that he could not recover, his brother and Lady Louisa were allowed to see him. Their presence gave him visible pleasure, though his intellects sometimes wandered, and in a few hours he breathed his last. He had frequently and devoutly been engaged in prayer, and had desired the surgeon, on the evening before he expired, to read to him the history of our Saviour's death. His aunt had the comfort of believing that his mind was made up to his situation, and that such a heart and such a mind might meet his God. The friends whom he was entangled with,' she said, pushed his destruction forward, screening themselves behind his valuable character.' And now,' said the Duke of Richmond, the best friends to poor Edward's memory must wish to have as little said of the past as possible.'

On Lord Edward Fitzgerald's monument, indeed, as on Lord Byron's, implora pace might be written. But Mr. Moore will not allow them even so much of the mercy of oblivion, as the public, in humanity toward the living as well as the dead, would have accorded. He represents Lord Edward as the hero and martyr of a good cause; he dedicates the present work to a lady, as the memoirs of her Illustrious Relative; and he says, that while on those who so long refused the just claims of the Irish people lies the blame of whatever excesses they were ultimately driven to, the concession, late, but effectual, of those measures of emancipation and reform which it was the first object of Lord Edward and his brave associates to obtain, has set a seal upon the general justice of their cause, which no power of courts or courtiers can ever do away.' The general justice of the cause, and the particular excesses of its defenders and champions, cohere as well, it would seem, in the biographer's views, as the blessing everybody in general, and damning all bishops in particular, in Wolfe Tone's Drunken Diary. Emancipation and Reform were topics used by Mr. Moore's heroes as archers of old used stalking horses; they were levers for deadlier designs. They asked for these measures, because they knew that many who looked for nothing further would thus be drawn in to cooperate with them, up to a certain point; and because they considered them as preliminaries to a revolution, and a separation of the two countries,-objects upon which they were bent at whatever cost.

Having to his own satisfaction established the justice of the conspirators' cause, Mr. Moore proceeds to consider whether the probability of success was such as to justify their appeal to arms; and upon this ground also he pronounces the conspirators justified. He then enters at some length into Lord Edward's military views, and concludes this part of his subject with a paper which was found in his lordship's writing-box, containing a plan of

insurrectionary tactics. Lord Edward's reason for writing and intending to print this, was to remind the people of discussing military subjects.' How far the publication may tend now to answer a similar end to that for which it was originally designed, is a question that might have suggested itself to the Editor.

Mr. Moore has printed a noticeable passage in one of Lord Byron's letters to himself. I have been turning over Little,' says his Lordship, which I knew by heart in 1803, being then in my fifteenth summer. Heigh ho! I believe all the mischief I have ever done or sung, has been owing to that confounded book of yours.' Well will it be for Mr. Moore if this present work does not produce a similar effect, and that too in happier and better constituted minds. Well will it be, if some generous and noble-minded youth, like Robert Emmet, or Lord Edward himself, be not seduced by it to take as an example what, if it were exhibited at all, ought to have been exhibited as a warning. For that the concession of Catholic Emancipation has tranquillized Ireland, no man is impudent enough to assert; and that the largest measure of Reform can tranquillize it, which O'Connell could ask, or a ministry ready to accommodate him in anything would accord, is what O'Connell himself does not believe. He who prophesies of ills, has before him a mournful prospect; but far more dreadful will be the retrospect of those who have done all in their power to bring upon their country the miseries of rebellion and revolution!

We conclude with transcribing Lord Byron's graceful Sonnet to his late Majesty on the reversal of Lord Edward Fitzgerald's attainder :

To be the father of the fatherless,

To stretch the hand from the throne's height, and raise

His offspring, who expired in other days

To make thy sire's sway by a kingdom less

This is to be a monarch, and repress

Envy into unutterable praise.

Dismiss thy guard, and trust thee to such traits,

For who would lift a hand, except to bless?
Were it not easy, Sir, and is 't not sweet
To make thyself beloved! and to be
Omnipotent by mercy's means! for thus
Thy sovereignty would grow but more complete,
A despot thou, and yet thy people free,
And by the heart, not hand, enslaving us.'

ART.

ART. VIII.-The London Gazette for October 20th, 1831. Rules and Regulations of the Privy Council concerning the Cholera.

WE

WE are obliged to recur to a very painful subject, in consequence of the impression left on our minds, by the perusal of these directions, that the government of this country neither have done, nor are doing, nor even as yet contemplate doing, what we conceive to be their duty in relation to that pestilence which hovers at our doors. A hundred and fifty years have elapsed since any such visitation occurred in this happy island, and men of all conditions had been lulled, through long security, into a practical disbelief that the like may occur again. We mean no reproach to the present ministers in particular, when we state the fact that they appear to us to have taken up the consideration of the subject too late, and to have at length entered upon it feebly. We cannot forget how narrowly the government of Lord Liverpool, but a few years ago, escaped being seduced by our anticontagionist reasoners into the repeal of all our laws respecting the plague.

History records instances of pestilence in which the mortality has been as great as in the cholera-others, in which the suddenness of the transition from life to death has been as appalling— and perhaps some few, in which the agonies of death have been not less excruciating; but no disease has ever before presented so fearful a combination of these three features-of extensive mortality -concentrated power of destruction-and exquisite anguish of suffering.

What has been done to meet this fatal contagion? One Board of Health has been established, and it has issued two documents. The first of these (lithographed in July) was made up of recommendations totally inapplicable and impracticable in a society such as ours, and which, if enforced, must have burthened us with evils yet more intolerable than those of death by cholera. Our wives and daughters, in the event of illness, were to be torn from us and thrust into lazarhouses; the rest of our families were to choose between the alternative of accompanying their sick kindred to the pest-house, or being placed, perhaps among the refuse of society, in a lazaretto, until time had shown that they might return to their own dwellings without danger to the public safety. Our houses, meantime, if the malady had visited them, were to be surrendered into the absolute keeping of Expurgators'-outcasts, probably, capable of, and tempted to every crime! The government, we must suppose, have the merit of detecting-at their leisure-the absurdity of thus ap

6

plying to Great Britain the plague code of the garrison of Malta! and hence certain important modifications of the Board's original views, in the regulations of the 20th of October. But this second document, however superior to the first is, still far from being a satisfactory one. The advice it contains (for it

is but advice) is of so general a nature, and so loosely worded, that we doubt if any individual has been thereby guided to frame for himself and his household a more efficient system of prophylactics than a very moderate exercise of unprofessional common sense might have at once suggested. It may be said that the Board have been deterred from going into details, by the dread of exaggerating alarm; but we cannot shut our eyes to the equal impolicy and inhumanity of being held back, under such circumstances, by such considerations. The fatal consequences of ignorance have been written black and strong in every history of pestilence. The amount of evil has always been in proportion to the want of knowledge and preparation. Witness Marseilles, where, in the language of an eye-witness, the rich found no protection -the poor no aid;' witness the massacres during the plague of Messina-the fearful anarchy which has attended the footsteps of this cholera throughout Persia-witness various towns of Hindostan, where the whole population rushed in despair into the country, and leaving their own valuables to destruction, spread the pestilence far and wide about them-and the islands of the Indian Ocean, where Europeans were butchered on the shore, in sight of British ships and Spanish soldiery. We are, in fact, inclined to attribute the diminishing mortality of cholera, as it has advanced into comparatively civilized regions, much less to any considerable mitigation of its virus, than to the superior arrangements as to hospitals and police, especially adopted in foresight of its eruption.

When we compare our own country with those European states as yet ravaged by cholera, so far from finding grounds to justify comparative neglect on the part either of government or of individuals here, we are constrained to arrive at a far different conclusion. Allowing all that can be asked for, as to the many points in which we are favourably distinguished-especially the morality and cleanliness characteristic of great classes not elsewhere so far advanced-and the skilfulness of our medical men-we are still forced to suspect, that on the whole, the balance may be struck against us. We have great towns in a proportion prodigiously beyond any other European empire-London with probably 1,500,000 inhabitants, Dublin with 400,000, Glasgow and Manchester with 200,000 each-five cities all above 100,000Edinburgh, Liverpool, Birmingham, Bristol, and Cork—at least fourteen, of from 30,000 to 60,000-and about thirty, ranging from

15,000 to 30,000 Our inland commerce and habits of life are such as to connect all parts of the country together in a style wholly unexampled. The extent and rapidity of our means of conveyance have never been approached. Then our, in general circumstances, admirable policy of doing everything to excite competition, has rendered us dependent on each other-on individual arrangements and exertions, even for the necessaries of life, to a degree unheard of in any other kingdom. The proportion of the people immediately dependent on the government for support, in the shape of soldiery, &c., is as nothing; and there is a corresponding deficiency of those magazines which almost everywhere else are at hand in case of a famine. Lastly, except in one or two places, we are more destitute of a police than any community in the world. Every historian of pestilence, from Thucydides to Jonnès, abounds in awful descriptions of the outburst of crime that ine vitably attends such visitations; and as it is obvious that this can only proceed from the suspension of usual occupations, it is needful to inquire what occupations are the most sure to be interrupted-and what nation can ever have had such reason for fear, in the prospect of such a calamity, as the one that possesses the most enormous proportion of manufacturers that the world has ever witnessed?

Have the king's ministers endeavoured to bring home to their own minds the effects of a sudden paralyzation of commerce through every limb of our body politic? Have they tried to calculate the consequences of prodigious masses of artisans-and in times like these too-being sunk at once to the depths of pauperism? Have they considered the necessity of guarding us, in case of the evil coming upon us in its most frightful form, against the rapacity of monopolists as respects food and fuel? Have they begun to think of public stores of bread (in all pestilences the mortality is fiercest among bakers?) Have they begun to make arrangements as to hospitals? Have they warned our medical officers, naval and military, that their services may be called for at a moment's notice? Have they considered what ought to be done as to the supply of our markets-the supply of medicine and medical skill to a population dislocated in all its joints, and stricken in all its resources-the regulations as to travellers, inns, and public conveyances of all kinds? Have they even dreamed of the enormous burden of care that may within a week devolve on them as a cabinet?

The country has a right to expect much from the government, and we are sure the country will give every support to the government if they do their duty, and act and order with the energy and precision which the case demands. When we reflect on the good

sense,