to omit giving us the means of ascer taining what was its value as such, which could only be done by telling us who your 300 noblemen and gentlemen" were. I have heard of no noblemen who were present but Lord Erskine himself and Lord Duncan; and although both you and my tailor, Mr Purves, say it was a splendid assembly, I have my doubts as to what constituted its splendour. The viands, I have no doubt, were as good as could be expected, and the wine was, I hope, tolerable, for I observe there were about thirty bumper toasts drunk, even before the chair was abdicated by Mr Maxwell of Carriden, and assumed by a gentleman closely connected with certain rotten boroughs, on the departure of Lord Erskine himself. But as for the eloquence of which you speak so pompously in your preface, really your own narrative will not bear you out; and I can only account for your excessive admiration by supposing, that your brain was heated while you listened, and that in your two or three busy days of redacteurship afterwards, it had not had leisure to regain its natural coolness. The preface is assuredly a most drunken performance. The one sentence stands quite disjointed from the other throughout. Here you exhibit the dull heavy listlessness of a comatose wine-bibber-there the sudden start of excitement, as unnatural as what is, in the technical language of taverns, called the second or devil appetite, and then back you sink again in to your helpless doze. But something of this effect may perhaps be set down to the account of your own original unfitness for the great office you have undertaken. Your style, Moses, is naturally hard and barren; and the flowers which you here and there endeavour to rear upon it, are quite out of all place and keeping, and cannot thrive. Cold, dry, and dusty in one page-flaming, exuberant, and bombastical in the next-always puerile, inept, and feeble,I wonder what made even the Whigs of Edinburgh choose you for their Thucydides. That Lord Erskine's speech, and that the speeches of many that followed him, might pass pretty well over the -bottle, and interspersed and relieved as they were with hip-hip-hip-hurras and fiddles, I have no doubt: but it should have been considered by a set of people who talk so much about the effects

of the press, that the processes of printing and publishing, enable one to judge much more accurately of the value of speeches, than is in the power of those that wash down every sentence they hear with a bumper ;-and you or your employers should have acted accordingly. Had you been contented to let the dinner go off as dinners usually do, and merely to chatter about the eloquence displayed on the occasion for a month afterwards, with the usual pertinacity of Whigs applauding themselves, it is possible that we might have believed part, at least, of what we heard said, and almost, in spite of our creed, regretted our absence from a scene distinguished by the exertions of so many redoubtable orators. Erskine, Cockburn, Jeffrey, Murray, Grant, Moncrieff, Macfarlane, Craig, Steuart, and Inglis-these are, no doubt, grand names; and if you had been satisfied with oral commendations, we might have believed it possible that they had really uttered- magnificent speeches; but you have quite undone yourselves by your "complete and permanent form," forsooth; and after perusing your no doubt at the least impartial record, it is painful but necessary to inform you, that not one word seems to have been uttered, in the whole course of the evening, even by the most distinguished of these personages, which could do the smallest honour to the least of them. Although, for example, all the fine things in your pamphlet had been delivered by Mr William Inglis in the General Assembly, or the Grand Lodge, they would not have made ministers or masons consider him as one whit a less execrable rhetorician than before; and although all the wisdom you have treasured up, had dropt from the unassisted lips of Mr James Steuart, it would not have induced one person in the whole kingdom of Fife to vote for him-no, not with all the praises of the Examiner to boot. In fact, all your orators, widely different as they are in station and character, appear to have been, on this occasion, pretty much upon a par. The egregious vanity which may be pardoned in a Thomas Erskine, is matched with a most lamentable effect indeed by the vanity of speechifying writers and traders. Mr Cockburn seems to have been as harsh as Mr Moncrieff, Mr Jeffrey as frothy as Mr Grant, Mr Murray as

clumsy as Mr Steuart, and Lord Erskine himself, miserabile dictu! as imbecile as Mr Inglis. In short, wine, it would seem, had proved an equivocator with your eloquence; it set you all a-speaking, but it made you all speak ill; and if it set yourself a-writing too, I can't flatter you by saying, that its influence has been more propitious on the pen of Moses than on the tongues of his coadjutors. No wonder that the classical taste of Mr Cranstoun was soon sickened. Nobody could have suspect ed that HE would condescend to be a speaker among such a motley crew of speakers as these; but it was an additional gratification to me to find, that he could not even endure listening to their speeches. If you had known "what heart was his," when he turned from your tumultuous and plebeian congregation, you would scarcely have been so clamorous in your huzzas upon his retirement from the scene of your jollity.

I daresay, however, that the wretched nature of the eloquence was not the only or even the chief thing that disgusted Mr Cranstoun with your meeting. I am sure it is not what disgusts me most in your account of it. It is the total want of good feeling exhibit ed by the whole of you, that if your dinner be remembered at all, will be uppermost in the mind of every honest lover of his country that remembers any thing about it. This great congregation of the Northern Whigs took place at a time when the state of the country had been such as to call forth the most sincere alarm, not among the adherents of administration merely, but among all statesmen of any cha racter-and to justify certain measures of restraint and coercion in the eyes of all those whose opinions are entitled to any weight either in or out of Parliament; and yet, if your assembly had any purpose at all, it seems to have been that of reviling those measures and all that supported them-of keeping open the wounds of popular discontent and exciting anew those feelings of distrust and aversion which all the true lovers of their country's welfare had been doing their utmost to sooth. Lord Erskine was made a stalking-horse to cover the nefarious design of vituperating a government which had been attacked not by philosophers and politicians, but by a set of ignorant, deluded, and abandoned miscreants, with whom, till your voices

were lifted up on their side, all parties in the state had been alike studious to disclaim any alliance or sympathy.Your cold-blooded cant could not be misunderstood even at the moment it was uttered-but I almost pity the feelings with which you yourselves must now regard it. Your solemn diatribes about the inutility and absurdity of the late restrictions—your foul slanders against the guardians of the state your shallow abuse of the constitution of the British Parliament -your rapturous commemoration of a set of disturbers of the public peace, who were acquitted not because they were guiltless, but because proof was not complete against them, and because their advocate was a master of his trade-all this was published, Moses, the very day after the conspiracy in Cato Street was discovered. When you drank the memory of the acquittal of Thomas Hardy, I wonder, by the way, you did not also drink the memory of the acquittal of Mr Thistlewood-for he too was once acquitted and yet even you will scarcely venture to say now that he was guiltless. But you had collected all the notes of the speeches-and, above all, you had written your own exqui site preface, Moses, and you could not think of suffering so many fine things to be suppressed in oblivion. Out came the pamphlet, and out, in spite of all your bitings of the lip, it must remain.

Were I to take notice of all the foolish sayings uttered on this occasion, my letter would grow to be as long as your pamphlet; but there is one omission which I must notice. Your dinner had been deferred on account of the death of the late King-because, says Moses, "this was considered decent." It might have been decent to have said a single word in honour of his memory-but no. Bumper followed bumper-speaker followed speaker, to pour forth the tide of calumny against every man that ought now to be most honoured, and every institution that ought now to be most sacredly upheld-but not one of you all had the common decency to express one particle of sympathy with those feelings of universal reverence which then filled most deeply the national mind, and which must ever deeply fill the mind of, every genuine Briton that remembers the name of George III-that virtuous and pa triotic sovereign whose character, as one of your prime orators has else

I have been out of sorts all my lifetime; and the causes of my continual illness have this day been revealed to me. May my melancholy fate be a warning to you, and all your dear contributors, a set of men whom the world could ill spare at this crisis. Mr Editor-I HAVE BEEN POISONED. You must know that I became personally acquainted, a few weeks ago, quite accidentally, with that distinguish ed chemist, well known in ourmetropolis by the name of "Death in the Pot."* He volunteered a visit to me at break fast, last Thursday, and I accepted him. Just as I had poured out the first cup of tea, and was extending it graciously towards him, he looked at me, and with a low, hoarse, husky voice, like Mr Kean's, asked me if I were not excessively ill? I had not had the least suspicion of being so-but there was a terrible something in "Death in the Pot's" face which told me I was a dead woman. I immediately got up I mean strove to get up, to ring the bell for a clergyman-but I fainted away. On awaking from my swoon, I beheld "Death in the Pot' still staring with his fateful eyes-and croaking out, half in soliloquy, half in tête-a-tête, "There is not a life in London worth ten years purchase." I implored him to speak plainly, and for God's-sake not to look at me so malagrugorously-and plainly enough he did then speak to be sure" MRS TROLLOPE, YOU ARE POISONED."

"Who," cried I out convulsively, "who has perpetrated the foul deed? On whose guilty head will lie my innocent blood? Has it been from motives of private revenge? Speak, Mr Accum +-speak! Have you any proofs of a conspiracy?" "Yes, Madam, I have proofs, damning proofs. Your wine-merchant, your brewer, your baker, your confectioner, your grocer, aye, your very butcher are in league against you; and, Mrs Trollope, YOU ARE POISONED!" "When -Oh! when was the fatal doze administered? Would an emetic be of no avail? Could you not yet administer a" But here my voice was choked, and nothing was audible, Mr North, but the sighs and sobs of your poor Trollope.

At last I became more composedand Mr Accum asked me what was, in general, the first thing I did on ris ing from bed in the morning. Alas! I felt that it was no time for delicacy, and I told him at once, that it was to take off a bumper of brandy for a Complaint in my stomach. He asked to look at the bottle. I brought it forth from the press in my own number, that tall square tower-like bottle, Mr North, so green to the eye and smooth to the grasp. You know the bottle well-it belonged to my mother before me. He put it to his nose-he poured out a driblet into a tea-spoon as cautiously as if it had been the black-drop, he tasted it-and again repeated these terrible words, " Mas TROLLOPE YOU ARE POISONED. It has," he continued, a peculiar disagreeble smell like the breath of habitual drunkards.”—“ Oh! thought I, has it come to this! The smell ever seemed to my unsuspecting soul most fragrant and delicious. Death in the Pot then told me, that the liquid I had been innocently drinking every morn for thirty years was not brandy at all, but a vile distillation of British molasses over wine lees, rectified over quick-lime, and mixed with saw-dust. And this a sad solitary unsuspecting spinster had been imbibing as brandy for so many years! A gleam of comfort now shot across my brain-I told Mr Accum that I had, during my whole life, been in the ha bit of taking a smallish glass of Hollands before going to bed, which I fain hoped might have the effect of counteracting the bad effects of the forgery that had been committed against me. I produced the bottlethe white globular one you know. Death in the Pot tried and tasted— and alas! instead of Hollands, he pronounced it vile British malt spirit, fined by a solution of sub-acetate of lead, and then a solution of alumand strengthened with grains of paradise, Guinea pepper, capsicum, and other acrid and aromatic substances. These are learned words-but they made a terrible impression upon my memory. Mr Accum is a most amiable man, I well believe-but he is a stranger to pity. "Mrs Trollope,