it by force as guilty of an "apparently gross infraction of a constitutional right."

The prejudicies excited against the Magistrates and Yeomanry by misconstruing their laudable abstinence from formally justifying their conduct by opening the whole case to the public. while a prosecution was in progress, are ably and manfully encountered by the Prebendary of Durham. He has well remarked that the forbearance from all publication may be, and ap parently is, the bounden, but certainly not the pleasing duty of these victims of popular delusion: and the rigid manner in which it is discharged by them may probably be found hereafter to merit the gratitude of every true friend of his country.'

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"This is not a mere gratuitous supposition. A declaration has appeared in the Gazette, and it was signed by near a thousand of the most opulent and respectable of the inhabitants of Manchester, in which it is stated to be obvious, that the magistrates and others of their fellow-townsmen who have been so wantonly assailed with insult and abuse, are solely with-held from vindicating themselves from these calumnious aspersions by a firm and magnanimous sense of public duty, by a determination not to suffer any personal feelings of injury and insult to betray them into those premature disclosures, which might defeat the salutary ends of public justice.'" (Mr. Phillpotts' first Letter, p. 14.)

Upon the whole, we cannot but feel that the advantage is entirely on the side of Mr. Phillpotts in his controversy with his Reviewer, whose cause is certainly not that of legitimate criticism, but of political revenge. As a reviewer has no name or proper person, and is therefore out of the reach of retaliation, he is less than others at liberty to inflict personal injury on those whose publications come under his cognisance. If he steps out of his province of impartial examination to throw contumely upon the maintainers of political opinions opposed to his own, he violates, the common principles of commutative justice. There is a sort of mala fides in such a case. It is a vessel in the trade and service of the enemy carrying false papers to cover its real destination and character. Of the production of Mr. Phillpotts we cannot credit the Reviewer when he speaks in terms of contempt. The pamphlet is written with scholarlike accuracy, and with a decided good sense and solidity of remark that resists all the perversions and sophistry of his assailant. In the second pamphlet of the Prebendary, the critic has found at least his match;-the Mars of his party striken by the spear of Diomede bas learned the danger of interfering in these sublunary quarrels. Mr. Lambton and the Durham seconders of the Manchester reformers have gained nothing by the alliance but a more systema

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tic development of the sinister politics which have dictated these ill-omened addresses.

Mr. (since become Dr. Davison) is not allowed by this unsparing critic to be capable of writing grammar, and a few specimens of that very learned writer's phrases, torn from the context and in a mutilated state, are produced in a note in proof of the allegation. They are inadvertences which owe their apparent magnitude in the Reviewer's eye to the cause in the service of which they were committed, and are much too slight to warrant the harsh and general comments into which the censure is expanded. Neither do we understand Dr. Davison to be liable to the construction of denying the right or reasonableness of parliamentary inquiry into matters cognizable by our ordinary tribunals, so as to afford an occasion to the Reviewer for his long and abstract disquisition on the general question. The remarks of Dr. Davison appear to us to have confined themselves to the particular case under consideration, the nature and exigency of which seemed to him to belong properly to, and to require only the cognizance of our common law courts, those regular fountains from which justice flows through the land. But as we have not heard that Dr. Davison has answered his critic, we have hardly the question between him and his Reviewer properly brought before us; and shall therefore proceed to the consideration of the other publications with which we have headed our article. We cannot, however, help observing, as we pass, that but little political discredit can be inflicted by the censure of those who at a period in which that class of persons in the state which appears to form the most attractive object of universal concern is the suffering or simply the complaining poor, when Charity in her breathless haste to relieve, scarcely stops to consult the proportions of misery or desert, but pours its influence like the sun on all alike, the just and the unjust, when the rich, neglecting their own education (look at the pitiable state of their public seminaries), are cheapening education to the lowest candidates. for instruction, and calling the meanest to more than an equality with themselves in some of the soundest parts of human learning, have sagely discovered, and with an oracular solemnity pronounced in an article having "the State of the Country" for its running title, that "the most alarming sign of the times is that separation of the upper and middle classes of the community from the lower, which is now daily and visibly encreasing;" and that "the conduct of all parties, and of every branch of society, has contributed more or less to produce this unhappy estrangement between the two grand divisions of which the population consists." At a period when the sense of the men of property and thinking in a county can no longer be collected

or even safely pronounced at meetings, called in mockery the meetings of freeholders (under which name were once veraciously comprehended the intelligence and spirit of the nation), by reason of the clamour, folly, and ferocity of men and women without suffrage or sentiment, feeling, or forbearance; at a period when men, foremost in rank and opulence, stoop to solicit a coalition with the multitude which shrinks with acoy suspicion from the embrace,—at a period when tumultuary meetings always on foot have been carrying their menaces to every man's door, interdicting the traffic and business of towns and cities, and shaking their standards in the face of law and authority, till they have forced at length the constitution to rise in a reluctant effort of self-defence to legislate for existence, have these honest men with like sagacity discovered and pronounced that the lower orders, particularly such as are without votes, have all their rights forgotten and trampled upon; that at city and county meetings, where all the inhabitants attend indiscriminately, this description of persons, of whose "mighty power" in the community we are nevertheless reminded, are disregarded, degraded, and allowed no voice or influence; and that thus is created what these interpreters" of the signs of the times" call a schism which sooner or later must end in mischief.

For our own parts, though these auguries create in us but little alarm, they render us rather curious to ascertain what further is required of " the upper and middle classes" to conciliate those from whom they are thus accused of separating themselves. Must every beggar be forthwith set on horseback? Is the Spanish ambassador when he next gives an entertainment to correct the mistake of a former night by opening his doors to the self-invited croud? Would an agrarian distribution of land be enough, or must moveables also be brought into the common stock? Would it suffice if the whole population were made to start afresh in the race of industry and acquisition? Or must accumulation be interdicted and a perpetual maximum of property be established? For really, we say it with all seriousness, if the innumerable charities, occasional and permanent, spread over the land in such profusion that the funds of the poor show most of the nation's wealth,-if all the efforts now making to bring all within the range of a civilizing, protecting, and religious care,-if the wide and promiscuous tender of universal education by which the outcasts of a former day are invited to take their station among thinking beings, are altogether unavailing to content these vindicators of the populace, and notwithstanding all that has been done and is doing "the upper and middle" ranks of society are still under the imputation of estranging themselves from the lower, and of disregarding their feelings and their claims, we must cease to expect any political or social good from any

endeavours in the way of conciliation, and must be satisfied with the solacing reflection that these acts of brotherhood and kindly affection will be purer in proportion as they are persisted in independently of all political ends or even the returns of gratitude. We cannot stop to inquire what may be the conduct of these assertors of the people's rights towards their. poorer brethren. Another opportunity will present itself of examining into that fact; in the mean time it is but charity towards them to presume that they are themselves splendid exceptions to the case they are deploring; that their participating sympathies and community of fellowship with the poor consist. not only in multiplying their malignant passions into their own, and making a common stock with them of hostility and hatred towards authorities and magistracies, but in feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and visiting the fatherless and widows in their affliction. If they do nothing of all this, their spoiled children will be very apt to turn against their parents and preceptors, and make them one day too sensibly feel the recoil of their liberal instructions.

It is among "the most alarming signs of the times" that such unfounded aspersions upon paper of "the upper and middle ranks" of society as that to which we have been adverting should find accceptance with a numerous class of readers; but it is the fatal felicity of these heartless publications that they create the very dispositions which secure their prevalence and permanence. By such instruments we are brought to the distressing necessity of beholding this noble country at the highest point of military glory and moral elevation, but never for a moment estranged by its great objects from the homely concern of its national poor; mixing up in its character those qualities which enter most beautifully into combination-all that is martial and manly with all that is considerate and tender,—all that is chivalrous with all that is charitable,-whatever belongs to highmindedness with all that charms and warms in domestic life and humble intercourse,-of beholding it on the one haud so potentially great and happy, on the other so practically disfigured and abused, so endowed and so endangered, so deserving and so dishonoured, a tree of fairest fruit and foliage, with a canker corroding its interior.

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From these signs of the times," which shake the bosom with alternate admiration and alarm, let us turn to the speech of Lord Grenville, as one that inspires better hopes. Let us place it in the scale against the Scottish journal, and Mr. Lambton's disgusting speech to the Durham meeting. We are put in mind, by this timely oration, of those paintings of the old school, which with colours identified with the canvas, make an

impression not easily defined, but easily recognized, of harmony, mellowness, and sobriety. It has an air of antique grandeur, an internal authority, a dignity of manner, which correspond with our gravest conceptions of a British statesman.

In a period of storm and danger a sense of security suddenly refreshes the spirits, when such a man puts his hand upon the helm. The spell of party may hold in captivity the wise and the strong, but the virtuous man can never be more than conditionally its slave. The bonds break, the ligature bursts, the thraldom is at an end, whenever the cry is heard of the country in distress. In the view of such a man as Lord Grenville, such a necessity is imperative and decisive. And the wonder is great that, with a mind like that which this statesman possesses, and after being associated as he formerly was with whatever was greatest in intellect and worth, it should have been possible for him to act so long with a party to whom may be traced whatever of schism, to use the language of the journal above commented upon, has taken place between the two great divisions of the population.

To the speech of Mr. Plunket pretty nearly the same observations apply. It is a speech fraught with such weighty compensations to his country, as almost to balance the mischiefs of his co-operation with persons so much below the standard of his genius, his judgment, and his character. Human pride is chastised by reflecting that such men as these should permit themselves to be soiled by the slough of party: but one thing we take to be quite clear,-Lord Grenville and Mr. Plunket by their speeches on this occasion have made it absolutely impossible for them to act in future with the party called the opposition. They have each of them presented a picture of their country, which it is difficult to contemplate with a steady mind. "The whole head is sick, and the whole heart is faint," while the stormy landscape developes itself to our view under the true and characteristic touches of these masters. And who are those that form the principal group in this picture? they look but too like the men who now compose what is called the whig opposition to government. It is true they are but sparingly mentioned in either of these speeches, but not a sentence that deprecates the march of disaffection among the common people but fixes disgrace upon those, who, to supply their own deficiency of moral force, have been for years invoking the tumultuary passions and numerical strength of the mass. To see the whole extent of our danger from a conspiracy against the life of the state, generated out of Jacobin France, and sedulously pursuing her bloody and delirious career, turn, reader, to the pages of these memorable speeches; and then say, is it possible for Lord Grenville and Mr. Plunket, with