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tender was so sweet a prince, that flesh and blood could not resist following him; and lying down to try the block, he said, "If I had a thousand lives, I would lay them all down here in the same cause.' He said, if he had not taken the sacrament the day before, he would have knocked down Williamson, the lieutenant of the Tower, for his ill-usage of him. He took the axe and felt it, and asked the headsman how many blows he had given Lord Kilmarnock, and gave him three guineas. Two clergymen, who attended him, coming up, he said, "No, gentlemen, I believe you have already done me all the service you can." Then he went to the corner of the scaffold, and called very loud for the warder, to give him his perriwig, which he took off, and put on a night-cap of Scotch plaid, and then pulled off his coat and waistcoat, and lay down; but being told he was on the wrong side, vaulted round, and immediately gave the sign, by tossing up his arm, as if he were giving the signal for battle. He received three blows, but the first certainly took away all sensation. He was not a quarter of an hour on the scaffold; Lord Kilmarnock above half a one. Balmerino certainly died with the intrepidity of a hero, but with the insensibility of one too. As he walked from his prison to execution, seeing every window and top of house filled with spectators, he cried out, "Look, look, how they are all piled up like rotten oranges!"

2. THE EARTHQUAKE IN LONDON IN 1750.-(PARTS OF TWO LETTERS TO SIR HORACE MANN.)

"Portents and prodigies are grown so frequent,

That they have lost their name."

DRYDEN'S " All for Love."

My text is not literally true; but as far as earthquakes go towards lowering the price of wonderful commodities, to be sure we are overstocked. We have had a second much more violent than the first; and you must not be surprised if by next post you hear of a burning mountain sprung up in Smithfield. In the night between Wednesday and Thursday last (exactly a month from the first shock), the earth had a shivering fit between one and two, but so slight that if no more had followed, I don't believe it would have been noticed. I had been awake, and had scarce dozed again, on a sudden I felt my bolster lift up my head. I thought somebody was getting from under my bed; but soon found it was a strong earthquake, that lasted near half a minute, with a violent vibration and great roaring. I rang my bell; my servant came in, frightened out of his senses. In an instant we heard all the windows in the neighbourhood flung up. I got up, and found people running into the streets; but saw no mischief done. There has been some: two old houses flung down, several chimneys, and much china-ware. The bells rung in several houses. Admiral Knowles, who has lived long in Jamaica, and felt seven there, says this was more violent than any of them. The wise say, that if we have not rain soon, we

THE EARTHQUAKE IN LONDON IN 1750.

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shall certainly have more. Several people are going out of town; for it has nowhere reached above ten miles from London. They say they are not frightened, but that it is such fine weather, "one can't help going into the country." The only visible effect it has had was on the ridotto,' at which, being the following night, there were but four hundred people. A parson, who came into White's 2 the morning of earthquake the first, and heard bets laid on whether it was an earthquake or the blowing up of powder-mills, went away exceedingly scandalized, and said, "I protest, they are such an impious set of people, that I believe if the last trumpet was to sound, they would bet puppet-show against judgment!"

I told you the women talked of going out of town: several families are literally gone, and many more going to-day and to-morrow; for what adds to the absurdity, is, that the second shock having happened exactly a month after the former, it prevails that there will be a third on Thursday next, another month, which is to swallow up London. I am almost ready to burn my letter, now I have begun it, lest you should think I am laughing at you; but it is so true, that Arthur of White's told me last night that he should put off the last ridotto, which was to be on Thursday, because he hears nobody would come to it. I have advised several who are going to keep their next earthquake in the country, to take the bark for it, as it is so periodic.3 Dick Leveson and Mr Rigby, who had supped and stayed late at Bedford House the other night, knocked at several doors, and in a watchman's voice cried, " past four o'clock and a dreadful earthquake." The frantic terror prevails so much, that within these three days seven hundred and thirty coaches have been counted passing Hyde Park corner, with whole parties removing into the country. Here is a good advertisement which I cut out of the papers to-day :

"On Monday next will be published (price 6d.), a true and exact list of all the nobility and gentry who have left, or shall leave, this place through fear of another earthquake."

Several women have made earthquake gowns; that is, warm gowns to sit out of doors all to-night. These are of the more courageous. One woman, still more heroic, is come to town on purpose; she says, all her friends are in London, and she will not survive them. But what will you think of Lady Catherine Pelham, Lady Frances Arundel, and Lord and Lady Galway, who go this evening to an inn ten miles out of town, where they are to play at brag till five in the morning, and then come back, I suppose, to look for the bones of their husbands and families under the rubbish.

2 A famous coffee-house.

1 A fashionable amusement. 3 Walpole probably remembered one of the last papers in the "Tatler," in which Addison tells of an impudent mountebank who, after an earthquake, went through the country selling pills, which, as he told the country people, "was very good against an earthquake." "Tatler," No. 240.

4 This part of the letter was written on the day when the third earthquake was expected to happen.

XIX. EDMUND BURKE.

His

EDMUND BURKE was born in Dublin in 1730, and, after an education at Trinity College, came to London and entered himself as a student of law in the Temple. His inclinations however led him to a literary life, and in 1757 he published his "Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful," which was well received, and brought its author into intimacy with some of the most distinguished men of the day. For some time he continued to subsist on the labour of his pen, but at length he found in Lord Rockingham a munificent patron, who introduced him to politics and parliamentary life. Here Burke's abilities found full scope; his high principle, his extensive knowledge, his rich imagination, and his copious eloquence, at once secured for him the highest place as a parliamentary orator. speeches on the American war, and on the impeachment of Warren Hastings, are not surpassed in eloquence by those of any orator ancient or modern. He employed his pen with equal vigour in defence of his political party; but it was not till the breaking out of the French Revolution that his full power was put forth. Horrified at the atrocities which accompanied the first outbreak, and apprehensive, not altogether without reason, of attempts to imitate them in this country, he published his famous "Reflections on the French Revolution," in which he denounced in a torrent of indignant eloquence the proceedings of the National Assembly. This work, and succeeding ones in a similar strain, led to a rupture between him and his old friend Fox, but Burke was at all times ready to sacrifice friendship to principle. He died at Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire in 1797. No one now disputes Burke's title to be regarded the first of British orators; his works, daily rising in popularity, are likely long to remain the textbooks from which succeeding generations of statesmen will learn the science of political wisdom.

1. ENGLISH REVERENCE FOR ANTIQUITY.—("REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE.")

From Magna Charta to the Declaration of Right, it has been the uniform policy of our constitution to claim and assert our liberties, as an entailed inheritance delivered to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity; as an estate specially belonging to the people of this kingdom, without any reference whatever to any other more general or prior right. By this means our constitution preserves an unity in so great a diversity of its parts. We have an inheritable crown; an inheritable peerage; and a House of Commons and a people inheriting privileges, franchises, and liberties, from a long line of ancestors.

This policy appears to me to be the result of profound reflection, or rather the happy effect of following nature, which is wisdom without reflection, and above it. A spirit of innovation is gene

ENGLISH REVERENCE FOR ANTIQUITY.

357 rally the result of a selfish temper and confined views. People will not look forward to posterity who never look back to their ancestors. Besides, the people of England well know that the idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of conservation, and a sure principle of transmission, without at all excluding a principle of improvement. It leaves acquisition free; but it secures what it acquires. Whatever advantages are obtained by a state proceeding on these maxims are locked fast as in a sort of family settlement, grasped as in a kind of mortmain for ever. By a constitutional policy, working after the pattern of nature, we receive, we hold, we transmit our government and our privileges in the same manner in which we enjoy and transmit our property and our lives. The institutions of policy, the goods of fortune, the gifts of Providence, are handed down to us and from us in the same course and order. Our political system is placed in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world, and with the mode of existence decreed to a permanent body composed of transitory parts; wherein, by the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, moulding together the great mysterious incorporation of the human race, the whole at one time is never old, or middle-aged, or young, but, in a condition of unchangeable constancy, moves on through the varied tenor of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progression. Thus by preserving the method of nature in the conduct of the state, in what we improve we are never wholly new; in what we retain, we are never wholly obsolete. By adhering in this manner and on those principles to our forefathers, we are guided not by the superstition of antiquarians, but by the spirit of philosophic analogy. In this choice of inheritance we have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood; binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties; adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections; keeping inseparable, and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined and mutually reflected charities, our state, our hearths, our sepulchres, and our altars.

Through the same plan of a conformity to nature in our artificial institutions, and by calling in the aid of her unerring and powerful instincts to fortify the fallible and feeble contrivances of our reason, we have derived several other, and those no small benefits, from considering our liberties in the light of an inheritance. Always acting as if in the presence of canonized forefathers, the spirit of freedom, leading in itself to misrule and excess, is tempered with an awful gravity. This idea of a liberal descent inspires us with a sense of habitual native dignity, which prevents that upstart insolence, almost inevitably adhering to and disgracing those who are the first acquirers of any distinction. By this means our liberty becomes a noble freedom. It carries an imposing and majestic aspect. It has a pedigree, and illustrating ancestors. It has its bearings and its ensigns-armorial. It has its gallery of portraits; its monumental inscriptions; its records, evidences, and titles. We

procure reverence to our civil institutions on the principle upon which nature teaches us to revere individual men, on account of their age, and on account of those from whom they are descended. All your sophisters cannot produce anything better adapted to preserve a rational and manly freedom than the course that we have pursued, who have chosen our nature rather than our speculations, our breasts rather than our inventions, for the great conservatories and magazines of our rights and privileges.

2. CHARACTER OF ROUSSEAU.-(" LETTER TO A MEMBER OF THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY.")

We have had Rousseau, the great professor and founder of the philosophy of vanity, in England. As I had good opportunity of knowing his proceedings almost from day to day, he left no doubt on my mind that he entertained no principle either to influence his heart or to guide his understanding but vanity. With this vice he was possessed to a degree little short of madness. It is from the same deranged eccentric vanity that this, the insane Socrates of the National Assembly, was impelled to publish a mad confession of his mad faults, and to attempt a new sort of glory, from bringing to light the obscure and vulgar vices which we know may sometimes be blended with eminent talents. He has not observed on the nature of vanity who does not know that it is omnivorous; that it has no choice of its food; that it is fond to talk even of its own faults and vices, as what will excite surprise and draw attention, and what will pass at worst for openness and candour.

It was this abuse and perversion, which vanity makes even of hypocrisy, which has driven Rousseau to record a life, not so much as chequered, or spotted here and there with virtues, or even distinguished by a single good action. It is such a life he chooses to offer to the attention of mankind. It is such a life that, with a wild defiance, he flings in the face of his Creator, whom he acknowledges only to brave. The French Assembly, knowing how much more powerful example is found than precept, has chosen this man (by his own account without a single virtue) for a model. To him they erect their first statue. From him they commence their series of honours and distinctions.

It is that new invented virtue which your masters canonize that led their moral hero constantly to exhaust the stores of his powerful rhetoric in the expression of universal benevolence, whilst his heart was incapable of harbouring one spark of common parental affection. Benevolence to the whole species, and want of feeling for every individual with whom the professors come in contact, form the character of the new philosophy. Setting up for an unsocial independence, this, their hero of vanity, refuses the just price of common labour, as well as the tribute which opulence owes to genius, and which, when paid, honours the giver and the receiver; and then he pleads his beggary as an excuse for his crimes. He

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