This sketch is good as far as it goes, but it does not place in sufficient relief the high intellectual powers of the Duke, which made him second only to Napoleon in war, and prominent among the statesmen of his time.

Mr. Greville's portrait of Lord Melbourne is admirable for its breadth and discernment. We can notice one or two features only:

His distinctive qualities were strong sound sense and an innate taste for what was great and good either in action or sentiment. His mind kindled, his eye brightened, and his tongue grew eloquent when noble examples or sublime conceptions presented themselves before him. . . . But while he pursued truth as a philosopher, his love of paradox made him often appear a strange mass of contradiction and inconsistency. A sensualist and a Sybarite, without much refinement or delicacy, a keen observer of the follies and vices of mankind, taking the world as he found it, and content to extract as much pleasure and diversion as he could from it, he at one time would edify and astonish his hearers with the most exalted sentiments, and at another would terrify and shock them by indications of the lowest morality and worldly feelings, and by thoughts and opinions fraught with the most cold-hearted mocking and sarcasm. His mind seems, all his life long, and on almost every subject, to have been vigorous and stirring, but unsettled and unsatisfied. It certainly was so on the two great questions of religion and politics, and he had no profound convictions, no certain assurance about either. He studied divinity eagerly and constantly, and was no contemptible theologian; but he never succeeded in arriving at any fixed belief, or in anchoring himself on any system of religious faith. It was the same thing in politics. All the Liberal and Constitutional theories which he had ever entertained had been long ago more than realized, and he was filled with alarm at the prospect of their further extension. All his notions were aristocratic, and he had not a particle of sympathy for what was called progressive reform.

Mr. Greville's 'Peel' is not nearly so life-like; he describes the man as the statesman only, and does not give us his true image; but the following is correct:

The misfortune of Peel all along was that there was no real community of sentiments between him and his party, except in respect to certain great principles which had ceased to be in jeopardy, and which therefore required no united efforts to defend them. There was no longer any danger of organic reforms; the House of Lords and the Church were not threatened; the great purposes for which Peel had rallied the Conservative interest had been accomplished; almost from the first moment of his advent to power, in 1841, he and his party stood in a false position towards each other. He was the Liberal chief of a party in which the old anti-Liberal spirit was still rife; they regarded with jealousy and fear the middle classes, those formidable masses occupying the vast space between aristocracy and democracy, with whom Peel was evidently anxious to ingratiate himself, and whose support he considered his best reliance. His treatment of both the Catholics and Dissenters was reluctantly submitted to by his followers, and above all, his fiscal and commercial mea

sures kept them in a state of constant uncertainty and alarm. There was an unexpressed but complete difference in their understanding and his of the obligations by which the Government and the party were mutually connected. They considered Peel to be not only the Minister, but the creature of the Conservative party, bound above all things to support and protect their especial interests according to their own views and opinions. He considered himself the Minister of the nation, whose mission it was to redress the balance which mistaken maxims or partial legislation had deranged, and to combine the interests of all classes in one homogeneous system, by which the prosperity and happiness of the whole commonwealth would be promoted.

The picture of Lord George Bentinck is coarse and hard; but Mr. Greville knew his subject thoroughly; and possibly it is much nearer the truth than is supposed in the outward world.

He has long been held up as the type and model of all that is most honourable and high-minded; iracundus inexorabilis, acer, indeed, but the lofty and incorruptible scorner of everything mean and dishonourable, and the stern exposer of every species of delinquency and fraud, public and private. Oh for the inconsistency of human nature, the strange compound and medley of human motives and impulses, when the same who crusaded against the tricks and villainies of others did not scruple to do things quite as bad as the worst of the misdeeds which he so vigorously and unrelentingly attacked!

man

Mr. Greville was for years on the turf; his account of Lord Derby at Newmarket is not new, but is not the less curious:

If any of his vociferous disciples and admirers, if some grave members of either Houses of Parliament, or any distinguished foreigner who knew nothing of Lord Stanley but what he saw, heard, or read of him, could have suddenly found themselves in the betting-ring at Newmarket on Tuesday evening and seen Stanley there, I think they would have been in a pretty state of astonishment. There he was in the midst of a crowd of blacklegs, betting-men, and loose characters of every description, in uproarious spirits, chaffing, rowing, and shouting with laughter and joking. His amusement was to lay Lord Glasgow a wager that he did not sneeze in a given time, for which purpose he took pinch after pinch of snuff, while Stanley jeered him and quizzed him with such noise that he drew the whole mob around him to partake of the coarse merriment he excited. Our space is exhausted, and in conclusion we shall make only a single remark. No one who reads these volumes can fail to see how much of the real work of politics was accomplished by men, who had no place at St. Stephen's, or were recognized statesmen. Mr. Greville, a sportsman and a man of the world, conducted negotiations of extreme importance on domestic and even foreign affairs; Mr. Henry Reeve and the late Mr. Delane played a silent, but often a significant part in arranging questions that involved the State. Men like these would in France have been public characters, conspicu

ous in the front rank of politicians; in England they did their most useful work under the shadow, so to speak, of that aristocratic world which, as De Tocqueville truly observes, shows its vital strength in its power of commanding the unobtrusive services of such able subordinates.

ART. V.-The Established Church and its Defenders.

ACCORDING to the Bishop of Rochester, the Church of England has been saved by the late elections from a serious danger with which it had been threatened. As he was one of the first to sound the alarm, and as there is no prelate on the bench who has shown a more anxious desire to deal with the question, which has been suddenly und unexpectedly thrust into the forefront of our controversial politics, in a fair and candid temper, or who has made a more honest endeavour to put himself in the place of Nonconformists so as to understand the basis of their religious objections to a State Church, such an utterance on his part is all the more significant, and renders it all the more clear that the bishops have actually been disturbed at the prospect of the possibly near approach of Disestablishment. The scare has, from the first, been unintelligible to Nonconformists, even to those of them who were most anxious for the settlement of the question. But the security of the present is just as unfounded as the apprehension of the past was exaggerated. There never was any intention of an attack on the Anglican Church at the last election, but the action of the clergy has made it as certain as any event subject to the changes of opinion and circumstance can be, that this immunity will not be enjoyed by the Church again. The battle is not over. On our part it has hardly commenced.

According to some, the Liberation Society has been carrying on a secret and subtle movement among the constituencies, in order to compel the Liberal party to adopt candidates who held its views, and were prepared to carry them into action. At other times it is Mr. Chamberlain who serves as a convenient scapegoat upon whom to lay all the transgressions of the Radical party, and who is credited with a nefarious design against the Establishment about which, on two or three occasions, he had given hints, more or less distinct, hints which have provoked the indignation of the people, and have

been one of the most pregnant causes of the terrible disasters which the Liberals have sustained in the English boroughs. From two opposite quarters, the Dean of Manchester on the one side, and the Dean of Bath and Wells on the other, both of them men of conspicuous fairness and moderation-qualities which appear even in their discussion of this exciting question -we have the expression of the same idea, that either the Liberation Society or Mr. Chamberlain was the aggressor in this matter. The Dean of Manchester says, in a letter to 'The Times':

To organize in secret the extortion of a pledge from aspirants to the Legislature, to advocate Disestablishment generally, and then to say that those who found this out and protested against it had made it a practical question, may be quite of a piece with the tactics of the Liberation Society, but it will not be reckoned in the long run to the credit of party government, nor will it, I fear strengthen the Liberal party if it is persisted in in the impending election. All men know that the Liberal leaders think the question the gravest, the most perplexed, the most dangerous, that could be raised at any time; that they think the raising of it now premature and suicidal, and that they believe the practical undertaking to which it points so vast as to be well-nigh impossible. But all men also know that the backbone of the Liberal party has made itself the backbone for forty years mainly to acquire the right and the opportunity to lend its force to the execution of this pet idea. There may be, at this moment, some room for a fair exchange of compliments between pot and kettle on the contemptible comparison of tactics, but the Liberal leaders have certainly clean hands.

The Liberation Society must of course expect to pay the penalty which inevitably follows the advocacy of an unpopular reform, and in their case it is sure to be the more severe because of the religious sentiments which surround the institution which they attack, and give it a certain aroma of sanctity. Its members are credited with all sorts of evil designs, and their actions are judged in the suspicious temper which is thus awakened, so that even if actual evil cannot be detected, it is assumed to be present, though so subtle as to elude observation. It is idle to complain of this, for the tendency is in human nature, and they only suffer what all reformers have suffered before them. They are very much in the position in which the abolitionists of America were in that stage of their agitation at which a belief in abolition had ceased to be a mere pious opinion, and was rapidly passing into a practical question, by which parties were to be divided and elections determined. Not the less is it necessrry to enter a stern protest against this mode of judgment, and the unfair prejudice on which it proceeds. It is only neccesary to read the

report of the proceedings of the conference of the Liberation Society, in March last, in order to see that the prominence recently given to the question has been as great a surprise to its leaders as to its opponents. No doubt they hoped for a great deal from the admission of the newly enfranchised voters, and they were desirous to secure for their question the place to which they considered it entitled in the Liberal programme, but they were perfectly aware that that place could not be in the foreground, and, in truth, that there were so many other questions pressing for immediate settlement, that there was little hope that any serious proposal for Disestablishment could be entertained in the present Parliament. There were many of us who were of the opinion that the question had not yet been so far ripened by full and thorough discussion as to be ready for early settlement; and while we hoped that the present Parliament might do something towards advancing that discussion, no one was wild enough to suppose that it could bring it to a close. The coup de main of which Mr. Bosworth Smith speaks is a mere creation of the imagination, a rickety child begotten of senseless panic and clerical Liberalism.

This idea of the underground tactics and subtle procedure of the Liberation Society, which seems to have possessed the minds of some, among whom it is surprising to find Dean Oakeley, has been evolved out of their own consciousness. What the Society has done it has done openly and in the face of the world. It has nothing to explain, nothing to recant, nothing for which to apologize, nothing which it will not at every possible opportunity repeat. Whether the fear of its action, which is shown by the dignitaries and representatives of so great an institution as the Anglican Church, is very dignified or honourable, it is not necessary to discuss here. But considering that all the machinery at the disposal of that Church has been employed in its defence, that bishops in their charges, diocesan conferences in their meetings, Church congresses by speeches, sermons, and papers, have all been so many agents of the Church Defence Society, it seems somewhat inconsistent, and at the same time extremely feeble, to indulge in these unworthy charges in relation to a Society whose only sin is that, having a great principle to establish, it has taken all legitimate means to get it embodied in legislation.

In one point the Dean is strangely unfair.

All men know that the backbone of the Liberal party has made itself the backbone for forty years mainly to acquire the opportunity