to those whose services he had
commended. His real views on subjects of civil and religious liberty
were selfish and narrow. His professed patriotism was to a certain
extent real, but it was narrow and invidious where true, and it was for
the most part simulated. He was an object of hatred to the ultramontane
party in his own church; and a report prevailed in Europe, which does
not appear to have been substantiated, that he was, by that party,
ingeniously deprived of life through skilful agency appointed for that
purpose.

August 5th, Mrs. Harriet Lee, in her ninety-eighth year. This lady was
one of the authoresses of the "Canterbury Tales." Her works were various
and popular.

August 6th, at Hong-Kong, the distinguished missionary, Gutzlaff. He was
by birth a Pomeranian, but was associated with the English so intimately
as interpreter, and as secretary to the Hong-Kong government, that he
was always regarded as a British citizen.

August 12th, aged fifty, the Honourable Elliott Drinkwater Bethune, a
man whose efforts for legal reform in England and India won for him the
gratitude of the good, and caused him to incur the bitterest hostility
of the selfish classes affected by proposals of reform.

November 18th, aged eighty-one, at Herenhausen, the King of Hanover,
uncle to her majesty.

December 19th, at Chelsea, London. Joseph Mallord William Turner, the
great English landscape painter, whose works are too well known, and
whose fame is too widely spread, to require more particular notice.

CHAPTER LXIV.

{VICTORIA. 1852}

Home Affairs: General State of Great Britain; Religious
Agitations; Death of the Duke of Wellington; The Court;
Parliamentary Discussions; Changes of Ministry..... Ireland:
Animosities on Account of Religion; Insecurity of Life;
Terrible Assassinations..... Colonies: War at the Cape;
Gold in California; General Condition of the British
Colonies..... Foreign Affairs: Electric Telegraph Between
London and Paris; Revival of the French Empire; English
Policy in Reference to that Event; Indignant Feeling of the
English nation towards Austria and the despotic Princes of
Italy; Efforts of the British Navy to put down Piracy and
Slavery.

{A.D. 1852}

The year 1852, like its predecessor, opened in the British Isles with
fierce religious controversies. The agitation about the papal aggression
had not died away, and events