of foreign invasion or internal insurrection. Strange that he did not perceive that this peculiarity is the great glory of the measure, and holds out the greatest prospects of its benefits as well as of its permanency. For it proves that public spirit is active and energetic in England, even there where it is least expected, and where corruption has done the most to extinguish it.

"As you will have discovered, I made no speech in the House during this last debate. Macaulay was sublime, perhaps a little too severe in his censure of the ex-ministers. Lord Stanley's' refutation of Croker's clever, elaborate, humorous, extravagant, and excessively overpraised speech, was most vigorous and masterly, directly to the point, full of nerve and business. Peel's effort, highly studied and wrought up, was worthy of his character, but not of his name: by which I mean that his name is much more considerable than his character deserves that it should be.

"The most remarkable thing about the debate is that the enemy boldly takes up the cry of No Reform!' I believe the Lords grow reasonable, and will pass the bill."

No sooner had the pressure of his Reform Bill labors been thus suspended for a time than another and far more ungrateful task was imposed on the Attorney-General-the conduct through the House of Commons of Brougham's bill for the amendment of the law of bankruptcy, which was brought down from the Lords on September 28. He thus refers to it, and also to the reception by the King, at Windsor, of its illustrious author the Chancellor, in a letter written to his wife on September

29:

"I am hard at work at the Chancellor's Bankruptcy Bill, and you may see by the division yesterday (the day for introducing it into the House) what a cantankerous opposition it will meet with. The worst is they may very likely prevent its coming on by filling up the whole evening with other things. I cannot help it. I am amassing

1 Speech of September 23, 1831; the third speech on Parliamentary Re form printed in the collection of speeches corrected by himself.

2 Late Lord Derby.

my materials, and shall charge my gun with a very de cent speech, whether allowed to fire it off or not.'

'Brougham is come back, delighted with the King, who drove him all about, and showed him everything, among the rest the kitchens that had cooked the dinners of twenty-four kings, having been employed in its present form and dimensions since the time of (I think) Edward the First. Dick [his third son, Honorable R. Denman] may count the crowned heads.

"The Queen does not appear very favorable to the Bill. If the Lords pass it, the tranquillity and welfare of the country are secured, and if they throw it out their triumph will be but for a time. The misfortune will be the chance of tumult in the country. But as the King has no idea of parting with his ministers in that event, nor they of deserting him, I trust the evil will be but momentary."

Brougham's Bankruptcy Bill, though in many respects a vast improvement, in point of procedure, on the preceding system, or rather no system, yet, by the great amount of new patronage it created (a Chief Judge at 5,000l. a year, two Puisne Judges at 3,000l., and ten Commissioners at 1,500/.), gave an opportunity to the Tory lawyers, headed by Wetherell, to attack it with the bitterest and most relentless opposition. Denman, from the fact of his practice having been almost exclusively confined to Common Law, was not by any means so well versed as Wetherell and Sugden, both great Chancery practitioners, in the minutiae of Bankruptcy proceedings; and it required anxious labor and close attention on his part to prepare himself adequately for the minute, harassing, and protracted discussions in Committee, which dragged their slow length along till October 18, when the

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1 The speech in question was "fired off" on the next day, September 30, and is complained of by Lord Althorp in a letter to Brougham of the beginning of October as having been ill-opened, both as to the plan of the speech and its execution" (see letter in Brougham's "Memoirs," vol. iii. p. 108). Lord Althorp's admirable temper had probably, when he wrote this, suffered a little under the stress of great labor and vexatious opposition. Denman's speech, as reported in Hansard (vol. vii., third series, pp. 895-915) does not bear out his strictures, though his want of familiarity with Bankruptcy proceedings may have rendered him less effective than usual in his exposi

tion.

bill was read a third time and passed. It was some reward to Denman for his long and laborious exertions that his old friend Merivale was appointed by the Chancellor to one of the new Commissionerships, on a salary of 1,500l. a year.

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Meanwhile the Lords had not, as Denman in his letter of September 22 to Mrs. Wright had ventured to anticipate they would, grown reasonable and passed the Bill;" on the contrary they had, after long debate, rejected it late in the morning of October 8, by the famous majority of 41—199 to 158.

Denman, being elsewhere busily occupied with his Bankruptcy Bill, was present during a part only of the great debate which preceded this memorable division. He did not hear Brougham's carefully prepared oration. In writing to Mrs. Wright, he says of it, "I thought the Chancellor's speech read beautifully, but they tell me it was rather languid in the delivery." In writing to his wife, he says, "it is universally allowed to have been worthy of the occasion and of himself." He did hear Lord Grey: "Lord Grey's reply," he tells his daughter, was considered the flower of the debate." He describes himself, in writing to Lady Denman, as "listening to it with pride," and calls it a most noble speech, so clear in its reasoning, so impressive in its tone, so calm and dignified in its spirit." This was the famous speech to which Macaulay refers in his article on Warren Hastings, when he talks of men "listening with delight till the morning sun shone on the tapestries of the House of Lords to the lofty and animated eloquence of Charles, Earl Grey."

The rejection of the Bill by the Lords was, as every body knows, the signal for wild commotion throughout the country. The burning of Nottingham Castle, the murderous riots at Bristol, the revolutionary menaces of the political unions at Birmingham and elsewhere, showed the extent and fierceness of the popular exasperation.

On December 12, after a brief recess, the bill was a third time introduced into the House of Commons. On Friday (16), the debate on the second reading commenced and did not terminate till one o'clock in the morning of Sunday (18) when, on the division, the second reading

was carried by a majority of 162, in a House of 486, the numbers being 324 to 162.

With this act closed the session of 1831, the most laborious, perhaps, in the whole course of our parliamentary history.

A

CHAPTER XX.

A.D. 1832. ET. 53.

FTER a very brief respite from labor, Denman was called upon, early in January, 1832, to conduct the prosecution, before a special commission held at Bristol, of the prisoners charged with participation in the frightful riots that had taken place in that city during the previous October. Of these, besides a crowd of minor offenders, twenty-four were capitally indicted for having been concerned in burning or otherwise destroying private dwellings, the gaol, the Bridewell, and the Bishop's Palace. Out of this number twenty-one were convicted, and four of the most guilty executed.'

On January 19, 1832, the House re-assembled. The next day the Bill again went into committee, and Denman's Parliamentary labors recommenced almost with the same severity as in the dog-days of 1831. Croker, more active than ever in his malign and bustling activity, was the Opposition hero of the battles that raged in committee all through February and till past the middle of March, over Midhurst and the Tower Hamlets, and many another borough deplored as unduly suppressed or denounced as unduly created.

Croker probably reached his parliamentary acme in the debate on the third reading, when, on the night of March 19, 1832, he made his celebrated reply to Macaulay, comparing the progress of the Reform movement to the progress of the Cholera, which was then filling all London with alarm.

1 "Annual Register" for 1832, p. 48 et seq.