supported in the ruins of Carthage the consular exile, and more recently transmuted for a more illustrious exile, the barren constableship of Elba into an image of Imperial France), when in melancholy after-years, again, much near the same spot, I met him, when that sceptre had been wrested from his hand, and his dominion was curtailed to the petty managership, and part proprietorship, of the small Olympic, his Elba? He still played nightly upon the boards of Drury, but in parts alas! allotted to him, not magnificently distributed by him. Waiving his great loss as nothing, and magnificently sinking the sense of fallen material grandeur in the more liberal resentment of depreciations done to his more lofty intellectual pretensions, "Have you heard" (his customary exordium) "have you heard," said he, "how they treat me? they put me in comedy." Thought I-but his finger on his lips forbade any verbal interruption-" where could they have put you better?" Then after a pause- -"Where I formerly played Romeo, I now play Mercutio"-and so again he stalked away, neither staying, nor caring for, responses.

O, it was a rich scene,-but Sir Antony Carlisle, the best of story tellers, and surgeons, who mends a lame narrative almost as well as he sets a fracture, alone could do justice to it—that I was witness to, in the tarnished room (that had once been green) of that same little Olympic. There, after his deposition from Imperial Drury, he substituted a throne. That Olympic Hill was his "highest heaven;" himself"Jove in his chair." There he sate in state, while before him, on complaint of prompter, was brought for judgment-how shall I describe her?-one of those little tawdry things that flirt at the tails of choruses a probationer for the town, in either of its senses-the pertest little drab—a dirty fringe and appendage of the lamps' smokewho, it seems, on some disapprobation expressed by a "highly respectable" audience, had precipitately quitted her station on the boards, and withdrawn her small talents in disgust.

"And how dare you," said her Manager-assuming a censorial severity, which would have crushed the confidence of a Vestris, and disarmed that beautiful Rebel herself of her professional caprices-I verily believe, he thought her standing before him-"how dare you, Madam, withdraw yourself without a notice from your theatrical duties ?” “I was hissed, Sir." "And you have the presumption to decide upon the taste of the town?" "I don't know that, Sir, but I will never stand to be hissed," was the subjoinder of young Confidence-when gathering up his features into one significant mass of wonder, pity, and expostulatory indignation-in a lesson never to have been lost upon a creature less forward than she who stood before him-his words were these. "They have hissed me."

'Twas the identical argument a fortiori, which the son of Peleus uses to Lycaon trembling under his lance, to persuade him to take his destiny with a good grace. "I too am mortal."- And it is to be believed that in both cases the rhetoric missed of its application, for want of a proper understanding with the faculties of the respective recipients.

Quite an Opera pit," he said to me, as he was courteously conduct

MR. HUSKISSON.

ing me over the benches of his Surrey Theatre, the last retreat, and recess, of his every-day waning grandeur.

Those, who knew Elliston, well know the manner in which he pronounced the latter sentence of the few words I am about attempting to record. One proud day to me he took his roast mutton with us in the Temple, to which I had superadded a preliminary haddock. After a rather plentiful partaking of the meagre banquet, not unrefreshed with the humbler sort of liquors, I made a sort of apology for the humility of the fare, observing that for my own part I never ate but of one dish at dinner. "I too never eat but one thing at dinner"was his reply then after a pause-" reckoning fish as nothing." The manner was all. It was as if by one peremptory sentence he had decreed the annihilation of all the savory esculents, which the pleasant and nutritious-food-giving Ocean pours forth upon poor humans from her watery bosom.-This was greatness, tempered with considerate tenderness to the feelings of his scanty but welcoming entertainer.

Great wert thou in thy life, Robert William Elliston! and not lessened in thy death, if report speak truly, which says that thou didst direct, that thy mortal remains should repose under no inscription but one of pure Latinity. Classical was thy bringing up; and beautiful was the feeling on thy last bed, which, connecting the man with the boy, took thee back in thy latest exercise of imagination, to the days when, undreaming of Theatres and Managerships, thou wert a Scholar, and an early ripe one, under the roofs builded by the munificent and pious Colet. For thee the Pauline Muses weep. In elegies, that shall silence this crude prose, they shall celebrate thy praise.

ELIA.

MR. HUSKISSON.*

SKETCH OF HIS PUBLIC LIFE AND CHARACTER.

BY AN EX-M.P.

[We willingly give a place in the Englishman to the following review of the late Mr. Huskisson's claims upon the grateful recollections of his countrymen, notwithstanding its abrupt transitions, occasional egotism, and un-authorlike style, because we know the writer to be well acquainted with his subject, and to be as free from prejudice as it is possible any ex-M. P. can be.-Ed. E.j

I WAS acquainted with Mr. Huskisson for the last twenty-seven years of his He has been an under-rated life; Mr. Canning was our common friend. man, and an over-rated man: he has been considered by some as a mere official hack, like Goulburn or Herries; he has been extolled as a second Turgot. He was neither the one nor the other; but, as Edmund Burke said of Sheridan's eloquence, neither poetry nor prose, but something better than either. Mr. Huskisson dealt in general principles; that fact lifts him far above the millof the Cocker school: he was without a rival in his knowhorse "statesmen ledge, at once accurate and profound of facts, the practical workings of our financial and commercial systems, and therefore was not obnoxious to the senseless cry of being a "wild metaphysical theorist."

Mr. Huskisson was a self-taught man; was not indebted for his education to

Speeches of the Right Hon. William Huskisson, with a Biographical Memoir. 3 vols. Murray. Just published.

PP 2

a university hence the uncooped views which he was enabled to take with ease of the most complex political subject, and hence too the difficulty which he laboured under of explaining those views with the facility and logical order of those who have early in life had the advantage of academical discipline. The fact of a man being self-taught implies more than ordinary vigour of understanding, at the same time that it disposes him to be arrogant, and hasty in jumping to conclusions. The native modesty of Mr. Huskisson's temper, and the fortunate accident of being early accustomed to measure himself by high standards of senatorial eminence, saved him from the too common defect of self-taught men of talent, without impairing the energy of his intellect.

Mr. Huskisson had not a particle of the mens divinior of oratory in his composition, but he was an effective debater. His voice was weak and unmusical, his elocution cloggy, his sentences generally clumsy and verbose, and his manner unengaging; still, as he warmed with his subject, you forgot all in admiration of the soundness and comprehensiveness of his general principles, and of his extraordinary command of facts to illustrate them. His " practical" opponent he overwhelmed with details upon details, all bearing upon the point, while he delighted us economists with as long-sighted views of the national advantages of acting upon the enlightened doctrines of Adam Smith and Mr. Ricardo. At times too, when excited, as on one or two occasions which I shall hereafter quote, he assumed a high-toned confidence in the soundness of his free trade opinions, and of indignation at those who imputed them to unworthy motives, which approached very nearly to produce on his hearers all the effects of sterling eloquence.

Mr. Huskisson was in grain an honest man, but somehow or other wanting in that inflexible and uncompromising moral firmness which precludes even the suspicion of official chicanery. The truth was, with him, like my friend Canning, fate and circumstances were ever conspiring against the fine play of his better nature. He never had, while in office, more than elbow-room for his political honesty, and yet was too fond of the labour as well as distinction of office to manfully throw it in the face of those who thus fettered his natural tendency towards the right and the lofty. Like Archbishop Cranmer, whom, it often struck me, he resembled in many features, of physical and mental character, he was not without ambition; but, as Shakspeare says of Macbeth,

he was ever entangled in some mesh or other of apparent" political aberration." In truth Mr. Huskisson was an unlucky wight; was ever labouring under the effects of some accident, physical or political. On this point his biographer tells these anecdotes, which I know to be strictly correct.

There are some persons who are recorded never to have gone into action without being wounded. Mr. Huskisson seems to have laboured under a similar fatality in regard to accidents, from his earliest infancy to that fatal one which closed his career. As a child, he fractured his arm;-a few days before his marriage, his horse fell with him, and he was severely hurt ;-soon after, he was knocked down by the pole of a carriage, just at the entrance to the Horse Guards ;-in the autumn of 1801, being then in Scotland at the Duke of Athol's, he missed his distance in attempting to leap the moat, and gave himself a most violent sprain of the ankle, accompanied with a considerable laceration of some of the tendons and ligaments of his foot, and it was many weeks before he recovered sufficiently to leave Scotland. Indeed, the effects of this accident were visible in his gait during the remainder of his life. He afterwards fractured his arm by a fall from his horse at Petworth; and again, in 1817, by his carriage being overturned. On this occasion, none of his surgeons could discover the precise nature of the mischief, but Sir Astley Cooper was of opinion that the bone was split from the fracture up to the joint. The recovery was slow, and his sufferings very severe; as all kinds of experiments were employed to prevent the joint from stiffening.

In spite of every exertion, he never recovered the full use of his arm, and a visible alteration in the spirit and elasticity of his carriage resulted from the injury. He was constantly encountering accidents of minor importance, and the frequency of them, joined to a frame enfeebled from the severe illnesses under which he suffered during his latter years, had given rise to a certain hesitation in his movements, wherever any crowd or obstacle impeded him, which may, perhaps, in some degree have led to that last misfortune, which, to his friends, and to the country, may well be termed irreparable.'— vol. i. pp. 44, 45.

His political career during the last and most important years of his life, was but a series of such accidents, but this brings me to his biography.

It is not necessary to criticise the "Biographical Memoir" prefixed to this edition of Mr. Huskisson's speeches. It is evidently the work of a novice in composition, and in the art of thinking; and therefore is only worthy of notice as an authentic chronological narrative of the leading events of his public career. As such then I will take it as the text-peg of a few comments.

Mr. Huskisson was descended, in the words of his biographer, "from a gentleman's family of moderate fortune, which had been long settled in Staffordshire." All the anecdotes of his precocious talent for figures are fudge. The same might be told of the veriest dunce now in parliament; and besides Mr. Huskisson's not being of that high order of genius, whose early career may have put forth the indication of future eminence he was at no period of life entitled to a higher rank than being, like Michael Cassio—an “ expert arithmetician." He was ignorant of algebra, and therefore could not possibly be a scientific calculator.

His biographer displays thistle-wooing ears of rather inordinate dimensions, when he labours to show that the "pecuniary prospects and circumstances" of Mr. Huskisson on his outset in life, were not so lowly as that "of prudence and necessity he should be trained up to the exercise of some profession." I cannot speak positively on this point, but I have reason to believe that Mr. Huskisson was mainly dependent upon the bounty of his uncle, Dr. Gem, (who left him the means of purchasing Petworth), and that at his suggestion he applied himself to medicine as a profession. I know he attended medical lectures, and that he took pains to conceal his knowledge of medical technicology. But this was an essential advantage to him, "there being," as was justly observed in a recent number of the Englishman's Magazine with respect to Mr. Locke, and Sir James Mackintosh, (6 no study better suited to the training of the sagacious and analyzing and generalizing faculties essential to a statesman, than that of medicine." Besides, Mr. Huskisson's credit is impaired instead of being raised in the eyes of the discerning, by representing him as a young man of fortune, to whom political distinction was a species of birthright; and not, as was the case, the reward of laborious industry, vigorous understanding, and tried zeal in the public service. It certainly was one of his own foibles, to be esteemed of "gentle birth"-as indeed much of the apparent absence of right straightforwardness in certain passages of his latter career, was owing to an ignoble plasticity to the influence of rank and power.

Mr. Huskisson spent the ten most important years of his life, so far as the formation of character is concerned-from fifteen to twenty-five-in Paris; and was present and took part in the remarkable event which led Louis XVI. to the scaffold. He always manifested great soreness on this Jacobin prologue to his own history, and took such pains to disclaim Jacobinism, that I for one never doubted that he had been, and indeed was till his death, in heart and soul at least a Girondist. It would be contrary to the nature of things that he should be otherwise; for in addition to the enthusiasm with which the wise and good of all nations hailed the bright dawn of the French Revolution, and which was so natural and becoming in him as a youthful Englishman, his uncle was a red-hot Jacobin; and Mr. Huskisson met few others at his table but English, Irish, American, and French republican zealots. I do not for a moment mean to say, that he did not recoil instinctively from the dark monsters who followed each other to a deservedly violent death during the reign

of terror, but only to assert, which I do with confidence, albeit the sentimental twaddle of his biographer, that to the last moment of his life Mr. Huskisson's heart throbbed at the mention of the French Revolution. He was an abettor of that glorious event, for such despite the oceans of blood which it occasioned, I hold it to be, not because he was a convert to the doctrines of the Encylopedists, who indeed might have "written their fingers off" before they would so have influenced him; nor from the contagion of the American Revolution, which affected so many gallant spirits at the time, nor on account of the financial embarrassments of a despotic court, whose folly hurried the denouement of their own tragedy; but because he saw what the blind opponents of the Reform Bill nearer home just now will not see-that the degree and kind of knowledge and wealth attained by the French people, far exceeded the measure of their political liberty; and because he saw that the mad attempt of the governing few to retain forms and institutions not suited to the increased and increasing knowledge and wealth, and thence political power of the governed many, would only end in the overwhelming of all existing institutions in one common ruin. This conviction it was that made him rejoice in the glorious promise of the days of 1789 and 1790. This legislative necessity of accommodating forms and institutions to the growing wealth and intelligence of the age, it was, that induced him to introduce free trade principles into our commercial polity; that led to his revision of the navigation laws— the corn laws-that made him vote for the transference of the East Retford franchise to Manchester, instead of the "Dukery" of "do what I like with my own," Bassetlaw, à la Sir Robert Peel, and the moderate" bit by bit" reformers; and that would, no doubt, were he living, enlist him among the most zealous advocates of the Reform Bill.

One word touching the "Discours prononcé par M. Huskisson, Anglois et Membre de la Société de 1789, à la Séance de cette Société, le 29 Août, 1790," which the editor of his speeches has very judiciously reprinted in the Appendix. It is, indeed, a psychological curiosity highly creditable to his youthful talents, as showing at what an early period of his economical studies he hit upon sound principles of finance. The operation to which it refers was a proposed issue of two milliards of assignats, equal to eighty-four millions sterling paper currency, to be paid to the national creditors, and to be received by the government back as payment for the rates of the national land, there being at the time a limited amount of assignats afloat. Mr. Huskisson was opposed to the project.

You had better exchange your land for your existing government securities, which do not circulate; so that your acres may extinguish your debt. Whereas, if you put this enormous amount of paper-money into circulation, all the effect of it will be, that your prices in paper will go to any amount: your gold and silver will rise in paper price, like all other things, and you will have to pay a thousand livres in paper, for as much wheat as you now have for two hundred in silver.” —vol. i. p. 14.

The concluding paragraph is characteristic.

"On a cru que cette grande émission d'assignats attacheroit à la révolution beaucoup de personnes mécontentes, ou qui la voient avec indifférence. On a fait valoir cet argument comme s'il étoit de la plus grande importance. C'est avec un sentiment de douleur que je me suis dit, en lisant cette partie du discours de M. de Mirabeau; et quoi! une révolution qui a tiré vingt-quatre millions d'hommes de l'esclavage, pour leur rendre les droits sacrés de la nature, auroit elle besoin d'un appui aussi dangereux ? Non; je ne puis le croire; voulez-vous d'ailleurs diminuer le nombre de ces égoïstes agioteurs voulez-vous en faire des patriotes? faites-en des propriétaires: au lieu de tant de droits féodaux, de dixmes, et d'impôts vexatoires, au lieu de ces privilèges, de ces exemptions accordées au hasard par cet amas de sous-despotes, qui ne protégeoient les uns que pour peser plus durement sur les autres, les nouveaux propriétaires n'auront plus à payer qu'un impôt juste, ègal et modique, dont la perception et l'emploi seront surveillés par eux: que de motifs pour aimer la révolution, pour la defendre comme le plus grand des bienfaits; que de motifs pour s'attacher à la constitution