which Ireland has been administered for nearly seven hundred years was in contemplation, it would not have been announced in preference to an amendment in some Grand Jury Act'? But we have still more direct and indeed positive proof, that up to the very moment when Lord Clarendon began his lamentable defence on the 19th of February, 1850, no such idea had crossed his imagination, or, as it seems, that of his colleagues. That speech began in the following very remarkable manner:

'Before I proceed to offer a few remarks upon the speech of my noble friend who has just sat down, you will perhaps permit me to express a hope that my presence here this evening may not be considered as constituting a precedent. I did not determine to come without much doubt and reflection, because I thought it would be injurious to the public service, and to the position of Her Majesty's representative in Ireland, if the Lord-Lieutenant were required to appear here in his place upon every occasion when any noble lord might think fit to require his attendance to explain the acts of the Executive Government. If such should become the practice, the result would be, that when party spirit ran high (degenerating, as it too often does, into personal questions), it would be impossible for the Lord-Lieutenant to maintain the position and prestige which are essential to his authority. (Cheers.)'

This prospective anxiety, so ostentatiously and elaborately expressed, to guard himself as well as future lord-lieutenants from so inconvenient a precedent-to prevent such summonses becoming a common practice-proves more strongly than even a direct assertion would have done, that Lord Clarendon looked like Banquo on a long line of successors, against whose even momentary absence from Ireland he thought it necessary to enter this reiterated protest, amidst the approving cheers of his friends and colleagues around. At that moment then-up to six o'clock on the evening of the 19th of February, 1850-Lord Clarendon no more thought of abdication or dethronement than Louis-Philippe did on the 19th of February, 1848. We do not forget that such a measure has been often theoretically discussed, and even within a year or two debated in parliament; but it is clear that its sudden adoption by the present Government,-so sudden that Lord Lansdowne spoke of it as not settled on Thursday, the 7th of March, and Lord John Russell on Friday, the 8th, announced that it wasthat its sudden adoption, we say, arose from the irresistible conviction, forced, by the general reception of that debate, on the reluctant Cabinet, that the public mind of England was awakened to a true sense of the importance of the great principles involved in the mountain skirmish of Magheramayo-that every lawyer in England and Ireland who looked into the case pronounced the illegality of Mr. Berwick's Commission, and every reading man

was

was convinced of the shameful, or rather shameless, partiality of his Report-and finally that Lord Clarendon had come over with no better, in fact no other, apology than to try-failing, too, in the attempt to pick holes in newspaper reports, upon one or two incidental points altogether extraneous to the main charges brought against him. Then, for the first time, it was that a little paragraph was permitted to whisper that the Ministers had in contemplation to abolish the Lord-Lieutenancy of Ireland.

Of the measure itself we have not space nor time to treat. We admit at once that it will have some, at least specious, advantages; it promises at first sight to put an end to much petty intrigue, and not-petty jobbing, and to the reign of a faction, of which the originally good intentions, honourable feelings, and conciliatory address of Lord Clarendon could not prevent his being made the tool. There are also, we admit, many circumstances of a more general and permanent character, that, at a future day and under more favourable circumstances, might render such an amalgamation of the administrative powers of the empire not merely desirable, but necessary; but under present circumstances we think the measure-though rendered palatable by the general odium that Lord Clarendon has incurred-adventurous and impolitic. We do not exactly see our way to the governing Ireland through Mr. Stephenson's iron pipe, and doubt whether it may not accelerate the dire necessity of governing her with an iron hand; and in any case we can bode no good from such hasty experiments on so delicate a patient as Ireland. It took the Government two years of deliberation and hesitation before they could bring themselves to abolish the Palace Court at Westminster; but the Viceregal Court of the Castle of Dublin they made up their minds to get rid of in about a fortnight. We think we may safely predict that those who make great administrative and political changessuddenly—rashly-to get rid of some personal or temporary inconvenience, run the risk of creating consequential and permanent dangers and difficulties even more serious than those which they pretend to remedy.

But, however that may turn out, thus much is certain, that Lord Clarendon's discomfiture has directly and immediately produced the extinction of the Viceroyalty. His colleagues, silent and ashamed, had not the face to defend nor the heart to recall him; and they have treated him like a true Irish tenant-they have pulled down the house as the dacentest way of getting rid

of him.

And so-Exit Clarendon Pro-regum Ultimus.

ART.

ART. X.-1. Impressions of Central and Southern Europe. By William Edward Baxter. 1850.

2. The Soldier on Active Service. 1850.

3. A Voice from the Danube. 1850.

4. Hungary: its Constitution, and its Catastrophe. By Corvinus. 8vo. 1850.

5. Relazione delle Operazioni Militari, dal Generale Bava, nel 1848. Con Documenti.

WHATEVER rashness we occasionally may have exhibited

in offering admonitions to travellers whose views have differed from our own, or whose mode of explaining them we could not approve, we shall take no such liberty with a gentleman who addresses us with such authority as Mr. Baxter, and who casts forth his volume for the guidance and edification of mankind from the romantic capital of Forfar, the birth-place of the learned Boethius. This writer comes not to dispute, but to instruct. He forms his opinions and acquaints us with the result. In emphatic sententiousness of style, as well as in many of his moral qualities, he recalls the Eidolon of the learned Mr. Jedediah Cleishbotham; but he addresses us from an elevation yet more conspicuous than that to which the careful performance of his Sabbath duties' had raised the sedulous instructor' of the youth of Gandercleugh. Mr. Baxter, we must suppose, is a bailie or at least a deacon of his native city: none of less rank, we think, would decide with such a magisterial loftiness :—we imagined indeed at first that he had been accompanied in his expedition by a deputation of the town council, or a select commission appointed to inquire and report on things in general—in short, might be considered as the chairman of a body of Dundee Reviewers in the senatorial garb of old Gaul'-but on continuing our perusal we find that our teacher is decidedly singular' and himself alone, though he employs the plural pronoun with a dignified pertinacity that reminds us of the Tamerlanes of the stage.

He does not indeed expect that the world will be universally docile;-but he finds it consolatory to know that his sentiments are heartily approved by many men of great acquirements and European experience' (p. 4). This approbation we must say does credit to the candour of these high personages, since every creed, political, social, and religious in every state, with hardly an exception, falls in turn under the lash of his impartial censure. He disclaims with lofty modesty all intentions of writing a volume of travels, though he does not conceal from us the weight which we ought to attach to his 'impressions' of countries which he whirled over on railroads, or at whose capitals he

touched

touched in a steam-boat, performing (as he avows) his whole circuit with a rapidity unusual in an age emphatically of locomotion.'

He tells us in his preface that on the Continent, between the fall of Buonaparte and the year 1848, there occurred few events sufficiently important to engage the attention of the British public; and truly this sentiment, unfortunately not peculiar to the lights of Dundee, can alone account for the apathy with which the British public' have of late years regarded many foreign transactions pregnant with danger to ourselves.

Our bailie is a radical reformer, a redresser of grievances, the Quixote of progress, an enemy to peers and prelates, a thorough-paced utilitarian, who despises all arts which contribute not immediately to the material comfort of man or the replenishment of his purse. He is so warm an advocate of peace, that he would drive all military sovereigns and their satellites from the earth at the bayonet's point; he has the true orthodox hatred of Austrians and Bourbons, and attributes all the recent calamities of Europe to the policy of Prince Metternich. He professes a boundless admiration for the principles of universal toleration, but proscribes all forms of Christianity except the precise shade of dissent (such as he boasts it at p. 47) to which he personally adheres; and while declaring the most devoted attachment to religion, he elevates Mazzini, Sterbini, and their co-operators into the regenerators of mankind, although they are the avowed enemies of Christianity and unblushing blasphemers of its divine author.

In recording his 'impressions' he loses sight so entirely of the objects by which they are suggested, that his volume might as well have been composed without the trouble of visiting them. So exclusively does he see what his political leaning teaches him to desire, that in the Tyrol he discovers only an abject, timid race, morally and literally prostrated before a tyrannical prince and an usurping priesthood. Often have we seen,' he says (p. 31), these poor mountaineers falling prostrate on the path, that these begging gentry might tread on their bodies.' But Monarchy and Romanism hardly excite his indignation so strongly as the practice and cultivation of the fine arts. To the ambitious architecture of Munich, and the profusion of its external frescoes, he seems to attribute, with equal confidence, all the public and political, and all the private and personal, errors and delinquencies of the ex-king. As to the arts themselves, he professes the ignorance, not of humility, but of disdain. How inferior,' he has often heard it remarked, are the Britons to the Italians in taste!' and he proceeds thus to vindicate the former: How immeasurably

immeasurably more intellectual and enlightened is the essayist, the mechanic, or the manufacturing inventor, than your Raphaels, Vandykes, and Thorwaldsens!' He boldly appeals to the admirers of Michelangelo to decide between the comparative civilisation of Florence and Dundee. Look to Italy,' he says; when prosperity flowed into that country and princely fortunes were made, the people turned their minds to the fine arts, leaving mental science, politics, mechanism, manufactures, and literature to after-generations. Italy became a vast museum, and treasures were exchanged for well-executed statues :'-to which melancholy delusions he attributes among other things the fall of Venice and the decay of Genoa, with its half-tenanted palaces.' It is very obvious to us that Mr. Baxter never had occasion to inquire the price of lodgings in this last populous city--he would otherwise have discovered the difficulty of finding an apartment at all-the all but impossibility of securing a good one-and that even very inferior accommodation is, to use a phrase of his own, 'unpleasantly dear.'

"We shall tremble,' he continues, 'for old England when she begins to emulate foreign countries in spending money upon paint and marble, when it can be much more profitably employed in ships, books, manufactories, and machine-shops. . The English have no taste for national decay, and they do not relish the prospect of sharing the fate which an inordinate taste for the fine arts materially assisted in bringing on in Italy.'-p. 26.

We have never been of that school which connects religion and liberty with the progress of the fine arts; but few modern theorists, with the exception of Rousseau, have insisted on their necessary divorce-and as Dr. Johnson, on a memorable occasion, kindly hinted to a Scotch friend, who had met an exclamation of nonsense, applied to a dictum of Lord Monboddo's, by quoting something he had himself heard when on his travels from the lips of the Swiss sage, Ah! Sir-but a man who talks nonsense so well as Rousseau does, must know it to be nonsensewhereas (laughing and chuckling) I fear Monboddo does not.' We must be allowed to add that the distinguished countryman of Monboddo and Boswell now enlightening us is, when he maintains the incompatibility of the fine arts with mechanical and physical science, with literature and material civilisation, at variance with the express testimony of history, to which, with rather an unusual want of self-reliance, he appeals for the support of his theory. The reign of art in ancient Greece, from the birth of Pericles to the death of Alexander, was precisely the period of her most rapid social and intellectual development. In the final struggle of Syracuse, the mechanical and scientific resources of Archimedes