THE FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1830.

63

North. I do not know that he is a weak man, James; but on this emergency this crisis of his fate he reckoned without his host-and thence his second visit to Holyrood.

Shepherd. I will ca' on him neist time I come to Embro'; and if he's no at hame, leave my caird.

North. Liberty, my dear Shepherd, is like the air we breathe-if we have it not, we die. You have heard these words before—and you and I have felt their meaning on the mountain-top. Slavery is a living death.

Shepherd. That's a bull

North. But of all slaveries the worst is that which, dancing in chains, supposes itself Freedom.

Shepherd. But didna ye admire, sir, the behaviour o' the Mob o' Paris?

North. An old man like me, James, is chary of his admiration. In my youth-some forty years ago I was too prodigal of it—and the sun I worshipped set in a shower of blood. The French-with many and great defects-are a gallant a noble people; but the mob that fought-and they fought well-though victorious over but feeble oppositionduring what I leave others to call the Three Glorious Days— were not the French People-and I should be ashamed of prior to the act of 1828. Neither the intervention of third parties, nor an appeal to the ordinary courts of law, were permitted to interfere with the prefects in the preparation of the electoral lists.

"It has been already stated that the Polignac Cabinet acted most unwisely in making themselves even the aggressors on the public liberties, and still more imprudently in doing so with but inadequate preparations for a contest. But if the question be put, whether the ordonnances were absolutely illegal, and justified the resistance they experienced? a very different opinion must be formed. According to our ideas in England, where any invasion of established law, except by the act of the three branches of the legislature, is illegal, they unquestionably were a breach of the constitution. But that was not the constitution of France, either according to the letter of the Charter or the interpretation put upon it by the united voice of the whole Liberal party in France. The 14th article of that deed expressly recognised an overruling power to alter the constitution as residing in the sovereign, to be exercised when the safety of the state imperatively required it. Thenceforward it was only a question of circumstances whether the existing state of affairs called for or warranted the exercise of that dictatorial power; and it had repeatedly been exercised, under circumstances less critical than those in which Charles X. was at last placed, not only without any opposition from, but with the cordial and loud approbation of, the whole Liberal party in France."-ALISON'S Europe, 18151852, vol. iii., pp. 503, 585.

64

EDINBURGH MEETING IN ITS CELEBRATION.

myself were I to waste any of my enthusiasm on such actors, prepared long beforehand to play their parts—yet, after all, little better than puppets-though the machinery worked well -and was triumphant.

Shepherd. I thocht you wadna attend the Meeting.1

North. Had I been a republican, I would; and have declared my delight and exultation at the downfall of a great and ancient monarchy. Probably I should have thought it a despotism, and would have sung odes and hymns of thanksgiving when all its towers and temples toppled into dust. Some such men, I believe, were at the meeting here-and believing them to be conscientious and consistent, they have my respect.

Shepherd. And mine too-and I howp they'll be proud o't. North. Other men, again, were at the meeting, James, who love what they call a limited monarchy- and limited the French Monarchy is now to their hearts' content! Till Louis Philippe began to reign (to reign!) eyes never saw a cipher.

Shepherd. I hae mair power in the Forest-under the young Dyuck, I verily believe-though I'm no his grieve-than the son of Egalité now has in Paris, under old Lafayette and that sweet innocent invention for preserving freedom, the National Guard.

North. Good, James. They therefore lifted up their voices on high-like sounding harp and tinkling cymbal, and were applauded to the echo.

Shepherd. Sae far a' seems to hae been richt. Then what hae you to compleen o', sir?

North. I complain of nothing-not I, James-I have left my goutat John-o'-Groat's House-and my complacency and peace of mind are perfect. But oh! the superasinine stupidity of all those sumphs and sumphesses-those Jack and Jeanie donkeys -each row above row, rising up with ears of still-increasing longitude, till those at the acme swept the spiders from the cornice, and crushed the undevoured flies asleep on the ceiling.

Shepherd. Haw! Haw! Haw! Haw! Haw!-What do you mean?

1 A meeting held in the Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh, to celebrate the French Revolution of 1830.

OH! THE NINNIES!

65

North. Tories leaning on the bosom of Whigs, and encircled in the arms of Radicals! Church-and-King men shouting their praises of altar-pullers-down, and throne-shatterers, and of all the fierce and ferocious foes of Old Establishments, with mattock and pickaxe razing them all from their very foundations, and howling in each cloud of dust that went darkening up the heavens!

Shepherd. Puir infatuated fules! I'm ower angry to pity them-nor ought leal men and true to accept now the peaceoffering o' their humiliation and their shame.

North. People there are, as you well know, James, who never can move one single step, either backwards or forwards, unless led by a finger and a thumb, gently or rudely pinching their nose. No will of their own have they-for will and reason go together-and only the intelligent are free. More abject slaves never trooped together in a gang before the whip of the overseer to the sugar-canes, than those slaves of both sexes, that sat in our Assembly Rooms, in chains flung over them by masters who despised them too thoroughly to honour them with any portion of their hatred, shouting and bellowing at the prospect of dominion and empire about to be given to them who would trample them into dust. Shepherd. Oh! the ninnies!

North. Why not even though the mob of the Faubourg St Antoine had, as if by some seeming miracle, performed their parts like angels-angels of blood at best-and thereby set at defiance all our knowledge, all experience, all history of human mobs, which the Liberty-and-Equality-men, and the old and young Anarchists, have the audacity to ask us to believe-ought they who swear by the BRITISH CONSTITUTION to have uttered one word in eulogy of the "Three Glorious Days," till they knew something more of what was likely to be the upshot of it all-if indeed ignorance could be supposed so dense as to be impenetrable to the lurid lights already gleaming all round the horizon

"With fear of change
Perplexing monarchs !"

Shepherd. What'n a face! Dinna fa' intil a fit. Tak a swig. Na I didna tell you to drink out o' the green bottle -that's spirits-but to kiss the jug. If you speak that way

VOL. III.

E

66

FALSE AND TRUE ADMIRATION.

noo that you're sober-mercy on us, what a fury when get fou!

North. Some there were

you

many-and certainly not the least silly of the set-who held that a demand was made upon their admiration, simply by the bravery and moderation of the Parisian mob - which demand they were bound to answerwithout any reference whatever to the past or the future-and even were the Revolution afterwards to turn out the greatest of all evils. They pledged themselves, they said, to no political opinion on the subject and begged that to be understood clearly by both sides of the whole world. But nothing should prevent them from giving vent to their admiration. No doubt, James, if their admiration were of the nature of a wind-colic, they were right in giving vent to it-time and place duly considered-though roses and lilies forbid that I should have been there to hear! But admiration is not a vice of the stomach, bowels, and intestines, but a virtue of the heart and brain; and so far from seeking to evaporate itself in noisy explosions, it loves to breathe in long-continued and silent incense over the whole actions of a man's life. A stronger proof of a weak mind cannot be exhibited than an impatient, restless, and feverish anxiety to hail every coming or newcome event, action, or character that seems to be good, with instant applause. In private life they, whose admiration is perpetually bursting out, are always the most frivolous; the shallow rills of their sympathy soon run dry; and when you talk to them a few weeks-say a few days-even a few hours after the unmeasured expression of their enthusiasm, of the cause which excited it, they look at you with a face of blank forgetfulness of all their former feelings, and you discover that they are occupied with some new favourite event or incident, which in its turn is forgotten before next day's dinner.

Shepherd. Hoo that used to be the case wi' Sir Walter's Novelles! Strang minds read them with deep delight—said some sentences to that effect when the talk gaed roun' the table, and were silent; but they retained all the glorious things impressed unobliterably (that's a kittle word to pronounce) on the tablets o' their memories—that is, their understandings-that is, their hearts-that is, their sowls-for they are a' ane in the lang-run, and o' a composite character. But bits o' triflin laddies and lassies, and auld women o' baith

CHARACTER OF THE REVOLUTIONARY MEETINGS.

67

sexes, used to keep chatterin and jabberin about each new novelle as it came out, just as if it never had a predecessor, and was never to hae a successor—as if it had been the only byuck in prent-when lo and behold! in less than sax months, out came anither in fowre volumins, and then they clean forgot that the ane they had sae lang bothered you about, till you wished yoursel dead, had ever been in the press !

North. An apt illustration, James. The shallow persons of whom I was speaking had not the small sense to see that it was in the nature of things utterly impossible to pronounce an isolated panegyric on the personal conduct of the actors in a political revolution, that should not include approbation of much, if not all, involved in that revolution. And even for a moment granting that such an isolated panegyric could have been pronounced, they had not the still smaller sense to see that all the opposite party would insist on either dragging them in among their ranks-though, heaven knows! they would be no acquisition to any party,-or on representing them thenceforth as lukewarm or milk-and-water adherents to their own, or more probably-say certainly-talking of them in all companies as noodles, and incapable, from sheer ignorance and folly, of forming any opinion at all on political questions of any pith or moment.

Shepherd. You hae treated the subject, sir, wi' your usual masterly discrimination. It's easy noo, on lookin back at the newspapers, to ken the kind o' cattle that ca'd thae meetings.

North. Two or three eminent, and some half-dozen able men attended the meeting here (which was got up by my friend John Bowring!) but otherwise it was a poor affair, and forgotten sooner than an ineffectual fancy ball. In England such meetings were all of one character. No distinguished or conscientious man of our side, James, attended them,—and even the great Whig leaders stood aloof,-nay, the bulk of the Whig gentlemen. True it is, as is said in the last number of the Quarterly Review, an admirable one, that "the meetings and dinners, and subscriptions, set on foot by our old-established disturbers of the public peace, have been countenanced by hardly one person which any human being will dare to call respectable."

Shepherd. Why, as to that, sir, there's nae sayin what some human beings will daur to ca' respectable; and for my ain