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to Mr. Cole, to his inferences, his insinuations, or his facts. Not, indeed, that I have yet finished my observations on Mr. Cole's credit; but I must reserve the remainder till I consider his evidence with respect to Mr. Lawrence; and till I have occasion to comment upon the testimony of Fanny Loyd. Then, indeed, I shall be under the necessity of exhibiting to your Majesty these witnesses, Fanny Loyd and Mr. Cole, (both of whom are represented as so unbiassed, and so credible,) in flat, decisive, and irreconcilable contradiction to each other."

After all the deliberatious and meetings of the commissioners, as far as regards Sir Sidney Smith, and other questions in connexion with the Princess, his Majesty says

"On the other matters produced in the course of the inquiry, the King is advised that none of the facts or allegations stated in the preliminary examinations, carried on in the absence of the parties interested, can be considered as legally or conclusively established. But in those examinations, and even in the answer drawn in the name of the Princess by her legal advisers, there have appeared circumstances of conduct on the part of the Princess, which his Majesty never could regard but with serious concern. The elevated rank which the Princess hold in this

country, and the relation in which she stands to his Majesty and the royal family, must always deeply involve both the interests of the state and the personal feelings of his Majesty, in the propriety and correctness of her conduct. And his Majesty cannot, therefore, forbear to express, in the conclusion of the business, his desire and expectation, that such a conduct may in future be observed by the Princess, as may fully justify those marks of paternal regard and affection which the King always wishes to show to every part of his royal family.

"His Majesty has directed that this message should be transmitted to the Princess of Wales, by his Lord Chancellor, and that copies of the proceedings which have taken place on the subject should also be communicated to his dearly beloved son, the Prince of Wales."

Therefore, from the charge of levity and imprudence, the Princess must still be deemed as not exonerated.

We should not have adverted, in the slightest degree, to the affair narrated in this chapter, had it not assumed, to all intents and purposes, the features of a public transaction. We have called these volumes by a name no more pretending than that of "Memoirs ;" and having meant to do no more than the title warranted,

we have only given so much of our hero's private adventures and family concerns as was needful to form something like continuity in the narrative. Indeed, we are well aware, so replete as Sir William Sidney Smith's life has been of "moving accident by flood and field," so rife has been his prolonged days with private enterprise and wonderful surprises-in a word, the feats he has performed and witnessed have been so numerous and so strange, and his memory is stuffed so full of anecdote, that none but himself could be his biographer: for no one can tell the tales of himself that he can; and if any one could, disappointment would still be the result, for to achieve his happy manner of telling them would be utterly impossible.

Many of these anecdotes have found their way into the public periodicals: generally speaking, they do not read well, because the hero did not himself write them. They are turgid and overstrained, being miserably bloated and swelled out with too much panegyric. We shall quote a few of them at the end of these volumes, and endeavour to divest them a little of their inflated laudation.

We may just now, moreover, observe, that to write a good life, in the extended sense of the word, of the gallant veteran, would be a matter of no

small difficulty, were it rigidly a true one; and a biography, however amusing, if not true, could not be good. It is in this that the difficulty lies, the impossibility to find a person sufficiently impartial. Were Sir Sidney himself to attempt it, much of it would appear, from him, like gasconade, simply because his adventures have been so singular that it would be hazardous for a man to publish them of himself; and unfortunately, such are his qualities, that his friends are very friends indeed, and verge too much upon idolaters; and his enemies are contemning sceptics of anything good or great about him. Whilst the one party would extol him, as the ne plus ultra of heroism, the other would designate him merely as a successful charlatan - brave, but without conduct, cunning without being sensible-arrogant and supercilious in his youth, and, in his after life, immersed in the vapours of his intolerable vanity; that all that ever was sterling in the man is totally evaporated, and that nothing remains of him but a gaudy shell, tricked out with ribbons and stars, and all the blazonry of which beggarly monarchs are so lavish, and fools so greedy.

That Sir Sidney has nothing of the latter character about him, those who attentively read these memoirs must be convinced. They must

also be convinced that he is, properly speaking, truly a great man, and had more favourable opportunities presented themselves, would have been a much greater, perhaps the very greatest man of his time-or nothing. We have always thought, and always said, that he possessed wonderful but dangerous faculties; that he is a sort of warrior Lord Brougham, though a much pleasanter fellow. We do not mean to say that his lordship is not a very pleasant man; but still, after his public avowal of his inability to play the courtier, he will not consider us as libellous in saying, that it is possible there may be pleasanter men, and that our fine old admiral is one of them, though we fear he will not take the comparison altogether as a compliment.

We must resume our narrative in the next volume.

END OF VOL. I.

LONDON:

IBOTSON AND PALMER, PRINTERS, SAVOY-STREET, STRAND.

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