auditor of the Exchequer for life, which office purports or pretends to be the post of the officer who is to examine and check the accounts of the first lord of the Treasury. To unite the two offices; to set a man to audit; that is to say, to examine and check, his own accounts; this seemed to be a thing impossible; it seemed to be what the poet calls

"To solder close impossibilities

"And make them kiss."

That, however, which was clearly impossible with all the rest of mankind; that which had never existed before, except in the imagination of that poet who had conjured up ghosts and witches to aid him in carrying on his dramatic designs; that which seemed a thing so monstrous as not to be suffered to exist in real life; that thing the Whig faction found the means of accomplishing.

113. The office of auditor of the Exchequer, though a perfect sinecure in the person of the auditor, had been in the hands of Lord GRENVILLE for about twenty years. In the accounts since laid before parliament, the income of this office is stated at four thousand pounds a year; so that, at the time when Lord GRENVILLE became prime minister, he had drawn from the public purse about eighty thousand pounds on account of this sinecure alone; besides having been a secretary of state or speaker of the House of Commons about eighteen years of that time;

and having on account of those offices, drawn about six thousand pounds a year. The nation thought that something nearly approaching to two hundred thousand pounds might have satis fied a man for twenty years of services; but, still he wanted to retain the office of auditor of the Exchequer, though now become first lord of the Treasury. To enable him to do this was against all rule, as well as against all reason; it was against all precedent; and, therefore, an act of parliament for this express purpose was resorted to: and, as if to make the manner of doing the thing as odious as the matter was offensive to the nation, this act was brought into the House of Commons by CHARLES FOX himself, who had oftentimes reproached this Lord GRENVILLE with having been one of the chief instruments in the producing and in the prolonging of that war which had brought such hardships upon the people, and the country into such danger. This was the first act of the Whig administration; the second was, the bringing into England from Hanover a body of troops to serve in England and Ireland while English and Irish soldiers were employed in fighting the battles of Germany abroad. There was already a body of such troops serving in these countries: when PITT introduced them, the Whigs reproached him with breach of the constitution, and with sinister designs as to the liberties of the country; but having grasped hold

of power themselves, they lost scarcely a month before they added to the number of those troops. At that time the tax on income, or property, which tax the Whigs had opposed as to its very principle; they had over and over again protested against it; had declared it to be a confiscation of men's estates; had called it a tax levied by force, like the contributions of a highwayman; had loaded it with every epithet calculated to excite resentment against those by whom it was imposed and upheld: this tax they found at six and a quarter per cent. upon men's incomes; and, instead of abolishing it, instead of lowering it, they at once raised it from six and a quarter to ten per cent.! The manner was here, again, full as offensive as the matter; for, Fox, in speaking in support of the measure, insisted solely upon the necessity of it, and added, that people must do as they could; if they were compelled to move from the first floor to the second, and found themselves unable to remain even there; they must go from the second floor to the garret. In such a case as this, the writer of history can have no authority, except in rare cases, other than the reports published by newspaper reporters. I do not, therefore, pledge myself for the perfect correctness of this saying of Mr. Fox; but I pledge myself for its substance, and for the general discontent and disgust that it excited. The chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord HENRY PETTY, now

Marquess of Lansdowne, had, like all his predecessors, and all his successors, a new scheme of finance; and a report was laid upon the table of the house in a large volume describing this scheme, of which it is necessary only to say that it proposed to pay off the whole of the national debt in the course of comparatively few years, the projector taking the precaution that the debt should not be extinguished too soon nor too suddenly! The mirth and contempt excited by this species of imbecility were soon, however, supplanted by a general alarm at the project of taxation which this chancellor had prepared. Two projected taxes particularly gave great offence, and, indeed, roused the resentment of the country: the one was a tax on pig iron, and the other a tax on home-brewed beer. Thus, men saw the exciseman coming, at last, to superintend the iron furnaces, and to put their gaugingrules into the barrels in the cellars of private houses. People exclaimed, parodying the words of scripture, that the little finger of the Whigs was heavier than the loins of the Tories! The war, for undertaking and persevering in which they had condemned PITT in the most vociferous manner, from 1793 to the year 1801; and for renewing which they had reproached ADDINGTON, in 1803, which renewal they denominated by every term expressive of breach of faith and of perfidy; that war, after a pretended attempt to put an end

to it, which attempt was a mere blind, they carried on with more expense and extravagance than ever; they found England at peace with the King of Prussia with whom they went to war solely on the ground that he had committed an act of aggression on Hanover; and, upon that occasion, the prime minister, who spoke for the rest, of course, said that Hanover ought to be considered as dear to us as Hampshire. They granted more pensions without public services, during the fifteen months that they were in power, than had ever been granted at any former period in a like space of time. Keeping in mind their former professions, they were approached with complaints of abuses which the people hoped that they should now have redressed. These applications, however respectful and humble, they received with more contumely than their predecessors had ever exhibited on similar former occasions; and, finally, not to dwell longer on the enumeration of their offences, they bore themselves towards the people with a loftiness, a haughtiness, with disdain and with insolence such as had never been beheld in any ministry that had gone before them. As to parlia mentary reform, not a word escaped them on the subject; and, if spoken of by any independent member of parliament, or any-body else, they treated it with that derision with which men treat the words of an idiot.