in 1825, when the banks were filled with unwelcome customers, the silverplaters of Sheffield, could, and did, buy any required quantity of gold or silver, with any bill that bore a banker's endorsement, we cannot but believe, that if no such nuisance or blessing as the Bank of England were in existence, the country bankers could, at any time, buy any required quantity of the precious metals with the bills of each other. Fools will teach, though they cannot learn. Pray excuse me; and oblige,-Dear Tait, yours very truly, Sheffield, 7th August, 1833. EBENEZER ELLIOTT. TOADY ISM. "Chapeau bas, chapeau bas! Gloire au Marquis de Carrabas!"-BERANGER. TOADYISM may be defined as the petty homage rendered by the mean in indigence, to the mean in affluence; the servility testified by the base obscure, towards the base illustrious. But the divisions of society have become uncertain boundaries; and even the vices of mankind are less definitively graduated than of yore. It is an oversight on the part of our makers of comedies, (or rather of those three-volume pictures of society which have superseded in our literature the comedy of high-life, so popular on the stage when Abington and Farren were the finest ladies of the land,) to show up exclusively the toadyism of the humbler classes ; of ladies' maids, and ladies' companions; of governesses or curatesses; of the butler, the tutor, the chaplain, the attorney! Out upon such ignorance, or such hypocrisy ! Yet, can any denizen of this enlightened nineteenth century be ignorant that the most flagrant of all tuft-hunting is perpetrated among wearers of the tuft? the most abject toad-eating committed among the privileged breeders of toads? that more than one Irish dowager might be backed for vileness of servility against all the ladies' maids that ever courted the smiles of fortune per favour of a Register Office? It is true the led captains of a former century, the braggadoccios of a Buckingham, the "parsons in tie-wigs," who fed upon the scraps of Walpole, and the threadbare dilettanti who rewarded with their ecstacies the Vitruvianisms of the Earl of Burlington, have passed away and are forgotten! The disbanded captains of our own times hire out their heroism to Don Pedro, instead of drawing corks for some libertine Lord; and instead of "talking religion" for the Duchesses de la Ferté of St. James's Square, our Mesdames de Stäel Delannay endite historical abridgments for the penny libraries, or edit a Magazine. The cause of this amendment of morals among such of our shabby genteel as are ambitious of rising in the world is yet to show. Their place was taken, their monopoly of meanness invaded. Not a nobleman worth toadying, but boasted hangers-on, of his own order and degree, worth dozens of dozens of professional toadies, the "base bisognons" of the calling! The Bishop had his Archdeacon, the Duke his military secretary, the Ambassador his attachés, the King his physician; what need of a led captain or a tiger? Oh! that those who have anything to give away, the Dukes of Wellington and Devonshire, the Marquis of Hertford, the Earl of Chesterfield, the Duchess of St. Albans, would boldly tell the secrets of their prison-house, and unfold an instructive lesson in the mysteries of the sanctuary of fashion! What littleness might they not detect in the great-what low manœuvres among the high and mighty! The history of Dudley House alone, will afford a page to the future history of our time, of which it were to be wished that posterity might not prove the sole inheritor. We, perhaps, could profit by the warning; for when will the genius of toadyism ever soar more triumphantly than now? For our own part, we cannot blame the trés magnifiques seigneurs by whom the vice has been fostered. It is only natural that his Grace should value the devotion of a friend ready to start off with him at a moment's notice on an excursion to Timbuctoo, or a picnic at the top of the Jura ; when that ever-smiling toady chances to be a dandy of sixteen quarterings, and secures him from a tête-a-tête with the valet, who quarters nothing but his wages! It is only natural that the Marquis should pique himself on his power to improvisate at half an hour's notice, a dinner party of twelve wits of fashion, such as it would cost a Mrs. Skinner twelve weeks of anxious correspondence to congregate into divan! It is only natural that the Duchess should exult in finding among the obedient humble servants who search the curiosity shops and cheapen old china for her sake, Right Honourable Ladyships and Knights of the Bath, overflowing with the bile of scorn towards the inferior vassals, their fellow-creatures! Who could resist the triumph of converting Timon into a trencher scraper; or the satisfaction of making a Lady Katharine or a Sir Charles digest those showers of bitter ashes, which their own volcanic eruptions scatter over the majority of the community? It was a Duke who, in his last moments, entreated the pardon of the King of France, a visiter to his sick bed, for the grimaces he might be compelled to make in the agonies of death; it was a Countess who humbly apologized for not attending a royal fête, “her lord having experienced a second apoplectic fit." It is an Earl's daughter who swallows the toads of the Duchess of St. A and Lady Strachan. The serviles of the great world may, perhaps, choose to class their foible with that of the courtiers of royalty, rather than the toadies of greatness. By no means! Courtiership is an exploded thing in England. One of the most manly reforms suggested by the present King on his accession, was the abrogation of all those fariboles which had been wont to poison the atmosphere of the Pavilion. The times admitted of no further circumlocution; the world had business on hand, demanding plain-dealing and honesty of speech. A man must, indeed, have ample leisure, if he can lend his ears with patience to all that loathsome flummery of the toad-eaters of the great world, which made a misanthrope of poor Lord Dudley! We have been betrayed into these reflections-we care not who knows it by having been present some weeks ago, in one of the most brilliant coteries of the beau monde, when one of the idlers of the party lounged in to announce a rumour circulated by the newspapers of Lord Hertford's dangerous illness, and the departure to Italy of his favourite surgeon. There were females present who, last season, we beheld eagerly canvassing Lady S. for an invitation to Sudbourne; there were men who all but choked themselves, last year, in pronouncing upon the excellence of the Ragby venison, or perjured themselves, while at testing the weight of a Ragby pine-apple; yet, may we be burnt or branded, if one among the mob of illustrious toadies had a single word of commiseration to waste on the sufferings of that quondam host, whose cuisine was supposed to be drawing towards its last spark! The tenderest-hearted among the ladies whispered conjectures touching his will ;the most gentlemanly of the gentlemen indulged in bets upon the probability of Lord Yarmouth becoming a resident in England; and a general inquiry arose whether the Abercorns or the Buccleuchs were supposed to entertain a predilection for the Regent's Park,-or were likely to give breakfasts! We appeal boldly to Messieurs Bulwer, Massy, and Lister, to Mesdames Sullivan, Sheridan, and Gore, whether the dirtiest professional toadies they have been pleased to compound out of the vulgar clay of the servants' hall, or the steward's room, could have shown themselves worthier distinction in their vocation? SONG OF THE GHOSTS. "MORTAL! that weepest when weeps the night dew, Midst the shadows that fall, and that flit around, "Holds the grave none who live to thee still?— Throbs not thy breast, though fearless of harm ?— "Live there not yet in thy memory Those who would quit even Heaven for thee, To Eternity? "Could their spirits appear to thy sorrowing eye, Could'st thou not list to that gentle tone? "We are near thee-we love thee-we watch thee yet,— Still, still art thou dear: In thy pleasure our smile of gladness is near; Our sympathy yet descends with thy tear We never forget. "Hear us! We come whence no tears are shed ; Hear us! Our hearts as thine own have bled, And thy doubts have known: We have curs'd the destruction that Earth has shown- "Hear us! We have hung o'er the blighted flower, And the leaf devoured in its loveliest hour, And the first-born slain : And we, too, have witness'd the long life of pain, "Hear us! Our hearts have in penitence flown- And our anguish then claim'd that He would endow "As thine have our hearts with sorrow been riven; We have shrunk from the death that laid Nature low; Found best proof of Heaven. "Hear us! We knew, we have felt all this :- Yet we live by that Mercy that we had dared "Heir of that bliss! we may not reveal But we promise thee pleasure without alloy; "Doubt not, yet man's doubts are forgiven; nor grieve Time's torture must end, Heaven's rapture will last; IN CELO QUIES. LIFE has its pleasures,-many and varied joys, TRAUMER. RISE AND FALL OF THE IRISH NATION. BY SIR JONAH BARRINGTON, LL.D., K.C. Member in the late Irish Parliament for the Cities of Tuam and Clogher. 8vo. G. Bennis, Paris; G. Lapham, London. Pp. 494. THIS is a remarkable book, on a subject of surpassing interest. All who can read aright the symptoms of political change, have long looked to Ireland with anxiety and fear. There doubtless do exist, in other parts of our great empire, causes of irritation, and grievances hard to be borne; but in Ireland, misrule sits crowned, injustice is universal, and oppression forms the rule, and not the exception of her government. The moral degradation of the people being essential to the continuance of such a system, every means of repressing their improvement has been too long and too successfully resorted to. Divide et impera has been the tyrant's watchword through many a weary age of popular suffering; while all the avenues to knowledge have been shut up and guarded with a zeal and unremitting watchfulness, worthy of a better cause. But, though great, the success has not been perfect. The light has shone, though dimly, on the people of Ireland. They have been roused from the prostration of hopeless apathy to the upright attitude of independence; and though Britain has again succeeded in throwing her chains around Ireland, she now wears them with a proud indignant heart; anxiously waiting for the hour when domestic convulsion, or foreign aggression-neither of them improbable events-shall restore to her the opportunity, formerly thrown away, of again calling her volunteers to arms; re-asserting her independence, and for ever dissolving a connexion, which to her has been only productive of humiliating insult, and barbarous oppression. In the emphatic language of our Scottish proverb, "She bides her time!" Among the wrongs carefully treasured up, to be remembered in the day of retribution, not the lightest in the estimation of the Irish people, is the Legislative Union with Great Britain, by which, three and thirty years ago, the name of Ireland was struck out of the roll of European nations; and her interests, commercial, political, and religious, surrendered to the adjudication of men who look upon her mercantile prosperity as inimical to their own, and her national faith as a dangerous and degrading heresy. Sir Jonah Barrington, the author of the present work, was not only a witness, but an actor in the scenes which it describes; and, being intimately acquainted with the leading characters of the time, seems well qualified for the elucidation of transactions, which those who managed them were very naturally far from anxious to obtrude upon the notice of the public. Of the facts which he relates, there must be many who are cognizant, still alive: and though, in expressing his views on the subject, there remains enough of fervid vehemence, to remind us of the time when Parliamentary opinions were ever ready to be enforced by pistol bullets, we must say that they are eloquently supported, and fairly, though strongly stated. Sir Jonah commences his work by a view of Ireland as she stood in 1779, and of the causes which had produced the degraded station which she then occupied in the scale of nations. From the first moment of British invasion to that period, during the long lapse of six centuries, her humiliation had been unceasing, her oppression unremitted.-Henry, Elizabeth, Cromwell, William,-Plantagenets, Tudors, Republicans, and Revolutionary Monarchs; all had agreed in holding the Irish as a people whom it was becoming to trample and tread under foot, whom it was VOL. III, NO, XVIII. 3 D |