fear was.

One quality remains to be added, but that a high one, and for a demagogue essential. He was a courageous man. Neither politically nor personally did he know what Into no risks for his party did he ever hesitate to rush. From no danger, individually, was he ever known to shrink. The meeting which he gave Secretary Martin, and which nearly cost him his life, was altogether unnecessary; he might easily have avoided it; and when a wild young Scotch officer asked satisfaction for something said against his country, he met no refusal of his absurd demand; but was ordered on a distant service before he could repair to Flanders; whither Wilkes went to fight him, after the Mareschal's Court of France had interdicted a meeting in that country.

Some of the other honourable feelings which are usually found in company with bravery, seem generally to have belonged to him. He was a man, apparently, of his word. In his necessities, though he submitted to eleemosynary aid for pecuniary supplies, and maltreated his wife to relieve his embarrassments, he yet had virtue enough to avoid the many disreputable expedients which have made the condition of the needy be compared to the impossibility of keeping an empty sack upright. His worst offence, and that which brings his honesty into greatest discredit, is certainly the playing a game in political virtue, or driving a commerce of patriotism, which the reader of his story is constantly struck with; and in no instance does this appear more plainly than in such attempts at pandering to the passions of the people, as his addressing a canting letter to the Lord Mayor, when refusing, as Sheriff of London, to attend the procession to St. Paul's on the occasion of the King's accession. He grounds his refusal on the preference he gives to "the real, administration of justice, and his unwillingness to celebrate the accession of a prince, under whose inauspicious reign the Constitution has been grossly and deliberately violated." That this was a measure to catch mob applause, is proved by his sending a draft of his epistle to Junius for his opinion, and in his note, inclosing the paper, he calls it a "manœuvre."*-(WOODFALL'S Junius, i. 324.)

* In admitting the polished manners of Wilkes, and that he had lived much in good society, somewhat in the best, we need not admit that his turn of mind was not in some sort vulgar-witness his letters

I have dwelt longer upon this celebrated, rather let me say noted person, than may seem to be in proportion or keeping with a representation of the group in which he figures; because it is wholesome to contemplate the nature, and reflect upon the fate, of one beyond all others of his day, the idol of the mob, the popular favourite; one who, by the force of their applause, kept so far a footing with the better part of society as to be very little blamed, very cautiously abjured, by those most filled with disgust and with detestation of his practices. It is an addition to the chapter on this subject, already suggested by the French revolution. The men in Parliament, the members of the popular party, with perhaps the single exception of Lord Chatham, while they would have viewed with utter scorn any approaches he might make to their intimacy, nevertheless were too much afraid of losing the countenance of the multitude he ruled over, to express their strongly entertained sentiments of his great demerits. They night not so far disgrace themselves as to truckle in their measures; they never certainly courted him with extending their patronage to himself or his accomplices; but they were under the powerful influence of intimidation, and were content to pass for his fellow-labourers in the Whig vineyard, and to suppress the feelings with which his conduct in

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to Junius throughout-particularly the papers wherein he describes Junius's private communications to him as stirring up his spirits like a kiss from Chloe," and asks the "great unknown" to accept of what? Books? Valuable MSS.? Interesting information? No-but tickets to the Lord Mayor's dinner-crowded dinner-and the Lady Mayoress's far less tolerable ball, with a hint "to bring his Junia, if there be one."-(WOODFALL, i. 325.)

When, in 1817, I stated my strong opinion in the House of Commons on Wilkes's character, and the shame that his popularity brought on the people of England for a time, Mr. Wilberforce expressed his thanks to me and confirmed my statements. Mr. Canning, however, observed that Wilkes was by no means a singular instance of demagogues not being respectable, and added,

He's Knight o' th' shire, and represents them all,

which is an exaggerated view certainly. Sir Philip Francis, the morning after, remonstrated strongly with me, in the company of other friends, for saying any thing in disparagement of a man run down by the Court. He regarded the offence as greatly aggravated by the praise which had been given to Lord Mansfield, against whom he inveighed bitterly. This tone, so precisely that of Junius upon both subjects, was much remarked at the time.

public and private life filled them, rather than encounter his vengeance and risk the loss, the temporary loss, of mob applause. How base does such conduct now appear, and how noble is the contrast of Lord Chatham's manly deportment in the eyes of impartial posterity!

But the fall, the rapid and total declension, of Wilkes's fame-the utter oblivion into which his very name has passed for all purposes save the remembrance of his vices -the very ruins of his reputation no longer existing in our political history-this affords also a salutary lesson to the followers of the multitude-those who may court the applause of the hour, and regulate their conduct towards the people, not by their own sound and conscientious opinions of what is right, but by the desire to gain fame in doing what is pleasing, and to avoid giving the displeasure that arises from telling wholesome though unpalatable truths. Never man more pandered to the appetites of the mob than Wilkes; never political pimp gave more uniform contentment to his employers. Having the moral and sturdy English, and not the voluble and versatile Irish, to deal with, he durst not do or say as he chose himself; but was compelled to follow that he might seem to lead, or at least to go two steps with his followers that he might get them to go three with him. He dared not deceive them grossly, clumsily, openly, impudently-dared not tell them opposite stories in the same breath-give them one advice to-day and the contrary to-morrow-pledge himself to a dozen things at one and the same time; then come before them with every one pledge unredeemed, and ask their voices, and ask their money too on the credit of as many more pledges for the succeeding half year-all this with the obstinate and jealous people of England was out of the question; it could not have passed for six weeks. But he committed as great, if not as gross, frauds upon them; abused their confidence as entirely if not so shamefully; catered for their depraved appetites in all the base dainties of sedition, and slander, and thoughtless violence, and unreasonable demands; instead of using his influence to guide their judgment, improve their taste, reclaim them from bad courses, and better their condition by providing for their instruction. The means by which he retained their attachment were disgraceful and vile. Like the hypocrite, his whole public life was a lie. The tribute which his unruly

appetites kept him from paying to private morals, his dread of the mob, or his desire to use them for his selfish purposes, made him yield to public virtue; and he never appeared before the world without the mask of patriotic enthusiasm or democratic fury;—he who in the recesses of Medenham Abbey, and before many witnesses, gave the Eucharist to an ape, or prostituted the printing-press to multiply copies of a production that would dye with blushes the cheek of an impure.

It is the abuse, no doubt, of such popular courses, that we should reprobate. Popularity is far from being contemptible; it is often an honourable acquisition; when duly earned, always a test of good done or evil resisted. But to be of a pure and genuine kind, it must have one stampthe security of one safe and certain die; it must be the popularity that follows good actions, not that which is run after. Nor can we do a greater service to the people themselves, or read a more wholesome lesson to the race, above all, of rising statesmen, than to mark how much the mockpatriot, the mob-seeker, the parasite of the giddy multitude, falls into the very worst faults for which popular men are wont the most loudly to condemn, and most heartily to despise, the courtly fawners upon princes. Flattery indeed! obsequiousness! time-serving! What courtier of them all ever took more pains to soothe an irritable or to please a capricious prince than Wilkes to assuage the anger or gain the favour by humouring the prejudices of the mob? Falsehood, truly intrigue! manoeuvre! Where did ever titled suitor for promotion lay his plots more cunningly, or spread more wide his net, or plant more pensively in the fire those irons by which the waiters upon royal bounty forge to themselves and to their country chains, that they may also make the ladder they are to mount by, than the patriot of the city did to delude the multitude, whose slave he made himself, that he might be rewarded with their sweet voices, and so rise to wealth and to power? When he penned the letter of cant about administering justice, rather than join in a procession to honour the accession of a prince whom in a private petition he covered over thick and threefold. with the slime of his flattery, he called it himself a “manœuvre." When he delivered a rant about liberty before the reverend judges of the land-the speaking law of the land-he knew full well that he was not delighting those he

addressed, but the mob out of doors, on whose ears the trash was to be echoed back. When he spoke a speech in Parliament of which no one heard a word, and said aside to a friend who urged the fruitlessness of the attempt at making the House listen-" Speak it I must, for it has been printed in the newspapers this half-hour"-he confessed that he was acting a false part in one place to compass a real object in another; as thoroughly as ever minister did when he affected by smiles to be well in his prince's good graces before the multitude, all the while knowing that he was receiving a royal rebuke. When he and one confederate in the private room of a tavern issued a declaration, beginning, "We, the people of England," and signed "by order of the meeting," he practised as gross a fraud upon that people as ever peer or parasite did, when affecting to pine for the prince's smiles, and to be devoted to his pleasure, in all the life they led consecrated to the furtherance of their own. It is no object of mine to exalt courtly arts, or undervalue popular courses; no wish have I to overestimate the claims of aristocracy at the cost of lowering the people. Both departments of our mixed social structure demand equally our regard; but let the claims of both be put on their proper footing. We may say, and very sincerely say, with Cicero-" Omnes boni semper nobilitati favemus, et quia utile est reipublicæ nobiles homines esse dignos majoribus suis; et quia valet, apud nos, clarorum hominum et bene de republica meritorum memoria, etiam mortuorum." (Pro. Sext.) These are the uses, and these the merits of the aristocratic branch of our system; while the mean arts of the courtier only degrade the patrician character. But mean as they are, their vileness does not exceed that of the like arts practised towards the multitude; nor is the Sovereign Prince whose ear the flatterers essay to tickle that they may deceive him for their own purposes, more entirely injured by the deception which withholds the truth, than the Sovereign People is betrayed and undone by those who, for their own vile ends, pass their lives in suppressing wholesome truth, and propagating popular delusion,