once more on his back, John Ardworth went
resolutely on to the great vortex.

CHAPTER I. THE CORONATION.

The 8th of September, 1831, was a holiday in London. William the Fourth
received the crown of his ancestors in that mighty church in which the
most impressive monitors to human pomp are the monuments of the dead.
The dust of conquerors and statesmen, of the wise heads and the bold
hands that had guarded the thrones of departed kings, slept around; and
the great men of the Modern time were assembled in homage to the monarch
to whom the prowess and the liberty of generations had bequeathed an
empire in which the sun never sets. In the Abbey--thinking little of the
past, caring little for the future--the immense audience gazed eagerly
on the pageant that occurs but once in that division of history,--the
lifetime of a king. The assemblage was brilliant and imposing. The
galleries sparkled with the gems of women who still upheld the celebrity
for form and feature which, from the remotest times, has been awarded to
the great English race. Below, in their robes and coronets, were men
who neither in the senate nor the field have shamed their fathers.
Conspicuous amongst all for grandeur of mien and stature towered the
brothers of the king; while, commanding yet more the universal gaze,
were seen, here the eagle features of the old hero of Waterloo, and
there the majestic brow of the haughty statesman who was leading the
people (while the last of the Bourbons, whom Waterloo had restored to
the Tuileries, had left the orb and purple to the kindred house so fatal
to his name) through a stormy and perilous transition to a bloodless
revolution and a new charter.

Tier upon tier, in the division set apart for them, the members of the
Lower House moved and murmured above the pageant; and the coronation of
the new sovereign was connected in their minds with the great measure
which, still undecided, made at that time a link between the People
and the King, and arrayed against both, if not, indeed, the real
Aristocracy, at least the Chamber recognized by the Constitution as
its representative. Without the space was one dense mass. Houses,
from balcony to balcony, window to window, were filled as some immense
theatre. Up, through the long thoroughfare to Whitehall, the eye saw
that audience,--A PEOPLE; and the gaze was bounded at the spot where
Charles the First had passed from the banquet-house to the scaffold.

The ceremo