these expectations being gratified, we are little disposed to ask from the author results, which the innate qualities of his mind and his accidental acquirements,-his genius and his associations, could not enable him to attain. To quarrel with a writer because in some of his developements he has exceeded our notions of fitness, or has given to others a comprehension less than is "dreamed of in our philosophy," is a species of criticism which belongs rather to trading, than to honest and liberal reviewers. Yet if, in remembering the vast and allinvolving themes which are connected with the epoch of Sheridan's political career, we sometimes feel that more light, is desirable to penetrate the chaos of affairs, than Mr. Moore has cast upon them, we may be permitted to express a regret that the speculative disposition of booksellers should induce them to prescribe to highly gifted beings, tasks more completely within the competence of commoner intellects.

The life of Mr. Sheridan presents three distinct aspects; that of the dramatist, the legislator and the man and it is with no view to disparage Mr. Moore's production, we state our conviction-that in the first of these departments, its author has succeeded the most happily. Seizing, as he has done, the loftier and more ideal aspect of Sheridan's character, the delicacy of his tact has forced him to keep in the background those personal defects of his hero, which were so much out of keeping with his original design,-defects, in which posterity will feel little interest, and with which the present generation is but too wel! acquainted and as the French tragedy, in its jealousy of the ignoble, is often compelled to exclude the natural, so has the biographer, in his effort to sustain the tone of his work, been forced to shade off some of the most characteristic traits of his subject, and to sacrifice the real to the poetic truth of his composition. This fastidiousness has rendered the details of an eccentric and diversified life more sterile than the anecdotical taste of the time will relish; and the lovers of gossip, that great majority of the book-buying public, will often lament the absence of some portraiture of the convivial drolieries of Brooke's, or specimen of the wit and frolic of the green-room.

In his review of Sheridan's political career, Mr. Moore has had to contend with many difficulties. Sheridan, though attached to the Foxites was not strictly a party man; and the author's known connexion with the wreck of the old whigs, and his avowed bias towards their opinions, must often have embarrassed him in the progress of his narration. That Mr. Sheridan should have entered more warmly into the views of the reformers than some of his coadjutors, and that the names of Mackintosh and Whitbread should have appeared, with his, upon the lists of the "Friends of the people," before those of the great aristocratical whigs, though by no means unnatural, must, in the present bright hour of political illumination, be a painful recollection to a staunch advocate of the party, and have required all Mr. Moore's hardihood to avow.

Another difficulty with which Mr. Moore has had to struggle, lies in the peculiar epoch of his story. Too recent for history, and yet too remote to live in the memory of the existing generation, the events he had to describe will neither admit of a lengthened developement, nor be fully understood from a hasty summary. The more important phasis of modern politics has also stripped the miserable squabbles for place and

power, which formed the groundwork of some of Sheridan's most brilliant efforts, of much of that interest, which would otherwise belong to their nearness. In order therefore to avoid details, which he perhaps suspected nobody would read, Mr. Moore has sometimes become obscure, and has forced us to recur for information to those annual and parliamentary registers, the pages of which he says he has disdained to compile. Thus it happens that, in his relations, the story is for the most part made subservient to the man, and as soon as Mr. Sheridan's conduct and speech are discussed, the subject is abandoned as if exhausted. That our author is a politician at all, has indeed long seemed to us more a matter of chance than of liking. Nature designed him for a poet; and like genuine poets, he feels more deeply than he thinks. Being born an Irishman and a Catholic, his quick apprehension of the wrongs which weigh on this category of persons seems to have given their point, venom, and direction to the satirical breathings of his muse. Goarded to indignation by overmastering injury, he apprehends a world of figures, and clothes the sentiment of liberty in language that goes at once to the understanding and the heart. But for a laborious investigation of the particulars which constitute liberty, or determine its existence among men, we should imagine him, both by his poetic and his pleasurable temperament, peculiarly indisposed. Placed likewise in social contact with whatever is most distinguished among the upper classes of all political creeds, his own opinions must occasionally be shaken by their influence. It is impossible for a good-natured man to avoid wishing that his associates may be not utterly in the wrong; and it is difficult for a scholar and a wit to credit the corruption and baseness, that too often hide themselves beneath a smooth surface of refinement, urbanity, and convivial ease. To these causes we are inclined to attribute some occasional apologies for men and measures, into which Mr. Moore has been seduced, not exactly in accordance with his own eloquent appeals in favour of liberty; apologies of which men of a more scrutinizing turn will at once perceive the fallacy. With an evident endeavour to conciliate all parties, we question, therefore, whether Mr. Moore will satisfy any. Let it not however be imagined that this portion of the volume before us is deficient in ability, it abounds in fine writing, and in just and often penetrating views; and it possesses a sustained tone rarely displayed in Mr. Moore's former prose works. As a specimen of his manner, we take at hazard his remarks on Mr. Pitt's administration.

When we are told to regard his policy as the salvation of the country-when (to use a figure of Mr. Dundas) a claim of salvage is made for him, it may be allowed us to consider a little the nature of the measures, by which this alleged salvation was achieved. If entering into a great war, without either consistency of plan, or preparation of means, and with a total ignorance of the financial resources of the enemy-if allowing one part of the cabinet to flatter the French Royalists, with the hope of seeing the Bourbons restored to undiminished power, while the other part acted, whenever an opportunity offered, upon the plan of dismembering France for the aggrandisement of Austria, and thus, at once, alienated Prussia at the very moment of subsidizing him, and lost the confidence of all the Royalist party in France, except the few who were ruined by English assistance at Quiberon-if going to war in 1793 for the right of the Dutch to a river, and so managing it that in 1794 the Dutch lost their whole Seven Provinces-if lavishing more money upon failures than the successes of a century had cost, and supporting this profusion by schemes of finance, either hollow and delusive, like the Sinking Fund, or desperately regardless of the future, like the paper issues—if driving

Ireland into rebellion by the perfidious recall of Lord Fitzwilliam, and reducing England to two of the most fearful trials that a nation, depending upon credit and a navy, could encounter, the stoppage of her bank and a mutiny in her fleet-if, finally, floundering on from effort to effort against France, and then dying upon the ruins of the last coalition he could muster against her-if all this betokens a wise and able minister, then is Mr. Pitt most amply entitled to that name ;-then are the lessons of wisdom to be read, like Hebrew, backward, and waste, and rashness, and systematic failure to be held the only true means of saving a country.

Had even success, by one of those anomalous accidents, which sometimes baffle the best-founded calculations of wisdom, been the immediate result of this long monotony of error, it could not, except with those to whom the event is every thing "Eventus stultorum magister"-reflect back merit upon the means by which it was achieved, or, by a retrospective miracle, convert that into wisdom, which chance had only saved from the worst consequences of folly. Just as well might we be called upon to pronounce alchemy a wise art, because a perseverance in its failures and reveries had led by accident to the discoveries of chemistry. But even this sanction of good luck was wanting to the unredeemed mistakes of Mr. Pitt. During the eight years that intervened between his death and the termination of the contest, the adoption of a far wiser policy was forced upon his more tractable pupils; and the only share that his measures can claim in the successful issue of the war, is that of having produced the grievance that was then abated-of having raised up the power opposed to him to the portentous and dizzy height, from which it then fell by the giddiness of its own elevation, and by the reaction, not of the princes, but the people of Europe against its yoke.

His observations on the regency question are extremely sagacious.

Taking this as a correct exposition of the doctrines of the two parties, of which Mr. Fox and Mr. Pitt may be considered to have been the representatives in the regency question of 1789, it will strike some minds that, however the Whig may flatter himself that the principle by which he is guided in such exigencies is favourable to liberty, and however the Tory may, with equal sincerity, believe his suspension of the prerogative on these occasions to be advantageous to the Crown, yet that, in both of the principles, so defined, there is an evident tendency to produce effects, wholly different from those which the parties professing them contemplate. On the one side, to sanction from authority the notion, that there are some powers of the Crown which may be safely dispensed with,-to accustom the people to an abridged exercise of the prerogative, with the risk of suggesting to their minds that its full efficacy needs not be resumed,-to set an example, in short, of reducing the kingly power, which, by its success, may invite and authorize still farther encroachments,-all these are dangers to which the alleged doctrine of Toryism, whenever brought into practice, exposes its idol; and more particularly in enlightened and speculative times, when the minds of men are in quest of the right and the useful, and when a superfluity of power is one of those abuses, which they are least likely to overlook or tolerate. In such seasons, the experiment of the Tory might lead to all that he most deprecates, and the branches of the prerogative, once cut away, might, like the lopped boughs of the fir-tree, never grow again.

On the other hand, the Whig, who asserts that the royal prerogative ought to be reduced to such powers as are beneficial to the people, and yet stipulates, as an invariable principle, for the transfer of that prerogative full and unimpaired, whenever it passes into other hands, appears, even more perhaps than the Tory, to throw an obstacle in the way of his own object. Circumstances, it is not denied, may arise, when the increase of the powers of the Crown, in other ways, may render it advisable to control some of its established prerogatives. But, where are we to find a fit moment for such a reform,—or what opening will be left for it by this fastidious Whig principle, which, in 1680, could see no middle step between a change of the succession and an undiminished maintenance of the prerogative,-and which, in 1789, almost upon the heels of a declaration, that "the power of the Crown had increased, and ought to be diminished," protested against even an experimental reduction of it!

According to Mr. Fox, it is a distinctive characteristic of the Tory, to attach more importance to the person of the king than to his office. But, assuredly, the Tory is not singular in this want of political abstraction; and in England (from a defect, Hume thinks, inherent in all limited monarchies), the personal qualities and

opinions of the sovereign have considerable influence upon the whole course of public affairs,-being felt alike in that courtly sphere around them where their attraction acts, and in that outer circle of opposition where their repulsion comes into play. To this influence, then, upon the government and the community, of which no abstraction can deprive the person of the monarch, the Whig principle in question (which seems to consider entireness of prerogative as necessary to a king, as the entireness of his limbs was held to be among the Athenians,) superadds the vast power, both actual and virtual, which would flow from the inviolability of the royal office, and forecloses, so far, the chance which the more pliant Tory doctrine would leave open, of counteracting the effects of the king's indirect personal influence, by curtailing or weakening the grasp of some of his direct regal powers. Ovid represents the Deity of Light (and on an occasion, too, which may be called a regency question) as crowned with moveable rays, which might be put off when too strong or dazzling. But, according to this principle, the crown of prerogative must keep its rays fixed and immoveable, and (as the poet expresses it) "circa caput OMNE micantes."

Upon the whole, however high the authorities by which this Whig doctrine was enforced in 1789, its manifest tendency, in most cases, to secure a perpetuity of superfluous powers to the Crown, appears to render it unfit, at least as an invariable principle, for any party professing to have the liberty of the people for their object. The Prince, in his admirable letter upon the subject of the regency to Mr. Pitt, was made to express the unwillingness which he felt "that in his person an experiment should be made to ascertain with how small a portion of kingly power the executive government of the country might be carried on ;"-but imagination has not far to go in supposing a case, where the enormous patronage vested in the Crown, and the consequent increase of a royal bias through the community, might give such an undue and unsafe preponderance to that branch of the legislature, as would render any safe opportunity, however acquired, of ascertaining with how much less power the executive government could be carried on, most acceptable, in spite of any dogmas to the contrary, to all true lovers as well of the monarchy as of the people.

In speaking of the connexion of Whigs with the Prince of Wales, Mr. Moore reads them "a great moral lesson."

The Whigs, who had now every reason to be convinced of the aversion with which they were regarded at court, had lately been, in some degree, compensated for this misfortune by the accession to their party of the heir-apparent, who had, since the year 1783, been in the enjoyment of a separate establishment, and taken his seat in the House of Peers as Duke of Cornwall. That a young prince, fond of pleasure and impatient of restraint, should have thrown himself into the arms of those who were most likely to be indulgent to his errors, is nothing surprising, either in politics or ethics. But that mature and enlightened statesmen, with the lessons of all history before their eyes, should have been equally ready to embrace such a rash alliance, or should count upon it as any more than a temporary instrument of faction, is, to say the least of it, one of those self-delusions of the wise, which show how vainly the voice of the past may speak amid the loud appeals and temptations of the present. The last Prince of Wales, it is true, by whom the popular cause was espoused, had left the lesson imperfect, by dying before he came to the throne. But this deficiency has since been amply made up; and future Whigs, who may be placed in similar circumstances, will have, at least, one historical warning before their eyes, which ought to be enough to satisfy the most unreflecting and credulous.

We would willingly quote likewise, had we room, some very good remarks on the trial of Hastings. They will be found in page 381, and well merit perusal.

Mr. Moore's estimate of Burke, both as an orator and a politician, is much higher than we are disposed to allow. We cannot well understand the facility of temper, which urges Mr. Moore to mitigate the mercenary character of that political windmill's abrupt gyrations. For ourselves, we never could fancy that well-turned sentences, lofty figures,

or impassioned language, however excellent, were justly entitled to the noble appellation of eloquence, if divested of clearness and precision of idea. We have ever regarded them, when used to cover vagueness of thought and sophistical argument-to make the worse appear the better cause, but as sounding brass and tinkling cymbals; and even when our ear has been most flattered, our understanding has revolted from a charm, the prevalence of which portends the permanence of error and the multiplication of abuse. With respect to the moral estimate to be made of Burke's "ratting" at the French Revolution, we still possess two infallible tests, the virulence of his attacks on the friends he had deserted and the opinions he had abandoned,-and the pecuniary rewards which accompanied or followed the change. Emolument, indeed, may go along with conviction; much more frequently it precedes it and self-defence requires that we should think the worst of him, who, in a sudden variation of political creed, does not scrupulously avoid the stain of a pecuniary advantage. It is the peculiar misfortune of our form of government that it holds out vast encouragement to political speculators, and a proportionate severity is necessary in our judgments of public characters: men of all ranks, too much familiarized with corrupt ideas, gradually content themselves with a more flimsy pretext for covering their venality. But the easy complaisance of the people, a too facile cullibility, which accepts of any excuse that is offered for abandoning the popular cause, is perhaps the most dangerous form of political indifference. There is no sentiment more frequently forgotten among Englishmen than the necessary indignation at fraud and dishonesty, whenever these vices are clothed in purple, and fare sumptuously; and the same man who spurns the necessitated aberrations of the lowly, and cants by the hour at the faults of the poor, too often imagines himself neither disgraced nor degraded by an intimacy with a public defaulter, or a venal turn-coat. As far therefore as our influence may extend, we shall always be prepared to denounce that sort of "liberal concession," that ill-conceived "moderation," which tends to screen the naked deformity of him who sells his country's cause and his own principles, and to beget a consideration for the vices of the great, which is denied to those of smaller and less successful knaves. We turn with pleasure to Mr. Moore's own words on a similar occasion. On the secession of the Duke of Portland he observes:

It is to be regretted that, in almost all cases of conversion to the side of power, the coincidence of some worldly advantage with the change should make it difficult to decide upon the sincerity or disinterestedness of the convert. That these noble Whigs were sincere in their alarm, there is no reason to doubt; but the lesson of loyalty they have transmitted would have been far more edifying, had the usual corollary of honours and emoluments not followed, and had they left at least one instance of political conversion on record, where the truth was its own sole reward, and the proselyte did not subside into the placeman.

The same lesson is read more severely by Sheridan himself to the seceders.

Will the train of newly-titled alarmists, of supernumerary negotiators, of pensioned paymasters, agents, and commissaries, thank him for remarking to us how profitable their panic has been to themselves, and how expensive to their country? What a contrast, indeed, do we exhibit! What! in such an hour as this, at a moment pregnant with the national fate, when, pressing as the exigency may be, the hard task of squeezing the money from the pockets of an impoverished people, from the toil, the drudgery of the shivering poor, must make the most practised