the first and most conspicuous to cover with ridicule the apprehension of its renewed assaults, and to do all but welcome its kindred forms-the danger indeed would not have been the less real or terrible; but the people would have been slow to take the announcement of its advance from the presiding minds of their statesmen, whom it might have been difficult, in such circumstances, to avoid regarding either as the guilty instruments or the compassionable victims of delusion. The opinions of Lord Grenville, however, have undergone no change upon the leading points of our national policy, which must deeply infuse themselves into, and visibly colour the whole tenor of the practical administration of affairs. In what manner the Noble Lord could reconcile this profound and unswerving consistency with his recent personal and party affinities-how the most resolute foe of Jacobinism could endure even the most temporary alliance with its English defenders-how he could suffer himself to be eulogised by the panegyrist of the ferocious Carnot, and the advocate of the ultra-jacobin Bonaparte, who is, peradventure, the same redoubted journalist and orator that has returned, in the paper before us, to his more natural vocation of abusing one of the most distinguished antijacobins of England-how the champion of institutions and of order could brook an alliance with the bigots of experiment and mutation-we profess not to explain or understand. Surely the alliance was pre-eminently unnatural:-that it has suffered recent disruption, is not so much a matter of surprise as that it should have admitted of so long an apparent conservation. It was at the mercy of every breath of popular discontent, in which the one party to this strange connexion was pledged upon principle, to recognize only the rightful spirit of freedom, while the other could not help occasionally perceiving the tainted blast of anarchy. We know of no question of state almost, with which those irreconcileable principles ought not to have mingled; and when we are now informed, upon the authority of Lord Grenville himself, that his apprehensions of danger from the gathering elements of popular discontent have suffered no abatement of intensity throughout the course of his political career, that they draw back to the beginning of Europe's troubles, and have been deepened and aggravated by the whole course of her recent history,-that while side by side with William Pitt, he guarded the ramparts of Britain's power, no less than in his mysterious retirement with his new associates, they have been the constant inmates of his breast,-while we must know what to think of the spurious defence of this memorable coalition, which has been reiterated ad nauseam in the Edinburgh Review, and which ascribed it to the fortunate extinction, produced by the course of events, of all the material differences of opinion that had so long separated the great party-leaders, -our wonder must only be increased, that so radical a division of sentiment should have admitted of a moment's compromise, while our confidence is rendered complete, that the mighty breach has at last been opened, never again to be closed. The political offences of Lord Grenville are traced up by his reviewer to their source, in the school of Edmund Burke, whose hallowed shade is impiously evoked to sustain the insolence of Whiggish derision. The student of his works, upon whom the loftiness of his imagination, and the serene grandeur of his intellect, have left a suitable impression, will fancy to himself the scornful composure with which he would have bidden away from him the tame vulgarity of his assailant's arguments, and the impertinent freedom of his buffoonery. He will imagine how the high and haughty thought, solicitous of the real dignity, and prescient of the coming destiny of the species, would, as it rushed through the fervid spirit of the sage, have embraced and dissolved the petty cavils of the earth-born critic. He will imagine him absorbed in high communion with the spirit of wisdom, undisturbed by the inaudible murmurs of dissent, as they rise from the immeasurable depths, at the bottom of which it has been the will of nature to station this pert censor of his opinions, and forward detracter from his fame. It is not to the man who can quibble about the failure of emigrant expeditions, or exult over the partial success of Jacobin audacity, that it has been given to fathom the mighty mind of Burke-to sound the depth, or appreciate the magnificence of his views. It was Burke's to grapple with the un dying and all-pervading spirit of the mighty evil of which he devoted himself to the abatement; the power of this narrow and acrimonious censor is bounded to the humbler function of toiling after the material shapes and sensible details in which it developes itself. The critic is "of earth, earthy," and let him not be forgetful, therefore, of the humility of his caste, and the insuperable mediocrity of his destination. Although, with the common perspicacity of a peasant's gaze, he may have, marked the movements and recorded the vulgar epochs of revolution, let him not presume, in any other attitude than that of reverence, to approach the mighty spirit of him who has left in his works an entire chart of the interesting phenomena, exact in science, perfect in comprehension, and richly illuminated with the unfading colours of genius. We know not, we confess, why the partial abandonment of Mr Burke's system by the restored government of France, should be welcomed with such an air of triumph as it appears to be by this reviewer. The unmeasured abuse of the French emigrants has ever been a favourite topic with our English Jacobins, just because they have been unfortunate, we suppose, and may, it is thought, be abused with impunity. The gentle and forgiving temper of the Revolutionists and Bonapartists, so fully exemplified in the late history of Europe, has ever been discreetly and modestly contrasted with the bloody and vindictive spirit of the Royalists, thirsting for power and plunder, and eyeing in perspective the mangled victims of their superannuated rage. The Jacobins of France knew well that they had committed crimes to satiety, and that some slight retaliation might be expected, even from the subdued and broken spirit of their Royalist victims; and while their hands were yet red with blood, and their hearts all but glutted with plunder, they began to set up a cry about the horrors of retaliation, which they pretended to deprecate, although they did not dread them, just that they might have a pretext for trampling in the dust those who had already been so long bowed down by adversity. The English Jacobins loudly echoed the cry of their French brethren, and have endeavoured to misrepresent the Royalists as an epi tome of all that is stupid and impla cable. The restored monarch of France, if he did not, as indeed he could not, believe those vulgar and revolting calumnies, seems, however, to have been intimately persuaded, from the moment of his return to France, that he was treading apon half-extinguished embers, and to have been treacherously advised that the admission of the Royalists to favour would prove the spark which should rekindle the flames of rebellion. The result of such councils upon his first restoration was to enclose him in a circle formed of all the putrid glitter of revolution, which was quickly dissolved for the exemplification of new and frightful treasons. But terror or infatuation appears to have mastered his better understanding experience has lost with him its ordinary power of instruction. The same fatal empiricism has made him reiterate the experiment of alienating himself from the stedfast and persecuted friends of his house, and confiding in the treachery of a gang of adventurers, whose hearts overflow with the blackest hatred of his name and dynasty; and the natural result has been, that, after a series of giddy rotations, ominous to the stability of his throne, and of which the King himself has been the sport rather than the constitutional spring, the array of high and titled traitors round his person, rather appearing to vouchsafe to him their protection, than to win his favour by their merit or fidelity, has nerved the murderous hand of a kindred but vulgar being to perpetrate a frightful crime, of which the avowed object was the utter extinction of the Bourbon race. It was with its usual felicity that the Edinburgh Review seized such a moment to boast the partial triumph of the Revolution-to assert the preferable claims of its worthies over the insulted and persecuted Royalists-and to exult in the abandonment thus far of Mr Burke's system, to whose sound and honest advice, as deducible from his immortal works, had the restorers of the French monarchy listened, they would not assuredly have left to the world the revolting spectacle, or the contagious example, of successful crime-nor to the unhappy King of France the odious protection of insolent and menacing villany. We scorn to wade through the details brought forward by the Reviewer relative to the recently buoyant, and we suspect, yet lurking spirit of dis content in this country. Here he is quite at home, intrenched in documents to the teeth, and quietly performing behind the curtain all the usual party operations of misrepresenting, extenuating, distorting, and confounding evidence. To reconsider, in detail, a cause upon which the Parlia ment and the people of England have pronounced their solemn judgment, and upon which events have so recently spoken in terrible confirmation of the award, accords with the distinguished modesty of the Edinburgh Review alone, but would scarcely be reconcileable with the pretensions of any other journal. That there was nothing to create alarm or to justify precaution in the state of the country at the meeting of last Session of Parliament, is a proposition bearing so much absurdity in its very announcement, that after all that has already passed upon the subject, it is difficult to know how to deal with it. Would our readers now endure an operose and technical dissection of the evidence with which they have for months past been made acquainted through speeches, pamphlets, newspapers, and all sorts of publications, and which, after all, only vouches for events of which the spectacle was familiar to many, and the horrid din audible to all whose ears were not sealed in factious incredulity? But without descending to the now unprofitable details, or disturbing the deep conviction of the public mind by examining the solitary scruples of an Edinburgh Reviewer, we may notice one or two points of a more general nature, which mark the spirit of this impartial censor of public measures, and decide the confidence to be reposed in his conclusions. He does not complain that the evidence laid before Parliament is scanty, or that the mass of discontent which it embraces was not sufficient to excite reasonable apprehension; but he insinuates that the evidence is not credible; and why? Because, forsooth, it did not pass the ordeal of cross-examination, and come forth to the public purified by the sneers and the sarcasms of opposition. A secret committee and a green bag are the eternal theme of such battered jokes as the genius of the Whigs is competent to supply; and yet it is only in a committee that witnesses can be interrogated, or the secrets of treason effectually extorted. The recent case which demanded the notice of Parliament was of a different nature; government was in possession of conclusive evidence, composed in general of deliberate statements proceeding from the magistracy of the land, and communicating full and circumstantial information of transactions, of which, in their appalling outline, no human being could be entire ly ignorant. These documents they accordingly laid before Parliament, and demanded its interposition. But this open and public form of procedure has not satisfied the Reviewer:nay, with the most whimsical inconsistency, he appears all of a sudden to have caught an affection for secret committees and green bags, so lately the objects of his abhorrence. They are better, he thinks, than the official and solemn reports of magistrates who have not been personally subjected to the acute and sifting cross-examination of Mr Brougham (we suppose); and who, it seems, are not to be believed, because they have been allowed to give their deliberate narration without the interruption of captious remark, and, it might be, of studied insult. The notable proceeding of a full inquiry and examination of witnesses, not by committees, but by Parliament itself, being no less indispensable, in the opinion of this Reviewer, to the credibility of the story, than it is, for obvious reasons, unsuited to the urgency of a great crisis, and impracticable in the prospect of an approaching insurrection, it seems to follow, that discon tents and plots must just be put down without being either proved or believ ed by a sound Whig, and that the legislature must even go on to provide for the safety of the country, while the Reviewer continues his appropriate function of cavilling at its encroachments. There are one or two other points which deserve notice. This sagacious censor travels through the evidence applicable to large and thickly peopled districts of the country, as if he were talking of some paltry village or depopulated parish, or as if it were necessary to the vindication of the mea sures which he assalls, that the whole or the greater part of the country, should be proved to have been in a state of actual insurrection. No one ever insinuated any thing so absurdly alarming, or which, in the reality, would have been so fatal to the prosperity of the commonwealth. The mighty interests which are bound up with the preservation of the public tranquillity require, that we should watch the smallest dot on the horizon, indicative of the coming storm. The ministers would be traitors to their country, who could permit sedition to increase in boldness and in strength, till, with the erect front of actual rebellion, it should dare to grapple with the laws. The conflict must be begun; a decisive blow must be struck; while there is yet an immeasureable inequality be twixt the contending parties, or the warfare can close only in disgrace and ruin. That, in the case before us, there was rather more of questionable forbearance than of censurable temerity on the part of government, will be acknowledged by all who, in their estimate of the game of revolution, do not forget to reckon its cost and its perils. Nor will their conviction be greatly staggered by recollecting, that the same amazing wiseacre who has recorded his mockery of the alarms of 1819, has also, with singular felicity, revived his long buried joke about "the Magazine in the foot of an old stocking," of 1817, just when some of the owners of that Magazine, with a few kindred spirits, were quietly assembled in Cato Street, over a Magazine a little more various and formidable, and were commencing the proof of their innocencè amid the emblems of conspiracy rapidly to consummate it in assassination and blood. LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC INTELLIGENCE. Jameson's GeognosyProfessor Jameson's elementary work on geognosy, will appear, we understand, in the month of May. A work of this description is at present rather a desideratum in our mineralogy, and is more particularly demanded at present, as the publication of the learned Essays of the distinguished President of the Geological Society of London has, we believe, induced many, through want of attention to the scope of Mr Greenough's views, to abandon this important and beautiful branch of natural history as vague and unsatisfactory. Discovery of the Oriental Emerald Mines. It is very interesting to learn, with accuracy, the situation of the oriental mines of the emerald, to be able to explain where the Greeks and Romans found this mineral, as they could not be acquainted with the only place where they are now found in Peru. From the latest accounts, M. Ca liot, who has been sent by the Pascha of Egypt to look for the ancient emerald mines, has been so fortunate as to discover them in the neighbourhood of the Red Sea, which pretty nearly agrees with their site as given by ancient writers. New set of Rocks discovered in Iceland. Menge, a German mineralogist, has discovered in Iceland an extensive formation of rocks, resembling basalt on the one hand, and cava on the other, and which he proves to have been formed by the agency of hot springs. An Institution is about to be formed in Glasgow for the Encouragement of the Fine Arts. It is proposed to have apartments for the display of productions of Painting, &c., and an annual exhibition. Much may be expected from this, considering the well-known liberality and intelligence of the Glasgow public. Cadmium.Dr Clarke of Cambridge has discovered the metal named Cadmium, in the radiated blende of Derbyshire. Imitation of Cameos, Agates, &c.-There is something very curious in the conception, and very fortunate in the success, if it be at all equal to what is reported of an attempt to imitate cameos of different colours as they appear in certain antique gems. It has occupied the attention of M. Dumersan of Paris, and his endeavours have succeeded. This amateur has long been conversant with divers branches of antiquities; particularly with medals and engraved stones. After having taken impressions by means of moulds, from the original cameos, he gives them the various colours of agates and sardonyxes, by a faithful imitation of the layers of colouring matter interposed, or even superposed, with their clouds and other accidents. Under a glass these copies represent their originals so perfectly as to deceive the eye; and connoisseurs may now indulge themselves, not, as before, with simple impressions, but with fac similes of these antiquities. The inventor has formed an extensive collection; and sells selections, more or less numerous, at the pleasure of the purchaser. Earthquake at Copiapo.-Three dreadful earthquakes took place at Copiapo, on the 3d, 4th, and 11th of April. The whole city is said to have been destroyed by these awful visitations. More than three thousand persons were traversing the neighbouring plains, flying from the desolation which had been produced. It appears, according to all the accounts, that the inhabitants had time to save their lives, but only their lives. Petrified City. The enterprizing traveller, Mr Ritchie, who proceeded, some time since, with an expedition from Tripoli, for the purpose of exploring the interior of Africa, writes as follows. "As one of my friends desired me to give him, in writing, an account of what I knew touching the petrified city, situated seventeen days journey from Tripoli by caravan to the south-east, and two days journey south from Ouguela, I told him what I had heard from different persons, and particularly from the mouth of one man of credit, who had been on the spot; that is to say, That it was a spacious city, of a round form, having great and small streets therein, furnished with shops, with a large castle magnificently built: That he had seen there several sorts of trees, the most part olives and palms, all of stone, and of a blue, or rather lead colour : That he saw also figures of men, in postures of exercising their different employments; some holding in their hands staffs, others bread; every one doing something; even women suckling their children; all of stone: That he went into the castle by three 'different gates, though there were many more: That there were guards at these gates, with pikes and javelins in their hands. In short, that he saw in this wonderful city, many sorts of animals, as camels, oxen, horses, asses, and sheep, and various birds, all of stone, and of the colour above-mentioned." Mineral Animal Matter.-Zoogene.Sig. Carlo di Gimbernat has discovered a peculiar substance in the thermal waters of Baden and of Ischia, of which he gives the following description in the Geornale di Fisica. This substance covers, like an integument, many rocks in the valleys of Senagalk and Negroponte, at the fort of the celebrated Epomeo, beneath which mountain the poets confine Typhon. It is remarkable, that in this very place should be found a substance very similar to skin and human flesh. One portion of this mountain, that was found covered with this substance, measured 45 feet in length by 24 in height. It yielded, by distillation, an empyreumatic oil; and, by boiling, a gelatine, which would have sized paper. I obtained the same results at Baden. It may therefore be considered as confirmed, that an animal matter is present in these thermal springs, which, being evaporated, becomes condensed in their neighbourhood. To this principle. I give the name of "Zoogene." The editors of the Giorn. Fis. state, that they have seen the substance obtained by M. Gimbernat, and that, externally, it has the appearance of real flesh covered with skin. Isle of Elba-Magnetism.-Baron de Zach announces in his " Correspondence," vol. i. that the opinion long entertained, that the Isle of Elba, from the quantity of iron ore found on it, and especially Mount Calamita, (supposed to be a solid mass of loadstone,) has a sensible effect on the mariner's compass, is unfounded. Mr Charles Rumker in 1818 could not find, at the distance of two or three or four nautical miles, the declination of his needle affected in the least by the action of the island. Mean Temperature of the Earth.-According to Laplace, any actual diminution of the mean temperature of the earth would be detected by a diminution of the length of the day. It appears by computation, that one degree of Fahrenheit's Thermometer would make an alteration of nearly one second in the length of a day, and four or five minutes in that of a year. Comparative Strength of Europeans and Savages.-M. Peron, the naturalist, has had occasion to observe, that men in a savage state are inferior in strength to men civilized; and he has demonstrated, in a very evident manner, that the improvement of social order does not, as some have pretended, destroy our physical powers. The following is the result of experiments which he has made on this subject with the Dynamometer of M. Regnier (described Phil. Mag. Vol. I.) Comparative Experiments on the Strength of Europeans and Savages. Conversion of Wood, &c. into Sugar.Dr Vogel, Member of the Royal Academy of Sciences, has submitted to a careful examination, in the laboratory of the Academy of Munich, the surprising discovery of Mr Braconnot of Nancy, of the effects of concentrated sulphuric acid on wood and linen. He has not only fully confirmed this discovery, so as to lay before the Academy an essay on the subject, and show the products resulting from the original experiments, but also extended his own experiments, with equal success, to other similar vegetable substances such as old paper, both printed and written upon, and cut straw. By di luting the sulphuric acid with a due addition of water, saw dust, cut linen, paper, &c. were converted into gum and saccharine |
