security of the nation must ultimately rest. Their example is sure to be quoted against them: and however illogical and fallacious such a ground of defence or resistance must be admitted to be, human infirmity and human prejudice will never patiently endure punishment from the hands of those whose example has partly led to the commission of the crime. Let those, then, who look for obedience take care how they relax the moral springs of government. Quis non faciet quod princeps? It is in vain that resort is had to our tribunals for the chastisement of abuses of the sacred Scriptures, or blasphemies against Heaven. Neither religion nor morals can be effectually served in this way. The evil must be met higher up, and nearer its source. None can successfully enforce what they do not appear to believe, or efficaciously preach what they do not practise, or cause to be reverenced that which they do not appear to respect. And whether they that enforce, or preach, or maintain, do really feel, and practise, and revere, what they so enforce, or preach, or maintain, the people of this land are very competent to judge. In all the cases where this is not done, ordinary men will continue to go from churches and from tribunals as they do from theatres or auction rooms, saying with the usurer in Le Sage's novel, after hearing the preacher inveigh against the crime of avarice, il a fort bien fait son metier, allons nous en faire le nôtre. There can no longer be any dalliance with these great objects: to have the credit of being serious, we must be consistent. Every day, and all the day long, a mighty court of moral inquest upon all high and distinguished characters may be said to be sitting on the great floor of the nation, and the record of the prosecution and pleadings is the free press of the land. By the new system of universal education, by the publicity given to every movement of the great amongst us, by the quick circulation of family occurrences, by those arts of discovery to which no privacy is inaccessible, all public men are brought before this forum of the multitude, and virtually and morally put upon their country. This is now the ordinary state of things; but it is eminently so whenever offences committed among the people against the decencies or truths of religion or morals are brought to the bar of suppliciary justice. Then it is that the free spirit of inquiry, the cheap diffusion of intelligence, the urgency of self-defence, and perhaps a more malignant principle, produce a re-action upon those in authority which renders the discharge of public duty an invidious and a difficult task. When upon a late trial it was said by the accused to the Judge that he (the defendant), and not his Lordship, was upon his trial, in a large sense the observation was untrue. His Lordship, and all the Peerage of the land, the Bench of Bishops, and the Bench of Judges, and all

the high functionaries, civil and ecclesiastical, were upon their trial before the people. Every levity in the use or application of that holy book, which book was never intended to serve any secondary and collateral purposes, or to be made the medium of personal or political invective, from Luther down to the Antijacobin Reviewers, afforded some shelter or countenance to the man upon his trial. Every state trial for libel, or misdemeanour, or even for treason itself, has furnished a lesson of the same sort. Then is developed the permanent mischief which is created by those effusions by which decency, or truth, or sanctity is violated for temporary or party purposes: then is perceived the whole latitude of the injury which a momentary abuse by great authority may produce in the shape of precedent. The best of all causes is found to suffer more from the levity of her friends than even from the violence of her enemies. To conclude this strain of observation we will hazard the general remark, that until a genuine sensibility to the interests and honour of religion shall pervade the upper ranks of society, until statesmen and lawyers shall cease to unhallow the Sabbath before their families and dependants; until, in the higher clergy, punctilious duty, and stated service shall rise to the temperature of active zeal; until the Bible shall become a book of practice to the professional Christian in conspicuous station; until the legislature shall, in good earnest, set about providing church accommodation for the people, it will be to little purpose to prosecute for prophaneness or blasphemy; and when these things shall be done, such prosecutions will scarcely be necessary. It is by thus directing our attention to the inestimable value, in the present circumstances of the country, of moral and religious example in elevated life, that we feel the whole extent of our moral loss in the death of the Princess Charlotte.

For these five and twenty years past our country has been exposed to far greater danger than at any former period. Partial changes of the constitution, the transitions of power, the struggles for empire, the agitations of faction, or even the convulsions of intestine war, are events involving more or less of evil, but they have their measure and their boundary, and sometimes their compensations. But the deposition of God from his throne in the heart is an evil of which no thought of man can calculate the amount, or measure the extent. To the verge of this evil we were brought, together with the rest of Europe, by the moral contagion of French principles, especially in the first years of the revolutionary æra. The source of Britain's safety through that menacing period was THE MORAL AND RELIGIOUS EXAMPLE OF THE KING. He was, more than his own great minister, the pilot that weathered the storm. While all around was vacillating, and Europe was sinking fast into the vortex-while a vain and vision

ary philosophy was divorcing man from his Maker, and writing her decrees with the blood of her votaries, Great Britain's King, armed with intrepid moderation and steady purpose, pursued his right honest course, through good and evil report; rose early, visited first the house of God, and, after the regular dispatch of business, divided the day between manly amusements, frugal repasts, and peaceable, pure, and home delights. Old, and infirm, and bereaved of sight, he yet preserved a heart unchanged-a moral courage unsubdued. Still at the sun-rise, though it rose not to him, he was at his orisons. Still his duty to his people came next to that which belonged to his Maker and his Saviour. Still his family felt his tender care, and yielded him his usual solace. The ornament of his domestic circle, his gentle and pious daughter, was taken from him, and his reason lasted only to receive her last farewell, and mingle his blessings with her dying accents. Half in heaven, and separated from the taint of all earthly communion, he lives in the deep retirement of his palace solitary, sequestered, silent,-but not forgotten. The remembrance of him still rules, his example is still profitable, the nation still hears, and is edified by hearing, that his grey hairs do not descend in sorrow to the grave, that his very aberrations are holy, and high, and happy; and that God, who has taken from him reason, has, in exchange, given him peace. There is not a thinking being among his subjects that does not feel it a consolatory reflection that the royal grandfather is incapable of feeling the pang of this last privation.

It was out of these moral materials that Mr. Pitt erected that invisible barrier to the revolutionary principles of France which formed a protection to this sea-girt land superior to the ocean itself-superior to all the towers and fortifications which covered its coasts; and in this view we think that his Majesty has been, during all this stormy period in which Europe has been shaken to its basis, the real and radical defender of his people. But let us also do justice to the people. Is there a monarch in Christendom whose popularity stands upon a basis so wide as that of George the Third? Is there a political, or even factious feeling by which his reign has been disturbed, that it has not survived? Where is now the memory of that bad man who, soon after this Prince had ascended the throne of his ancestors, in the vernant strength of his youth and passions, full of his duty to his God, and his oath to his people, full of the principles and intentions of a virtuous Englishman, and of a fixed regard to whatever best became a gentleman and a husband, acquired his infamous and momentary popularity by his libels upon decency, upon religion, and upon his King. There is not a silver hair of the Monarch's head that is not of greater price than all his wit, all his buffoonery,

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aye, and all his patriotism. Where is now the interest of those once celebrated letters that coupled the name of Junius with patriotism, falsely so called? All that paradox which was once mistaken for depth of thought, all that assertion which once passed for proof, all that insolence which once assumed the credit of integrity, are fading fast into oblivion. The public have now scarcely any interest in the discovery of the lying and cowardly author. The pompous secret is secure, because no one cares about it. We believe that neither Wilkes nor Junius, to revert to the execrable wish of the latter, was ever "a thorn in his Majesty's side." If it was so, not a scar now remains to mark where the injury was inflicted; but the thorn, perchance, is buried, with this unholy secret, to rise together with it in judgment against him who boasted to be its sole depositary." Where is now the fame of those once celebrated characters that formed the phalanx of opposition through thirty years of his Majesty's virtuous reign? The great leader is no more: weak and weary, and half stunned by the democratic uproar which he had himself excited, he sunk into his grave, soon to be followed by the last breathing remnant of his party. His me mory is that of a man, recorded on his own confession, the idol and the slave of party. He lived to see how fugitive is the trumpery title of "man of the people," and to do homage to his departed rival by involuntarily pursuing his steps. The second and the third in estimation, among this memorable junta, are gone; alas! how gone! the confederation itself is broken, and, exhausted of its stamina, drops mouldering into the tomb of all the Capulets. But the King has lived out all that heretofore has troubled his public or private thoughts. An anticipation of felicity, no longer to be disturbed, is said to hold him in a quiet and heavenly abstraction. An exemption from pain or sorrow rewards the temperance of his early years. The storms are past, and his character, like a Pharos, through the melancholy space that divides him from his people, illumines that distant shore where the tempest-driven may hope, at the last, to be anchored in peace.

In reflecting upon the value of religious and moral conduct in great personages, as operating by way of example to the nation, our thoughts were naturally raised towards the reigning Monarch; who is the more entitled to this respect on account of the interest he appears to have taken in the education and opening faculties of the Princess Charlotte. There is something peculiarly touching in this softness of the royal grandsire towards the females of his family. Nor is it easy to find a happier composition of general delicacy towards the sex, and manly taste for their society, than that by which the Sovereign

has been distinguished. But all is over. And what can now be done, but, as these personal losses are past recovery, to redeem somewhat of the moral loss by reflecting in the national manners the spirit of the model which has been withdrawn, and to retain among us that forma mentis eterna quam tenere et exprimere non per alienam materiam et artem sed tuis ipse moribus possis.

Independently of these affecting considerations, there is also a political loss in this untimely grave. A goodly and bearing branch has been cut off close to the regal stem;-the genealogical tree is mutilated and defaced. The graft, too, of Saxon blood is lost and fallen. A loyal people, sensible of what they owe to the mild and constitutional sway of the house of Brunswick, and looking to their posterity with that large and ample feeling that carries in its bosom the happiness of after-born Britons, feels this disturbance of the succession with natural inquietude; but perhaps with an inquietude too wakeful to possibilities remote and contingent, and which ought to be committed in humble trust to Providence by a christian community. Our attachment to the present reigning house, will not allow us to place the national loss by the death of Queen Anne's only surviving son, in competition with the recent national disaster. But at the time of that loss, its consequences, in a mere political view, seemed much more preg nant with alarm. Yet it is not a harsh observation, at this distance, to make, that the removal of that young Prince was probably a blessing to the nation :-it made way for a family which put the seal to the Protestant succession; and from which has. sprung that venerable Prince upon the throne, whose protestant oath has been too strong to give way to the liberal indifference, or vacillating policy of the times. What may be in reserve for us it is impossible to foresee; but thus much is clear, that the best way of securing the future is to improve the present.

Of the two books purporting to be memoirs of this amiable Princess, the second is certainly most tolerable; but between them the race of insignificance is sharply contested. It is curious to observe the spirit in which this little mischief-making book, called the Cypress Wreath, is written; and would be amusing but that we recognise in it that bad political spirit which these latter times have called into existence and into action. It is thus that this ephemeral volume, after describing the various modes in which the day of the funeral of the Princess was solemnized, points the moral of its tale, and magisterially disposes of all questions, high, doubtful, difficult, or delicate, by a few charitable and cheap assumptions.

"What, we may now ask, produced this combined act of generous commiseration, unprecedented in our annals? Nothing but that sympathy, mixed with some indignation, that every Briton naturally feels