and Birmingham and Manchester none at all.

The Duke of Wellington discovered very soon, and in a very feeling manner, that the most perfect system of representation

Earl Grey lost also thereby the opportunity of bringing the war to that glorious and triumphant close the conquest of France, and the restoration of the Bourbons. Unable from his own overbearing arrogance and obstinacy to form a firm and efficient ministry, he continued the head of a weak and inefficient opposition; and in 1818, at some public dinner, not only recanted all his old partialities for parliamentary reform, but went out of his way to draw an invidious and offensive parallel between the British mode of representation and that of the United States of America declaring his decided preference of the former.

On the score of consistency, therefore, the Duke of Wellington had greatly the advantage in this debate over Earl Grey. In the domineering tone of their tempers, there was little to choose between them. But the Earl had caught ere she changed, the Cynthia of the minute, parliamentary reform, and he returned to the standard from which he had deserted. It is hoped he has discovered that the representative system of the United States of America is not quite so bad as that which gave old Sarum and East Redford two members each,

longer reigned in England. He could not show himself in the streets of London without being pelted with stones. He was covered with odium ; and precisely at that moment occurred an incident, very trifling in itself, but which covered him and his administration with ridicule.

We have seen that the king's speech to Parliament was delivered on the second of November. The ninth of that month was the annual festival, known by the name of Lord Mayor's day. It had been usual for the kings of England who affected popularity to accept, shortly after their accession to the throne, an invitation to go in procession with the Queen to Guildhall, and there to partake of a banquet with the Lord Mayor, and the Corporation of London. Such an invitation had been given to King William, and accepted by him, and the Lord Mayor's day had been fixed upon for the festivity. The preparations for it were accordingly magnificent. The precedents of royal conviviality in the city had been drawn out from long years of oblivion, and consulted for repetition. A committee of arrangements had been appointed, and the loyal and the curious were all on the tiptoe of expectation. Orders had been given for a general illumination of the streets along the whole line of the procession. The

lamps were displaying their variegated colors in advance, and the inventive genius of the city was upon the rack for designs to represent in elegant and classical devices the happiness of the land, under the paternal government of the sailor king. The prudent and thrifty shop-keepers had let their front windows for the day at prices nearly equivalent to their rent for the year, and strangers had flocked from all parts of the united kingdom to tell their grand children hereafter that they had seen King William feasting with the Lord Mayor of London. All the invitations had been issued, and large sums had been offered and refused for tickets of admission. Wise precautions had also been taken to prevent tumults and preserve order among the multitudes of people who were expected to be assembled. Six thousand citizens of the livery of London were to line the streets, and nearly two thousand special constables had been qualified by oath in aid of the police.

In the midst of all this excitement and apparatus of preparation, a project of personal violence at least upon the Duke of Wellington was formed, or was apprehended by some of the city authorities. It was threatened in multitudes of inflammatory handbills posted on the walls throughout the city. The Lord Mayor elect was so alarmed by these and by other indications reported to him, that he wrote a letter to the Duke apprising him of the danger to which there was reason to fear he might be exposed, and advised him to come to the banquet under

the protection of an armed escort. In consequence of this information two successive cabinet councils were held, one of which lasted till midnight. Communications were opened, and continued through a whole day between the home department and the government of the city, and late in the evening of the seventh of November, the committee of arrangements for the banquet deemed it their duty to give publicity to a letter received at nine o'clock of the same evening by the Lord Mayor from the secretary of state, Mr Peel, of which the following is a copy.

WHITEHALL, Nov. 7. 'MY LORD, — 1 am commanded by the king to inform your lordship, that his majesty's confidential servants have felt it to be their duty to advise the king to postpone the visit which their majesties intended to pay to the city of London on Tuesday next.

From information which has been recently received, there is reason to apprehend, that notwithstanding the devoted loyalty and affection borne to his majesty by the citizens of London, advantage would be taken of an occasion which must necessarily assemble a vast number of persons by night to create tumult and confusion, and thereby to endanger the properties and the lives of his majesty's subjects.

It would be a source of deep and lasting concern to their majesties were any calamity to occur on the occasion of their visit to the city of London, and their majesties have therefore resolved, though not without the greatest reluctance

and regret, to forego, for the present, the satisfaction which that visit would have afforded to their majesties.

I have the honor to be,

My Lord, your ob't. serv't.

ROBERT PEEL.

The Right Hon., the Lord Mayor. This letter, it will be perceived, takes no notice whatever, of the real danger, of which the Lord Mayor elect had apprized the Duke of Wellington-an attack upon his own person. It cannot reasonably be doubted, that this danger was real. But it was probably not of a general character, nor menacing so much to the properties and lives of his Majesty's subjects, as to the person of the Duke. The exasperation of the populace was at that precise moment so great against him, on account of his recent peremptory declaration against reform, that it is not unlikely if he had gone unprotected in the royal procession, he would not have returned alive. That the hero of so many bloody days, the conqueror who had received thirteen times the thanks of both Houses of Parliament for vanquishing the enemies of his country, should shrink from attendance at a royal banquet in the metropolis of the Realm from the terror of being torn to pieces by an infuriated rabble, is among the phenomena of the times which for the credit of human nature we would readily disbelieve, but that nothing less than an imminent danger of life would have induced him to endure this unparalelled mortification of consenting to the postponement of the

royal visit to the city, to save him from the brutality of the mob, carries its evidence in the nature of the transaction itself.

But as the real danger which had been notified by the letter of the Lord Mayor elect, to the Duke, was masked in the letter from Sir Robert Peel to the Lord Mayor, by the substitution of another and a very different danger, the panic of the Ministry, thus communicated to the public mind, assumed yet another form, and nothing less than a Guy Fawkes gun-powder plot, to blow up King, Lords, and Commons at a blast, was supposed for a moment to have been detected, and alarm and terror took possession of the whole city,

Not only was the royal banquet postponed, but the ordinary and immemorial celebration of the Lord Mayor's Day, with its pompous procession, and its festive dinner were pretermitted - the public funds fell four per cent in one day. The people of London were disappointed of their holiday-the shopkeepers of the profits of their front windows; the tradesmen of their quickened circulation of sales, and all were in a fearful looking for, of some tremendous explosion.

The next morning, occasion was taken from it for a spirited assault upon the ministry in both Houses of Parliament. They were called upon to assign the causes of this great and sudden manifestation of royal alarm. No evidence of a plot or conspiracy threatening the properties or the lives of his Majesty's subjects, nor yet against his Majesty's Government

or person, could be adduced the only document of terrific import they could bring forward was the private letter of Alderman Key the Lord Mayor elect to the Duke of Wellington, advising him of the danger to which his person might be exposed if he should come without an armed escort, in the procession with the King. That the victor of Assai's bloody plain, and the vanquisher of Napoleon at Waterloo should flinch from the exposure of his person amid the multitudes of his own countrymen, following his king to the joyous gratulations of the people upon his accession to the throne was an attitude, mortifying enough to the hero and portentous of downfal to the Prime Minister of State. Meetings were immediately convened of the corporate city authorities, the Common Council and Court of Aldermen, at which a rigorous inquiry and examination was instituted into the causes of this extraordinary ministerial fit of vapors. The fears of Alderman Key, who acknowledged he had written the letter, were derided as visionary, and he and the Duke of Wellington were jointly and severally turned over to the Pie-powder court of caricaturists and ballad-singers.

Goulburn. The civil list, is in plain English, the salary, or as in this country we should call it, the annual compensation of the king. It has usually, since the accession of the Hanoverian family, been settled by parliament upon each king for life, immediately after his accession to the crown. It is a provision not merely for the personal and household expenses of the king; but includes many items of a character altogether national. tional. Such for example as the salaries and support of ambassadors and ministers to foreign powers. The establishment of the civil list distinct from the other charges of the state was created by the first of Queen Anne, chap. 7, March, 1701. But neither the amount of the sum thus granted, nor the modes of levying the money, nor the objects of expenditure provided for by them have been uniform. There had been sometimes grants of hereditary revenues to the crown, and there were revenues of like character accruing from rents of crown land, and also from the Duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster, and from the county palatine of Chester. These were dignities held separately from that of the royal crown, and produced an income usually considered as the private property of the King. The annual amount of the grants which constituted the civil list, had at first been from six to seven hundred thousand pounds sterling, but it had been gradually increasing at the accession of every king, and found encumbered with a considerable debt, at the close of every reign.

During the long reign of George the Third there had been at different times, different parliamentary dispositions of the civil list. It had been fixed at first at an average of about eight hundred thousand pounds, but constantly contracting debts for which supplementary provisions had been found necessary. In presenting his bill the Chancellor of the Exchequer had estimated the civil list as settled upon George the Fourth at 1,221,600 pounds sterling-from which a deduction was to be made of charges for which he proposed to provide, leaving one million and fiftysix thousand pounds, as the object for comparison with that which he was to propose. This was an annuity of 970,000 pounds; and thus a reduction of eightyfive thousand pounds, upon the civil list of the preceding reign.

The first entanglement in which the ministry became involved, upon this statement was by the disclosure elicited in debate, that the surrender of the hereditary resources so emphatically announced in the royal speech was not intended to include the hereditary revenues of the Duchiesand when this explanation was extorted from the minister, a laboring and learned argument to prove that the revenues of the Duke of Lancaster and Cornwall were not the revenues of the Crown of England, did not satisfactorily answer the charge that the ministers had put into the mouth of his majesty a promise of disinterested generosity more extensive than he was ready or willing to perform. The distinc

tion between the royal and ducal titles in the same person, had fifty years before been consigned to ridicule by the imperishable eloquence of Edmund Burke in his speech upon economical reform, and the revival of it now in grave debate to curtail the ostentatious generosity of the king, gave it an air at once of craftiness and ill faith, bargaining by an ostensible gratuity for a profusion of allowance in the civil list.

But

The statements of the Chancellor of the Exchequer were all presented in the fairest points of view to induce the belief that a great reduction of expenditure would be the result of his plans, and he expressly alleged the surrender of the hereditary_revenues, as imposing upon Parliament the obligation of liberality in the grant to the crown. the statements were controverted. The whole amount of the hereditary duties surrendered, was proved by Mr Hume not to exceed twenty four thousand pounds. The classifications of expenditure on the ministerial plan were denounced as incorrect and the plan itself as unintelligible, fallacious, and extravagant. The debate was adjourned over to Monday the 15th of November, and then renewed with invigorated opposition. A motion was finally made by Sir Henry Parnell for the appointment of a committee of inquiry, not to examine witnesses, or to call for persons and papers, but to verify the statements of the minister. The result of this motion, which succeeded, though in form amounting merely to a com