throughout without convicting one among them of any title to the last. We knew also that the Pluckless of our party had been in the habit of adulating our enemies out of innate cowardice-out of a conviction of their own feebleness, and a dread of the superior abilities, such as they were, of the scribes of Whiggery. Far different were our feelings. We were determined to expose hollow pretensions without mercy, and to say in public what the more courageous of our party had always said in private.

We knew our own strength, nor had we overrated it. In our inmost hearts, we despised the ignorance and arrogance of the domineering faction, and we proclaimed war against them in the perfect confidence of speedy success. On the opening of the campaign, the Whigs pretended to hold our raw troops cheap; but a few skirmishes were sufficient to daunt the spirit of their veteran but impotent battalions; and their leaders soon showed, by their altered system of tactics, that they feared a fatal overthrow. Still there was a mighty sound of trumpets—much bravadoing-and even apparent offers of battle. It was hinted abroad by the cowed army, that we did not fight according to the spirit and rules of modern and civilized warfare. Bah! We took their artillery, and for a few engagements, turned it against themselves; but we had a fine park of our own, and with it, finally, we won all our victories.

One such sounding paragraph as the above may be forgiven in a twenty-page preface. The real meaning of it we take to be this that we Tories beat the Whigs in argument all to sticks, and that all the world acknowledged it. The secret of our power lay in these four words, "We wrote like Britons"-we loved, we gloried in our native country. To us al! her time-hallowed institutions were most dear-dear the dust from which our feet brought the sound of liberty. We were above all that sneaking and snivelling patriotism, that lives but in disinterring the bones of some old buried abuse. Our national blessings were bright and benignant as the stars in heaven; and we rejoiced-not to count them, for that was impossible-but to gaze on them with gratitude to the Giver! Whenever we beheld a Whig, or a Radical, with a long, sour, vinegar aspect, weeping, ugly as Sin, over the miseries of human life in Great Britain, we fixed him, as by a talisman, in the most ridiculous of all his possible attitudes, and showed him

up as a Fool. We brought forth against him shouts, and peals, and guffaws of laughter; from every corner and every cranny

"Redoubled and redoubled a wild scene

Of mirth and jocund din."

Why these sardonic wits, who had so ruled the roast for a quarter of a century, that they would have stuck the spit into any one who had dared to say, "black was the white of their eye," were struck all of a heap by our roaring laughter; and then gathering up their legs, set off in cowardly discomfiture, like so many old women at the shadow of Satan. WITS indeed! WHIG WITS! We defy you to utter that conjunction of words now in any room or vehicle in Great Britain or Ireland, without every face being graced with a grin. We declared, that the disease of the Whigs was an inveterate and incurable stupidity; and although many people could not bring themselves to believe that such a disease was mortal, they acknowledged their error when they saw the Party lying dead, and found themselves, as subscribers to this Magazine, actually walking in the funeral procession.

Our first Numbers were received with astonishment and indignation. What! the great Jeffrey declared a paltry and shallow critic! The excellent Brougham a political adventurer without principle! The philosophical Playfair accused of almost deism! The learned Leslie convicted of ignorance! It was unendurable, and a clamour immediately of personality, insolence, impertinence, assassination, with many other crimes of similar atrocity, was showered upon us. The loudest lamentation came, as usual, from the lower orders. The Magnates of Whiggism ate their leek in silence. They despised us, forsooth. The poorer creatures of the pack could not afford this. The iron had entered their souls, and they howled and wept under the infliction with the hideous yet comical contortions of a suffering baboon. It may be easier to allude in some detail to the controversies in which we have engaged, than to continue these general remarks. Let not the reader be frightened-we shall not delay him long.

I. The first charge of personality brought against us came from the Edinburgh Whigs. Disliking the general cause of Whiggism very much, we cannot, however, do it the injustice of confounding it with the party here. The Whigs of the Empire aim at

turning out the King's ministers, and unsettling the fate of nations-the glorious ambition of the Whigs of Edinburgh extends no farther than the caballing against a Dean of Guild, or effecting a radical reform in the mode of paving and lighting the Cowgate. It is a glorious night for the Whigs of the empire, when they carry a motion in Parliament—a night equally glorious for the Whigs of Edinburgh, is one on which they can get drunk on bad wine in honour of a stray lawyer, or an uneducated rector. The Whigs of the empire write state-papers, protests, resolutions. The Edinburgh Whig thinks he has done a feat equally important to the world, if he has written a paragraph in an unread newspaper, or contributed to render the dullness of a stupid review still more leaden. And then on the strength of these important feats, these very paltry people hold themselves entitled to speak with insolence of the great leaders of Church and State. We have heard a poor writer to the signet, whose whole practice would have been over-paid at a hundred a year, being in all probability about twice the value of his sweats-worth, declaring with a look of assinine indignation that Lord Eldon, to whose sub-deputy-secretary's clerk he would not have been qualified to be clerk, was no lawyer; and that it was allowed by all thinking men, in particular the great club that met at the Sign of the Cat and Bagpipes, and of which he had the honour occasionally to be president, that Mr Canning was no sound orator. We have heard Bloomfield of Chester pronounced no scholar, by people who knew no language on the face of the earth, except a corrupt patois of Scotch and English-and been assured that Magee, of Dublin, was a poor theologian, by a ragged collegian of two years' standing. The vanity and conceit of these creatures had, by congregating together, swelled to an enormous degree. There was nothing that they could not do. One person would write a universal history-another, a digest of all the laws of all the nations in the world, in a six shilling review. The Whigs of the empire are, of course, by being men of the world, free from these follies. But when Whiggery was engrafted upon provincialism the results were truly ridiculous.

Nor was it, perhaps-we say perhaps, for we are not quite sure--worth our while to extinguish these fellows. It might have appeared to our friends in England absurd to have taken

the trouble; but it should be recollected that we were in actual contact with them, and could not always curb our propensity to laugh at the jackdaws about us. Having resolved to do so-and Heaven knows it was all gaieté de cœur-how were we to effect our task? Laughing at them by name would have been quite useless; for who could know anything of John Douglas, or Sawney M'Guffog, or Jock Mucklewraith? In two or three jocular articles, therefore, when we had to allude to these absurd and unknown creatures, we had to describe them by their ridiculous attributes. Loud was their clamour against our personality-grievous their threats of vengeance. But peace be with them! They may rest quite satisfied that we annoy them no more. The elder ones among them are effete-the younger do not afford any indications of talent sufficient to disturb the serenity of a conclave of old tea-drinkers in the seventh flat.

So far for our quarrel with the Edinburgh Whigs. It has ceased these five years. If any person hear any abuse of us on this account, we request him to turn to our earliest Volumes, where he will find the Chaldee MS.-the Hora Scandicæ and Sinica-the Pilgrimage to the Kirk of Shotts,—and a few more papers of a similar character. We leave it to himself, if he be a man of the smallest discernment, whether these jeux-d'esprit would have produced anything beyond a smile from any but the victims of inordinate vanity, or a party determined, right or wrong, to put us down. Yet these papers were held up as crying sins. One of these, the Chaldee MS., exposed us to the charge of blasphemy from the party which at the very time was subscribing to Hone.

II. Connected in some measure with the above subject were our strictures on Professor Playfair. Him, indeed, we do not mean to compare with the rabble to whom we have been just now alluding. He was a man of respectable powers, and considerable acquirements, and wrote in a clear, lucid style, and arrangement. This last was, after all, his greatest praise. That he was overpuffed in his own coteries, there is no one who will not now admit. But we are not going to draw his frailties from their drear abode we only wish to defend our own conduct. That gentleman made use of the influence his talents and acquirements had procured for him, in spreading tenets which we believed to be

most dangerous. Now, we do not mean to deny that a very honest and worthy man may be sceptical in religion—but we do mean to deny, that any man, Deist, Christian, or Mahometan, can be honest if he shrinks from his principles.

Of all characters, the meanest is he who is willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike. This was said at the time this we say again after a lapse of seven years. We could not bear to see Playfair and his faction attacking Southey (a man so far his superior in genius and erudition, and surely at least his equal in virtue) for being an apostate, and yet keep silent on the fact that Playfair himself had been in orders. and yet had become one of the scoffers. We never shall cease to think that a man, who, by his continuance in his professorial chair, avowed himself a Christian, and yet in his writings, by sneaking inuendoes, advocated principles hostile to Christianity, was not a high-minded man. In days of perse

cution, when life and death are at stake, it may be conceded to the weakness of human nature, that we should be allowed to dissemble; but for doing so, because we thereby gain a lucrative employment, there can be no defence set up. This was the full amount, and perhaps more than the full amount (for the party lied against us in their fury) of what we said about Mr Playfair, and it called forth a great deal of whining on the score of insulting venerable age, from the men who at that very moment were taunting the years and afflictions of George III., and are now with falsities and lies insulting the undimmed decline of Lord Eldon.*

III. The only time we appeared in court was for a libel on Professor Leslie. The law-papers, cleared of their technicalities, accused us of saying, that Professor Leslie was ignorant of Hebrew --had not made some discoveries in freezing which he claimedand had corrupted the youth of Edinburgh by teaching them bad principles. There were other trifles besides, to which we shall by

• We have heard that some remarks on Dr Chalmers a couple of years ago have roused some anger against us. It is not worth discussing in the text. Dr Chalmers, in a paper in the Edinburgh Review, had, with a view to vilify the institutions of England, asserted the monstrous physical absurdity that nine-tenths of the people of England were paupers, supported by the other tenth, which he proved by the arithmetical absurdity, that 990,000 was nine-tenths of ten millions. The motive was bad, the means ridiculous. So we think still; but should nevertheless be very sorry to forget the merits of Dr Chalmers in his own profession. He has lately-thanks to us-avoided politics.