which I know to be false, and an assertion of opinion which I believe to be false." The provision of the new bill which excluded Mr. O'Connell was expressly designed for his exclusion, and had been insisted on personally by the king. Mr. O'Connell went back to Ireland, and was re-elected without opposition for Clare.

The whole interest of the session was absorbed in this single measure. One curious effect of its success was, that it piqued some of the intolerant tories into reformers. The session was prorogued by commission on the 24th of June.

Sir Charles Wetherell was succeeded by Sir James Scarlett, who had been attorney-general under the administration of Mr. Canning; and Mr. Sugden was appointed solicitor-general in the room of sir N. Tindal, made chief justice of the common pleas. The most important official change was the retirement of the duke of Clarence from the admiralty, and the return of lord Melville as first lord. The administration of the duke of Clarence was popular; his official levees and evening hospitalities enlivened the admiralty; and his visits to the chief naval stations produced extraordinary animation in the fleet. The victory of Navarino shed its lustre upon the lord high admiral, and was rumoured to have been, in part, the result of his instructions to sir Edward Codrington.

The last session of the reign of George IV. was opened by commission, on the 4th of February, 1830. He did not live to witness its close, or the great political movements which render this a memorable year. The emperor of Russia had dictated hard

and humiliating terms to the Ottoman Porte, at Adrianople, on the preceding 14th of September; and the speech congratulated parliament on the restoration of peace in the East. Considerable progress had been made by diplomatic agency towards a pacification of Greece. The sultan, chastised by the Russians, submitted himself to the treaty of the 6th of July; and the allied parties to that treaty, in a conference held in London, on the day before the opening of parliament, signed a protocol, erecting Greece, within certain boundaries, into a new monarchical state, without yet deciding who should be its sovereign. The final arrangement of the affairs of Greece was accordingly announced, in the commissioners' speech, as nearly, not actually, completed. In Portugal, the prince who filled the throne continued to murder, pillage, and proscribe; and failed in the attempt, not the will, to assassinate his sister. Had Mr. Canning lived, this Portuguese bauf-tigre would not have been sent back without the humane precaution of disarming his savage instincts. The duke of Wellington restored him on his parole; and lord Aberdeen thought it enough to consult the king's dignity by continuing the suspension of diplomatic relations with Portugal, and announcing the suspension in the commissioners' speech. In the part of the speech which was addressed to both houses, the king lamented briefly "that distress prevailed among the agricultural and manufacturing classes in some parts of the united kingdom." The hardihood of this attempt to slur over a notorious and distressing truth shook the ministry to its centre: it was met in both houses, and

throughout the country, with the indignant reply that distress was severe and universal. Lord Stanhope moved an amendment in the house of lords; which was vitiated by his notions on the currency question, and supported by a minority of only nine. In the house of commons, an amendment moved by sir Edward Knatchbull was negatived by 158 to 105. The catholic claims had produced a sort of approximation between the duke of Wellington and the whigs; they were unwilling to abandon him to the vengeance of the tories: otherwise his government must have been routed at the very opening of the campaign. Lord Blandford next day, upon the bringing up of the report, moved what he called " a wholesome admonition to the throne," by way of appendage to the address. The "wholesome admonition" was a vindictive effusion of defeated bigotry, under the name of parliamentary reform, and was repudiated by the true reformers.

Petitions, setting forth and detailing the severest state of privation and suffering, poured in from all parts of the country. A motion on the state of the nation in the house of commons, by Mr. Davenport, was negatived, after four nights' discussion, by a large majority, referable to the secret tendency of the author and advocates of the motion to bring back paper money, and the adherence of ministers to the more popular and steady medium of the precious metals. The government took steps to afford some relief: the public charges were reduced a million, and taxes were removed to the amount of three millions and a half.

The fate of Greece was the only topic of public

interest in the foreign policy of the country. The sovereignty of the new state, soon after the opening of parliament, was offered by the conference of ministers of the three powers to prince Leopold of Saxe-Cobourg, and accepted by him. Difficulties, however, arose: the Greeks were dissatisfied with the boundaries assigned to them; they were deprived of a frontier which was necessary, they said, to their military defence; and the Greeks of Crete and Samos, who had fought and bled for freedom, like the rest of their countrymen, were doomed to return under the yoke which they had thrown off. Prince Leopold was made acquainted with the discontents of the Greeks by the president Capo d'Istria, who played, with a perfect knowledge of the man, upon his habits of life, his love of tranquil pleasures and elegant enjoyments, by an overcharged picture of the hardships to be endured by the prince sovereign of Greece. After much negotiation with the ministers composing the conference, prince Leopold refused the proffered sovereignty. Destiny reserved for him a crown in another quarter, and almost without his seeking. There is something extraordinary in the caprice with which Fortune has forced upon the unambitious, quiet, perhaps common-place character of this prince, favours which are usually won with difficulty by the aspiring and adventurous.

Meanwhile the hand of death was upon the king. For the two last years he had almost wholly secluded himself at Windsor. The royal lodge, the fantastic structure at Virginia Water, the avenues in which he took exercise in a pony chaise between Virginia

Water and Frogmore, were screened by every artifice of surrounding surface and plantation to shut out the world. When he took an airing, sentinels were placed at the several accessible points, to keep off those who might intrude from accident or curiosity; or, where the way was public, to give notice, so that he might take another course. It was, perhaps, an injustice to ascribe his impatience of the common eye to those habitually pampered illusions of royalty which render it contemptuous of the multitude. His infirmities had been growing rapidly upon him. He had frequent attacks of gout; tendency to inflammation; oppressed breathing; and depression of spirits. The last alone would account for his aversion to the observation of strangers. His person had also reached a still more remarkable degree of corpulency, which was said to give him pain, less as an inconvenience than as a disfigurement. He felt it an affliction that he did not still resemble the pictures of his youth, or those portraits of his advanced life by sir Thomas Lawrence, in which flattery and fidelity are so magically blended. This was another motive for the weakness of shunning 'casual observation or curiosity.

His illness became serious at the beginning of the year, but was studiously concealed, and if mentioned in the newspapers, authoritatively denied. About the middle of April, however, his state was such that the court physicians were called in, and bulletins of his health were periodically made public. These announcements were vague and reserved, and passed, it was said, under his own eye. At one period he was declared convalescent, and the bul