rising abruptly from his settle, and be coffins to laugh at and marriages "I knew thee, I knew thee, my lord and my liege!" "Get up," said Wilfrid of Ivanhoe, scarcely able to articulate; "only fools are faithful." And he passed on and into the little chapel where his father lay buried. All night long the friar spent there, and Wamba the jester lay outside watching as mute as the saint over the porch. When the morning came Gurth and Wamba were gone; but the absence of the pair was little heeded by the Lady Rowena, who was bound for York, where his majesty King John was holding a court. Here you have an idea of the first part of the narrative. And I think there is nothing unsatisfactorily accounted for but Ivanhoe's mysterious silence during four or five years. For though Rowena married the day after her mourning was out, there is not the slightest blame to be cast on her, for she was a woman of such high principle, that had she known her husband was alive she never would have thought of such a thing. As for Ivanhoe's keeping his existence secret, that I consider is a point which, as hero of a novel, he has perfectly a right to do. He may have been delirious from the effects of his wounds for three or four years, or he may have been locked up and held to ransom by some ferocious baron of the Limousin. When he became acquainted with Rowena's second marriage there was a reason for his keeping incog. Delicacy forbade him to do otherwise. And if the above hints suit you, and you can make three or four volumes out of them, as I have little doubt you will be able to do, I will take the liberty, my dear sir, of finishing the tale in the September Number. WILL THE WIG GOVERNMENT STAND? THERE is no employment more profitless, in public as well as in private life, than to look back upon misfortunes that are beyond remedy, and to complain of their occurrence. Peel's Corn-bill, whether for good or for evil, has become the law of the land. The great principle of Free Trade is established as that on which the commercial policy of this country must henceforth be conducted, and let its remote consequences be what they may, there is no power in any quarter to avert them. We have taken a step in politics which does not admit of recall. Lovers of the Arcadian state of existence may mourn over this, hankerers after feudalism complain or threaten, and men of soberer judgment than either doubt the wisdom of measures which bid fair to convert England, at no distant date, into a huge manufactory. But the impulse having been fairly given, we may no more hope to stay the progress of events than to arrest the speed of the railway carriage, or the descent of the loosened rock into the lake. We are in the beginning of changes, of which it would puzzle the sharpest-sighted to foretell the end, and there is positively no help for it. Entertaining these opinions, and heartily subscribing to the doctrine that "the brave never repent," we purpose for the future, as often as the projects of politicians make a demand upon our attention, to look at them with a forward rather than with a backward glance, forgetting, as far as we are able, party feelings that have been engendered of old associations, and delivering our sentiments on men and things more with reference to the effects which they seem calculated to produce upon society hereafter, than in the idle purpose of trying them by the test of bygone arrangements. And here we must be permitted to observe, in J limine, that in thus proposing to act, we are guilty of no abandonment of principle, that we have submitted to no change even of opinion. We believe now, as we always did, that the only true end of government is, -to ensure the greatest amount of happiness to the greatest amount of persons. We are satisfied, likewise, that the ancient institutions of the country were admirably calculated to forward this end, so long as alf classes, high and low, rich and poor, acted in the spirit of these institutions; for the settled institutions of the country have grown out of a state of things which had little or nothing to do with mere money power; which linked territorial possession and political influence inseparably together; which made the owner of the soil the natural protector of the families, be they many or few, that dwelt within his do main; and held the Church to be the teacher of all in divine things, and the ready and willing administrator of help to the needy. But if the course of time, and the changes wrought by it in the habits of society, have damaged all this, then we must we be prepared to meet the evil in the best way that circumstances will permit. Now it is vain to think of denying that new ele ments have arisen, and entered into all our social relations. Commerce has become a science, towards the cultivation of which a high order of mind is directed. Trade, in point of importance to the well-being of the community, outstrips agriculture greatly. The relative numbers of the population employed upon the land, and in pursuits that congregate our masses in towns and cities, are quite changed. The amount of persons to whom agriculture, in one shape or another, gives occupation, does not now exceed one-fourth part of the population of Great Britain; if we take Ireland into aecount, it hardly reaches one-third; and the proportion is continually growing less. In like manner the Church, though still embracing a large majority of the people, is not the religion of the whole, and has long ceased by the legislature to be treated as if she were. Now it is obvious that, let our tastes and wishes take what direction they may, we have not the power to deal with a nation so circumstanced as if it were a purely agricultural and Church nation: The masses must be fed and taught and though we are satisfied that fed they would have been, both with temporal and spiritual food, quite as abundantly under the arrangements of 1842 as under those of 1846, we must not wonder if they, and still more their employers, entertam a different opinion. Besides, the wealth of the country is no longer monopolised by the lords of the soil. Men like Lord Ashburton, Mr. Jones Lloyd, Mr. Joseph Neeld, and many more whom we could name, regard their broad acres, abundant though they be, as mere playthings. Their riches are counted in stocks of various sorts, and they are by no means singular in this respect. - We will undertake to name a dozen manufacturing firms in the north of England alone, of whom it would be no empty boast to say, that they could buy up one-half of the squires in England, and that they give employment to a greater amount of persons than ten times the number of landowners, evein if we include among them the most influential members of the House of Lords. And as to the Dissenters, if they lack the power to press important measures forward, they are sufficiently influential to stop all improvement if they choose, as is abundantly testified by the deplorable neglect into which the Education question has fallen, With these facts staring us in the face, and remembering that we live under the constitution of 1832, it is no matter of astonishment to find that the feelings of the country are changed; that new men, with new opinions, are gradually usurping the places of our ancient aristocracy, not in regard to precedence or etiquette, or the polite forms of society, but in the power and the will to give to society itself a direetion; and that, being able to wield the constituencies to their own purposes, they have fairly won the asCendant in the House of Commons, and, as a necessary consequence, in the government. He who sees all this and he must be blind indeed that cannot see it-must with us acknowledge that we are in a state of social transition, and 2-4104 that such progress has been made towards a reorganisation of the machine, that to stop short at what we have attained is impossible. At the same time there is no just cause to assume that our course is necessarily one of deterioration. Danger there may be there always must be while a great people are changing their views of things-while ancient prejudices, or principles, if the term be preferred, are losing their hold upon men's minds, and the principles or prejudices that are to take their place remain as yet immature. But never surely was revolution-if a revolution it deserve to be called-carried forward with greater moderation than among us. Nobody makes an attack upon property. Many, in their secret souls, may regret that it should have got into heaps, that hundreds should be overladen with it, thousands moderately cared for, and millions in poverty. But the thinking among the poor themselves feel and understand, that they, far more than their betters, would suffer from any attempt to break in upon the established order of things by violence. Nobody, as far as we can understand, seriously meditates an attack upon the House of Lords. The custom of voting there by proxy will probably be discontinued; and, for our own parts, we shall be glad to see it quietly got rid of, for not on any principle of common sense can it be defended. But the House of Lords, the chamber of hereditary legislation, is just as dear to the hearts of Englishmen as the House of Commons; they would not endure that the hand of the spoiler should interfere with it. In like manner, we have no fear for the Church. The Establishment may be still more shaken than it has already been, and in Ireland it will probably cease to hold its ground altogether. But as to the Church, as we believe it to be founded upon a rock, so we are confident that there does not exist the smallest inclination, where there is power, to molest it. On the contrary, we believe that sound Church principles were never more respected by the great body of the middle classes, the real strength of the empire, than they are now; and we are confident that there needs but common prudence, mixed with increasing zeal in the clergy, to confirm this feeling. And, finally, is the crown in danger? Does any human being, in parliament or out of parliament, indulge in dreams about a presidency? Very much the reverse. We may be, we are, in a state of social transition. We are scheming, indeed living, for the nineteenth century-perhaps for the twentieth-and not for the eighteenth; but it is not, therefore, a settled thing that we are going to rack and ruin; digging at the throne, laying barrels of gunpowder under the House of Lords, or mustering for the overthrow of the altar. That the opinions which we have ventured to express are held by the great body of the people is apparent from the perfect apathy with which they looked on during the whole course of the recent struggle. Except in the House itself, no human being seemed to be roused. The city of London sent no addresses either for or against the proposed changes. We heard of no gatherings in the Bull-ring at Birmingham, or on Penenden Heath, as in other days. And now that Peel is out and Lord John Russell in, the people seem to care as little about the matter as if Lord Johnstone had merely removed from the Mansion - house, in order that Lord Thomson might come in his place. And the people are right. Events must now take their course; though whether they are to move too fast or too slow, both extremes being perilous, will depend mainly upon the measures which, in the beginning of their reign, the Whig ministers shall propose. We write it with regret, but a consideration of the materials of which the Whig ministry is composed, compels us to avow our belief, that Lord John will not be able to carry on the government. There is no principle of cohesion in his cabinet. Not only do the individual members hold opinions on all important subjects diametrically opposed, but they boast of these discrepancies to the world. Take one great question, which we defy them to blink-the Irish Church question, and see how they are circumstanced. In 1835, Lord John Russell forced Sir Robert Peel out of office by proposing and carrying his Appropriation clause. Lord John did not, it is true, persist in this policy, after he had won his way back to Downing Street, but he made a boast of retaining the opinions which he had advocated while in opposition, and claimed credit on the ground of moderation while putting them in abeyance. He now tells the world that he cannot conceive a more fatal measure than the disestablishment of the Protestant Church in Ireland, and declines taking any further notice of the project of 1835. Meanwhile Earl Grey has published a manifesto against the Protestant establishment of Ireland. He considers its existence to be the monster grievance in that portion of the empire, and conceives that there is imposed upon the government no more pressing duty than its overthrow. Lord Grey is supported in his opinions by Mr. Sheil; whereas Mr. Macaulay appears to have arrived at the unexpected conclusion that even to pay the priests out of the Consolidated Fund would be injudicious. Not so my Lord Morpeth. He is all for a stateendowment; and, if we understand him right, he would rather take it out of the property of the Church than supply it through the Treasury. Mr. Ward, on the contrary, is for no state-payments at all. He would have religionists of every sort to provide their own parsons as they provide their own physicians, and, saving vested interests, he would seize the property of the Church, as incumbencies fell vacant, and apply them to the general education of the people. Mr. Ward may be a small man in the estimation of the noble lords to whom he plays second fiddle; but he is not small in his own estimation, nor in that of the Radicals, of whom he is one of the represen tatives; and having Mr. Benjamin Hawes to support him, he flatters himself that he will be more than able to counterbalance Mr. Charles Buller, whose views on religious points are somewhat Puseyite, and who is too honest a fellow to sanction the spoliation of any class of the queen's subjects, even if the class proposed to be plundered be the clergy. So much for the state of feeling in the new government on a question which is just as sure to be brought forward early in the next session, as day is sure to succeed to night. Let us consider one or two points besides, in regard to which, if there be greater unanimity in the cabinet, there has been too much of coquetting out-ofdoors to sanction remissness in the executive, or to ensure success after the movement is made. And, first, let us take the sugar question, on which Lord John is pledged to speak out forthwith. It was during the former reign of the Whigs, when Lord John was rising to the first place among them, that in order to get rid of the incubus of slavery in our own sugar colonies, the British parliament voted to the holders of slaves a compensation of not less than twenty millions sterling. The vote was opposed, of course, by the Joseph Hume clique of economists. But a sense of justice prevailed over the opposition, and, with the hearty concurrence of Quakers and philanthropists of every sort, the Whigs, supported by the Conservatives, gained their point, and the planters their money. So bold a confiscation of the property of Englishmen was tolerated only upon the plea that our West - India growers must be placed in a very unfavourable condition of rivalry towards the growers of sugar in the Brazils, and in the Spanish and French colonies. It was held that, taking into account the natural habits of the negro, the planter who cultivated his canes by means of free labour could not possibly compete with the slave-owner; and that to give him any chance at all it was necessary first to compensate him for his loss of property in his labourers, and next to afford him such protection as a proper adjustment of import duties between him and his rivals might establish. Indeed the levying of duties, comparatively heavy, upon slave-grown sugar was regarded as a measure not merely of fiscal arrangement, but of Christian duty; and as such the Whigs proposed and triumphantly carried it. Now see what they are prepared to do. On the plea that the repeal of the Corn-laws has entirely revolutionised the commercial policy of the country, the head of the Whig government talks of equalising the duties on sugars, whether fabricated by slaves or by free labourers. Christian duty has thus ceased to have any weight with him. The Quakers, it appears, were mistaken in the use which they made of this argument; and his lordship, with his friends, accepted their view of the ease, simply because it suited their convenience to do so. Perhaps Lord John is right, looking at the matter in a purely religious point of view. A state of things which has existed ever since the world began, which was sanctioned by the example of Abraham, and is nowhere denounced in the New Testament, cannot be opposed to the spirit of the religion which we profess; except, indeed, in its abuses. But we are quite sure that Lord John will never persuade the Quakers to understand this; and we are apt to suspect that he will find more than the Quakers averse, on other and less sublimated grounds, to sanction the arrangement which he proposes to make. John Bull retains a lively recollection of the twenty millions which it cost him to get rid of slavery in his own dependencies; and will not see, all at once, that there can be any fitness in the encouragement of slavery elsewhere. Besides, John cannot endure to be humbugged; and so if the Peelites and Protectionists unite to resist the move, Lord John will be obliged to dissolve and go to the country on a question by no means calculated to win recruits to his standard. But worse remains behind. Lord John has taken new ground, such as we cannot believe that he will be permitted to hold throughout a single session. He is for waiting the progress of events. Whatever his own views and the views of his cabinet may be touching the arrangements which would best promote the permanent welfare of the empire, he is determined to do nothing-to propose nothing, till public opinion shall have declared in favour of a change. Now we shall be exceedingly surprised if gentlemen on either side of the house permit this. The purpose for which a cabinet exists is to take the lead in legislation, to think for the people, and to provide them with laws and usages which shall carry them forward in civilisation and prosperity; and the people know this so well that they will not readily be put off with a continued waiting upon Providence. Moreover, there are those, apart from the people, the leaders of faction both here and in Ireland, whose very na ture must change if they abstain from goading ministers into action. Does any body suppose that Mr. O'Con nell will be quiet? He may patronise the Whigs to a certain extent, and count upon getting a good deal out of them; but he is no more willing to relinquish the trade of agitation than he is able. The Repeal cry may be softened for a brief space out of deference to that show of decency which even he is constrained occasionally to put on. But that it will be raised again in due time, assuming the cabinet to persevere in doing nothing, is just as inevitable as that without it the rent would not come in. Lord John may feel and express the utmost reluctance to open a campaign against the Irish Church, but we defy him to escape from it. And what is more, we do not believe that his half-and-half scheme - his Popish establishment here and Protestant establishment there will content any body. Delenda est Carthago. The Irish Church is, in the councils of O'Connell and the WhigRadicals, doomed; and the sooner and the more boldly Lord John or Lord Grey breaks ground before it, the better it will be for all concerned. But we have not yet done with the difficulties of the new cabinet. The members of the present government are as much divided on the subject of labour in the factories as upon the Irish Church question. An influential section of them, with Lord John at their head, supported Lord Ashley in his last attempt to carry a Ten-hours' bill, while Lord Grey and the more decided of the economists denounced the project as worse than visionary. What is now to be done? Will the government leave to Lord Ashley-on whose re-election next year we count as surely as we do upon any thing that is in the future the honour of fighting once more the battle of the factory children, and winning it? or will Lord John assume the initiative at the inevitable risk of exasperating his supporters of the League and of coming into direct collision with Sir Robert Peel? or, finally, knowing that Lord Grey is against him, will he be content to keep aloof, or possibly vote against his own wishes? These are points which it remains for time to determine. And, let us add, that their settlement, be it managed |