Mansfield leaves traces no less marked, but in a different direction. If he is on the side of falsehood, he adopts popular fallacies, defends them with skill, and relinquishes them when overcome by his opponents. If he is on the side of truth, his influence is stronger, but all the more mischievous. He espouses truth from conviction, his reason being clear. He abandons it on pressure, his courage being weak. He will generally be right in the outset, and he will maintain what is true; he will always be wrong in the end, and will be sure to abandon the truth; but before he abandons his cause, he will betray it and he will be the worst of traitors, because he will betray while he holds the position of a friend. His mode of betraying will be this: as truth in politics is generally mingled with error, and the side which espouses the true defends also what is erroneous, such a party has to encounter assaults upon its political creed, which are always vigorous and often just. As they maintain their views with prejudice, and regard all attack upon them with indignation, their creed is a heterogeneous mass, and they are conservative of errors as well as of truths. At this juncture a man of Mansfield's character occupying the position of their leader, will be the vigorous champion of their prejudices, tenacious of all, and opposed to change. But when the tide rises, and public opinion turns against them, and prejudice becomes untenable, and the vulner able part of the system must fall, such a leader passes, by a natural transition, from obstinate prejudice to a general surrender. He is now ready to give up everything-the true as well as the false-for as no principle guides his judgment, and he listens constantly to fear, he is prepared for any compromise, so that he may avoid a conflict. Having maintained his system because it was popular, he deserts it as soon as it becomes obnoxious; and instead of expunging from it what is worthless, and retaining what is good, he rises the beaten champion of prejudice, to surrender everything, even truth, to its enemies. As his practice is to maintain what he has as long as he can, he judges by the amount of pressure as to when and what he surrenders. He prepares himself for the result by refusing to discuss any question upon its principles, and argues always upon what is temporary and accidental. Whenever he can he reserves his opinion, where he cannot he makes it obscure. You will never find him on lines where he plants his standard. He will always have ground on which he can fall back, and nothing will be certain except his retreat. He will never leave any feeling of despair to his opponents, or of confidence to his friends. The one will always look to him with hope, and the other with anxiety; the one always expecting that he will surrender, and the other that he will desert. The effect of this in a discussion of principle is transparent. The principles of

which he is the advocate, being held back and thrown into the shade, first dwindle and then die. The principles of which he is the opponent, watered by hope and invigorated by success, will become rampant and grow. The cause therefore which he resists is sure to triumph, and that of which he is the champion to dissolve. His influence will be felt throughout his own party, which perceiving his abilities will assume that his policy is founded on reason, and unwilling to attribute his acts to his fears, will refer them to his forethought. They will suppose that he foresees difficulties which escape them, and they will join him in abandoning positions, which are only indefensible because not defended, and only weak because deserted. His course will in fact be the reverse of that of the great warrior. The one driven into a peninsula, with Europe banded against him, conscious of his resources and confident in his cause, chooses his position with the eye of genius, supports it with the constancy of courage, gathers Europe to the rescue, and the world is freed. The other, with truth on his side, but fear in his heart, his hands filled with weapons of strength, his loins shaking with alarm, dreads the attack before it reaches him, and looks round for retreat; blows up entrenchments which are impregnable, undermines what is strong, damps his friends by his cowardice, inspirits his enemies, and finally surrenders bulwarks which would have stood the shock of foes, had they found a friend with the heart to love or the nerve to defend them."

His

He was, indeed, too indifferent to the feelings and remonstrances of his friends, and too sensitive to the reproaches of his enemies. Some men wear their honour (Canning, for instance), but he wore his conscience, on his sleeve, for daws to peck at. political morality was but skin-deep and complexional. It received and did not give its tone to surrounding things, fluctuated with every variation in the temperature of the house, and was hot or cold according to the influences around him.

And yet it was not without a purpose and a principle that he acted, even when his conduct seemed most strange and inconsistent. When the great breach was made in the Constitution in '29, he long hoped against hope that the prophecies of the emancipationists would be fulfilled, that party differences, arising out of religious feelings, would cease, and that halcyon days were in prospect for Ireland. But when he became perfectly convinced that no such results were to be looked for, and that the measure

was irretrievable, he could see nothing but the destruction of the Church, and the exaltation of Popery, in the distance; and his course was at once shaped, not for the preservation of the one or the repression of the other, but such a gradual preparation of circumstances as that the rise of the one might not be too violent, whilst the fall of the other would be gentle and easy.

If the Church was to be defended, it was not because it upheld the truth, but because it really was not so rich as was pretended; that but little could be gained by its spoliation, while a great shock would be given to public opinion. But those who would uphold it in its integrity, and vindicate it from the assaults of the Romanists, had their merits imputed to them as faults, and were amongst the very last to whom any countenance would be given during his administration.

So it was, also, with respect to the Reform Bill. He thought he saw, in that measure, a principle triumphant, which must ultimately overturn the monarchy, and render it absolutely necessary that our institutions must henceforth be new modelled,

and

founded upon a democratic basis. This at once led him to believe that it would be idle any longer to contend for the existence of a territorial aristocracy; and, that point being once settled, that it would be wicked to struggle any longer for the maintenance of the corn-laws. The Irish corporations were surrendered to the Romanists, not because they could not have been effectually maintained by a minister who should " screw his conrage to the sticking-place," but because Sir Robert Peel deemed it useless any longer to maintain them.

He

Thus it was that there was a principle even in the most apparently unprincipled part of his policy. Altered circumstances gave rise to altered views, and made the altered man. When he said that Ireland was his dif ficulty, he was not understood. would, he could, have found no difficulty in putting down disaffection. By one vigorous measure, in which he would have been supported by the best of all parties, he might have made sedition quail. The difficulty was in taking any measure which might be obstructive of the great end which he had in view, and to which he deemed that all things were tending, the establishment

of Popery, and the substitution of a Romanist instead of a Protestant ascendancy in Ireland.

Such we conceive to be the rationale of the late right hon. baronet's policy. He imagined himself amongst breakers against which he could not safely make head, and he doubled and twisted in the only way in which he deemed it wise to proceed, or even possible, to avoid certain danger. He saw an inevitable tendency downward, and his measures were all calculated, to the best of his judgment, to retard its rapidity and break the fall.

Had he been a man of nerve-had his mental and his moral temperament been such as, when the floodgates were up, would have fitted him to contend with the terrible element which poured in upon him with such sudden violence -he might have accomplished great things. The rally which, under his guidance, his party had made after the reverses of the Reform Bill, clearly showed what might have been done, had that party had a leader who was not hasty in taking augury from his fears. Had he relied upon them as they relied upon him, there were no difficulties which he might not have conquered; and it is our belief that, had he shown an intrepid front, he would have found it easier to raise public sentiment to a height which would have sustained our monarchical institutions in all their constitutional vigour, than he did find it to let them down to a republican level, from the forgone conclusion that, sooner or later, they must be swept away.

It was said, with truth, of Pitt, that he was "the pilot that weathered the storm.' No man, than he, could have more disliked the hazards and the miseries of war. His great aim, when he entered office, was, to keep England at peace, and to extricate her, if possible, from her financial difficulties. He was long reluctant to act upon the views of Burke, who discerned the signs of the coming tempest when few others could see any symptoms of danger. But when he was once convinced that in peace there was no safety, and that our most sacred institutions were in imminent peril, he laid aside, for a season, his most cherished predilections, looked the dangers full in the face, and braced himself for the duties of a war minister with a courage as high as the cause was good, and per

severed in the contest, "per damna, per cædes." with a constancy as great as the blessings were inappreciable which were to be defended. All mere cheese-parings in finance he gave to the winds when the question arose what price would not England pay for the preservation of her liberties? And his name will, by all true lovers of their country, be held in perpetual honour, as the man whose trumpettoned eloquence aroused a nation to the most heroic efforts of self-defence, and inspired them with a willingness to make the enormous sacrifices by which alone the enemy with whom they had to contend could be effectually resisted.

All this lofty courage was, in Sir Robert Peel, a-wanting. If the one was "the pilot that weathered the storm," the other was "nimis procellæ timidus;" and whilst the boldness of the former, by confronting, overcame the most formidable dangers, the shrinking timidity of the latter, by eschewing, has only rendered comparatively lesser dangers more inveterate, until they can now, by scarcely any ability, be averted. They have become almost chronic in our constitutional system.

But was he not a great man? If the question be, was he fit to lead a a great party? we have no hesitation in saying, he was not. He was essentially a subaltern, and lost his head from too high an elevation. A great man must inspire his followers with confidence. He only made those nearest to him feel that he was unfit to deal with critical emergencies, and those at a distance to feel that they were betrayed. He broke up, and scattered to the winds, the most powerful party England ever saw, and that at a time when such a party seemed indispensable for the preservation of the empire. And this he did upon grounds by which no man could be satisfied, which surprised his enemies almost as much as they grieved his friends. With such a parliamentary army as he had at his command, handled properly and managed wisely, he might have quelled all domestic faction, and bade defiance to the hostility of the world.

In the sense mentioned, therefore, it is our opinion that he was not a great man. But he must not be confounded with little men. If he was a subaltern, as we have stated, he was

the ablest of subalterns. Under a chief, like either of the Pitts, he would have been invaluable. His adroitness and dexterity in the management of details were consummate, and he possessed great skill as a financier; added to which, he was always ready and well-informed upon every subject connected with the department over which he presided. It might be truly said of him that he would be deemed " consensu omnium dignus imperio nisi imperasset."

But did he leave behind him no great measures, as evidences of his ability and monuments of his fame? He did. His revisal, amendment, and condensation of the criminal law is a great boon to his country. He found our criminal code a mass of contradiction and confusion, and, like the code of Draco, written in blood; and he devoted days and nights of intense labour to the reduction of it to its present form; classifying its enactments, simplifying its forms, and mitigating its severity, until it is no longer a disgrace to social man, but may vie, in humanity and perspicuous simplicity, with the most enlightened codes of criminal jurisprudence that have ever appeared in the world. For this he should ever be gratefully remembered.

Upon the merit of his great currency measure, as we before stated, we do not pronounce. It has not as yet, in our judgment, been sufficiently tested. There is no doubt that by it he be came the idol of the chruseocracy. No sooner were its effects felt than all the worshippers of mammon fell down before him. His merits in staying public credit, and putting monetary transactions upon what he deemed a solid foundation, were so great as to cause a forgetfulness of his errors and his short-comings in matters far more important. It is true he doubleriveted the chains of the debtor; but that was no reason why he should not find favour in the eyes of the creditor, who, for that, forgave him all his tergiversations, and to whom his propopery and his anti-corn-law policy were but as dust in the balance when weighed against his transcendent merits in making the pound a veritable pound, and enabling the Shylocks of the day to claim much more than that for which they had bargained.

Nor do we presume to say, that hitherto the good of his currency

measure has not predominated over the evil; nor even that it was not, when it passed, the best thing that could have been done. The evil which he had to remedy was, a currency running wildly towards the extreme of depreciation; and he put upon it an Egyptian curb which, at all events, restrained its headlong course, so that one evil, that of a circulation in excess, was avoid

ed. Whether something might not have been concurrently done to prevent the other evil, that of a circulation in deficiency, we omit, for the present, to inquire. But subsequent experience enables us to state positively, that against that evil Sir Robert was not equally on his guard; and future experience will, we trust, enable some equally able man to remedy the defect by some arrangements which, while they ease, shall not injuriously relax, our monetary regulations, but give to the currency a kind of elastic accommodation to our growing trading and mercantile requirements.

Of the private character of this eminent man there is, there could be, but one opinion. It was, in the highest degree, excellent. He was the light and the joy of the domestic circle; and his charities found their stealthy way to many an abode of suffering and of anguish, where the artist lay upon the bed of sickness, heart-broken and destitute; or, more unhappy still, with a family around him pining for food.

Often has the man of letters, whose pen had been dipped in gall against him, found in him, when overtaken by want and woe, a munificent benefactor. Nor were these deeds of mercy few and far between. It is our belief that an appeal to his compassion, whether by friend or enemy, never was made in vain; that neither his ear nor his purse were ever closed to the tale of calamity, from whomsoever it proceeded; and that he was as simple and unostentatious in the mode, as he was liberal in the measure of his princely charities. Doubtless all those works of love returned largely into his own bosom; and when he suffered most keenly under what he deemed the detraction and malignity of party hate, "sweet must have been the odour of their memory, and pleasant the balm of their consolation."

We now take our leave of him. As a public man, a sense of duty has compelled us to deal with him with a painful fidelity. If we have nothing extenuated his defects and errors as a

politician, we are not conscious of having set down aught in malice. We are, perhaps, too near the scene of his actings and doings to judge with entire impartiality of his character as a minister. But the judgment which we have formed is now before the reader, and we believe it will not be found to differ widely from the award of an impartial posterity.

AN account of this expedition has been long due. We will not, however, say that the work now before us could have been forthcoming much sooner. Were we even to ignore the validity of the reasons which the author gives in his preface for delay, we could not well expect to have been put in possession at an earlier period of the mass of original research which this valuable work contains-so far at least as these two volumes, now published, may be taken as representing it. We are betimes a-weary of the rough-and-ready writing of the day, when the scribe, for shortness, seems to indite with the type instead of the pen; and we are content to await even the tardy substance of a good book, rather than put up with its counterfeit, though furnished to order at the earliest notice. Did the question, however, exclusively turn on a matter of time, the causes which postponed the publication, as stated in the preface, would go far to relieve Colonel Chesney of responsibility. But on this point it may, perhaps, be well to let him speak for himself:

"The illustrations selected by the officers to elucidate the expedition, were put in hand at the earliest moment, with a clear understanding that two would be completed each week; but when nearly five years had elapsed, the author was obliged to seek redress in a court of law; and a verdict was

scarcely obtained, with the prospect of the immediate completion of the plates, when he was ordered to take the command of the artillery in China.

"The alternative of postponing, for an indefinite period, the publication of the work, or of going on half-pay, placed the author in a state of painful embarrassment. He had incurred a serious outlay, which it was necessary to recover if possible; and he was most anxious for the publication of the work, in furtherence of which, part of the funds granted had been drawn from the Treasury; while, on the other hand, his position as a soldier of fortune would not justify him in making such a sacrifice as that of quitting active service, particularly as he had been serving without pay when commanding the expedition; and neither the minute regarding an increase of army rank, nor the repayment of the expenses incurred previously to the expedition, had been realised by Government: the hope also of assistance from the Board of Control and India House towards the expenses of the work had been disappointed.

"The author eventually set out for China; and about half the first volume being printed, he availed himself of the opportunity afforded by the leisure of the voyage to improve the remaining portion of the work. The recent success in deciphering the cruciform character, has also led to some facts which served to elucidate several important points in the Persian history.

"The manuscript was sent to England in portions, as it was prepared, and the printing of the first volume was completed. Some difficulty, caused by the author's absence, prevented the completion of the index-map,

VOL. XXXVI.-NO. CCXIV.