en

visit of the soverign would 'tranquillise' that unfortunate country; and the accounts sent home by Lord Sidmouth, who attended the king, of his reception, show no misgiving as to the duration of the 'good-feeling' with which his majesty was greeted. Nothing was visible but thusiastic loyalty,' inducing hopes of 'permanent benefit,' and this as late as September. Yet, on the 20th of October, Lord Sidmouth reports to Lord Londonderry (Lord Castlereagh, under his new title) 'very unpleasant accounts from Ireland.' Unreasonable as it would be at any time to expect to satisfy a malcontent nation by a passing visit from the sovereign, there seem to have been special reasons, in this case, why the royal appearance acted only for the moment, and on the surface-and a limited surface. While the royal squadron was wind-bound off Holyhead, news arrived of the death of the queen. The king proceeded to Dublin and secluded himself till the corpse of his wife was supposed to have left England. He then emerged—in a mood which we can imagine to be shared by the crowd around him under the stimulus of Dublin festivities, but which can hardly be supposed to have so impressed the Irish nation with reverence and love as to work in them a sudden restoration to peace, contentment, and loyalty. 'I cannot help suspecting,' writes Mr. Ward, that his majesty's late journeys to see his kingdoms of Ireland and Hanover will not, on the whole, redound much to his honour or advantage. His manners no doubt are, when he pleases, very graceful and captivating. . . . . But on the whole, he wants dignity, not only in the seclusion and familiarity of his more private life, but on public occasions. He seems to have behaved, not like a sovereign coming in pomp and state to visit a part of his dominions, but like a popular candidate come down upon an electioneering trip. If the day before he left Ireland, he had stood for Dublin, he would, I dare say, have turned out Shaw or Grattan.'

At the coronation, which took place on the 19th of July, George IV., for the time, looked the king. There was hollowness there too. The blaze of jewels, the splendour of the robes, the pealing of the music, the cry of God save the king,' the smiles and loyal eagerness, all

looked like rejoicing; but the king's chancellor, the keeper of his conscience and slave of his prerogative, admits: Everybody went in the morning under very uncomfortable feelings and dread.' The reason why was known to all. There was one outside knocking for admission, 'trying every door in the Abbey in vain. This phantom of an injured queen was felt, though not seen, amidst the festivities; and how dreaded it was, we perceive from the triumph of the pious Lord Eldon in her mortification. 'It is all over, quite safe and well. A gentleman in the hall told us, that when her majesty got into the carriage again, she wept. . . . . John Bull spared us; indeed, his family were very civil to me, in the course of my transit from the hall to the Abbey. The business is certainly over in a way nobody could have hoped.'

Another business' was 'certainly over' just at this time, which must have caused relief to the king and his ministers, even greater than that the coronation passed off well. It may be hoped that they also felt something of the solemn and mournful emotion which ran through the heart of the civilised world at the news. While the pageantry of our great regal festival was preparing-while the gems were burnishing, and the tapestries unrolling, and the throne erecting, and the choir practising, the Chamber of Deputies at Paris were receiving the following petition:

'Napoleon is no more. We claim his remains. The honour of France requires this restitution; and what the honour of France requires will be accomplished. She cannot endure that he who was her chief-that he whom she saluted with the title of Great, and the designation of Emperor, should remain as a trophy in the hands of foreigners; and that every Englishman may say, on showing an insolent monument: "Here is the Emperor of the French."

The temper of this petition may be excused when it is considered that it is from the officers and adherents of Napoleon, who saw him pine and die, far from home, and in captivity. At such a moment, they had the sympathy even of those who had most urgently demanded that the world should be secured by the rigid seclusion of him who

Now that it was

had troubled it so long and so severely. over, and that that restless spirit could trouble his race no more, the natural feelings of compassion and regret arose strongly and universally. His fellow-men began at once to look back upon him as a man, and not only as a conqueror and disturber who had humbled the pride of nations, and broken up the peace of continents. He was at once regarded as a suffering man-all pitying him for the dreadful fate of his closing years, spent in chafing against his bonds, and sinking under the burden of ignominious idleness; while the most thoughtful had a still deeper compassion for him, as one who had failed in the true objects of human life by the pursuit of personal aims. Looking back, they saw how one endowed with noble powers could have known but little of the peace of the soul; and how, in the crowning moments of his triumphs, his life had been a failure. Looking forward, they saw how, throughout the whole future of human experience, he would stand dishonourably distinguished from the humblest servant of the race who had ministered to its real good. Many, throughout all time, who have apparently been baffled in their aims, and laboured in vain to work out their schemes, have, visibly or invisibly, attained the truest and highest success by an unwavering fidelity to the right and the true, and have enjoyed their natural recompense in the exaltation of their own being. This one man, before whose powers the nations quailed, and whose will seemed to be, for the time, the law of his kind, was, in his very triumphs, a sufferer—a wanderer from the home of human affections-a powerless and defeated soldier in the conflict of human life. And he could not retrieve himself in adversity. Leisure and solitude brought no healing to him. He had no moral force which could respond to the appeal of adverse circumstance. He had in him nothing of the man which could, in a season of rest, look back with wonder or a smile on the turbulence of its childish vanity and pride; nothing of the sage which could draw from the vicissitudes of experience any aliment of present wisdom and peace. He remained to the last morally a child and a sufferer-a baffled child, and an unconscious sufferer from worse woes than his mortifica

tions, his bondage, and his privations. It might be a question whether all was done for him, or done in the best way, which his vast powers, and his misfortunes, and his appeal as an enemy, might claim; but if all had been done which the highest wisdom and magnanimity could suggest, it could have really availed him nothing. His misery lay too deep for healing by human hands: it was wrought into his very being; and it could be dissolved by no touch short of that which took out the life from the clay, and gave back the dust to dust. That time had now come. The dulled eye no longer wandered over the boundless ocean which surrounded his island-prison; his aching mind no longer gazed abroad listlessly over the heaving sea of human affairs; his spent heart had ceased its beating; and his dust lay under the willows in that nook at St. Helena, where strangers came from the east and the west, to feel and wonder at the silence which had settled down on one who had made the world echo with the wail of the widow and the orphan, the groans of dying multitudes, the tramp of hosts, and the crash of falling empires. In this nook of the world there had been no peace to his soul; and it was, perhaps, all the more soothing to find quietness about his grave.

He died on the 5th of May 1821, after a painful and lingering decline. The news of his death reached England while London was preparing for the coronation of the sovereign who had had him in charge, and who was to follow him, after the lapse of a few years, to that bed of rest where foes lie down side by side-comrades at last.

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VOL. 1.

CHAPTER IV.

Coalition with the Grenville Party-Retirement of Lord Sidmouth---Mr. Peel-Mr. Canning-Lord Wellesley in Ireland-Motion in favour of Catholic Peers-Peterborough Questions-New Marriage Act-Close of Session-King's Visit to Scotland-Death of Lord Londonderry-Mr. Canning Foreign Secretary-Lord Amherst goes to India.

LORD LIVERPOOL's administration had been very powerful in its day; and it still preserved an air of authority and security which imposed upon the general public, and prevented all but the watchful lovers of liberty on the one hand, and those who dreaded change on the other, from perceiving that a new time was coming-a way opening for the arrival of new men and new measures.

The ministry were not strong with the king. We have seen how nearly they were going out immediately after his accession. Again, when the king went to Hanover, there existed an uncomfortable state of feeling between himself and his prime-minister,' which was afterwards accommodated; but not for long. In December, he was anxious and ill-humoured about a new creation of baronets, on which Lord Sidmouth observes, in a note to the premier, and really the matter is not worth a gale of wind, much less a storm.' However trifling the subject of these royal discontents, their frequency was by this time affecting the strength of the ministry.

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The administration was not strong in itself. Lord Sidmouth had long been wishing to retire; and there was perpetual apprehension of the lord chancellor being compelled to do so. Lord Londonderry showed at times symptoms of fatigue and nervousness which made his colleagues uneasy, and caused the king to advise rest and change of scene; and the anxieties and toils of office were wearing down the frame of the premier himself.

The administration was not strong with the country, though its weakness was not perceived by everybody. The distress of the agriculturists was pressing; and the