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By a curious coincidence Disraeli had visited a signal retribution upon those who had deserted and persecuted Canning from jealousy and envy of his surpassing gifts; and now he who had been the avenger was in his turn to be the sufferer. He had "achieved greatness," as Canning had done, by genius alone. Without connexion, influence, or family, he had wrested the leadership of one great party from the hands of an illustrious and sagacious statesman, and had for ten years denounced the organised hypocrisy of the other. He had won the prize of his high aims, and by his "vaulting ambition" had reached a proud pre-eminence. But he had won it only to commence, like Canning, a hopeless struggle with relentless opponents. Every single statesman of either party was arrayed against him;-there they sat, cold, keen, and stern, waiting for their time. And now their time was come. They had forced him-him, untried and utterly inexperienced as he was, holding the high office which had tasked the talents of Pitt and Peel- they had forced him to a premature exposition of his policy, and then they had united their utmost abilities to dissect and to defeat it; to discover fallacies and detect flaws; to expose, criticise, and to denounce. During a whole week they had baited him; night after night they had derided and ridiculed him, taunted and twitted him, scoffed and scouted him. They had scornfully bidden him "take back his budget" and "mend it," and "try again." They had done this with cruel craft, at once to torture him and secure their triumph; for he had proudly said, in that marvellous oration of nearly six hours' duration in which he had opened his policy, "I will not be a minister on sufferance;" and he had also said, in the same lofty spirit, "I will not condescend to plead for a ministry, but I will advocate a policy." They had an instinctive consciousness of the pride of genius; they wished to provoke it to the utmost, to make their victory sure. They knew he could only make a final reply; he had hardly one colleague to assist him even with the aid of mediocrity. There he sat, in the loneliness of genius, conscious that scarcely from one there could he expect that sympathy which similarity of soul inspires, and from none any assistance he cared to receive; with an air at once of haughty apathy and lofty abstraction, he scarcely seemed to hear, and not at all to feel. The scoffs of statesmen keen and acute, like Goulburn and Graham; the petty shafts of each light witling, or the laboured efforts of each heavy dunce; -all passed seemingly unheeded, his face bearing that cold, changeless look which in natures such as his, covers depths of smouldering emotion, like snow upon a volcano. So he sat, hour after hour, night after night, the full black eye gazing upon vacancy, his pale face veiled in apathy.

But his hour at last arrived. The fourth night was waning rapidly away-it wanted less than two hours of midnight-the exhausted energies of the House were instantly awakened. His rising was the signal for an eager rush for places; and as he rose, the memory of the chivalrous spirit in which he had waged the unequal warfare-the consciousness of all that he had encountered and endured-a sense of the fearful odds against which he had to contend-and admiration of the quiet courage with which he bore up so bravely, all this called forth a burst of cheers, which rarely greets an orator before he has spoken.

From the first, although his usual air, half-easy and half-haughty, did not desert him, they saw that feelings long restrained and painfully excited were struggling to escape and panting for expression. Nor was it difficult to imagine what those feelings were,-emotions not of mortification at his defeat, but of scorn for his foes. Although he so far subdued his feelings as to grapple for an hour with an argument of Graham,

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with such cool collectedness and surpassing skill as secured complete success, yet ever and anon the lightning of his scorn flashed forth, playing over the heads of his enemies like casual coruscations of the electric current which precede a fearful outburst. At length that scorn broke out in all its scathing fire upon his foes. He knew his fate, but his was not the mere energy of despair; it was not anger at being vanquished, but hatred of the hypocrisy of the victors. Indignation at the accusations that had been made against him struggled with scorn for his assailants; he retorted upon them a sarcasm which was crushing. His voice rang out like a trumpet: "The statesman who charges me with recklessly increasing the amount of direct taxation proposed a housetax larger in amount than the one I have proposed." Hardly heeding the cheers which broke from his now excited adherents, he proceeded in a higher key: "But is this all?—is this all that has been done by the statesman who charges me with proposing 'recklessly to increase the direct taxation of the country?"" These latter words were said with cutting bitterness; and the tone was electrical in which he cried out, pointing his extended hand at Sir Charles Wood and turning round to his supporters with an expression of contempt that cannot be conceived, Why, there is the Minister who, with a property-tax producing its full amount, and the window-tax which brought in two millions, came down to the House of Commons and proposed to the startled assembly to double the income-tax." The hand pointed at poor Sir Charles, the look and accents of indignant reproach, like the thunders of those cheers which echoed its expression, all concurred to remind one of a fatal flood of lightning brought down upon some doomed head. But the storm had only commenced; flash succeeded flash with rapid succession. "Is this all? The most curious thing is (such a sneering tone here!), that the Minister at the first whisper of an opposition withdrew his proposition! What was the ground on which he made this monstrous and enormous proposition, which only the safety of the state could have justified? When he was beaten, baffled, humiliated (inexpressible the intense contemptuousness with which these words were slowly uttered!), he came forward and said that he thought he had sufficient revenue without resorting to it!" "Talk of recklessness! Why, what in the history of finance is equal to his recklessness! The future historian will not be believed, when he tells that the Minister came down one day to double the income-tax, and the next day came down and said that he found the ways and means were ample!" Such an intensity of irony had never been heard as characterised the utterance of the latter words, and the effect of these repeated appeals to the passions of the House was now tremendous. Scarcely had the thunders which this passage provoked subsided, when the indignant irony suddenly changed into tones of a deep and concentrated sarcasm. "And then he tells me, in language not very polished and scarcely parliamentary, that I do not know my business!" After a tremendous burst of cheering, breathing all the angry passion which this sarcasm inspired, there was a moment's pause; Disraeli seemed wrestling with his feelings and subduing them into a deadly calmness, as he said, looking downwards as one does who is suffering a fierce internal contest, or gathering himself up for a terrific blow: "He may have learnt his business!' The House of Commo: s is the best judge of that; I care not to be his critic. But if he has "learnt his business,' he has yet to learn some other things-(raising his head, and looking full in the face of Sir Charles,-that petulance is not sarcasm, and that insolence is not eloquence!" The violence of the cheering which was elicited by this outburst shewed how thoroughly the bulk

of his party sympathised in and shared his vehemence of feeling, and the excitement was unprecedented. For some time Disraeli proceeded, as if exhausted by his own emotions, in a milder tone. But towards the close he broke out again in the same strain as before: "I am told to take back my budget. I was told that Mr. Pitt once withdrew his budget, and that more recently other persons have done so too. I do not aspire to the fame of Mr. Pitt;" (a pause, and then with crushing sarcasm), "but I will not submit to the degradation of others! No, sir, I have seen budgets withdrawn, and reproduced, and rewithdrawn; and I have seen the consequences of such a system-consequences not honourable to the Government, not advantageous to the country, not conducive to the reputation of the House. What was the consequence of a Government existing upon sufferance? why, that ignoble transaction I have described!" Amidst vehement cheering he went on in a higher tone: "When a Government cannot pass its measures, the highest principles of polity degenerate into party questions." And now he came to the close-"Yes, I know what I have to face I have to face a coalition." He said these words with look and countenance of the most scornful defiance, as he gazed on the closely serried ranks of his assailants: "The combination may be successful; but coalitions, though successful, have always found this, that their triumphs have been brief!" The tremendous cheers of his powerful party re-echoed his defiance"This I know, that the people of England have never loved coalitions!" Again the cheers came down with deafening violence. Elevating his voice, Disraeli spoke in lofty tones, "I appeal from your coalition to that public opinion which rules this country, whose irresistible decrees can control the decisions of party, and without whose support the most august and most ancient institutions"-(here his voice suddenly sank into a half stern and half melancholy)—" are but the baseless fabric of a vision!"

It was amidst a furor of excitement that he sat down. He had lashed the passions of his own party into fury, and of their opponents into frenzy; and when Gladstone rose, and in tones of severe reprehension gave expression to the resentment which the sarcasms of Disraeli had aroused, the indignant cheers on one side were met by defiant cheers on the other, and their united thunders completely drowned the voice of the orator who had risen to reply. As he grew more angry, the other side grew more enraged; and it was amidst constant interruption that he succeeded in delivering his opening sentences of rebuke for the "license with which the Chancellor had spoken of public men." While he spoke, the countenance of Disraeli was a study of scorn-cold, passionless scorn: his head back, his countenance pallid, and settled into its usual aspect of apathy; you could scarcely see a trace of the vehement emotions with which he had just been working up the House into a torrent and tempest of excitement, which now raged and roared all around him, while he sat still and stern, as if no human passions stirred his soul. He had spoken from ten o'clock at night until one in the morning; it was amidst a terrific storm of thunder and lightning that at that hour he sat downone of those remarkable coincidences which mark the events of great men's lives. The storm of nature raged without; the storm of human passions raged within. He alone, amidst all this crowded assembly, seemed to sit unmoved. It was the hour of his fate; he knew what that fate would be. He had faced his enemies; he faced them still, proudly but coldly. He seemed as though he felt not, as if all was passed with him; and there was something in his countenance which recalled the melancholy cadence of those concluding words of his; words which

struck with such a solemn sound upon the ear of all who heard, and which they will hereafter recal as the knell of human ambition-his own among the rest—" the baseless fabric of a vision !"

SHORT NOTICES.

Mr. Manning's long-promised Sermon preached in the Synod of Oscott (London, Burns and Lambert,) has at length appeared. Its title, "Help nearest when need greatest," sufficiently indicates its subject; a truth which is most happily and eloquently illustrated by the story of the Gospel of the day on which it was preached,-the multiplication of the loaves and fishes; by the history of the Church in all ages, and more especially of our own branch of the Church, and in the present moment. If it is not so strikingly beautiful and touching a discourse as Father Newman's, preached before the same assembly, yet there are many deep thoughts and stirring words in it, worthy of the speaker and of the solemn occasion on which it was delivered.

We believe that there are persons still to be found in the world who, in spite of Father Persons in olden, and Mr. Maitland in modern times, look upon Fox's Book of Martyrs as a veritable history, and not, as the older of these critics justly described it, "the falsest volume that ever was published in any tongue." To such persons the new edition of Mr. Andrews' Critical and Historical Review of the book in question (London, M. Andrews,) would be a very wholesome medicine, if they could be persuaded to take it. We think the editors would have done well, perhaps, to have omitted the first three books of the review, and begun with the fourth, where Fox's lying begins in good earnest. In the earlier portion of his work his gross mis-statements were mostly the fruit of his intense ignorance; it is only after the year 1000 that his history becomes a tissue of malicious falsehoods. Mr. Andrews' refutation both of the one and the other is complete.

A Letter to the Lord Bishop of Chichester, assigning his Reasons for leaving the Church of England, by Robert Belaney, M.A. (London, Dolman,) adds another item to the very interesting and continually increasing class of publications to which it belongs. A collection of publications of this class that have appeared during the last ten years would furnish most ample materials for a very curious chapter in some future compitum. Mr. Belaney, late vicar of Arlington, in Sussex, appears to have been a zealous Anglican clergyman for nine or ten years, and has now been a Catholic about six months, we believe. His Letter to his late (supposed) diocesan is written in a tone of true courtesy and Christian charity, and expounds with great clearness the motives that have persuaded him, under God's grace, to give up all his worldly means, and to submit to the Catholic Church; not with any expectation that these reasons will prove satisfactory to his Lordship, but simply because they have been satisfactory to himself." They are stated very plainly, but earnestly, and exhibit in a striking way the logical necessity by which ordinary High Churchmen ought to feel themselves bound, under existing circumstances, and consistently with their own principles, to follow his example.

Mr. Huntington, whose poem on the discovery of America we noticed in our last, has just published a work of fiction in prose, The Forest (Redfield, New York; London, Dolman), which is more suc

cessful. It appears to be in some sort a continuation of one that he published some time since, and which we have not seen. It may be read, however, as an independent tale, and there are parts of it that are very interesting. With the manners of Miss de Groot and her rival, as women, we should often be disposed to quarrel; but the contrast between the firm and principled conduct of the Catholic lady and the mere purposeless, impulsive existence of the Protestant, is finely drawn, without being exaggerated. We must confess, however, to a great dislike of the principal scene in the book, the turning point of the tale, in which the hero and heroine come to a definite explanation with one another; and this is not the only passage in which we should complain of a want of sufficient delicacy. The first half of the book hangs somewhat heavily for lack of incident, whilst the last fifty pages are almost overcrowded with them. The most pleasing and successful picture is that of the pilgrimage, and every thing connected with the settlement of the Catholic Indians.

The Meditations on the Sacred Heart of Jesus, by Father C. Borgo, S. J. (London, Richardson), which we mentioned, in our last, as an appendix to Du Ponte's Meditations, have been republished in a separate form, much more convenient for general use. They are illustrated, moreover, by a very striking portrait of their saintly author.

We have seldom seen a book more clearly arranged, more ably written, and more thoroughly exhausting the subject of which it treats, than Mr. Allies' new work, St. Peter, his Name and his Office, as set forth in Holy Scripture. (London, Richardson and Son.) It is in some parts a translation of Father Passaglia's very learned commentary on the same subject; but it is a translation of the kind that we like best to see, not literal, but transferring the whole substance of the original work into another dress, framed with a particular view to the needs of the English reader, for whose benefit it is now intended. This, of course, is a work of far greater responsibility than mere literal translation into another language; but when well done, it is proportionably more valuable; and Mr. Allies has executed his task with consummate ability. He has produced a book which is not only invaluable to the controversialist, but also will be read with interest by every body who cares to see, in a single and popular instance, how wonderfully the key of Catholic doctrine unlocks the treasures of Holy Scripture. It ought also to attract the attention even of ultra-Protestants; for its argument is strictly confined to what they profess to be their only guide— the Bible. From a book whose arguments are so close and condensed as the one before us, it is not easy to disconnect passages by way of specimen. We shall best do justice to the author by giving a sketch of the plan. It presents the whole chain of scriptural evidence for the prerogatives of St. Peter that is to be found in the New Testament, beginning from the very first mention of him in the Gospels, and going on in order through the Gospels, Acts, and Epistles. In the first chapter we have a full examination of those passages in which the name of Peter was first promised, then conferred and explained. The second chapter contains all the intermediate notices of St. Peter, from this first and fundamental one down to the time of our Lord's resurrection; and these are not inaptly called the education of St. Peter for the high post for which he was destined. Next follows the actual investiture of St. Peter with the new dignity; and then a fourth chapter is devoted to an examination of the joint force of those passages which have been already treated separately. In the two next chapters the

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