as a presumption that the balance turned in favour of the former. Thinking most highly of the talents of both, we own that, in our judgment, the late secretary had the superiority in the more transcendant powers of mind; while in those of a secondary degree, his rival far outstripped him. The mind of Mr. Fox was the more capacious, the more fertile, and the more acute; in caution, circumspection, and reserve, he fell greatly short of Mr. Pitt. In dexterity in argument, and, on some occasions, in cogency and force of reasoning, it was impossible to exceed Mr. Pitt."

Art. 31. An Answer to the Inquiry into the State of the Nation; with Strictures on the Conduct of the present Ministry. With a Supplement. 7th Edition. Svo. pp. 219. 4s. Murray. 18c6. Invective against an illustrious public character, who is now no more, and whose loss is deeply, and we believe very generally lamented, forms the chief characteristic of this pamphlet. With submission to this writer, we cannot help thinking that England has lost an ardent friend, a wise, faithful, and most able servant; and a principal ornament. Fate, if we may so express ourselves, seems to have been envious of him. Excluded during the greater part of his life from the opportunity of rendering any direct services to his country, then, at the moment of his being fixed in a station for which no man was ever more qualified, and in which, we trust and believe, he would have rendered great services to mankind, he is cut off for ever from us and from the world! Mr. Fox is, in these pages, considered as, in a degree, the author of the pamphlet called, " An Inquiry into the State of the Nation." That performance is here represented as having been revised under his eye; and all the statements, doctrines, and facts, which it contains, are said to have been authorized by him. We by no means believe that this is true; since nothing can less betray the manner of the late Right Honour able Secretary, than the tract in question. That he approved of the general scope of it we can easily credit: but that all its hypotheses, assumptions, and doctrines, were deliberately considered by him, and honoured by his sanction, would require stronger evidence. to intitle it to credence from us, than any that has been yet produced. If on that pamphlet we could bestow only partial approbation, we can with truth declare that in our sentiments of the answer to it, there is nothing that is partial or qualified. It deserves our unqualified disapprobation. At any other time, we might have de rived amusement from an exposure of the extravagances of this au thor, who writes not in order to instruct the impartial, but to gratify a rancorous party spirit. In his pages, Mr. Fox figures as the black. est of demons, while Mr. Pitt is represented as almost a divinity. Both these great men are now no more; we wish that the animositics, which their unhappy differences occasioned, should be buried with them; and that the sole contest in future between their respective partizans may be, which shall most serve their common country, in this its hour of necessity.

The writer inveighs against the appointment of a certain treasurer. We do not vindicate that measure: but if this author had his own wishes gratified, would he not bring another treasurer again into play?

The

The Treasurer of the Board of Ordnance, we admit, lavished his own money for illegal purposes, and was properly visited for his delinquency by a court of law: but we have never heard that any money except his own found its way into his pocket, even by mistake. act of Parliament was lately passed to regulate the business of his office; we trust that he never will be brought to trial for violating it, though it was not introduced by himself; and that if he be, no abstruse and intricate questions on it will be put to the judges, as necessary to a decison on the acqusation preferred against him. Art. 32. A Letter to the Right Honourable the Earl of Moira, on the Accusations brought against his R. H. the Prince of Wales, by Mr. Paul; with Notes critical and admonitory; in which the Character and Principles of Mr. Paul, and Sir Francis Burdett, are examined, and their Origin and Tendency briefly elucidated. 8vo. pp. 102. 3s. 6d. Jordan and Co. 1806.

With great reason, this writer censures a late communication made to the Public, of the opinions of a' Royal Personage on certain high national questions; and such conduct leads him to descant on the difference between the temper and behaviour of a keen trader, and those of an accomplished and well educated gentleman.

So long as facts which are notorious, and fair reasoning are alone the weapons used, an author may appear anonymously without any one having a right to complain: but, when a nameless writer retails scandalous anecdotes on his own authority, he can expect to obtain credit only from those who have a relish for defamation, while by the sober and the candid he will be set down as a libeller. Tales are here told of a well-known Baronet, which refer to his visit to Paris in 1802, and which reflect very seriously upon him: but while this writer so properly catechises a late candidate for a great city on the impropriety of betraying what passed in confidential intercourse, how can be act the unworthy part of making attacks on characters in the dark? Of the late proceedings of the Baronet, we are very far from being admirers. He has provoked hostilities, and let them be waged against him: but let them be conducted on principles of fairness for the goodness of a cause can furnish no grounds to sanction a departure from the laws of legitimate warfare. On the same principle, since talents and attainments seem to distinguish this author from the herd of pamphleteers, let him disdain to make any unworthy use of them, or to employ them under any veil which may diminish their effects.

We invoke justice, not favour, for Sir Francis Burdett. His late electioneering attack on the Sovereign of the Empire, and on that recently departed Patriot whom he professes to admire, if it can be called by the soft name of error, was a wanton and preposterous error. His Majesty had recently called to his councils the men whom public opinion regarded as most deserving of his confidence; and all parties had scarcely ceased to mingle tears over the remains of a great and wise statesman, who had devoted his life to serve the cause of which the Baronet is solicitous to be considered as the principal and almost exclusive supporter. What a singular mode of engaging favour was this, then, to be adopted by a candidate for a high civil distinction! Did he

Y 4

imagine

imagine that the indecent introduction of his Sovereign into his advertisement, and the slight which he put on our regretted statesman, would recommend him to the Electors of Middlesex? If he entertained such an opinion, he must indeed be, as a Frenchman is here made to say of him, absolument dépourvu de jugement. Or did he yield to a sense of duty? What then must be the sentiments and views of the man who holds it to be a duty, in an address which was not less intended for all the subjects of the empire than for the Electors of Middlesex, to speak irreverently of a living Personage whom the law holds sacred, and of departed worth which common consent must venerate?

Art. 33. The Impostor Unmasked; or, the New Man of the People: with Anecdotes, never before published, illustrative of the Cha raeter of the renowned and immaculate Bardolpho. Inscribed, without Permission, to that superlatively honest and disinterested Man, R. B. S-r-d-n, Esq. 8vo. 28. Tipper and Richards. Though election purposes are to be served, there is something in the form of a pamphlet which induces an expectation that more regard will be paid to truth and decency, than mere election squibs often preserve. The virulence of this tract, however, is scarcely to be paralleled; and several most scandalous anecdotes are here retailed, which, even if they derive any probability from well known habits, deserve no admission on such baseless authority. To the habita which characterize the Right Honourable Gentleman in question, we are no strangers; nor are we disposed either to vindicate or palliate them; but we do not think that this is the moment in which it is magnanimous, or even just and fair, to recollect his personal faults and to chronicle his private misdeeds The Public have recognized him as their servant, and he has rendered to them services which have been received with the most general testimonies of gratitude. Mr. Sheridan is an entire stranger to us, but we would administer justice to all the world. We cannot forget that at a time when delusion in a few, when evil designs in others, when the abuse and perversion of the first blessing which can belong to a community, had occasioned Liberty to fall into obloquy, and when its very existence seemed to be in danger, the man who is so grossly traduced in these pages was among the most intrepid of its defenders and protectors. Of his opponent we know only what is known to the Public: but we must unequivocally approve the decision which the City of Westminster has made, It has rejected a novus homo; who had no pretensione to the high honour after which he aspired. He had neither education nor talents, nor services, on which he could found such an exalted claim.

Art. 34 The Viper exposed: or, the Merits of the Candidates for Westminster considered, in a Letter to the Electors; with Observations upon the malignant Designs of the Author of a Pamphlet, entitled, "The Impostor Unmasked," Svo. 18. 6d. Hughes, 1806.

According to this tract, Mr. Paul has been a private trader ia India, and was very expert in making advantageous bargains with

the

the natives for indigo, silk, cotton, pieces of muslin, and shawls: but he is charged with utter ignorance of the constitution and laws of this country. The indecency of holding out an untried person as a malefactor, in a public advertisement, is very much censured by the writer; and it is assigned as a proof of the ignorance of the candi date respecting the first principles of our law.

Concerning Sir Samuel Hood, the author says, If you (the Electors,) have not some good reason to deny him your suffrages, I should think he ought to be one of your two representatives. You will give him your votes as a tribute to his sufferings, as a reward for the battles he has successfully fought, and as an example to others, that those who fight for the country will reap their reward.'-We respect the feelings from which this effusion proceeds: but the writer will be told that the situation of a Member of Parliament is a trust attended with anxious and laborious duties, and not a thing merely remunerative and honorary. This objection is not without weight, though it be not so decisive as those would have us believe who hold that all matters in politics are to be decided by a few hacknied maxims, which they apply on all occasions. He gives a better reason when he says that it is proper to have persons of all professions as Members of the House; and that not many navy men have seats in it, whereas there are sufficient numbers who are conversant in East India affairs.

Of the third personage who acted his part on the late Westminster theatre, the author is a high panegyrist, as a political character; and, with reference to his private conduct, he traces several of the anec dotes told in the "Impostor unmasked," to the Highland Jester, a book which was published by Campbell, a relation of Mr. Paul's, in Edinburgh in the year 1747;' he also names the persons of whom the others have been reported.

Art. 35. Three Letters to that greatest of Political Apostates, the Right Hon. George Tierney, one of the late Representatives for the Borough of Southwark; along with a correct state of the imper fect Representation of the Commons of the United Kingdom. 8vo. 18. 6d. Crosby. 18c6.

We do not recollect the professions formerly made by this Right Hon. Gentleman to his constituents: but he is here charged with having in the most shameless manner abandoned them. The titlepage furnishes a fair specimen of the outrageous spirit displayed in this pamphlet, the author of which is Samuel Ferrand Waddington. If the fortunate placeman be the object of the most virulent abuse in these pages, he may console himself on sharing it in a large and mixed society. Here all public characters are bad, and every public measure is wrong. Nothing is as it should be. Mr. Waddington is evidently not pleased with the world, and inveighs against it most bitterly: but whether the world or Mr. Waddington be principally in fault, it has never occurred to him to examine, since he has always taken it for granted that he has been right.

The most violent reformers have in general spared our Courts of Justice, but they are severely arraigned by Mr. Waddington. He complains of them in his own person; and we own that we never less

approved

approved them than in the case of this unfortunate man. His of. fence had been made statutable, but the statute had been repealed from a conviction that the offence was ideal: - but then it is said that the authority of the common law revived, and the offence was to be regarded as it stood before the statute. Thus the rules of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries became applicable to the transactions of the eighteenth and nineteenth. The situation of things was odd and whimsical. The repeal of the statutes, if it had not superseded the decisions of a barbarous age, had at least stigmatized them, and stripped them of credit: yet they were put in action by the late Chief Justice, and by most of the Judges, not as being compulsory on them, but were represented as wise and salutary, and characterized in terms of the warmest approbation. If sound policy and good sense suffered on this occasion, and if at this time absurdity which was not wholly innocent was freely dealt out, we confess that we felt little pity for the suffering knight crrant in the cause of the freedom of trade. Though we hold it to be the right of every man to speculate in any article, to the utmost extent of his credit and capital, we do not vindicate the indecency of toasting the rise of necessaries, and the propriety of haranguing the sellers to increase the price of their articles; and though we admit that this conduct did not call for legal visitation, we do not deny that it must excite contempt and disgust in the mind of every sober man. Our law courts need not have been degraded, nor should the variance between the law and the sound maxims of political economy have been exposed. If the bill which went through the House of Commons, and which was stopped by the Lords, had passed into a law, permitting the importation of hops, the miscalled monopolizer would have been sufficiently punished. The courts might even then have been solicited to rescind the contracts, but the application would not have come from the sellers. The prin ciples of Adam Smith cannot be shsken; and the experience of the late unfortunate years prodigiously strengthens and confirms them: but let not Mr. W. consider himself as a martyr in their cause, since he did all in his power to disgrace them, and to render them odious.We would not trample on the unfortunate, but greater modesty and reserve became Mr. W. It is with no good grace that men, who are incapable of managing their own affairs, set up as state reformers.

Art. 36. Five Letters to the Right Honourable G. Tierney, Esq. including Reflections on his Political Character and Conduct. By John Gale Jones. 8vo. IS. Jordan.

These letters were written as early as the year 1801, and were then sent to the public prints, which rejected them. Why they now see the light, we are at a loss to guess; unless it were for electioneering purposes, on occasion of the late Southwark contest. The Right Hon. Gentleman is reproached for having given his vote in favour of the suspension of the Habeas Corpus act; a measure which, we learn, induced the writer to commit all his papers to the flames; and this, we presume, is stated as one of the calamities which arose out of that legislative enactment. The writer says that he would not change situation with the then Treasurer of the Navy; who is here charged