1823. the provision made for the meeting of parliament once in three years at the least; in a word, on the possession of a constitution, which King William admired so much, that he professed himself afraid to improve it. The gloom of the next reign, overcast and ruined as its prospects were by folly and oppression, and finally closed by means of intrigue, falsehood, and intimidation, is in part enlivened by a view of the courageous and disinterested conduct of Sancroft, Hough, Dundee, Craven, and a few others. Some of these persons, desirous of a parliamentary redress of grievances, thought, that instead of the force put upon the person of the King, an accommodation might and ought to have been effected with him; as he had a little before, when threatened with the just and open hostility of his subjects for his perversion of law, and maintenance of a standing army, made very important concessions. Yet it may be reasonably doubted, whether a composition with a prince of his disposition and feeble judg ment, whatever good qualities he was other wise possessed of, would eventually have been lasting, or even reducible to practice. The appeal made by him to his subjects, immediately after his retreat to another country, was signed by a secretary of state employed contrary to law. "Times had now passed, which were chequered with great virtues and vices; but the reigns of William and Anne exhibit to the reader one uniform scene of venality and corruption; and the mind, instead of being interested, is disgusted with the contests of two parties for the government of the country, assuming, as it best suited their selfish purposes, each other's principles. The long contemplated change in the executive government was at length effected; its power being virtually transferred to combinations of persons possessed of great influence in parliamentary elections, and in parliament itself. Hence what has been called the practice of the constitution differed widely from its theory; and to this depression of the crown and of its direct power, occasioned by the seeming necessity for the almost constant sitting of parliament, were added maxims totally annihilating the will of the single person, and, in conjunction with other causes, finally subversive of all dutiful and affectionate attachment to authority. These maxims, not recognised as constitutional by Clarendon, Hall, or Locke, were advanced in order to colour and justify the alteration. A wider and more extensive field was now opened for the exertion of talents, serviceable indeed to the advancement of the individual, but full as often pernicious as useful to the public. In these reigns also, contrary to every principle of justice, were laid the deep and broad foundations of a debt, which no other than the political system then adopted could have MARCH, 1823. entailed on a nation. It ought still however We have now little else to do, than to give our readers a few extracts from the notes, which will enable them to judge pretty accurately of the value of the whole of the additions: to say any thing on the work itself, so well known as Burnet's work is, would be quite su-" perfluous. To the Bishop's character of the first Earl of Shaftsbury, which represents him, as to religion, a deist at best, Speaker Onslow gives the following anecdote. A person came to make him a visit whilst he was sitting one day with a lady of his family, who retired upon that to another part of the room, with her work, and seemed not to attend to the conversation between the Earl and the other person, which turned soon into some dispute upon subjects of religion; after a good deal of that sort of talk, the Earl said at last, "People differ in their discourse and profession about these matters, but men of sense are really but of one religion." Upon which, says the lady of a sudden, "Pray, my lord, what religion is that which men of sense agree in ?" "Madam," says the Earl, "men of sense never tell it." The suppressed passages add to this nobleman's ill character, by saying "he had no regard to either truth or justice," nor was he "out of countenance in owning his unsteadiness and deceitfulness." It has been remarked by others than Burnet, that notwithstanding Shaftesbury's continual tergiversation, and the knowledge all men had, of how little he was to be depended on, he was, to the last, trusted by the discontented party. On this, Lord Dartmouth relates, that he "was told by one that was very conversant with him, that he had a constant maxim, never to fall out with any body, let the X provocation be never so great, which he said he had found great benefit by all his life; and the reason he gave for it was, that he did not know how soon it might be necessary to have them again for his best friends." To Bishop Burnet's very unfavourable and unjust account of Sir William Temple, Speaker Onslow adds: The author should have done more justice to the character of this truly great man; one of the ablest, most sincere, generous, and virtuous ministers, that any age has produced; and who will always be deemed one of the honours of this nation, as a statesman, a writer, and as a lover and example of the finest sorts of learning. They who knew Sir William Temple best, have had a disdain at the misrepresentations here of his principles with regard to religion; his whole life was a continued course of probity, disinterestedness, and every other amiable virtue, with every elegancy of it. Great in business, and happy out of it. See, and contemplate his writ ings; but pass gently over his few errors. Swift's note on the same passage is very characteristic." Sir William Temple was a man of virtue, to which Burnet was a stranger." Burnet hated the Stuarts, and would have enjoyed the following anecdote of James the First, related by Lord Dartmouth: Robert Cecil, great-grandson to the first Earl of Salisbury, told me, that his ancestor inquiring into the character of King James, Bruce (his Majesty's own Ambassador, and a very adroit one) answered, "Ken ye a John Ape? en I's have him, he'l bite you: en you's have him, he'l bite me." Of the power of the House of Commons none of our readers are ignorant, but the same annotator gives an instance of the exercise of authority by the Speaker, which we should suppose without a parallel. It is related of Sir Edward Seymour. When he was Speaker, his coach broke at Charing Cross, and he ordered the beadles to stop the next gentleman's they met, and bring it to him. The gentleman in it was much surprised to be turned out of his own coach, but Sir Edward told him it was more proper for him to walk in the streets, than the Speaker of the House of Commons; and left him so to do, without any further apology. Charles the Second well expressed the character of Lord Godolphin, who was much about his person; and we copy the praise, for the be nefit of future pages and gentlemen of the bed-chamber. "He was never in the way, nor out of the way." The conclusion of Lord Dartmouth's note is not so amiable; "his great skill lay in finding out what were his prince's inclinations, which he was very ready to comply with; haviour to every body else, and could but had a very morose, haughty bedisoblige people by his looks, more than he could have done by any thing he could have said to them; though his answers were commonly very short and shocking." At p. 399 of the second volume, the present Editor gives some noble lines, written by the present Bishop of Clonfert, in a poem entitled "The Love of our Country," which gained the Chancellor's prize at Oxford, in 1771. We the rather give them here because they are omitted, or much curtailed, in the late collection of Oxford Prize Poems, which is in the hands of every one. They are on the Death of Algernon Sidney: Here let the muse withdraw the blood. stain'd steel, And show the boldest son of public zeal. Lo! Sidney bleeding o'er the block! his His voice, his hand, unshaken, firm, serene! mien, Yet no diffuse harangue, declaim'd aloud, The love of ancient freedom to restore; On the commencement of the reign of King James the Second, and the offers of submission made him by Spain, the empire, and the states, Speaker Onslow says: This was a crisis that might have made this country as great in Europe, or greater, than it had been in any age, and put the King at the head of all foreign transactions, to have engaged in them, more or less, as it suited either his interest, or his honour: and had he but have kept his religion to his own practice of it, and governed by parliaments, he would have been the happiest and greatest king at the same time, both at home and abroad, that this nation had almost ever seen. There never happened before such a concurrence of incidents to produce all this: but the family was not made to govern this country. A false policy run through their four reigns, and they either did not know, or did not know how to make use of, the true genius and greatness of their people. The British nation, in its freedom, may be the first power of Europe; and a king who shows them he means their interest only, be the best obeyed. When they see him their king, they will be his subjects. On the promotion of Sidney, Earl of Rumney, Lord Dartmouth gives the following whimsical anecdote: When he was made Secretary of State, the Duke of Leeds told me he happened to go into the king's closet soon after he came out, and the king (William III.) asked him if he had seen the new secretary; the duke answered, no, he met nobody but Lord Rumney, (little thinking he could be the man). The king told him, he knew he would laugh at his being so, but he could not think of a proper person at present, and knew he was the only Englishman he could put in and out again without disobliging of him. The duke said, he did not laugh before, but could not forbear, when he heard he was to be at the secretary's office, like a footman at a play, to keep a place till his betters came. The same nobleman makes an observation, which has some justice in it, on the Liturgy of the Church of England: I never heard of but one reasonable objection to any part of the Liturgy, which is, thanking God for the king's being what we ought to pray he should be; the absurdity of which appeared very plainly in King James's reign, during which we were obliged to call him our most religious and gracious prince, and to desire that God would continue him in the true worship of him, when he went publicly to mass, and was overturning all the laws and liberties of the kingdom: but the bishop and his companions took no notice of that, from the same principle of flattery, by which it was first put in, and will always remain. Anecdote of Pope Alexander the Eighth, Ottoboni. I was told at Rome (says Lord Dartmouth) that he was a man of no religion, but left his family, who were poor before, possessed of above a hundred thousand pistoles a year in church preferments, besides vast wealth in personal estates. When some of the cardinals told him he made too much haste, he answered, that it had struck three-and-twenty, for he was past eighty years of age. Cardinal Ottoboni, who was chancellor of the church, kept a mistress in the chancery, which old Cardinal Alteri told the pope gave great offence: he said that was a fault, and next time he saw his nephew, asked him, why he did not take a private lodging for her. A little before he died, he asked his physicians how long they thought he could five: they said about an hour: then he called for a large draught of lachrymæ Christi, (a wine he loved extremely) and said he could not die much the sooner for that. In Pope's Moral Essays, Epistle III. addressed to Lord Bathurst, are the following lines: Once, we confess, beneath the patriot's cloak, From the crack'd bag the dropping guinea spoke, And, gingling down the back-stairs, told the crew, Old Cato is as great a rogue as you. The new Burnet gives an excellent illustration to this passage, in one of Lord Dartmouth's notes. Lord Pelham, who was a Lord of the Treasury in King William's time, told me, that, to his knowledge, Sir Christopher Musgrave had seven thousand pounds for settling the king's revenue for life, and that he carried the money himself, in bank bills, to the king's closet for that use. information still more curious. Speaker Onslow adds some political Upon one of these occasions Sir Edward 66 Seymour said to him “ Kit, Kit, I know where you have been, and what you have got, but it was first offered to me."Yes, (said another person), it was so, and the offer was 50001. but Seymour stood for 10,000l.” Mr. Pope alludes somewhere to Musgrave's hav ing received this money from the king, and that it was discovered by his dropping one of the bags, as he was coming down the back stairs at court. The occasion was after this period, (viz. 1693) and it was the settling of the civil list. The king desired it might be 700,000l. a year, and the contrivance for it was thus: Somebody for the court was to propose a million, upon which Musgrave was to rise up, and exclaim against the extravagance of the demand, and the danger of it, and after many severe reflections upon the court, he was to conclude with saying-he dared venture to answer for country gentlemen, that if the demand had been for a modest and reasonable sum, it would not have met with any opposition; that they were not unwilling to support the greatness and dignity of the crown, and that he thought, for all good purposes of government, 700,000l. would be sufficient, and hoped no larger sum would be given into:This he undertook, and did; and the court got what they wanted. I had all this from an eminent member of the House of Commons, who was then in parliament. We have made the foregoing extracts almost at hazard, and could have given a much larger number of a similar nature, and equally a musing, had our time and our limits permitted the extension of this article. Enough, however, has been done to show the general character of the additions to Bishop Burnet's work. Of the author himself, his new editor thus speaks: "He was, as it must be acknowledged even by his enemies, an active and meritorious bishop, and to the extent of his opportunities a rewarder of merit in others. He was orthodox in points of faith, possessed superior talents, as well as very considerable learning; was an instructive and entertaining writer, in a style negligent indeed and inelegant, but perspicuous; a generous, open-hearted, and in his actions, good-natured man; and, although busy and intrusive, at least as honest as most partisans." In respect to his veracity, his editor confesses, that he too frequently appears to have been no patient investigator of the truth, where either party zeal or personal resentment was concerned, and that he seems to have written under the influence of both those feelings, even whilst he was delineating the characters of some of the most virtuous persons of the age in which he lived. We thoroughly agree in this character of our author, and are even willing to exculpate him from intentional want of accuracy in his statements of men and things. We are, indeed, convinced that he was often misled by others, who, either out of amusement or for mischief, imposed upon his credulity, and invented scandals which they well knew he would not fail to register for truths. If there was any part of the Bishop's book with which we should be more particularly inclined to quarrel, it would be in his acrimonious remarks on persons of his own profession. Even the best and wisest of the English church are spoken of in terms far below their merits, whilst the great body of the clergy is at once accused of inactivity and faction. It must be remembered, however, that these objects of Bishop Burnet's censure were, almost exclusively, faithful to the House of Stuart, a crime of no mean magnitude in our author's estimation, whose antipathy to that unfortunate family is discernible throughout his whole work, and was so in all his conduct. We are not aware that the following anecdote has ever appeared in print, though we transcribe it from a very good manuscript authority. Burnet, in 1710, preached before the corporation of Salisbury, in the church of St. Thomas, in that city. His text was on the 13th of Romans, and his sermon on the authority of princes, and the doctrine of resistance. He was, (says our writer,) very bold, and went contrary to the best expositors, and, at last, growing probably too personal in his observations on the conduct and character of the exiled family, Mr. Mayor and the Aldermen took their hats off the pegs, went out of the church, with the rest of the congregation, and left his lordship to preach to the walls. Burnet and his works were not only attacked during the life of the author, but innumerable were the squibs that appeared on his decease: with one of them we shall conclude the present article. Here Sarum lies, Of late as wise A Christian, than Socinus. He swallow'd down, Wrote, preach'd, and pray'd, The church of God for Mammon. Of ev'ry vice He had a spice, Altho' a reverend prelate : A true dissenting zealot. If such a soul To Heaven is stole And 'scap'd old Satan's clutches, There may be room For Marlborough and his Dutchess. LITHERWIT and TRAMONTANE. Litherwit. Aha! aha! very good, very mad indeed, and an authentic description of celestial merry-making. Olympian Orgies!-ha! ha! a choice subject for the exercise of the goosequill; what man in a million would have thought of it! Admirably extravagant! Literally and alliterally, 'tis a divine divertimento. Tramontane. 'Tis good, believe me. Litherwit. Better than the best bacchanal ever roar'd by a priest: thou'rt fit to be Coryphoeus to a more vagabond troop than ever frighted the echoes of Rhodope or Pangæus. Tramontane. I am fain to think Dithyrambus the demon bestrides my pineal. Litherwit. Truly, I do think thou art possessed. Thou owest none of thy inspiration to that naughty beverage, wine; phew! Tramontane. A tint from the goblet hath not written "wine" upon the parchment of my lips, since I have worn the laurel. Lither wit. Pity, that instead of a poet, thou wert not Ganymede to a vintner: thou might'st then have stolen more cups of wine than thou now quaff'st flagons of Hippocrene. Yet, 'tis sweet drinking, that same visionary fountain; ah! thou luxurious fellow! thou dainty fellow! Tramontane. 'Tis marvellous small bibble though. Litherwit. Pure, pure. Tramontane. And methinks, a cup of inspiriting Portugal, a glass of red courage, now and then, would exalt mine enthusiasm to the very pinnacle of poetic phrenzy. Litherwit. 'Twould be superfluous infuriation: thou hast the natural knack of madness in thee; give thee wine, and a strait-waistcoat would not hold thee. Tramontane. Shall I make my thunder tattle upon thy ear-drums, and my lightning play about thy shoebuckles? Litherwit. Translate yourself. Tramontane. I have a Thunder-storm in my breeches-pocket. Lither wit. God shield us! Give me my hat! Thou'lt be singed like a widgeon, if it should burst. Give me my hat! Tramontane. Why man, 'tis made of paper. Litherwit. Nay then, 'tis combustible. Give me my hat, I say! I would be loth to be blown, bareheaded, over the moon. My hat, I say! Five flights to descend from thy perilous neighbourhood! Tramontane. Good master Litherwit, 'tis as innocent a storm as ever spent its fury in verse. Litherwit. O-I have a nose; I can smell out poetry which others wouldn't know if they saw it. "Tis a hurricane of the brain you speak of, my head to your half-crown! Am I oracular? Tramontane. Even so, to speak the solemn truth. Shall I fulminate? Litherwit. Nay, lad, the bedlamite Banquet once more, the celestial Carnival! Let your gods play their infernal tricks over again. Then shalt thou tickle us with thy storm, then shalt thou bray till the echoes groan. Come, sir! a Corybantian howl to prepare our ears for more horrible astonishment. Now, lad! The bousing Gods.' Tramontane. The bousing Gods sat late: And many a cheek in ruddier crimson burn'd, Jove had proclaim'd a banquet; in a flash |