trious band" the few fine flashes of departing day"-that gave such splendour to the last moment of Ireland as a nation.' This passage might lead the reader to suppose, that the year of which Mr. Moore is speaking was that of the Union, and that Lord Edward was at this time a shining speaker; whereas his name occurs but once in the debates of 1787, when he made a short and sensible speech upon a motion of Mr. Grattan concerning tithes it was to this effect,- That tithes having for thirty years been considered as a hardship and matter of grievance, it became the wisdom of the House to inquire into them. While the people were quiet, no inquiry was made; while they were outrageous, no inquiry perhaps ought to be made; but certainly it was not beneath the dignity of the House to say that an inquiry should be made when the people returned to peace and quietness again.' This is the whole that has been reported.

In a letter, written from Dublin at this time, Lord Edward says, I have been greatly disappointed about politics, though not dispirited. We came over so sanguine from England, that we feel the disappointment the more. When one has any great object to carry, one must expect disappointments, and not be diverted from one's object by them, or even appear to mind them. I therefore say to everybody, that I think we are going on well. The truth is, the people one has to do with are a bad set. I mean the whole; for really I believe those we act with are the

best.'

Mr. Moore comments on this letter thus:

In the determination here expressed, as politic as it is manly, not only to persevere, in spite of disgust and difficulty, towards the object he had in view, but even to assume an air of confidence in his cause when most hopeless of it, we have a feature of his character disclosed to us which, more than any other, perhaps, tended to qualify him for the enterprise to which, fatally for himself, he devoted the latter years of his life. In a struggle like that, of which the chances were so uncertain, and where some of the instruments necessary to success were so little congenial to his nature, it is easy to conceive how painfully often he must have had to summon up the self-command here described, to enable him to hide from those embarked with him his own hopelessness and disgust.'- vol. i., pp. 61, 62.

Lord Edward, in a letter written, soon after he entered the army, to his father-in-law, Mr. Ogilvie, said it gave him great pleasure to find that their sentiments were so perfectly in accord; but indeed, whatever mine are,' he added, as well as anything I have ever acquired, are mostly owing to your affection for me, both in forming my principles and helping my understanding.'

Whatever

Whatever may have been his obligations to Mr. Ogilvie on the score of moral, political, and religious instruction, that gentleman had evidently obtained his affections by an uniform course of kindness. His was indeed an affectionate as well as an ardent temper. Writing at this time to his mother, who was then at Nice, he

says,

'You cannot think how I feel to want you here. I dined and slept at Frescati the other day, Ogilvie and I tête-à-tête. We talked a great deal of you. Though the place makes me melancholy, yet it gives one pleasant feelings. To be sure, the going to bed without wishing you a good-night; the coming down in a morning, and not seeing you; the sauntering about in the fine sunshine, looking at your flowers and shrubs without you to lean upon one, was all very bad indeed. In settling my journey there, that evening, I determined to see you in my way, supposing you were even a thousand miles out of it; and now coolly, if I can afford it, I certainly will.. You are, after all, what I love best in the world. I always return to you, and find it is the only love I do not deceive myself in. I love you more than I think I do, but I will not give way to such thoughts, for it always makes me grave. I really made myself miserable for two days since I left you, by this sort of reflections; and, in thinking over with myself what misfortunes I could bear, I found there was one I could not;-but God bless you.'-vol. i., pp. 62, 63.

One of his projects was to rejoin his mother at Nice, as soon as he should be released from parliament; this however, he laid aside for a wider and more instructive tour, and sailed for Gibraltar, a place which no traveller has described in a more lively manner. From thence he went to Lisbon, and then through great part of Spain. On his return to England, a second attachment which he had formed, and with apparent probability of success, was unexpectedly disappointed, and the father of the young lady forbade him his house. As the likeliest means of recovering his spirits, Lord Edward joined his regiment (the 54th) at St. John's, in New Brunswick. Captain Head did not enjoy the forest scenery of British America with keener relish, nor describe it more pleasantly. He complained of nothing but the musquitos.

I came by a settlement along one of the rivers, which was all the work of one pair; the old man was seventy-two, the old lady seventy; they had been there thirty years; they came there with one cow, three children, and one servant; there was not a living being within sixty miles of them. The first year they lived mostly on milk and marsh leaves; the second year they contrived to purchase a bull, by the produce of their moose skins and fish: from this time they got on very well; and there are now five sons and a daughter all settled in different farms along the river for the space of twenty miles, and all living

comfortably

comfortably and at ease. The old pair live alone in the little log cabin they first settled in, two miles from any of their children; their little spot of ground is cultivated by these children, and they are supplied with so much butter, grain, meat, &c. from each child, according to the share he got of the land; so that the old folks have nothing to do but to mind their house, which is a kind of inn they keep, more for the sake of the company of the few travellers there are, than for gain.

'I was obliged to stay a day with the old people on account of the tides, which did not answer for going up the river till next morning; it was, I think, as odd, and as pleasant a day (in its way) as ever I passed. I wish I could describe it to you, but I cannot, you must only help it out with your own imagination. Conceive, dearest mother, arriving about twelve o'clock in a hot day, at a little cabin upon the side of a rapid river, the banks all covered with woods, not a house in sight-and there finding a little old clean tidy woman spinning, with an old man of the same appearance weeding salad. We had come for ten miles up the river without seeing anything but woods. The old pair, on our arrival, got as active as if only five-and-twenty, the gentleman getting wood and water, the lady frying bacon and eggs, both talking a great deal, telling their story, as I mentioned before, how they had been there thirty years, and how their children were settled, and when either's back was turned remarking how old the other had grown; at the same all kindness, cheerfulness, and love to each other.

The contrast of all this, which had passed during the day, with the quietness of the evening, when the spirits of the old people had a little subsided, and began to wear off with the day, and with the fatigue of their little work,-sitting quietly at their door, on the same spot they had lived in thirty years together, the contented thoughtfulness of their countenances, which was increased by their age and the solitary life they had led, the wild quietness of the place, not a living creature or habitation to be seen, and me, Tony, and our guide sitting with them, all on one log. The difference of the scene I had left,-the immense way I had to get from this little corner of the world, to see any thing I loved,-the difference of the life I should lead from that of this old pair, perhaps at their age discontented, disappointed, and miserable, wishing for power, &c. &c.-my dearest mother, if it was not for you, I believe I never should go home, at least I thought so at that moment.'-pp. 78, 83.

'I know Ogilvie says I ought to have been a savage, and if it were not that the people I love and wish to live with, are civilized people, and like houses, &c., &c., I really would join the savages; and, leaving all our fictitious, ridiculous wants, be what nature intended we should be. Savages have all the real happiness of life, without any of those inconveniences, or ridiculous obstacles to it, which custom has introduced among us. They enjoy the love and company of their wives, relations, and friends, without any interference of interests or ambition to separate them. To bring things home to oneself, if we had been Indians, instead

of

of its being my duty to be separated from all of you, it would, on the contrary, be my duty to be with you, to make you comfortable, and to hunt and fish for you: instead of Lord * *'s being violent against letting me marry G * *, he would be glad to give her to me, that I might maintain and feed her. There would be then no cases of looking forward to the fortune for children,-of thinking how you are to live: no separations in families, one in Ireland, one in England: no devilish politics, no fashions, customs, duties, or appearances to the world, to interfere with one's happiness. Instead of being served and supported by servants, everything here is done by one's relations-by the people one loves; and the mutual obligations you must be under increase your love for each other. To be sure, the poor ladies are obliged to cut a little wood and bring a little water. Now the dear Ciss and Mimi, instead of being with Mrs. Lynch, would be carrying wood and fetching water, while ladies Lucy and Sophia were cooking or drying fish. As for you, dear mother, you would be smoking your pipe. Ogilvie and us boys, after having brought in our game, would be lying about the fire, while our squaws were helping the ladies to cook, or taking care of our papouses: all this in a fine wood, beside some beautiful lake, which when you were tired of, you would in ten minutes, without any baggage, get into your canoes and off with you elsewhere.'-pp. 91, 92.

These are characteristic letters; and the manner in which his biographer comments on them is not less so. Mr. Moore traces the origin of Lord Edward's republican notions to his residence in New Brunswick. The natural simplicity and independence of his character might itself have inclined him, he thinks, towards those equalizing doctrines which aim at levelling the artificial distinctions of society.

Disappointment in-what, to youth, is everything-the first strong affection of the heart, had given a check to that flow of spirits which had before borne him so buoyantly along; while his abstraction from society left him more leisure to look inquiringly into his own mind, and there gather those thoughts that are ever the fruit of long solitude and sadness. The repulse which his suit had met with from the father of his fair relative had, for its chief grounds, he knew, the inadequacy of his own means and prospects to the support of a wife and family in that style of elegant competence to which the station of the young lady herself had hitherto accustomed her; and the view, therefore, he had been disposed naturally to take of the pomps and luxuries of high life, as standing in the way of all simple and real happiness, was thus but too painfully borne out by his own bitter experience of their influence.

The conclusion drawn by Lord Edward in favour of savage life, from the premises thus, half truly, half fancifully, assumed by him,— much of the colouring which he gave to the picture being itself borrowed from civilization,-had been already, it is well known, arrived at, through all the mazes of ingenious reasoning, by Rousseau; and

it is not a little curious to observe how to the very same paradox which the philosopher adopted in the mere spirit of defiance and vanity, a heart overflowing with affection and disappointment conducted the young lover. Nor is Rousseau the only authority by which Lord Edward is kept in countenance in this opinion. From a far graver and more authentic source we find the same startling notion promulgated. The philosopher and statesman, Jefferson, who, from being brought up in the neighbourhood of Indian communities, had the best means of forming an acquaintance with the interior of savage life, declares himself convinced "that such societies (as the Indians), which live without government, enjoy, in their general mass, an infinitely greater degree of happiness than those who live under the European governments;" and in another place, after discussing the merits of various forms of polity, he does not hesitate to pronounce that it is a problem not clear in his mind that the condition of the Indians, without any government, is not yet the best of all. Thus, where the American president ended his course of political speculation, Lord Edward began,-adopting his opinions, not like Jefferson, after long and fastidious inquiry, but through the medium of a susceptible and wounded heart, nor having a thought of applying the principle of equality implied in them to any other relations or institutions of society than those in which his feelings were, at the moment, interested. This romance, indeed, of savage happiness was, in him, but one of the various forms which the passion now predomi nant over all his thoughts assumed. But the principle, thus admitted, retained its footing in his mind after the reveries through which it had first found its way thither had vanished; and though it was some time before politics,- beyond the range, at least, of mere party tactics, began to claim his attention, all he had meditated and felt among the solitudes of Nova Scotia could not fail to render his mind a more ready recipient for such doctrines as he found prevalent on his return to Europe;-doctrines which, in their pure and genuine form, contained all the spirit, without the extravagance, of his own solitary dreams, and while they would leave man in full possession of those blessings of civilization he had acquired, but sought to restore to him some of those natural rights of equality and freedom which he had lost.'-vol. i. pp. 98-103.

To make any observations upon this passage here would interrupt the view of what was the wisest, if not the happiest part of Lord Edward's life. At present we shall only express a wish that Mr. Moore had weeded his opinions as carefully as he has weeded his style, this book might then have been as useful in its tendency as it is delightful in its better parts.

The celebrated Mr. William Cobbett,' as Mr. Moore, in a manner which seems intended to be complimentary, speaks of one who, if not the most rancorous revolutionary writer of the day, is at least the most notorious for his undisguised malignity, the celebrated Mr. William Cobbett, who had even then,' it is said,

'made