their mission was, not only to keep French principles out of England, but to smother them throughout Europe. Sternly, earnestly, they kept to their purpose; forgetting, or, more probably, never having taken to heart, the prodigious expansion which the eighteenth century had produced in the human mind, and the certainty of its development in the line of liberty; whilst confounding, in one heterogeneous estimate, the unstable Gaul, the restless Pole, the high-spirited Celt, and the conservative Briton. * * * * * So Mr. Pitt’s supporters in the press, reflecting the fearsome notions of their chief, and dreading, as from the Evil One himself, the faintest breath of democracy, could only regard the “masses” as unfit for more than the mere semblance of political rights. The impossibility of phlegmatic JOHN BULL ever permitting, on his own soil, such follies and excesses as the French Jacobins had perpetrated never entered their minds. “Law and Order,” as personified in George III. and his ministers, was the only antithesis to “Anarchy.” Some of these writers lived to see the perilous consequences of the repressing system; and a few survived to note the blessings which flowed from general political enlightenment. Some, to the very last, shut their eyes to the inevitable, and could prognosticate only decay; others, sooner or later, discerned the signs of the times, and served worthily in the van of progress. Of these latter, one of the first, one of the most earnest, one of the bravest, was Mr. William Cobbett. And it is not uninteresting to note that, on the very morrow of Mr. Windham’s dinner-party, the dimness began to clear away from Cobbett’s mind. Better and nobler hopes for the future of England, founded upon something more solid than class-prescriptions, unfolded themselves; the veil began to part, behind which was hidden the framework of misgovernment alike with the skeletons of its framers; a glimmer of dawn, the expansion of which was soon to light up a path, so startlingly and unexpectedly distinct from his previous conceptions, appeared,--a path, not upon the mossy turf of favour and privilege, leading on to other mossy turves, but one trending up-hill, among stones and briers--which stones would, at last, beaten down into the earth by later footsteps, provide a firm foot-hold--which briers, refreshed by successive showers, would yet emit a sweet and blessed odour! Here is his own account; and the man, or the woman, who can read it without emotion, need scarcely go on with this history:--