MONS an opportunity of exercising their high privilege of election, and may furnish, with an excuse for submitting his humble notions of the talents and qualifications necessary to that office, a correspondent, who uses the plural number only because it is less hurtful to his ear than the singular. His views are amenable to controversy. And, while that stands fairly open, you are editorially exonerated from giving currency to sentiments which, individually, it is quite possible you could neither sanction nor admit.

Towards the last Speaker we are inclined to cherish nothing but that feeling of regret which is natural at parting with a name which had so long met our eyes in the political journals, and a figure with which we were familiar in some of the most interesting moments of our lives. And who that has stepped into the House, even of very late years, pending a great debate, when the lamented Horner was to engage the affections of his opponents by his candour and paramount regard to truth, to excite their deference by his deep science,-and the attention of all who heard him by his "grave and forcible manner;" or when Samuel Whitbread was to stand up as the voluntary, unhired representative of the human race, or the vindicator of the moral character of his country:-who, that has witnessed such things, does not associate them with some of his better impressions? We recollect, with the veneration of youthful enthusiasm, the temper of mind under which we used to visit the House in our earlier pilgrimages to London, that land of promised glories and delights, which, though not found, or fleeting when found, we now value perhaps too highly, because the occupation of other pursuits, as empty quite," prevent us from thinking of them as we could wish, or from trusting ourselves yet once more on the sea of their anxieties and enjoyments. Some good-natured member had told us that such and such a question was to come on, when certain men on both sides were to speak. Away we hied, after a hasty dinner at some tavern in the neighbourhood of Westminster, -panting with expectation,-feeling our own importance most immoderately, inasmuch as all this din of preparation and trial of intellect seemed to be prepared for us, and occupied with

"thick-coming fancies" of the earlier feats of Fox and Sheridan, and the magic of Erskine. After passing the gross scrutiny of a fat and presumptuous porter, opposite the door of the House of Lords, to whom the license and free awkwardness of our gait seemed no recommendation, we rushed up stairs at once into the gallery. There we commonly made shift to squeeze down as near a front seat as possible, at the expense of the toes, and to the endangerment of the powder and curls of some penurious bachelors, who had taken their places near the reporters, as a cheap way of spending the evening. The hour was six, or half-past; the time, a summer's evening, about the end of May; the House thin, quiet, and languid;-the tender light breaking in from the large window looking to the Speaker's garden, chequered now and then by the chance waving of the trees which shaded it, or a boat or two softly gliding past its surface on the silver Thames, which the fresh coolness of the evening seemed to have smoothed to perfect calmness, that the rippling of the oars, or the motion of the boat, might make that stream appear as the creature of man, pent in, and meted in its very risings, for his use and pleasure. If a boat-race, as was not uncommon, happened to be going on, there passed the light wherries, with their party-coloured rowers, their gay streamers, and their nicely feathered oars; while now and then the firing of a gun, or a cheerful huzza, announced the success of the happy victor. Within sat the Speaker; a few straggling members passing to and fro, or seated by sixes and sevens on the treasury bench; with Mr Bankes among them,-very much busied in person, and apparently much occupied in mind. Clerks were reading private bills in a low tone, and the Speaker measuring out motions (which nobody could be said to make, for they were all read from slips of paper which had been invisibly handed to him),and all the while, with but half his dignity about him, resolving that he should leave the chair-and then slipping easily down on the nearest seat of the treasury bench, while Mr Bankes took his place at the tableand the House resolved itself into a committee-and the bill was read a second time. Thus passed the hour till the tug of war came, and some of

to bear up all ascertained and accus tomed privileges of the House against oversights of the ennobled legislature, the conflicting authority of courts of law, or the less perceptible and more untangible influence of the sovereign himself. By his casting vote he may decide questions of the greatest moment to the safety of the state, and the liberty of the subject. On his personal character-on his love and right understanding of liberty-on the reach and vigour of his capacity, -it depends whether he shall exon erate himself well from a responsibility which is almost awful. On the same grounds he may, under some happy conjuncture of circumstances, infuse a spirit into the House, and give a character to its whole proceedings. He has to return its thanks to those who have done eminent service to their country. His taste and liter ture, therefore, are of some consequence. For the historian is guided, after all, in his estimate of the taste, turn of thought, and spirit of the age, by those memorials of the national gratitude to the heroes who have fought for it, or to the sages who have benefitted it, which are scattered through the journals of its parliament. The Speaker will be a grave, stiff, slow man of precedent; and, however wide his reach of thought, or correct his own internal estimate of things, he must appear to be guided by forms rather than by substances. Forms are often essential parts of our liberties. Forms are the landmarks by which these liberties have been ascertained and made palpable to the general mind, after their value had been evinced through the happy generalizations of first thinkers, and their exist ence assured by the struggles and blood of patriotism. They are the expedients by which, as a great mind has determined it, the high-souled benefactors of their species first "kept measures with prejudice, which they deemed necessary to the order of society," and by which "they imposed on the grossness of the popular understanding by a sort of compromise between' " fact ard right. So in all free states much depends on forms, that, to ardent spirits, may appear cold, trifling, unseemly, and sometimes contemptible. If a Speaker, however,

See "Vindicia Gallica," p. 302.

should, on great questions, hamper the House with a reference to prece dents not often acted on, or forms not essential to the constitutional efficacy of its proceedings, he may lower the dignity of that House in the world, and shake its character with our coun→ try for freedom, and capacity for existing circumstances, and aptitude for emergent exigencies. If he happens to be a man that has leaped into pub lic life from college and the bar,-with no taste for general speculation on the theory of law, government, and national polity,-and with a relish for classical themes merely because they are ancient, or for what is ancient only because it is classical;-he may evince a taste accurate as to modes of expression, genteel manners, and a love of justice merely abstract;—but his appearances will be uninteresting. He will shew, on great occasions, a feebleness of intellect-seeking after trimness and neatness, rather than grasp and force of allusion-always reaching out the dignity of the House as in a state of mere competition with other dignities, rather than, what it essentially is, a mode by which the rights of that people which gave it existence are to be practically asserted. In particular circumstances, he will appear rather more out of place, and rather more ridiculous, if he puts forth his little hand to support the ark of the constitution when there is no danger nigh;-learning unthinking men, as Wordsworth says,

"To speak of danger which they fear, And honour which they do not understand—” Not recollecting that, in the house of which he is the mouthpiece, there have been, and may be, credulous, weak, unserviceable, and subservient sort of men,-while, perhaps, all that is effected for the safety and character of the nation within its walls is sown, germinated, fructified, and ripened, by the courage, intellect, and information, which exist without.

He should be a grave and discreet person; and, if it be possible to unite such varying qualities, full of that warmth which excites and sustains the eloquence of generous passion, and, when they are conjoined, makes the wise pliancy which wins mankind appear a virtue. It is desirable, too, that he be fond, from early habit and subsequent conviction, of our old

English writers,-rather tinctured with the peculiarities of their rich flowing style, which compasses, at once, so much radical product of the essential thinking-principle with the poetry of eloquence and the language of imagination. In this way he may be able to quote from the best of them, and sometimes from a source whence it is least expected, such a passage as Mr Horner once quoted from Sir Robert Cotton, and of which he strikingly said, "the language is simple, but, in my mind, pregnant with wisdom." To this sort of taste and learning he should join a love of political science, as it treats of man relatively to his moral dignity, and lays down the rights and duties of citizenship, together with a full appreciation of the doctrines of political economy-their application, results, and extension.

The Speaker is commonly, as he ought to be, a lawyer. The study of the law of England, taken fully, is itself as wide as the stretch of the most retentive memory, and fully calculated to try the most strenuous capacity for attentive application. To excel in it requires extraordinary gifts and propensities. The forms and precedents of Parliament themselves, might well employ the study of an ordinary life. Before a man can at all pretend to have gained the vantage-ground of such studies, his character must have been insensibly formed. It is ten to one, therefore, if, at middle life, he sits down, with these acquirements secured, any thing like a finished man. He may have much knowledge, and some clearness of idea, with minute acuteness and tactual penetration of habit, and yet have none of that deeptoned, yet well harmonized, affection, -that easy play of fancy,-that excitability of imagination,-or that taste for the beautiful in nature, and the purely commendable in action; without which no man can be said to have a character fully intellectual. Without some of these, however, neither his classical associations, nor his knowledge of law, nor his acquaint

"It is not by the ends of wit, or by the shifts of devices, that you can defray the expenses of a monarchy-but by sound and solid courses."-BURLEIGH, as cited by Sir Robert Cotton.

VOL. III.

ance with precedents, nor his love and even pride of his office, can make a finished Speaker. Without something, at least, of what we have endeavoured to delineate, he will, after all his knowledge, appear but a third or fourth rate man. He will be feeble, dry, and unproductive,-not keeping pace with the knowledge of his time,

and not fitted to comprehend those alterations of public opinion, or to fall in with those changes in the face of establishments which it is the business of a masculine intellect not to wonder at, but to grapple with and to understand. Ever since Montesquieu observed, when speaking of the English constitution, (in reference to TACITus, de moribus Germanorum,)" on verra que c'est de'ux que les Anglois ont tiré l'idee de leur gouvernement politique; ce beau systeme a été trouvé dans les bois,"-it has been fashionable to add the study of legal antiquity to an admiration of our constitutional liberties. But it is something essential to the nature of liberty that, while it does not run riot at every ignis fatuus of fancied improvement, it is not to be stagnant, or unenlargeable on the grounds of reason and expediency;-of reason which makes expediency-and of expediency which gives a sanction to reason. Nor, is that progressive liberty which suits advances in knowledge and changes of society to be meted out, or withheld, according to ancient authorities, taken from times remote, and not at all like the present in form and spirit. For this last, it is enough to say, that such authorities are inapplicable. And, at all events, the mind which too much uses them, is likely to degenerate into that most unphilosophical habit-the idola specus.

The Speaker should be a man above the enticements of high rank. It is customary to confer the peerage on a Speaker who has served in several Parliaments, and ends his public life in that capacity. But it is not befitting the dignity of this high office, that he who holds it should enlist himself with the high-flown aristocracy and the Crown against the people. He ought to be as seldom as possible found a guest at the table of his prince, or pressing forward at levees, or countenancing projects for addresses of congratulation. There

T

should, in short, be no "glances and oglings," (to use Mr Burke's phrase,) for favour and confidence from illustrious personages. In such a case, the Speaker would sink into the condition of a first-rate Lord of the Bedchamber. He might come at last, unconsciously to sacrifice that independence and high-mindedness essential to his office, to an homage which in other men might be even praise-worthy, but in him fatal. It is now a trite remark of politicians, that, ever since the French Revolution and those popular excitements to which it gave rise in this country, there has been a strong tendency, among the holders of office, however independent of the Crown, de fucto, and among those whose property or birth is such as to give them the peculiar feelings of a class,-to support what is called the dignity of the Crown against popular encroachment. But, it is not trite to bear this in mind, to watch its tendency,—and to grasp it under the changing forms which it assumes as the false guise of its purposes.

Of late years, the most important labour of the Speaker has been saved in a Committee of Finance, of which some experienced member is the permanent chairman. For all this, however, the Speaker should add to his other acquirements a thorough knowledge of the nature and extent of our financial resources. Political economy will make him familiar with the origin of public wealth,—the media in which it exists freely and securely, and the means by which it is dilapidated or upheld. His own industry will do the rest. And he must have laid his hand on all the pages of our voluminous statute-book-from the monopolybreakings of Elizabeth, and the blunders of Cecil, down to the better understood freedom, but not much better practice, of George III. and the pre

tensions of Pitt. He must know the origin and motives of our laws,-the rise and history of our alliances,-and the nature and progress of our Funding System.

To sum up all in a few words:The Speaker of the House of Commons should have a large acquaintance with the whole frame of our government— and be thoroughly conversant with the forms and precedents of Parliament. His knowledge, in fact, ought

to be so deep and various as to require, in order that it may be rightly balanced and safely directed,-a mind of an higher cast than even our higher gownsinen and highest benchinen,-a penetration that can assist him in. difficult investigations,-and a ready self-possession that can put on, almost insensibly, the armour of prudence on instantaneous emergencies,-and a temper not to be hurt in "the strife of little tongues,"-a temper more bland than facile, but rather easily pliant than obstinately firm,—with enough of the respectable quality of firmness to make its exertions regarded, and its sacrifices valued.

I am afraid that I have fallen into two faults in this discussion about a

Speaker's qualifications,-lengthiness and over-rigidity of exaction. But, something like an approximation to this offered standard is what the state of our country and the tone of the general mind require. H. A.

THE CRANIOLOGIST'S REVIEW.

[OUR friend Doctor Ulrick Sternstare, a learned German, how residing here, has undertaken to supply us with a course of scientific criticisms upon the organization of such individuals as he may judge worthy of attention. This is no jest. The Doctor is a most persevering observer of nature, and has long turned his thoughts to the consideration of the physical structure of mankind. He therefore now steps forward, pregnant with matter, and elated with conscious knowledge, and assumes the dignity of a reviewer, meaning to wield the iron sceptre of criticism with no lenient hand. The Doctor intends to lay the axe to the root of the tree, and to examine, not the productions of the brain, but the brain itself. The review will be conducted with an impartiality inaccessible to political prejudices; and the thick vest shags of hair shall neither will also occasionally analyse works of art.] disguise praity, nor shelter stupidity. He

No I.

Napoleon's Head.

NATURE seems to have bestowed much pains upon this individual. His organization is massive, and his cerebral parts largely developed in almost all directions. No region of his brain has been starved, and I am inclined, after a careful examination of those