hundred thousand rupees--a sum large enough to buy any thing in
France but the First Consul.

Francis, Duke of Bedford, has just died. The reports vary as to the
cause. The general opinion is, that in playing rackets, or in some other
rough exercise, he overstrained himself, and produced a return of a
disease to which he had been for some years liable. The details of his
death are too painful to be entered into. The first surgical assistance
was brought down to Woburn. An operation was performed, which for some
days gave hope, but it was too late. Mortification ensued, and he died,
to the great regret of a large circle of personal friends; to the great
loss of his party, which was Whig in the highest degree; and to the
general sorrow of the country. He was a handsome man with a showy
figure, and the manners, and, what was better, the spirit of a nobleman.
He was magnificent in his household, and not less magnificent in his
sense of duty as a landlord and country gentleman. He first established
those great Agricultural Meetings by which the breed of British cattle
was so greatly improved; Agriculture took the shape of a science, and
the Agricultural interest, the true strength of a country, took its
place among the pillars of the Empire.

By a sort of fashion, the leading country gentlemen always began public
life as Whigs. And although the Bedford family had gone through every
form of politics, from the days of their founder, Russell, under Henry
the VIII., and especially in the person of the Duke of Bedford's
unpopular, but able, grandfather, the Duke espoused the party of Fox
with the devotion of an enthusiast.

He was thus brought into some unfortunate collisions with the bolder
spirits and more practised talents of the Treasury Bench; and though,
from his position in the House of Lords, secure from direct attack by
the great leaders of Government, he was struck by many a shaft which he
had neither the power to repel nor to return.

An unlucky piece of hardihood, in attacking the royal grant of a pension
of three thousand a year to the greatest writer, philosopher, and
politician of the age, Edmund Burke, provoked a rejoinder, which must
have put any man to the torture. Burke's pamphlet in defence of his
pension, was much less a defence than an assault. He broke into the
enemy's camp at once, and "swept all there with huge two-handed sway."
He traced the history of the Bedford opulence up to its origin, which he