the real object of the plot will soon become apparent, and Lord Normanby and O'Connell will speedily stand forth as the real rulers of the empire, and the dreaded investigation of Irish misgovernment will be sought to be stopped by the esta blishment of a similar system in this country. Against such an attempt let the nation arouse all its moral energies, and pour them forth through every constitutional channel; but let them never forget that faction and intrigue are transient, but the durable interests of the monarchy are permanent; that maturer years and more enlarged experience will enlighten the mind of our youthful Sovereign; and that, however slender the chances are that the ladies about a palace will select fit men for the administration of public affairs, there is greater likelihood of their doing so, than of the favour of a democratic mob lighting upon a worthy statesman.

ON THE GENIUS OF RAPHAEL.

ON a former occasion, the particular character or sphere of sentiment of the genius of Michael Angelo, as exemplified in the picture of the Last Judgment, was so far attempted to be assigned; our present object shall be to endeavour, in some measure, to elucidate that of the works of his competitor for the sovereignty of painting -Raphael da Urbino.

The title, "Il Divino"-the divine -which has been bestowed upon Raphael, is not, as may have frequently been supposed, a mere synonyme of excellence, vaguely accorded in reference to those qualities, which each for himself may be most ready to perceive or appreciate; but a definite and discriminating appellation, which has originated in the impression or general sense of the nature and tendency of his works-in their connexion with the great division of sentiment which gave birth to them, and which they embrace, in art.

The apprehension of the sublime, of the beautiful, of the graceful, of the terrible, and other qualities, which, on a wide view of art being taken, must be considered merely to be its adjective attendants, have generally been deemed the ultimate subjects of appreciation.† The perception of these has usually bounded the recognition of the purposes of art; they have been deemed the farthest limits of its aim; and each, on different occasions, has been held to be the great centre of its intention or object. But, in recognising these, we recognise merely qualities secondary to, or frequently dependant upon, those more ultimate relations of the mind, which recede into the absolute and final; and, in connexion with which, the purposes of art truly find their value. In cycle and epicycle" the various arts move round the great centre of all to man-his own mental constitution. Their more or less extended connexion with, and inherence in this the intellection, the emotion,

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the passion, which they express or signify, or of which they become suggestive, either in anticipation or in retrospection-the desire or the enjoyment which they are identified with, marks the individual worth of each, and by the rank of those divisions of sentiment, which, in particular exemplifications, are enforced in the different arts according to their powers or medium, the station of those exemplifications must be assigned. From this standard there is no possibility of appeal. It sweeps down all those fortuitous partialities and fashions in respect to art, which are the growth of limited localities, and of the mode of a day; those particular peculiarities, which are not unfrequently set up as standards of judgment; those individual characteristics, which, instead of being merely regarded as integrant portions of the whole art of representative substitution, or imitation, as embraced by painting, have frequently been made the archetypes of all excellence. It embraces, in their dependant order, in the necessary subordination and connexion of style with sentiment-inseparable as heat and light in the rays of the sunthe material, the process, the component parts of the modes and practice of art-what may be styled its physiognomic features - which, not only in painting, but in the more amply discussed field of literature, have been frequently mistaken for their legitimate purposes, and upon which criticism has more endeavoured to find a basement for its constructions than to found itself a science, in relation to those ultimate objects, to arrive at which these are merely the means-less to build its decisions upon the nature of man's being, his desires, powers, and needs, rather than upon certain limited portions of the operation of that being, by substituting fragments for the whole, and adopting certain models, and partial purposes as

*No. CCLXXX.

† Such a limited view has frequently been taken of painting, that any thing in itself disagreeable entering into a picture has been considered not to come under the purposes of art. How or what could The Last Supper really, or pictorially, have been without Judas? Will such analogy not still the treble pipe of this sort of criticism?

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