of reason and honest conviction. "All honourable men"—no hypocrites amongst them—
"But all is conscience and tender heart."
They have deserted the cause of liberty in as far as it deserted them; but no farther. No sinister motives, no disappointed expectations from a new order of things, no places to be got under the old, no laureatships, no editorships, no popular odium to contend with, no court-smiles to inveigle, have had any weight with them, or can be supposed to have had any. They could not tolerate wrong on any side, on the side of kings, or of the people. That's all. They have changed sides to preserve the integrity of their principles and the consistency of their characters. They have gone over to the strong side of the question, merely to shew the conscious purity of their motives; and they chose the moment of the total failure of all hopes from the weaker side to desert to the stronger, to put the matter out of all doubt. They are not only above corruption, but above suspicion. They have never once been at fault, have neither sneaked nor shuffled, botched or boggled, in their politics. They who were loud against the abuses of a principle which they set out with considering as sacred, the right of a people to chuse their own form of government, have not turned round to flatter and to screen, with the closeness of their fulsome embraces, the abuses of a power which they set out with treating as monstrous, the right of a discarded family to reign over a nation in perpetuity by the grace of God. They "whose love of liberty was of that dignity that it went hand in hand even with the vow they made this virgin bride," have not stooped to "commit whoredom greedily" with that old harlot, Despotism. They "who struck the foremost man of all this world but for supporting robbers," have not contaminated their fingers with base bribes, nor turned receivers of stolen goods for paltry knaves and licensed freebooters. Nice, scrupulous, firm, inflexible, uncorrupted, incapable of injustice or disguise; patriots in 1793, and royalists in 1816; at all times ex-
