* Rolliad,' but now converted) were the authors of the pieces best remembered; but Jenkinson, Morpeth, Hammond, Baron, Macdonald, and Mornington (afterwards Lord Wellesley) were also writers in the 'Anti-Jacobin.' Gifford, afterwards editor of the Quarterly Review,' was the editor. Great mystery was affected, and the contributors entered the editorial room in Bond Street through the door of the neighbouring house, but there was little mystery about the authorship of the pieces, which seem to have been attributed to their real authors with tolerable correctness as soon as they appeared.

With the exception of The New Morality,' the serious part of the 'Anti-Jacobin' has been forgotten, but a large part of it was serious; it is the fun, however, that has made it live. Canning and Frere saw the ridiculous side of the revolutionary fanatics, and as the Directory after the 18th Fructidor was not composed of fanatics at all, but designing scoundrels masquerading as fanatics, the contrast between Jacobin theory and practice was even greater than in earlier years. The Jacobins who triumphed after the fall of the Girondins were marvellously successful for a time because they had a narrow creed, which they believed in and promulgated with ruthless logic, but after the fall of Robespierre the real Jacobinism had ceased to exist, and what succeeded was the cant of Jacobinism, which was being adroitly employed by Barras, Rewbell, and his friends to maintain their ascendency at home, and by the victorious generals of the Republic to push their own fortunes abroad. It was this system against which the renewal of the war obliged England to fight to the death in 1797.

In the face of what was taking place in Europe, the contrast between Jacobin words and deeds was strong enough to have inspired less nimble wits than those of Canning and his friends. Their first victims were hardly those whose names are now associated with ideas of hatred towards kings and priests.

It is as difficult to remember now that Southey was once a revolutionary poet as that the Archbishop of Canterbury was once looked upon by many pious souls as a heretic or worse, but the first number of the 'Anti-Jacobin' contained an attack upon him in the form of a parody of some verses which he had published as an Inscription for the Apartment in Chepstow Castle where Henry Martin, the Regicide, was imprisoned thirty years.

To fully

appreciate the parody in this case, it must be preceded by the original :

For thirty years secluded from mankind
Here Martin lingered. Often have these walls
Echoed his footsteps, as with even tread
He paced around his prison; not to him
Did Nature's fair varieties exist;
He never saw the sun's delightful beams,
Save when through the high bars he poured a sad
And solemn splendour. Dost thou ask his crime?
He had rebelled against his king and sat
In judgment on him ; for his ardent mind
Shaped goodliest plans of happiness on earth,
And Peace and Liberty. Wild dreams! but such
As Plato loved; such as with holy zeal
Our Milton worshipped. Blessed hopes ! awhile
From man withheld, even to the latter days,

When Christ shall come and all things be fulfilled. The imitation, of which Canning and Frere were the joint authors, ran thus:

Inscription for the door of the cell in Newgate where Mrs. Brownrigg, the 'prenticecide, was confined previous to her execution :

For one long term, or e'er her trial came,
Here Brownrigg lingered. Often have these cells
Echoed her blasphemies, as with shrill voice
She screamed for fresh geneva. Not to her
Did the blithe fields of Tothill, or thy street,
St. Giles, her fair varieties expand ;
Till at the last, in slow.drawn cart, she went
To execution. Dost thou ask her crime ?
She whipp'd two female 'prentices to death,
And hid them in the coal-hole. For her mind
Shaped strictest plans of discipline. Sage schemes !
Such as Lycurgus taught, when at the shrine
Of the Orthyan goddess he bade flog
The little Spartans; such as erst chastised
Our Milton, when at College. For this act
Did Brownrigg swing. Harsh laws ! but time sball come

When France shall reign, and laws be all repealed ! One does not know whether to admire more the literary skill of the prody or the ingenuity with which the revolutionary doctrines are negociated with the most execrated criminal of the day.

The next week's number (November 27) contained the verses htwist. remembered by posterity of all that appeared in the periodical ince its existence, The Friend of Humanity and the Knife

preceded by a dissertation on Jacobin poetry hardly less han the verses themselves. The authors (Canning and

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Frere again) note that according to Jacobin ideas the animadversion of human laws upon human action is for the most part nothing but gross oppression ; and that in all cases of the administration of criminal justice the truly benevolent mind will consider only the severity of the punishment without any reference to the malignity of the crime.' "Another principle is the natural and eternal warfare of the poor and the rich.' 'A human being, in the lowest stage

of
penury

and distress, is a treasure to a reasoner of this cast. He contemplates, he examines, he turns him in every possible light, with a view of extracting from the variety of his wretchedness new topics of invective against the pride of property. He, indeed (if he is a true Jacobin), refrains from relieving the object of his compassionate contemplation, as well knowing that every diminution from the general mass of human misery must proportionably diminish the force of his argument.'

It will probably be said that their ideas as to the natural antagonism between rich and poor, and the moral superiority of the latter, have not been, and are not, exclusively confined to Jacobins. This is true, but to a Jacobin the small proportion of the population of France which agreed with him, and the ruffianly element which made itself most conspicuous, constituted the people, and in their name he guillotined and conquered.

The ‘ Knife-grinder' is the most successful attempt existing to adapt English words to the Sapphic metre. It was a parody of a similar attempt of Southey's, of which the following lines are an example. They are probably unknown even to some of the devoted band who have fought their way through The Curse of Kehama :'

I had a home once--I had once a husband-
I am a widow, poor and broken-hearted !
Loud blew the wind, unheard was her complaining,

On went the chariot.
Then on the snow she laid her down to rest her.
She heard a horseman. •Pity me,' she groaned out.
Loud was the wind, unheard was her complaining,

On went the horseman.
Compare this with the parody:

I give thee sixpence! I will see thee d-d first,
Wretch whom no sense of woes can rouse to vengeance;
Sordid, unfeeling, reprobate, degraded,

Spiritless outcast ! —which is as perfect a Sapphic verse as the English language is capable of forming. The Anti-Jacobins never put the case against

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the revolutionists more neatly than in “The Knife-grinder,' but events abroad had been offering for some time the same entertaining contrast between profession and practice. When Bonaparte's troops were actually devastating Lombardy, when works of art, priceless in themselves, and endeared by a thousand associations to their possessors, were being wrested from them by the French deliverers,' Carnot, at that time one of the Directors,

pronounced in the Champ de Mars a solemn and sentimental discourse, in which he mingled eulogiums of our army, of filial love, paternal love, sensibility, gratitude, and, above all, of humanity. “O Humanity !” he cried, “how sweet it is to practise thee, and how much to be pitied is the greedy soul that knows thee not!" After these patriotic effusions came dances and a banquet ; then, finally, a hymn composed for the occasion by Lebrun-Pindare, the refrain of which ran as follows :

Enivrons, mes amis, la coupe de la gloire;

Sous des lauriers que Bacchus a d'attraits !
Buvons, buvons, à la victoire,

Fidèle amante des Français !!! The 'greedy souls' who knew not the love of humanity might well envy its friends. In one night of plunder at Milan, Masséna pocketed 1,200,000 francs, and it has been calculated that in three years France wrung two milliards of francs from conquered countries! In the following year, after the capture of Berne by the French troops, the public treasury was plundered to the tune of twenty or thirty million francs, arms and ammunition enough for 40,000 men were seized, and sent off to Toulon to assist in the fitting out of the Egyptian expedition. To use the words of Mallet du Pan, that keen contemporary observer, ' The French Republic is eating Europe leaf by leaf, like an artichoke. It is to plunder nations that she revolutionises them, and she plunders them in order to live herself.'

"To this state of things had universal benevolence brought Pran, and Europe. Is it to be wondered at that Canning and his friends were sometimes unjust to its supporters at home, who talkol of wrote humanitarian sentiments, when such practical

stion of the application of these doctrines were being

their view abroad? If Chamfort's famous epigram, 'Sois “, ou je te tue,' defined Jacobinism in its earlier stages zite neatness, the 'Friend of Humanity and the Knife

Tanfrey, Histoire de Napoléon, fol. i. p. 127.

grinder' exposed the absurdities of its last developments with a trenchant wit, the effect of which no eloquence, however fervid, was able to destroy.

Repressive measures, even when justifiable, are never altogether just to all who suffer from them, and the proceedings of Pitt's Government at this time offered no exception to the rule. Vexatious prosecutions had been undertaken against writers who had enunciated opinions hostile to the existing state of things, and in several cases had failed owing to the eloquence of Erskine, whose vanity was not on all occasions proof against the applause which his splendid efforts on behalf of personal freedom had rightly earned. He was therefore marked out for the satirical notice of Canning and his friends. The famous 'Meeting of the Friends of Freedom,' which made its appearance in the 'Anti-Jacobin' of November 30, 1797, was entirely the work of Hookham Frere, and as a parody of style and sentiment is unequalled in the English language. This skit took the form of a supposed extract from the Morning Chronicle' of a future date, containing an account of the speeches made by leading members of the Opposition at a meeting held to celebrate the events of the 18th Fructidor and the triumph of the Directory.

To fully appreciate the force of the satire the speeches should be given in full, but that of course is impossible, and an extract from that attributed to Erskine must suffice.

Mr. Erskine now rose, in consequence of some allusions which had been made to the trial by jury. He professed himself to be highly flattered by the encomiums which had been lavished upon him; at the same time he was conscious that he could not, without some degree of reserve, consent to arrogate to himself those qualities which the partiality of his friends had attributed to him. He had on former occasions declared himself to be clothed with the infirmities of man's nature, and he now begged leave, in all humility, to reiterate that confession. He should never cease to consider himself as a feeble, and, with respect to the extent of his faculties, in many respects, a finite, being. He had ever borne in mind, and he hoped he should ever continue to bear in mind, those words of the inspired penman, “ Thou hast made him less than the angels, to crown him with glory and honour.' These lines were indeed applicable to the state of man in general, but of no man more than himself; they appeared to him pointed and personal and little less than prophetic; they were always present to his mind; he would wish to wear them on his breast as a sort of amulet against the enchantment of public applause and the witcheries of vanity and seifdelusion. . . . In his present terrestrial state he could only address it as a prayer to God and as counsel to man, that the words which they bad heard from the hon. gentleman (Fox] might work inwardly in their hearts, and in due time produce the fruit of Liberty and Revolution. Mr. Erskine concluded by recapitulating, in a strain of agonising and impressive eloquence, the several more