Star.
London, England, 1830-05-07 00:00:00

-N,

THE ROSE AND THE BEE.

The playful Bee each blooming flower explor'd—
In wanton frolic dipt his golden wing:
The beauteous rose supplied the luscious hoard,
Unmindful of the plunderer's venom 'd sting.

Those fragrant blushes bursting to allure
The gaudy insects that around it fly ;
While in the bud those beauties lie secure,
Matur'd, grow pale, and hang its bead to die !
M. PORTER.

THE SILENT MEMBER.
Blackwood's Magazine.
Under this title have appeared in " Blackwood's Ma-
gazine ' some admirable sketches of several of the lead-
rerformers of the " collective wisdom" interspersed
with critical remarks upon the modern comedies and
farces therein enacted with vast applause. We have
noticed the sketches before, but in the last number of
the magazine there are others worthy of being quoted.
for instance, hear what the silent gentleman sayeth of
ttie dictator :
• But the Duke of Wellington—he is the man to stand
up tor a friend. He does not mince matters. " Whatever
is is right" with him in these cases. " For my part,"
raid the noble duke (and he looked round the house as if
he felt that when he declared a thing was white no one
the must presume to call it black;) " for my part," said
lie, " I cannot see one derogatory word in any part of
that letter ! My noble friend certainly intended it as
private and confidential. It was a correspondence alto-
gether of a private nature, with a person on a foreign sta-
tion ; and if other persons think fit to lay hold of such
letters, and make out of them what they like, I must say
that public business cannot be carried on at all." Really !
I " must say," my lord duke, that had I been one of the
peers to whom you thus addressed yourself, I would have
endeavoured to enlighten your grace as to the language
which a minister of the crown, a servant of the king and
the nation, ought to use upon any subject which the
House of Peers " thought fit to lay hold of," adopting
your own classic phraseology. I would also have laid hold
of another " private and confidential letter," written to one
Dr. Curtis, a Catholic priest, and asked your grace whe-
ther you saw " one derogatory word in any part of that
letter ?" Or whether that, too, was to be covered by
the mantle which you threw over your noble friend's let-
ter, when you said he was not bound to answer for the
construction which others might put upon the language
contained in it, or for the sentiments of other persons
upon the subject ? This defence, by the bye, was twice
urged by Mr. Bankes in the course of his speech. I take
it, therefore, as a defence whose validity is recognised by
his majesty's government. Ido not quarrel with it. It
is .fair and reasonable. But why is it to be made a mo-
nopoly ? Why are others to be denied the benefit of it ?
Why did not his majesty's attorney-general, that paragon
of constitutional lawyers, recognise its validity in the
case of Mr. Alexander, as well as his majesty's prime
minister in the case of my Lord Ellenborough ? I sup-
pose, however, had this question been asked, your Grace
would have met it with your standing reply, " I do not
feel myself called upon to argue that point ; ' or by your
other standing reply (for your oratory is copious), " I
must say I do not see the force of that argument."
One word more upon this piece of official cozcombry,
and I have done with it. The story of the flea-bitten
traveller at Stony Stratford must hereafter be accounted
the dullest of all dull jokes, upon inconsequential reason-
ing. Lord Ellenborough has eclipsed it for aye. " I
should suppose," said he, in reply to Lord Holland, " that
I was one of the last men in the countrz wbo could have
been charged with a wish to interfere with the independ-
ence of the judges." Why ?.—Pray guess. Do you " give
it up ?"—Listen. " The station which my noble and
learned father held ought to have protected ma from such
a charge !! !" Lend me your ear, my lord, and let me
whisper in it : your noble and learned father's title was
hereditary, but not that which earned it. Shakspeare,
or Milton, or Newton, might have been father to a first-
rate blockhead (Sir Thomas More was, and we remember
what he said to his wife on the occasion)—and if that
same blockhead, being accused of stupidity, had replied,
" The talents which my celebrated father possessed
ought to have protected me from such a charge," would
not the answer have been a better certificate of his dunce-
hood than the unanimous decision in its favor of a whole
university ? lam enough your friend, my lord, to wish
that this argument had remained a " private and confi-
dential" opinion of your own.'
On Sir Charles Wetherell's flagellation of Sir Whig
Scarlett our "silent member" thus hazards Newgate
`And now, one ward to you, Sir James, upon your de-
fence this evening. You have had "an ugly customer,"
as the pugilistic phrase is, to deal with. Sir Charles
Wetherell fights like a windmill, I allow; and in the
course of his rambling, unhinged, dislocated speech
threw his arms about in a manner particularly inconve-
nient to an antagonist who wanted to get close in, and
pummel his argument with the knuckles of bar practice.
But, to my thinking he gave, nevertheless, some con-
founded hard knocks, right and left, and a great many
straight forward facers, not only to yourself, Sir James,
but to certain friends on your side of the house. And
you could not rally, Sir James. No, not a bit of it.
You fought off from your man. It was a grand, consti-
tutional set-to on the part of Sir Charles, which you
tried to convert into hugging and fibbing. In short,
you were in the House of Commons, and not in the
King's Bench, and where the wig and gown give
currency and authority to any thing, no matter how
vapid, how " stale, flat, and unprofitable." You'
wore not surrounded by junior barristers, whose
sluisking countenances reflect the full-blown cosi-
, datum of your own ; there were no sleek attorney.
sitting below you, with upturned eyes in placid asto-
nishment at your eloquence, nor a dozen plodding
shopkeepers before you, wondering how you can be at
once so long, so learned, and so loud, in your ad-
dress to them. You were not on your own dunghill,
and your crow was a craven one. But let all this pass,
and let pass the pompous inanity of your self-assumed,
one-and-indivisible supremacy, as the sole arbiter of the
fete of writers. I shall confine myself to your repeat
assertion, that you considered the licentiousness of the
public press so great, that in the discharge of your official
duty you were bound to bring the offenders to punish-
ment ; to make an example of the principal delinquents.
Could you have borrowed an angel's tongue, Sir James
.could all the rhetoric of all the orators of Greece, and
Rome, and England, have flowed from your lips—could
all the wit, and wisdom, and argument, that ever swayed
the .minds of men, have concentrated in your own—you
must have failed in proving what you asserted, so long as
the evidence remained of the partial and exclusive elm.'
hider of your proceeding ; so long as one man, min
petty, only, was placed upon the floor of the court by
your means to receive judgment, while it was, and is,
notorious, there are others whom you have not, and one
whom you will not, place in the same situation. What
should we say to a general who began a campaign with
announcing that he intended to overrun a certain territory,
laying it waste with fire and sword, and who, when he had

reduced a single frontier town to ashes, laid down his arms
without firing another gun? Why, that his ostensible were
not his real intentions, and that the former were put
forth only as a subterfuge, a trick to conceal the latter.
You denounced a sanguinary war—you made formidable
preparations—you breathed fierce menaces—you pro-
claimed to A, and B, and C, and D, and E, that you
were about to make a dreadful irruption into their territo-
ries with an army of ex-officios, all veteran troops, a bat-
tering train of heavy briefs, and a tremendous corps de
reserve, or rocket brigade, of fines and imprisonments.
" Look to yourselves !" you cried ; " you are all equally
guilty, and upon all I will take equal vengeance !" But
after this bluster and braggadocio, these burly Bobadilisms,
this swagger, and this rodomontade, had gone forth, lo !
your operations were a mere month of March, which, as
the proverb has it, comes in like a lion and goes out like
a lamb. No, no, Sir James, the purpose, the only pur-
pose, the undeniable, the paltry purpose, is to gross, too
palpable, and stands too indelibly recorded against you.
The legality of your proceeding I leave untouched. That
part of the question has been handled by Sir Charles
Wetherell in a way to make Westminster-hall ring with
laughter at your expense. But you have one consolation.
Sir Francis Burdett is your apologist. It was kind and
charitable in him. He affects to deprecate the party ap-
pellations of whig and tory. But his defence of you
proved two things, that his moral perceptions of right and
wrong are influenced by a whig friend in distress, and
that in some men the mind totters before the body.'