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times this country was a heptarchy, it now a strange sort of pentarchy, divided into five several distinct principalities, besides the supreme. There is indeed this difference from the Saxon times, that as in the itinerant exhibitions of the stage, for want of a complete company, they are obliged to throw a variety of parts on their chief performer; so our sovereign condescends himself to act, not only the principal, but all the subordinate parts in the play. Cross a brook, and you lose the king of England; but you have some comfort in coming again under his Majesty, though " shorn of his beams," and no more than prince of Wales. Go to the north, and you find him dwindle to a duke of Lancaster: turn to the west of that north, and he pops upon you in the humble character of earl of Chester : travel a few miles on, the earl of Chester disappears, and the king surprises you again as count palatine of Lancaster : if you travel beyond Mount Edgecombe, you find him once more in his incognito, and he is duke of Cornwall; so that, quite fatigued and satiated with this dull variety, you are infinitely refreshed when you return to the sphere of his proper splendor.

But the great evil in every one of those principalities was a regular establishment of considerable expense, and most domineering influence; and as his Majesty submitted to appear in such a state of subordination to himself, his loyal peers and faithful commons attended his royal transformations, and were not so nice as to refuse to nibble at those crumbs of emoluments, which consoled their petty metamorphoses. Every one of those principalities had the apparatus of a kingdom, for the jurisdiction over a few private estates; and the formality and charge of the exchequer of Great Britain, for collecting the rents of a country 'squire. The duchy and county palatine of Lancaster did not yield on an average four thousand pounds a year, to the crown. As to Wales, and the county palatine of Chester, it was a matter of doubt whether their productive exchequer yielded any returns at all; yet this revenue was more faithfully applied to its purposes than any of the rest, as it existed for the sole purpose of multiplying offices, and extending influence.

Here Mr. BURKE introduces a very laughable description of an attempt made by the minister to improve the local influence of the principality of Wales, and to transfer it to the fund of general corruption. The orator presents to our view a Mr. JOHN PROBERT, a knighterrant, dubbed by the noble lord, in the blue ribbon, and sent to search for revenues and adventures upon the mountains of Wales. But the Preux Chevalier was no sooner arrived on the confines, than he found all Wales in arms to meet him. Since the invasion of king EDWARD, and the massacre of the bards, there never was such a tumult, and alarm, and uproar, through the region of Prestatyn. Snowden shook to its base-Cader Edris was loosened from its foundations. The fury of litigious war blew her horn on the mountains. The rocks poured down their goat-herds, and the deep caverns vomited out their miners. Every thing above ground, and every thing under ground, was in arms. The knight went to look for revenue, like his masters upon other occasions; and, like his masters, he found rebellion. The wise Britons thought it more reasonable that the poor, wasted, decrepid revenue of the principality should die a natural than a violent death. They chose that their ancient moss-grown, castles should moulder into decay, under the silent touches of time, and the slow formality of an oblivious and drowsy exchequer, than that they should be battered down all at once by the lively efforts of a pensioned engineer. [Mr. PROBERT had been appointed with a pension of 300l. a year from the said principality, to try whether he could improve its revenue.] As it is the fortune of the noble lord, under whose auspices the enterprise had been set on foot, frequently to provoke resistance, so it was his rule and nature to yield to that resistance in all cases whatsoever. He submitted with spirit to the spirited remonstrances of the Welsh. Mr. PROBERT gave up his adventure, and keeps his pension-and so ends " the famous history of the revenue adventures of the bold baron NORTH, and the good knight PROBERT, upon the mountains of Vinodotia."

ance.

It was nearly the same with the revenues of all the other principalities-to do nothing with them was extinction-to improve them was oppression-they all abounded with ridiculous fooleries, which served no other purpose than to keep alive corrupt hope and servile dependMr. BURKE therefore proposed to unite all the five principalities to the crown, and to its ordinary jurisdiction; to abolish all those offices that produce an useless and chargeable separation from the body of the people;--to compensate those who did not hold their offices (if any such there were) at the pleasure of the

crown; to extinguish vexatious titles by an act of short limitation; to sell those unprofitable estates which supported useless jurisdictions; and to turn a tenant-right into a fee, on such moderate terms as would be better for the state than its present right, and which it would be impossible for any rational tenant to refuse. He wished to extend a similar plan of reform to the landed estates of the crown, to throw them into the mass of private property; by which they would come through the course of circulation, and though the political secretions of the state, into well-regulated revenue.

Mr. BURKE's next step was to the supreme body of the civil government itself, which he approached, he said, with that awe and reverence with which a young physician approaches to the cure of the disorders of his patient. "Upon this ground of the civil list, the first

thing in dignity and charge that attracts our notice," says Mr. BURKE, "is the royal household. This establishment, in my opinion, is exceedingly abusive in its constitution. It is formed in many respects upon manners and customs that have long since expired. In the first place, it is formed in many respects upon feudal principles. In the feudal times it was not uncommon, even among subjects, for the lowest offices to be held by considerable persons; persons as unfit by their incapacity, as improper from their rank, to occupy such employments. They were held by patent, sometimes for life, and sometimes by inheritance. If my memory does not deceive me, a person of no slight consideration held the office of patent hereditary cook to an earl of Warwick. The earl of Warwick's soups, I fear, were not the better for the dignity of his kitchen. There was some reason in ancient necessities for these ancient customs. Protection was wanted, and the domestic tie, though not the highest, was the closest. The king's household has not only several strong traces of this feudality, but it is formed also upon the principles of a body corporate: it has its own magistrates, courts, and bye-laws. This might be necessary in the ancient times, in order to have a government within itself, capable of regulating the vast and often unruly multitude, which composed and attended it. This was the origin of the ancient court, called the Green Cloth, composed of the marshal, treasurer, and other great officers of the household, with certain clerks. The rich subjects of the kingdom, who had formerly the same establishments, (only on a reduced scale) have since altered their economy, and turned the course of their expense to the maintenance of vast establishments within their walls, to the employment of a great variety of independent trades abroad. Their influence is lessened; but a mode of accommodation, and a style of splendor suited to the manners of the times, has been increased. Royalty itself has insensibly followed; and the royal household has been carried away by the resistless tide of manners; but with this very material difference, private men have got rid of the establishments along with the reasons of them, whereas the royal household has lost all that was stately and venerable in the antique manners, without retrenching any thing of the cumbrous charge of a Gothic establishment. But when the reason of old establishments is gone, it is absurd to preserve nothing but the burthen of them. This is superstitiously to embalm a carcase not worth an ounce of the gums that are used to preserve it. It is to burn precious oils in the tomb: it is to offer meat and drink to the dead, not so much an honour to the deceased, as a disgrace to the survivors. Our palaces are vast inhospitable halls. There the bleak winds, there "Boreas and Eurus, and Caurus, and Argestes loud" howling through the vacant lobbies, and clattering the doors of deserted guard-rooms, appal the imagination, and conjure up the grim spectres of departed tyrants, the Saxon, the Norman, and the Dane, the stern EDWARDS, and fierce HENRIES, who stalk from desolation to desolation, through the dreary vacuity and melancholy succession of chill and comfortless chambers. When this tumult subsides, a dead and still more frightful silence would reign in this desert, if every now and then the tacking of hammers did not announce that those constant attendants, upon all courts in all ages, jobs, were still alive, for whose sake alone it is, that any trace of ancient grandeur is suffered to remain. These palaces are a true emblem of some governments: the inhabitants are decayed; but the governors and magistrates still flourish. They put me in mind of Old Sarum, where the representatives, more in number than the constituents, only serve to inform us, that this was once a place of trade, and sounding with the " busy hum of men," though now you can only trace the streets by the colour of the corn, and its sole manufacture is in members of parliament.