If there be no such radical change, they will be looked on as men destitute of principle; and if there be, the Duke and his party must necessarily be looked on as the same; in either case, they will belong to a Ministry destitute of character.

Until the Tories can enter office honourably, they will be able to render their country infinitely more service out of, than in it. Let them be content at present to remain what they are, but let them strain every nerve to increase their party power. We wish to see them shake off every characteristic of being a mere Irish party; the Catholic question, so far as regards parties, is now settled; and if they stand only on the difference between Protestant and Catholic, it will not support them. Let them take up the questions which agitate England, and place their creed before the world in a comprehensive form touching general policy. They stand in the most favourable circumstances which could be imagined. The condition of Ireland is appalling-foreign affairs are in the most unsatisfactory state-and at home the state of things is truly horrible. The supporters of the Ministry admit that it has no party in Ireland, and it is equally destitute of a party in England."

Ministers, conscious of their feebleness and unpopularity, and unable to strengthen themselves, are resorting to the last worthless resource of all such ministers; they are carrying on a furious crusade against the press. Incapable of preserving power and favour by virtue and ability, they are determined not to lose them by being spoken against. Certain characteristics of their prosecutions deserve serious notice.

During a long term of years, the rulers of this empire have instituted no prosecutions against the press; and during a very long term previously, they confined their prosecutions to seditious and blasphemous libels-to offences against the state. Speaking generally, it has always been the maxim with men in office to prosecute such offences only. A Minister of talent and high honour always shuddered at the idea of attempting to vindicate his individual character by means of an action for libel; because he knew it would be the most effectual thing he could resort to for ensuring its destruction. Whatever bitter libels,

therefore, were showered on such a Minister, he left them to be refuted by the only matters which could refute them-his principles, conduct, and public services.

The present prosecutions in England have nothing to do with offences against the State; they are merely to punish personal offences against individual Ministers; they are for the private individual benefit of the Lord Chancellor and the Prime Minister.

For years, publications which contain the most atrocious attacks on religion and public morals-which advocate infidelity, lewdness, and every thing that can injure the State, have circulated with impunity. The present Ministers, whose especial duty it has been to suppress them, have never, though urged in Parliament to do so, given them the least molestation; but, on the contrary, have encouraged their circulation, by declaring that they would take no steps against it.

Our readers will remember the libels contained in Lord Byron's Don Juan, Parody on the Vision of Judgment, &c., on religion, the late King, and many of the most eminent characters in the country. Not many months ago a subscription was entered into for raising a monument for the noble poet, and the Right Hon. Robert Peel, his Majesty's principal Secretary of State for the Home Department, figured conspicuously in the newspapers as one of the leading subscribers. This Mr Peel is the Home Secretary amidst the Ministers who are labouring to crush publications for alleged libels against them as individuals.

It appears from all this, that it is one thing to write down religion and morals-to fill the land with infidelity, vice, and crime; and a very different one to write the Duke of Wellington and Lord Lyndhurst out of office.

Our readers have not forgotten the libels which not long ago were heaped by The Times on the Duke of Cumberland-libels which, for fiendish atrocity, were never equalled. They were directed against an individual who held no public office; they were levelled against his private character; and their avowed object was, to drive him out of his country merely for doing what it was his public duty to do. At different times previously to their publication, The Times stated, as from authority, what the Duke of Welling

"Come, signior," said he, rising and advancing towards him, " don't be too obstreporous. You see what a way your poor mother is in, and it is not much she asks of you, methinks, when she only begs you to have a priest. What harm can he do you? You say you are innocent; but that does not make the matter either better or worse, as I can perceive; for, innocent or guilty, your head is to be chopped off, and so you ought to be shrived. You are not the first man by many, I can tell you, that I have had under my care, who has felt a little qualmish about confessing his guilt. According to their own account, indeed, very few of them deserved what they got; but what then? They were none the better for being innocent; so do what your mother wishes, send for a priest, and confess your-innocence to him. It will be a comfort to yourself; and I am sure this noble lady will be all the happier for it, when you are gone."

My good fellow," replied Malavolti, who knew exactly what the gaoler meant to say, though his manner of expressing himself was neither very bland nor much adapted to his purpose," My good fellow, I'll talk with you upon this subject when we are alone

"Which we must soon be now," interrupted Verruchio, "for the evening gun went ten minutes ago; and by this time they are making preparations to lock up the outer prison gates for the night.”"

At these words Beatrice arose, and embracing her unhappy son, the wretched mother took her leave, imploring him to think of all she had said, and promising to return on the following morning at the earliest hour which the regulations for admitting strangers would permit. Malavolti kissed her tenderly, but made no reply; and when she had quitted the cell, he cast himself upon his litter of straw to brood in silence over his design.

Malavolti was a Florentine by birth, but a Neapolitan by education, and by all those relations, social, moral, and political, which constitute the affinity of country. His father was of patrician descent, though he inherited with the pure blood of his ancestors only a very slender portion

of that wealth which in former times had ranked them with the princes of Italy. Still, however, the wreck of his patrimonial property, that had escaped public confiscation, and the waste of private prodigality, through the long course of three centuries, enabled him to maintain the independence, if not to assume the state, of his noble lineage. At an early age he married Beatrice Polenta, the youngest daughter of the Marquis Polenta, and of a family as noble, but as decayed, as his own. The personal charms of the youthful Beatrice, and the lofty qualities of her character, were her only dowry; but when she bestowed these, with her heart's first love, upon the father of Malavolti, she went to the altar, rich in the costliest treasures of a bride. It was about two years after their marriage, and when Beatrice had given birth to the son whose doom she now bewailed so bitterly, that she accompanied her husband to Naples, where he had sought and obtained a civil office of considerable rank and emolument under the Neapolitan government. But he had scarcely entered upon its duties, and begun to nourish hopes of future advancement, which lay fairly within the range of his position, when a malignant fever, whose fierce progress no skill could arrest, brought him to his grave in the short space of three days.

Beatrice idolized her husband. Every hour since their union had developed some fresh cause why she should do so. When the ardour of mere passion had subsided, instead of clinging to her only by the cold remembrance of expired or expiring sympathies, (that common, though feeble link of conjugal attachment,) far nobler bonds succeeded. The lover, chosen by the heart alone, had grown into the being whose virtues kindled the devotion of the mind. And this love dies not, because it is inspired by that which partakes not itself of death. Memory retraces, in fleeting colours, that comeliness of the body which was pleasant to the eye, when the body lies in corruption; but the enduring record of departed goodness dwells in the soul, like the writing that is inscribed upon adamant.

There is, in singleness of grief,in the rare privilege to sorrow, with

out the upbraiding consciousness of disregarded duties,-a refuge for the mourner. When we can say to ourselves, our tears hallow the dead, but wrong not the living; when we feel we are at liberty to consecrate our whole existence to the deep, silent homage of the tomb, because we feel that all we have lived for has been taken from us, and that therefore all our thoughts may gather, unblamed, round the past, and a mysterious, and a scarcely earthly repose, dwells within us. We shut out the world, and a calm solemn submission of the bereaved spirit seems to reconcile us to afflictions with which we are thus permitted to hold undisturbed communion. But this Sabbath of the heart was denied to Beatrice. She had been a happy wife; he who had made her so lay festering in his shroud; yet she was still a mother, and her maternal yearnings gave eloquent language to the utter helplessness of her first born. "Poor child!" she would exclaim, as she watched its placid slumbers, or gently wiped away the tear that had fallen on its orphan brow, "it were a cruel office for my hand to barb death's arrow afresh, and leave thee, like a thing of chance, to sink or swim, upon the vexed waters of life. That thou art fatherless, is Heaven's will; but wherefore thou art so, concerns thy wretched mother less to know than it does to confess before Heaven the sacred duties she has to discharge towards thee! Yes, thou sleeping image of him who sleeps in death!-thou strange and incomprehensible source of bright hopes and a laughing future, streaming across my dim path, like sunbeams irradiating the dark edges of a passing thunder-cloud, giving fair promise of a serener sky anon!-yes, thou secret spell, that canst make a mother's warm smiles glow within the cold, cold sepulchre of her widowed heart, I will bid sorrow be gentle for thy dear sake; and when my sad thoughts steal to thy father's grave, or linger there with fond recollections, summon them back to the cradle of our child, and make them obedient servants to thy happiness."

Beatrice kept faith with herself. As years rolled on, the prattling infant grew into the sturdy boy; and the sturdy boy ripened into the man

ly youth, in whose every look and feature, tone of voice, proud bearing, and impetuous spirit, she saw the exact counterpart of him whom in her own youth she had loved to idolatry. Nor was the resemblance the selfcreated picture of a mother's partial eyes. Friends and kindred, nay even strangers, who knew the father, would dwell upon the extraordinary identity which shone forth in the young Malavolti. Oh! how she would sometimes sit and gaze upon him, or mark his lofty carriage as he trode the earth, or listen to his full melodious voice as its tones deepened into manhood, and in the thrilling ecstasy of imagination forget that twenty years had passed away! In such moments, he was her own Malavolti, and she the Beatrice Polenta who had stood with him blushing at the altar, and weeping in the fulness of her joy. When the delusion vanished, the charm remained, and the son was loved with feelings in which Beatrice unconsciously mingled the memory of her husband.

He was in his seven-and-twentieth year when the lamentable event occurred, which consigned him to a dungeon, with the sentence of a felon's death. Lamentable indeed it was in its consequences to Malavolti; but he was the victim of circumstances and not of premeditated iniquity. Without seeking it, and, in truth, without deserving it, he had drawn upon himself the enmity of a young Neapolitan nobleman, Count Brittorno. The immediate cause of this enmity was jealousy; the imagined offence of Malavolti, a secret intrigue with his self-assumed rival's mistress, the beautiful Angelica Donzelli. But Malavolti was too proud an aspirant for woman's heart to dispute its possession. The loveliest of the sex, if she could balance between his pretensions and those of another, was disdainfully released by him from the perplexity of a choice; though, in a case where he had once been received, he would punish an intruder, while he relinquished with scorn the object of contention. This haughty feeling, which could be satisfied with nothing less than unquestioned and unquestionable supremacy, presented an insuperable barrier to what he would have considered the intolerable de