The celebrated Burke, in that magnanimous partiality which disposed him to overlook the vices of individuals in the effect of their measures, has given a high-flown panegyric on the administration of Walpole; but the whole is a brilliant paradox. He looked only to the strength of the Brunswick succession, and, taking his stand upon that height, from which he surveyed grand results alone, neglected or disdained to examine into the repulsive detail. Seeing before him a national harvest of peace and plenty, he never condescended to look to the gross and offensive material by which the furrow was fertilised. Nothing is more certain, than that the daily acts of Walpole would now stamp a ministry with shame—that no man would dare now to express the sentiments which form the maxims of the minister; and that any one of the acts which, though they passed with many a sneer, yet passed with practical impunity, in the days of George II., would have ruined the proudest individual, and extinguished the most powerful cabinet, of the last fifty years. The arguments which Lord Hervey puts into the lips of the Queen are scarcely less corrupt in another style. She tells the King not merely that Walpole’s long experience and known abilities would make him the best minister, but that his simply being in power would make him the most submissive—that his having made a vast fortune already would make him less solicitous about his own interest—that _new_ leeches would be more hungry, and that, Walpole’s fortune being made, he would have nothing in view but serving the King, and securing the government, to keep what he had got—closing all this grave advice with that maxim of consummate craft, that in royal breasts both enmity and friendship alike should always give way to policy. If such were to be regarded as the habitual rules of the highest rank, well might we remonstrate against their baseness. The bigotry of James, or the morals of Charles II., would be preferable to this scandalous selfishness. But those maxims have never found tolerance among the people of England. We are to recollect that they came from a despotic soil, that they were the wisdom of courts where the great corrective of state-craft, public opinion, was unknown; that they were the courage of the timid, and the integrity of the intriguing; and that the maxims, the manners, and the system, have alike been long since consigned to a deserved and contemptuous oblivion.