intended for a sum of money, if they could have got off with impunity! How few are there who would have put themselves in Guy Faux's situation to save the universe! Yet in the latter case we affect to be thrown into greater consternation than at the most unredeemed acts of villainy, as if the absolute disinterestedness of the motive doubled the horror of the deed! The cowardice and selfishness of mankind are in fact shocked at the consequences to themselves (if such examples are held up for imitation), and they make a fearful outcry against the violation of every principle of morality, lest they too should be called on for any such tremendous sacrifices--lest they in their turn should have to go on the forlorn hope of extra-official duty. Charity begins at home, is a maxim that prevails as well in the courts of conscience as in those of prudence. We would be thought to shudder at the consequences of crime to others, while we tremble for them to ourselves. We talk of the dark and cowardly assassin; and this is well, when an individual shrinks from the face of an enemy, and purchases his own safety by striking a blow in the dark but how the charge of cowardly can be applied to the public assassin, who, in the very act of destroying another, lays down his life as the pledge and forfeit of his sincerity and boldness, I am at a loss to devise. There may be barbarous prejudice, rooted hatred, unprincipled treachery, in such an act; but he who resolves to take all the danger and odium upon himself, can no more be branded with cowardice, than Regulus devoting himself for his country, or Codrus leaping into the fiery gulf. A wily Father Inquisitor, coolly and with plenary authority condemning hundreds of helpless, unoffending victims, to the flames or to the horrors of a living tomb, while he himself would not suffer a hair of his head to be hurt, is to me a character without any qualifying trait in it. Again; the Spanish conqueror and hero, the favourite of his monarch, who enticed thirty thousand poor Mexicans into a large open building, under promise of strict faith and cordial goodwill, and then set fire to it, making sport of the cries and agonies of these deluded creatures, is an instance of uniting the most hardened cruelty with the most heartless selfishness. His plea was keeping no faith with heretics: this was Guy Faux's too; but I am sure at least that the latter kept faith with himself: he was in earnest in his professions. Ilis was not gay, wanton, unfeeling depravity; he did not murder in sport; it was serious work that he had taken in hand. To see this arch-bigot, this heart-whole traitor, this pale miner in the infernal regions, skulking in his retreat with his cloak and dark lanthorn, moving cautiously about among his barrels of gunpowder loaded with death, but not yet ripe for destruction, regardless of the lives of others, and more than indifferent to his own, presents a picture of the strange infatuation of the human understanding, but not of the depravity of the human will, without an equal. There were thousands of pious Papists privy to and ready to applaud the deed when done :-there was no one but our old fifth-of-November friend, who still flutters in rags and straw on the occasion, that had the courage to attempt it. In him stern duty and unshaken faith prevailed over natural frailty. It is impossible, upon Catholic principles, not to admit the force of this reasoning; we can only not help smiling (with the writer) at the simplicity of the gulled editor, swallowing the dregs of Loyola for the very quintessence of sublimated reason in England at the commencement of the nineteenth century. We will just, as a contrast, show what we Protestants (who are a party concerned) thought upon the same subject, at a period rather nearer to the heroic project in question. under the The Gunpowder Treason was the subject which called forth the earliest specimen which is left us of the pulpit eloquence of Jeremy Taylor. When he preached the Sermon on that anniversary, which is printed at the end of the folio edition of his Sermons, he was a young man just commencing his ministry, auspices of Archbishop Laud. From the learning, and maturest oratory, which it manifests, one should rather have conjectured it to have proceeded from the same person after he was ripened by time into a Bishop and Father of the Church.-“And, really, these Romano-barbari could never pretend to any precedent for an act so barbarous as theirs. Adramelech, indeed, killed a king, but he spared the people; Haman would have killed the people, but spared the king; but that both king and people, princes and judges, branch and rush and root, should die at once (as if Caligula's wish were actuated, and all England upon one head), was never known till now, that all the malice of the world met in this as in a centre. The Sicilian even-song, the matins of St. Bartholomew, known for the pitiless and damned massacres, were but kánve oxías óvap, the dream of the shadow of smoke, if compared with this great fire. In tam occupato sæculo fabulas vulgares Bistonii stabulum regis, Busiridis aras, Thoantis ; should I take for true story the highest cruelty as it was fancied by the most hieroglyphical Egyptian, this alone would weigh them down, as if the Alps were put in scale against the dust of a balance. For had this accursed treason prospered, we should have had the whole kingdom mourn for the inestimable loss of its chiefest glory, its life, its present joy, and all its very hopes for the future. For such was their destined malice, that they would not only have inflicted so cruel a blow, but have made it incurable, by cutting off our supplies of joy, the whole succession of the Line Royal. Not only the vine itself, but all the gemmule, and the tender olive branches, should either have been bent to their intentions, and made to grow crooked, or else been broken. "And now, after such a sublimity of malice, I will not instance in the sacrilegious ruin of the neighbouring temples, which needs must have perished in the flame,-nor in the disturbing the ashes of our intombed kings, devouring their dead ruins like Stragem sed istam non tulit In such strains of eloquent indig- which is thus commemorated; and the edge of that horror which the in poor Guy vainly should we try to naked historical mention of Guido's recognize any of the features of that conspiracy could not have failed of tremendous madman in iniquity, exciting. Guido Vaux, with his horrid crew of Now that so many years are past accomplices, that sought to emulate since that abominable machination earthquakes and bursting volcanoes was happily frustrated, it will not, in their more than mortal mischief. I hope, be considered a profane sport Indeed, the whole ceremony of ing with the subject, if we take no burning Guy Faux, or the Pope, as very serious survey of the consehe is indifferently called, is a sort of quences that would have flowed from Treason Travestie, and admirably this plot if it had had a successful adapted to lower our feelings upon issue. The first thing that strikes us, this memorable subject. The prin- in a selfish point of view, is the maters of the little duodecimo Prayer terial change which it must have Book, printed by T. Baskett, * in produced in the course of the nobility. 1749, which has the effigy of his All the ancient peerage being extinsacred Majesty George II. piously guished, as it was intended, at one prefixed, have illustrated the ser- blow, the Red-Book must have been vice (a very fine one in itself) which closed for ever, or a new race of is appointed for the Anniversary of peers must have been created to supthis Day, with a print, which it is not ply the deficiency; as the first part very easy to describe, but the con- of this dilemma is a deal too shocktents appear to be these :- The scene ing to think of, what a fund of mouthis a room, I conjecture, in the king's watering reflections does this give palace. Two persons,-one of whom rise to in the breast of us plebeians I take to be James himself, from his of A. D. 1823. Why you or I, wearing his hat while the other stands reader, might have been Duke of bareheaded,--are intently surveying or Earl of -: I particua sort of speculum, or magic mirror, larize no titles, to avoid the least which stands upon a pedestal in the suspicion of intention to usurp the midst of the room, in which a little dignities of the two noblemen whom figure of Guy Faux with his dark I have in my eye:—but a feeling lantern approaching the door of the more dignified than envy sometimes Parliament House is made discerni- excites a sigh, when I think how the ble by the light proceeding from a posterity of Guido's Legion of Hogreat eye which shines in from the nour (among whom you or I might topmost corner of the apartment, have been) might have rolled down by which eye the pious artist no “ dulcified," as Burke expresses it, doubt meant to designate Providence. “by an exposure to the influence of On the other side of the mirror, is a heaven in a long flow of generations, figure doing something, which puz- from the hard, acidulous, metallic zled me when a child, and continues tincture of the spring.”+ What new to puzzle me now. The best I can orders of merit, think you, this Enmake of it is, that it is a conspirator glish Napoleon would have chosen? busy laying the train,—but then, Knights of the Barrel, or Lords of why is he represented in the king's the Tub, Grand Almoners of the chamber?-Conjecture upon so fan- Cellar, or Ministers of Explosion. tastical a design is vain, and I only We should have given the Train notice the print as being one of the couchant, and the Fire rampunt in our earliest graphic representations which arms; we should have quartered the woke my childhood into wonder, and dozen white matches in our coats ;doubtless combined with the mum- the Shallows would have been nomery before-mentioned, to take off thing to us. * The same, I presume, upon whom the clergyman in the song of the Vicar and Moses, not without judgment, passes this memorable censure Here, Moses, the King : "Tis a scandalous thing That this Baskett should print for the Crown. + Letter to a Noble Lord. Turning away from these mortifying reflections, let us contemplate its effects upon the other house, for they were all to have gone together, King, Lords, Commons To assist our imagination, let us take leave to suppose, and we do it in the harmless wantonness of fancy, to suppose that the tremendous explosion had taken place in our days; we better know what a House of Commons is in our days, and can better estimate our loss;-let us imagine, then, to ourselves, the United Members sitting in full conclave above-Faux just ready with his train and matches below; in his hand a "reed tipt with fire"- he applies the fatal engine To assist our notions still further, let us suppose some lucky dog of a reporter, who had escaped by miracle upon some plank of St. Stephen's benches, and came plump upon the roof of the adjacent Abbey, from whence descending, at some neighbouring coffee-house, first wiping his clothes and calling for a glass of lemonade, he sits down and reports what he had heard and seen (quorum pars magna fuit) for the Morning Post or the Courier,- we can scarce ly imagine him describing the event in any other words but some such as these: "A Motion was put and carried, That this House do adjourn: That the Speaker do quit the Chair. The House ROSE amid clamours for Order." In some such way the event might most technically have been conveyed to the public. But a poetical mind, not content with this dry method of narration, cannot help pursuing the effects of this tremendous blowing up, this adjournment in the air sine die. It sees the benches mount,-the Chair first, and then the benches, and first the Treasury Bench, hurried up in this nitrous explosion; the Members, as it were, pairing off; Whigs and Tories taking their friendly apotheosis together, (as they did their sandwiches below in Bellamy's room). Fancy, in her flight, keeps pace with the aspiring legislators, she sees the awful seat of order mounting till it becomes finally fixed a constellation, next to Cassiopeia's chair,-the wig of him that sat in it taking its place near Berenice's curls. St. Peter, at Heaven's wicket,-no, not St. Peter,-St. Stephen, with open arms, receives his own While Fancy beholds these celestial appropriations, Reason, no less pleased, discerns the mighty benefit which so complete a renovation must produce below. Let the most determined foe to corruption, the most thorough-paced redresser of abuses, try to conceive a more absolute purification of the House than this was calculated to produce;-why, Pride's Purge was nothing to it ;-the whole borough-mongering system would have been got rid of, fairly exploded; -with it, the senseless distinctions of party must have disappeared; faction must have vanished; corruption have expired in air. From Hundred, Tything, and Wapentake, some new Alfred would have convened, in all its purity, the primitive Wittenagemot,-fixed upon a basis of property or population, permanent as the poles From this dream of universal restitution, Reason and Fancy with difficulty awake to view the real state of things. But, blessed be Heaven, St. Stephen's walls are yet standing, all her seats firmly secured; nay, some have doubted (since the Septennial Act) whether gunpowder itself, or any thing short of a Committee above stairs, would be able to shake any one member from his seat;-that great and final improvement to the Abbey, which is all that seems wanting,-the removing Westminster-hall and its appendages, and letting in the view of the Thames,must not be expected in our days. Dismissing, therefore, all such speculations as mere tales of a tub, it is the duty of every honest Englishman to endeavour, by means less. wholesale than Guido's, to ameliorate, without extinguishing, Parliaments; to hold the lantern to the dark places of corruption; to apply the match to the rotten parts of the system only; and to wrap himself up, not in the muffling mantle of conspiracy, but in the warm, honest cloak of integrity and patriotic intention. ELIA. THE CLOUDS; A DREAM. It was in the evening of the fifth of December, 1821, when, not being able to relish a glass either of the national drug yclept old port, or even of my housekeeper's home-made, which, as I sometimes tell my friends, I think nearly equal to the best vieux bourgogne in the Palais Royal, I sent for a small portion of my neighbour -'s entire. The afternoon was unusually gloomy. Before me lay a Number of the LONDON MAGAZINE, open at that part of it in which Mr. Howard's nomenclature of the clouds is explained. I was trying whether I could assign to their proper class a black army of vapours that was stretching itself slowly over the north. The attempt was to no purpose, and I began musing on the difference between arrangement and method, as it is laid down in those excellent papers in the third volume of Mr. Coleridge's Friend, when, stretching out my right arm over the Magazine and laying my head upon it, I fell fast asleep. Immediately I appeared to myself to be transported, just as I was sitting with my table and all that was on it, into the steamengine of my neighbour's brewery; The warmth was such as I should soon have found inconvenient enough, but that the valve opening, I rose up gently, enveloped in a dense smoke. The motion and its accompaniment put me in mind of those lines in Milton: Uplifted spurns the grounds; thence many As in a cloudy chair, ascending rides when the last word reminding me of when at an early hour of the morning she issues forth to market in an old bonnet bedizened with fresh ribbons, a parti-coloured shawl, and a gown curiously inlaid with all those hues, in which our British ancestors used to deck themselves: articles of dress, none of which separately would be thought good enough for any other occasion, but which being combined, all together make so showy an appearance that I sometimes think the tradespeople may suppose it is of no consequence what price they put on their goods to so fine a lady. My error was not of long continuance, for she accosted me in the words of Dante, I am not she, Not she whom thou believest. Behold in me her whom old Hesiod calls θαύμαντος θυγάτηρ, or as Edmund Spenser's Muse in her slip-slop way has it, “The daughter of Thaumantes fair." In a word, I am the wind-footed Iris. But what is all this stuff before thee about cirri and cumuli, and strati? Have not you English made yourselves fools enough already in the eyes of all Europe about the weather, but you must set yourselves gravely to nickname every day in the year after this uncouth fashion? Is it not sufficient to have these black shadows intercepting sun, heads nine parts in ten out of the moon, and stars; lowering over your year, and for one whole month (November I think they call it) tempting you to hang, drown, shoot, or poison yourselves merely to be out of the sight of them; but that, when they are fairly departed, you must raise up their ghosts again, and exhibit mer's Hercules at the gates of hell, every one of them standing like Hoἐρεμνῇ νυκτὶ ἐοικώς with his bow ready bent against you, or like him whom your own poet has thought to make yet more formidable by saying that he was not only "black as night," but "fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell?" If thou hast a mind to make something out of these dark visitations, sit not poring over that vile nomenclature, but see what such pencils as these have made of them. So saying, with one brush of her wings she swept down before me certain volumes, the leaves of which opening of themselves disclosed to me the following passages: |