every hypocritical perversion, and every inflammatory scandal,— by which the constitution and government of these realms, ecclesiastical and civil, may possibly be brought into contempt,have ranged themselves as ostensibly her agents, but in truth as the ministers of factious and revolutionary designs. Upon the whole, the Queen and her friends have done each other no good:-Her Majesty, if innocent, could derive no support from a connection with political demagogues; and the cause of these demagogues has suffered detriment by the full exposure of the whole machinery of their malice, with every wheel at work, and the whole mystery of iniquity developed to view. No person in the country supposes that the clamorous advocates for the Queen care more for her than they do for her chamberlain; and when the extreme cruelty and profligacy is considered of persuading her to brave the consequences of a trial,-the tendency of which was obviously to place her in the last situation in which a moral man could wish to behold his Queen, for the sake of covering with her name their own disorganizing views, and filling the land with calumnies against its sovereign and its government,perhaps it may be fairly said that no queen was ever so abused, nor any community so mocked and insulted.

The times are teeming with instruction, and by this instruction our perils and alarms are in some measure compensated. How the nation will come out of its present difficulties, will entirely depend upon the amount of right feeling that exists in it: how its safety will in future be guaranteed, will depend, under Providence, upon the right direction which its moral energies and capacities may receive from the spirit of its government. There is only one broad and champaign way through which we can proceed on our march to a better and securer state of things. The evil is high up in the state, and resides in the very fountains of opinion; and the real reason why all our late and present efforts in the spread of education have been unavailing to fortify the common mind against the concerted malice now in operation against it, is simply and shortly thisthat in our rage for reforming the moral state of the lower orders, we have too much neglected the immediate original sources of national improvement.

There is a first moving power in every political system; and it is quite absurd to look for correct action in the subordinate parts, unless the spring of motion is first attended to and rectified. In proposing such an altitude in the commencement of reform, the great question first to be determined is, who are the instructors of the people? To which we are prepared with what we deem an obvious and incontrovertible answer-the Clergy. In giving, therefore, a proper organization and direction to this

body, lies, in our opinion, the whole secret of reforming the minds and morals of the community. The great problem is to make the Clergy capable of their duty, and disposed to perBut so little is this attended to, that perhaps it would not be too much to assert that the ecclesiastical profession in this country is alone that for which there is no specific and strictly appropriate education. We speak only of the Clergy of the national Establishment; for, with respect to some of the dissenting communions, our impression is that the candidates for the ministry, whatever we may think of the ministry itself, receive a strictly preparative education, with a distinct reference to the duties they are destined to undertake; for which reason we find them in general, whatever may be their correctness or incorrectness in doctrinal matters, true to their trusts, and tenacious of consistency. There is no education that we know of for the Clergy of the established Church, calculated to lay a foundation of peculiar sanctity; to inculcate a higher sense of responsibility; or to train the habits to greater decorum and circumspection, than what the ordinary conditions of secular preferment, or good reception in society, impose. The Church is left to recruit itself from the mass-of educated persons, indeed, but of persons educated as well for one intellectual pursuit as another; and suffered to be engaged as deeply as other students in plea sures unsuited to the sacred profession. We have so often treated in this journal of the defects of moral and religious education, as it is carried on in our own country, that we shall not in this place dilate upon the topic; but we are quite satisfied in our minds that, unless something is speedily done, through the medium of our authorized teachers, to improve the tone of clerical piety, and supply the Church with more spiritual unction, however pompously we may legislate for making scholars and philosophers of the poor, we shall only descend with an accelerated speed through the gradations of infidel profligacy, till we reach that consummation which so many are now labouring, by the agency of an infernal press, and with a zeal which is rarely shown in a righteous cause, to accomplish.

The ear of Majesty can never be ours; we speak too plainly and independently for our Journal to penetrate the ranks that surround a prince; but if we could suggest to the gracious Monarch upon the throne what seemed to us most befitting his royal wisdom to do in the present moral exigency of the nation, we would say redeem the patronage of the church, as far as it appertains to the crown, from every consideration, save the one only safe and ade quate inducement-the honour of God. Make none bishops as a matter of political favour, interest, or reward; but only those who, though when startling at the greatness of the trust, they may

be hardly willing to be made bishops, will be willing, when become bishops, to be bishops indeed;-not to slumber on their couches of preferment, or to invent problems of divinity for ensnaring the consciences of candidates for ordination, but to enter upon a stage of constant and faithful exertion. Look among the watchmen and workmen, the men of toil and sweat, that labour on through good and evil report, stigmatized for their works of supererogation, and for being useful out of season, decided servants of the gospel living apart from secular affairs, in fervent charity with men and meek devotion to God;-from such materials carve out apostolical bishops; and on the same principle of preference and selection, let all church promotion, at its source and beginning, be governed and guided. Let its first salient spring be evangelically pure. Let an untainted hierarchy go forth from the crown to propagate the same principle of patronage through all their diocesan preferments, and by the flame of their bright examples to illustrate the path of spiritual duty, and expose the shame of clerical inaction in this hour of extremity and alarm. From this generous and politic procedure of the crown, all the lower classes of spiritual patronage will derive a lesson, and some, doubtless, will answer the call of their sovereign to imitate him in his vital care of a church, which is the mother of Christian subjection, of moral freedom, and of political stability.

We cannot but think that from such a beginning of the great work of moral reformation, a freshening impulse would be felt to carry the life-blood with a strong and reanimating current through the national system, and the British mind would erect itself against the insults upon its character and honour, which a venal and vitious press is hourly pouring forth. It might in the course of a few years be more hazardous to the safety of the mansion to cover its windows with libellous caricatures, alike false, profane, and filthy, than to maintain that most indisputable of the rights of an Englishman, the right of refusing to join the rabble in the expression of a feeling in which it shocks his sense of honour to seem to participate.

In the indulgence allowed to these emporiums of libels and caricatures, (the reader will pardon our rambling-it is the design of this article) it seems to have been forgotten that where their undisguised tendency is to bring the laws, privileges, magistracies, and public functionaries into contempt. with the people, they have gone far beyond the limit which sane liberty, and a constitution that knows how to protect itself, can consistently allow. We are not disposed to go the whole length with Montesquieu in maintaining honour to be the solitary principle of monarchical governments in exclu

sion of virtue; and perhaps it may be the great excellence of the British constitution that it practically unites the characteristic principles of the republican and monarchical forms, and has thus solved the most difficult problem in human affairs:-mercy forbid! that what the above-mentioned acute but system-loving writer affirms of monarchies in general," that the state dispenses with the virtue which is directed to the public good, honour being a substitute for it," should be in any measure true of the state under which we live; but we will adopt his reasoning to the extent of maintaining that honour, especially the honour of our great men, is a necessary ingredient in our constitution. The very execution of the law in its high judicial departments supposes the paramount obligation of the principle of honour; it is this principle which casts a generous glow over the intercourse of private life, gives lustre to rank, and sparkles on the brow of majesty; it is courtesy to the gentleman, dignity to the nobleman, security to the merchant, and chivalry to the soldier; it is the virginity of the soul that shrinks from the appearance of contamination with a natural horror, and out-runs the decrees of virtue by the vehemence of its spontaneous instincts; it is that "unbought grace of life," that heroism of sentiment, over which the genius of Britain hangs with nursing delight; it is that which completes, in the fulness of its proportions, the moral stature of an English gentleman. But whatever of this principle is allied to station or function, all that respect for rank which teaches rank to respect itself, every wholesome prejudice which, by encircling nobility with an ideal glory, raises the standard of its real worth; all which the sanction of the law, or the spirit of the constitution, annexes to the aristocracy as one of the integral parts of the civil and social system, are now alas! turned into mockery, and made the game of low and envious libellers. It is observable, that when the best men of Athens became the sport of the stage, and were ridiculed upon their gems and medals, the morals and spirit of the people fell rapidly into decline, until they sunk under the tyranny of Macedon. If the virtue of republics, which is their very essence, according to Montesquieu, has been undermined by malicious ridicule and profligate buffoonery, what is to become of the honour by which, according to the same writer, monarchies are characterised and sustained, if all that is honourable in name and place is daily handed over to the scorn and malice of the mob by the traffickers in abuse and the panders of a prostitute press.

But the venom of the libellous agents of revolution is principally directed against the crown. Those who conspire against the constitution make this the great mark of their destroying system. To the steadiness of the crown we owe

the signal success in which our long contest with jacobinical tyranny has terminated, and the maintenance, under God, of our protestant liberties. Our kings of the Hanoverian line have been almost the only true whigs in the nation. To their constancy and consistency is to be ascribed the fact that since the accession of that house, the constitution has experienced neither change nor vacillation. Of the perpetuity of our political blessings, the crown is the pledge and guarantee; in the monarch, as the first magistrate, the law concentrates the government of the realm, and therefore invests his person with a political sanctity. All which are so many motives with "that species of men, who are nourished into a dangerous magnitude by the heat of intestine disturbances, and to whom a state of order would become a sentence of obscurity" to do what they can to bring down majesty from its sacred elevation;—every step of which procedure is so much in advance towards the subversion of the state.

When a man of sense thinks it of importance to write a book, like that at the head of our present article, to prove that George the Fourth is not fitly compared with Henry the Eighth, we may judge to what a length of depravity the treasonable heart in this our day has proceeded in the treatment of a gracious and constitutional King. What then is this King, upon whom the press is pouring forth all its poison, and satire all its ridicule, contending which shall render him most odious in the eyes of subjects bound to him as much by the ties of gratitude as of allegiance? His virtual reign as Regent of this realm has been at least as glorious and felicitous as any in our annals. Not a single abuse of prerogative-not one harsh act of government can be charged upon him-the letter of the law has never been extended against the substance of liberty-and nothing has been done in defiance of the habits and feelings of the virtuous and the free. No charter has been invaded-no hope of the state has been disappointed-no pledge has been unredeemed-no call of philanthropy disregarded; his sceptre is green with the buds of national instruction, and moistened with the dews of public charity; the worship of God has had its area multiplied; the most forlorn of the population have been advanced to a state of intellectual culture; every trust for the benefit of the poor has been brought within the scope of special inquiry; literature and science have alike elevated the commercial and military character; equity and fidelity have marked our foreign transactions; our victories have been the triumphs of humanity; after the waste and consumption of a twenty years' war, the revenues of a principality have in Britain been contributed and applied singly to the diffusion of the Scriptures; and amidst actual war, and its succeeding difficulties, her Christian influence has kept pace with