Such is the force of opinion, that we would undertake to drive a first Minister from his place and out of the country, by merely being allowed to hire a number of dirty boys to hoot him along the streets from his own house to the treasury and from the treasury back again. How would a certain distinguished character, remarkable for uniting the _suaviter in modo_ with the _fortiter in re_, and who, with an invariable consistency in his political principles, carries the easiness of his temper to a degree of apparent _non-chalance_, bear to have a starling in his neighbourhood taught to repeat nothing but Walcheren, or to ring the changes in his ears upon the names of Castles, Oliver, and Reynolds? Can we wonder then at the feats which such Ministers have performed with the Attorney-General at their backs, and the country at their heels, in full cry against every one who was not a creature of the Ministers,—for whose morals they could not vouch as government-spies, or whose talents they did not reward as government-critics?—Mr. Coleridge, in his Literary Biography, lately published, complains with pathetic bitterness of the wanton and wilful slanders formerly circulated with so much zeal in the Anti-Jacobin against himself, Mr. Southey, and his other poetical friends, merely for a difference of political opinion; and he significantly assigns these slanders as the reason why himself and his friends remained so long adverse to the party who were the authors of them! We will venture to go a little further, and say, that they were not only the reason of their long estrangement from the Court-party, but of their final reconciliation to it. They had time to balance and reflect, and to make a choice of evils—they deliberated between the loss of principle and of character, and they were undone. They thought it better to be the accomplices of venality and corruption than the mark for them to shoot their arrows at: they took shelter from the abuse by joining in the cry. Mr. Southey says that he has not changed his principles, but that circumstances have changed, and that he has grown wiser from the events of five-and-twenty years. How is it that his present friend and associate in the Quarterly Review, who was formerly a contributor to the Beauties of the Anti-Jacobin, has not changed too? The world has gone round in his time too, but he remains firm to his first principles. He worships the sun wherever he sees it. Court-favour, ‘the cynosure of longing eyes,’ sheds a more steady influence on its votaries than vague popularity. The confined, artificial air of a Court has a wonderful effect in stopping that progress of the mind with the march of events, of which Mr. Southey boasts, and prematurely fixes the volatility of genius in a _caput mortuum_ of prejudice and servility, in those who are admitted within the magic circle! The Anti-Jacobin poet and orator, Mr. Canning, has not become a renegado to the opinions of