At any rate, we now find it worth while to know what the world had been telling all his life to an enlightened, highly-educated man, who was an active politician in the days of Walpole and of the elder Pitt, who was a friend of Pope’s and of the best writers of the day, and who in his occasional verse added at least one line to the household words of English literature when in his warm-hearted Prologue to Thomson’s play of Coriolanus, produced after its writer’s death, he said of that poet what we may say of Lord Lyttelton himself, that he gave to the world

   “Not one immoral, one corrupted thought,
   One line which, dying, he could wish to blot.”

H. M.

DIALOGUES OF THE DEAD.

DIALOGUE I.

LORD FALKLAND—­MR. HAMPDEN.

Lord Falkland.—­Are not you surprised to see me in Elysium, Mr. Hampden?

Mr. Hampden.—­I was going to put the same question to your lordship, for doubtless you thought me a rebel.

Lord Falkland.—­And certainly you thought me an apostate from the Commonwealth, and a supporter of tyranny.

Mr. Hampden.—­I own I did, and I don’t wonder at the severity of your thoughts about me.  The heat of the times deprived us both of our natural candour.  Yet I will confess to you here, that, before I died, I began to see in our party enough to justify your apprehensions that the civil war, which we had entered into from generous motives, from a laudable desire to preserve our free constitution, would end very unhappily, and perhaps, in the issue, destroy that constitution, even by the arms of those who pretended to be most zealous for it.

Lord Falkland.—­And I will as frankly own to you that I saw, in the court and camp of the king, so much to alarm me for the liberty of my country, if our arms were successful, that I dreaded a victory little less than I did a defeat, and had nothing in my mouth but the word peace, which I constantly repeated with passionate fondness, in every council at which I was called to assist.

Mr. Hampden.—­I wished for peace too, as ardently as your lordship, but I saw no hopes of it.  The insincerity of the king and the influence of the queen made it impossible to trust to his promises and declarations.  Nay, what reliance could we reasonably have upon laws designed to limit and restrain the power of the Crown, after he had violated the Bill of Rights, obtained with such difficulty, and containing so clear an assertion of the privileges which had been in dispute?  If his conscience would allow him to break an Act of Parliament, made to determine the bounds of the royal prerogative, because he thought that the royal prerogative could have no bounds, what legal ties could bind a conscience so prejudiced? or what effectual security could his people obtain against the obstinate malignity of such an opinion, but entirely taking from him the power of the sword, and enabling themselves to defend the laws he had passed?