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English, and therein extolled her firm faith in the doctrines of Christianity and rigid practice of its precepts.' She was buried in Westminster Abbey; and George II., on his deathbed, twenty-three years afterwards, directed that his remains should be placed close by hers-a side of each of the coffins to be removed, in order that the cerements might be in actual contact. This story has been doubted; but within these few years it became the duty of one of the Chapter (the Rev. H. H. Milman) to superintend some operation within that long-sealed vault, and the royal coffins were found on the same raised slab of granite, exactly in the condition described—the sides that were abstracted still leaning against the wall behind.

Soon after the Queen's death Madame Walmoden arrived in England, and was created Countess of Yarmouth-the last peerage of exactly that class.

In 1740 Hervey became Lord Privy Seal. He died in 1743, aged forty-seven; and was survived until 1757 by the Princess Caroline, who then died, aged forty-five.

Hitherto modern readers have in general, it is probable, connected at best frivolous ideas with Lord Hervey's name; henceforth, whatever may be thought of his moral character, justice will at least be done to the graphic and caustic pen of Pope's victim.

From 1733 he was a constant correspondent of the Rev. Dr. Conyers Middleton, whose Life of Cicero is inscribed to him in a long and pompous dedication, enumerating not only every intellectual power and accomplishment, but every grace and virtue that could contrast with Pope's portraiture. It will at least amuse the reader to turn to that specimen of pedantic adulation: but Lord Hervey fully deserved all that Middleton says of his scholarship. The scraps from Livy and Tacitus, with which his Memoirs are garnished, were according to the taste and habit of that day; and we are by no means to set them down for proofs either of shallowness or affectation, as we should do if we met them in a modern page. He was qualified to hold his own in corresponding with Middleton on any question of classical research-for example, that still mysterious one of the gradual changes in the composition of the Senate during the Republic. It is not true, however, that Hervey made the translations inserted in Middleton's Cicero.' Lady Hervey, in justice to the Doctor, contradicted that story in one of her letters to Mr. Morris. She says, all her husband did was to purify the MS. by striking out a number of low, vulgar, college expressions. Infidelity, no doubt, was a strong bond between his Lordship and the incumbent of Hanscombe, who, in writing to his friend about signing the Thirty-nine Articles as a step to

that

that benefice, says-While I am content to acquiesce in the ill, I should be glad to taste a little of the good, and to have some amends for the ugly assent and consent which no man of sense can approve.'-(Lady Hervey's Letters, p. 61.) It is probable that, if Queen Caroline and Lord Hervey had lived, Dr. Middleton would in due time have signed again as a Bishop-elect.

We feel that we have already given sufficient space to this book -though it seems to us one of very rare distinction in its classotherwise we would fain have extracted some of the author's minor portraits. Those of the Speaker Onslow, Sir Joseph Jekyll, the Duke of Argyle and his brother Islay, and many more, are remarkable specimens, and, we believe, done without the least exaggeration. Not so that of Lord Chesterfield. Indeed the slighting style in which Hervey (like Horace Walpole) uniformly speaks of his talents seems quite astonishing. It is true that Hervey had never seen the writings on which chiefly we form our high notion of the man; but Hervey heard the speeches of which we have but poor reports, and Horace Walpole's hero of ruelles' is admitted even by Horace Walpole to have made the best speech he ever heard-adding that he had heard his own father, and Pulteney, and Chatham! Walpole had besides access to almost all our own materials. We believe the fact to have been that both of those clever spirits were rebuked in the presence of Lord Chesterfield. You have but to turn from the most brilliant page either of them ever wrote to any one of his; and the impression of his immense superiority of the comprehensive, solid, and balanced understanding, which with him had wit merely for an adjunct and instrument-is immediate and irresistible.

A more puzzling point is the frequent repetition of most contemptuous allusions, both in Walpole and in Hervey, to the personal appearance of Chesterfield. All the portraits represent a singularly refined and handsome countenance: we have them of his youth, his middle life, and his age, even his extreme old ageand by painters of the most opposite schools, from Rosalba to Gainsborough-but in all the identity of feature is preserved: and making every allowance for pictorial flattery and Herveian spleen, it is hardly possible to understand the violent contrast of such a description as this by our present author :—

"With a person as disagreeable as it was possible for a human figure to be without being deformed, he affected following many women of the first beauty and the most in fashion. . . . . He was very short, disproportioned, thick, and clumsily made; had a broad, rough-featured, ugly face, with black teeth, and a head big enough for a Polyphemus. Ben Ashurst told Lord Chesterfield once that he was like a stunted giant.' -vol. i. p. 96.

But

But Hervey makes George II. himself—and his Majesty was of short stature-speak with the same sort of disparagement. The subject of conversation in vol. ii. p. 360, is Lord Carteret's having told the Queen (it was shortly before her last illness) that 'he had been giving her fame that very morning :

The King said, "Yes, I dare say he will paint you in fine colours, that dirty liar!" "Why not?" said the Queen; "good things come out of dirt sometimes; I have ate very good asparagus raised out of dung." Lord Hervey said he knew three people that were now writing the History of his Majesty's Reign who could possibly know nothing of the secrets of the palace and his Majesty's closet, and yet would, he doubted not, pretend to make their whole history one continued dissection of both. "You mean," said the King, "Lords Bolingbroke, Chesterfield, and Carteret.-They will all three have about as much truth in them as the Mille et Une Nuits. Not but I shall like to read Bolingbroke's, who, of all those rascals and knaves that have been lying against me these ten years, has certainly the best parts and the most knowledge: he is a scoundrel, but he is a scoundrel of a higher class than Chesterfield. Chesterfield is a little tea-table scoundrel, that tells little womanish lies to make quarrels in families; and tries to make women lose their reputations, and make their husbands beat them, without any object but to give himself airs; as if anybody could believe a woman could like a dwarf-baboon."'

Mr. Croker remarks, that Bolingbroke never wrote Memoirsthat Carteret's, if they ever were written, have perished—that Chesterfield has left us nothing of this sort but a few Characters, including those of George II. and his Queen, which are in fact drawn with admirable candour-done, no doubt, in his old ageand that it is curious enough to have all this criticism on three books of Memoirs that do not exist from the man who really was at that moment giving their Majesties such fame' as neither would perhaps have much coveted!

Who could have dreamed a hundred years since that posterity would owe its impressions of the society and policy of George II. mainly to the spurious Walpole and the Sporus Hervey? Which of us can guess now who may, in 1948, be the leading authorities for the characters and manners of our own day-the dessous des cartes of the courts and cabinets of William IV. and Queen Victoria? Some haunter of Christie's rooms and the French play, who occasionally shows his enamelled studs below the gangway? Some Patch' or Silliander,' whom our Lady Mary (if we had one) would bid-as she bade Hervey

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ART.

ART. VIII-1. Histoire de Dix Ans, 1830-1840. Par M. Louis Blanc. Brussels, 1845.

2. Révolution de 1848, Evénemens-Actes du Gouvernement Provisoire-Proclamation, &c. Paris, Garnot, 1848.

3. Journées de la Révolution de 1848. Par un Garde National. Paris.

4. Histoire de Trente Heures, Février, 1848. Par Pierre et Paul. Paris.

5. French Revolution in 1848-Three Days of February. By Percy B. St. John, an eye-witness of the whole Revolution. pp. 383. London.

THE

HE new Revolution in France has filled the world with astonishment-but more, we believe, from the facility with which it was executed than from any wonder at the attempt, of which-though not perhaps of its success-all who knew anything of the state of parties in France could not but feel strong apprehensions. Those of our readers who recollect or will refer to the series of articles in which we brought before them the most important works connected with the Revolution of July, 1830, and stated our views of the causes, circumstances, and consequences of that event, will believe that the Revolution of February, 1848, has caused us more of sorrow than surprise.

We never had any faith in the duration of the new monarchy. Even its successive and for the moment decisive victories over the émeutes did not reassure us as to the permanence of the Orleans dynasty :

'The bitter medicine [of repression by an armed force], of which a single dose might suffice to rescue and confirm a legitimate monarchy, becomes the daily bread of a usurper; and one, or two, or three, or four, or a dozen such bloody successes, instead of rendering his throne more stable, only render its steps more slippery and its overthrow more certain.'-Q. R., xlviii. p. 533.

And again, after the suppression of several formidable émeutes, when Louis Philippe seemed to most men to have subdued all future opposition, we said,—

'In their present anomalous and conflicting state matters cannot remain. France must again pass through a despotism—a republic— or a restoration-and probably all these before she can settle down into a constitution that shall command the undivided respect and rational obedience of the nation.'-Q. R., lii. p. 569.

And we have repeated on several other occasions the same reluctant prophecy. We refer to these passages not to claim the merit of peculiar sagacity, for we believe that most thinking men in this country were of our opinion, but because, in the present

unsettled

unsettled state of men's minds, and the general disposition that there seems to extemporise constitutions out of popular movements, it may be useful to repeat our warnings against insurrectionary reform, and to show how well experience has justified the anticipations of reasoning.

It is due, therefore, to Louis Philippe and to his ministry— it is due to truth-to say at once that the late revolution was not produced by any misgovernment or maladministration of theirs. We are by no means inclined to become the defenders of many details of their administration, which we have heretofore frankly criticised; but of this recent misfortune we do not hesitate to declare our clear opinion that its original cause was in the principles of the July revolution, of which that of February is but the continuation; it is the same revolution-only that, as in Shakespeare's Winter's Tale,' seventeen years have elapsed between one act and the next.

At first we heard a pretty general regret that Louis Philippe should have been so blind, and M. Guizot so obstinate, as to refuse to concede a very small modicum of reform, and to risk the monarchy to prevent a tavern-dinner. The Banquet' and Reform had—as we believe every one now begins to see-no more to do with the events that have happened than the flag that a ship may wear has to do with the effect of her broadside; they were adopted as a signal at which the Odillon Barrot section of the Opposition intended no more than to make a display of fireworks, but were quite as much surprised as either the King or his ministers to find that, by the machination of a third party, their fireworks ignited a secret magazine whose terrible explosion has not only blown up all that was within its reach, but has carried consternation and danger to incredible distances.

We have taken some pains to inform ourselves as to the real state of the case; and although, while the conflagration is still unextinguished and the extent of either the mischief or the danger so indefinite, it is very difficult to arrive at the truth, we believe that the following will be found a tolerably accurate summary of the causes and course of these events.

There were in France-in the nation as well as in the Chamber of Deputies (the Peers were nothing)-five parties or political sects. First-the Conservative party then in government, at the head of which was M. Guizot-men who thought that France had had enough of revolutions, and were unwilling to risk by new experiments in her political organization the large measure of rational liberty, internal prosperity, and European confidence which she had for some years enjoyed, and which she was daily improving.

Second

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