ment, the learned leading articles of the Liverpool Courier, a paper established by the Rev. Richard Watson, late Secretary to the Wesleyan Missionary Society, in conjunction with his friend Kaye, about 1807.* The old question of the liberty of reporting parliamentary debates was now again brought up, and it was again declared by a Lord Chancellor to be a breach of privilege. On the 21st of March, 1801, Lord Walsingham rose in the House of Lords to complain that some speeches and conversation of the Duke of Athol and two of the bishops had been reported, animadverted upon, and misrepresented in the Morning Herald. There was no objection to the motion which followed, that the printer and publisher be taken into custody of the Usher of the Black Rod; yet the Lord Chancellor, Lord Loughborough, could not forego the opportunity which it seemed to afford him, of laying down the law of the House :-"The Lord Chancellor left the woolsack, and observed that to print and publish reports of the debates, or any conversation that passed in that House, was a known breach of the privileges of that House; but the offence was much aggravated when any person took upon him to misstate what passed, and express it in language of his own, widely differing from that which was spoken; nor was it a less breach of privilege to make what had been said by two right reverend prelates in debate, the subject of discussion or animadversion in a public newspaper." + Not a murmur was heard in protest against this antiquated stuff, -not a smile came over one noble face in that august and intellectual assembly; but on the 23d the farce was played out, and Hugh Brown and T. Glassington, the printer and publisher, appearing at the bar, according to order, were reprimanded, and discharged on payment of the fees. On the 17th of April, the House of Lords committed Allan M'Leod, the editor, and John Higginbottom, the * Poetry of the Antijacobin, p. 245, note. + Parliamentary Register, vol. xiv. p. 534. printer of the Albion daily newspaper, to prison, for breach of privilege; but deigned to order the discharge of Higginbottom on his petition on June 2d, with a reprimand, and the never-forgotten payment of the fees. The Albion was, however, a paper of evil repute. On June 21st, 1802, M'Leod was again sentenced, for a libel on Lord Clare, to be imprisoned for three years in Newgate, and to give security for his good behaviour for seven years, himself in one thousand pounds, and two sureties in two hundred pounds each. To his unenviable seat in the editorial chair, John Fenwick succeeded, and in John Fenwick's motley staff, who should now enlist but Charles Lamb, who has left the Morning Post. Here, he says himself, his "occupation was occupation was to write treason.” Elia, who chats to us so agreeably of the Blue-coat School in his early days; the East India House clerk, who, perched at a desk in Leadenhall-street, patiently checked and made up pay-lists; good brother Charles, who lived a snug, harmless, quiet life with his kind, prim sister; Charles Lamb, who enjoyed with so keen a zest those quiet old evenings in the little smoky room of the Salutation and Cat, beaming upon Coleridge through the clouds that ascended from his pipe; worthy Charles Lamb, who cried when he missed the old familiar clock from St. Dunstan's Church-can we believe him when he says he wrote treason? His powder would have been spoiled with tears shed in the priming-he would have fought with his sword in its scabbard. The Albion was undoubtedly a violent, seditious paper, which had clung tenaciously to the exploded old republican doctrines of a few years before, and had raved itself down to a very small circulation; Lamb says, only a hundred subscribers. "Blocks, axes, Whitehall tribunals, were covered with flowers of so cunning a periphrasis, as Mr. Bayes says, never naming the thing directly, that the keen eye of an attorney-general was insufficient to detect the lurking snake among them." ... "Already one paragraph, and another, as we learned afterwards from a gentleman in the Treasury, had begun to be marked at that office, with a view to its being submitted at least to the attention of the proper law officers." In a subsequent letter to his friend Manning, he mentions "A Dissertation on the State of Political Parties in England at the End of the Eighteenth Century" (we should be disposed to think, from the title, that this was the most ambitious of his political flights), and adds, "It was written originally for the two-and-twenty readers of the Albion (this calculation includes printer, four pressmen, and a devil).” The fall of the Albion is thus announced to Manning,"The Albion is dead-dead as nail in door, and my revenues have died with it; but I am not as a man without hope. I have got a sort of an opening to the Morning Chronicle ! ! ! " * This was through the influence of whether it led to anything, we have Almost the last we hear of Lamb's George Dyer; but failed to discover. connexion with the newspaper press-never, as has been seen, a very intimate or agreeable one-was in a sketch contributed to the Examiner in 1817. Poor Fenwick, the last editor of the Albion, appears to have participated in its ruin; for we read in a letter of Charles Lamb's, dated 26th February, 1808, the following very significant line: "Little Fenwick is in the rules of the Fleet." It was far more excusable in the House of Lords to put a muzzle upon such a dangerous and rabid paper as the Albion, than it was in a popular member of Parliament, who boasted of his attachment to the liberties of the country, and more particularly of the press, to take advantage of this paltry privilege, and claim immunity from the remarks of public newspapers, by virtue of this arbitrary prerogative of Parliament. Yet Sir Francis Burdett, than whom none could be found louder in his *Talfourd's "Letters and Life of Charles Lamb," vol. i. p. 146. protestation of a devotion to freedom of all kinds, claimed the protection of Parliament against one of the most legitimate and least offensive of newspaper attacks, an advertisement, merely, emanating from the friends of his late antagonist, Mr. Mainwaring, and being the resolutions passed at a meeting held at the Crown and Anchor Tavern, for the purpose of promoting a petition against the return of Burdett. On the 18th of December, 1802, Sir Francis Burdett stood up in his place in the House of Commons, and called attention to the breach of the privileges of the House committed by the True Briton, in the publication of this advertisement. But although the discussion was continued till the 20th, the House came to no resolution on the subject, but met it coldly, and Sir Francis Burdett thought it advisable to let the matter drop. But a greater than Burdett, a greater power than the House of Lords, was now about to attack the liberties of the British press, and was astonished and annoyed to find that he, the master of almost all the world, could not prevent one English newspaper from dealing him blows that made him sickly sore, and shook the very foundations of his power. We have already seen how Cobbett lifted up his voice against the abominations of French politics; he had now given up his Porcupine, and wrote the Weekly Political Register, a paper which enjoyed an existence of thirty years, still playing upon the same string. There was also a French newspaper in London, the Courier François de Londres, the organ of the royalist refugees ; and a publication of an ambiguous character, scarcely to be called a newspaper, written by a refugee named Peltier, and called L'Ambigu. All these papers held the same tone in speaking of Bonaparte, after the peace of Amiens had made him nominally our ally, as they had used against him when our declared enemy. That he should have felt himself aggrieved at this is no wonder: and that he, accus tomed to issue his fiat uncontradicted, should have held the British Government capable of putting a stop to it, is equally easy to believe. But the British Government, when appealed to to suppress the obnoxious papers, calmly and dispassionately explained that the laws of England invested them with no power to do so; and, when threatened, firmly and with dignity refused a compliance which, while it perhaps might have prolonged the truce, would have emboldened the First Consul to make demands for concessions still more damaging. Let no parallel be drawn between this case and any of more recent occurrence, for none exists. The refugees of whom Napoleon the First demanded the expulsion from this country, were respectable and loyal Frenchmen, whose fidelity to the old state of things caused their expatriation, not a band of needy adventurers, of every degree and every country, turned into England by the laws of the kingdoms they had outraged-incendiaries and assassins without a spark of patriotism, for their countries had renounced them: whose only motive is the chance of plunder, and who would be at any time ready to head the rabble of the country which gives them shelter, in any throat-cutting or pillaging expedition. Moreover, Napoleon the First had been the enemy, and was only recently the transparently hollow friend of England, never the firm and faithful ally. While, therefore, we hold up to admiration the course taken by the British Government of 1803, we protest against its being made the groundwork for a comparison with any recent events, whose circumstances are as different as loyalty and order are from murder and rapine. The correspondence between the Governments and ambassadors of the First Consul and of his Britannic Majesty, in which the question of the latitude assumed by the English papers is dwelt upon, commences with a letter from M. Otto, minister plenipotentiary from France, to Lord Hawkesbury, dated July 28th, 1802, in which, after |