'

measure was supporting, to the utmost of his power, the Protestant reformed religion.” That it was not my opinion, nor the opinions of Archbishops, Bishops, or Lay Peers (all which he must know, as well the opinions in favour of the measure, as those against it) that were to guide and govern him; but he was to act according to his own conscientious view of the obligations under which such an oath placed him. Little more passed except occasional bursts of expression, "What can I do? What can I now fall back upon? What can I fall back upon? I am miserable, wretched, my situation is dreadful; nobody about me to advise with. If I do give my assent, I'll go to the baths abroad, and from thence to Hanover: I'll return no more to Engiand-I'll make no Roman Catholic Peers-I will not do what this bill will enable me to do-I'll return no more-let them get a Catholic King in Clarence." I think he also mentioned Sussex. "The people will see that I did not wish this."

He,

'There were the strongest appearances certainly of misery. more than once, stopped my leaving him. When the time came that I was to go, he threw his arms round my neck and expressed great misery. I left him about twenty minutes or a quarter before five.

I certainly thought, when I left him, that he would express great difficulty, when the Bill was proposed for the Royal Assent (great, but which would be overcome), about giving it. I fear that it seemed to be given as matter of course.'

The following extracts are from letters to his daughter, Lady F. Bankes:

'April 14th, 1829. The fatal Bills received the Royal Assent yesterday afternoon. After all I had heard in my visits, not a day's delay! God bless us, and His Church!'

April 30th, 1829.

I went to the levee in consequence of a communication that it was much desired that I should do so by the King. I was grieved that my visit was a visit of duty to a Sovereign whose supremacy is shared by that Italian priest, as Shakespeare calls the Pope. But I heard that he much wished it, and I understood that it would be a relief if I would go. I was certainly received with a very marked attention. I followed those who are in the high places of office, to whom one bow was made. When I was about to pass, expecting the same slight notice, he took me by the hand and shook it heartily, speaking with great kindness.'

Once after this George IV. sent requesting Lord Eldon to call on him-but whatever he had designed to say, he merely spoke a few civil words: his embarrassment was very obvious. No wonder -yet Lord Eldon-who so shrewdly estimated the probable influence even on the masculine mind of George III. of the recollection that the subject had witnessed the weakness of the Sovereign-appears to have been not a little surprised and hurt, on finding that George IV. could never forget the humiliating interviews of March and April, 1829.

Some

Some weeks later (May, 1829) he says to Lady Frances

'I fought as well as I could, but I am not what I was; and I never was what a statesman-an accomplished statesman-ought to be. Indeed a lawyer hardly can be both learned in his profession and accomplished in political science. The country will feel deeply feelthe evils arising from this late measure. Not that those evils will be felt in its immediate effects. Those in whose favour the measure has taken place are too wary-far too wary-to give an alarm immediately; but few years will pass before its direful effects will be made manifest in the ruin of some of our most sacred, and most reverend, and most useful establishments.'

6

6

He was far enough from foreseeing the course of events, or the way in which the measure of 1829 was to influence that course. His biographer comes in the very next chapter to the French revolution of July; and as soon as Lord Eldon learned in what spirit that revolution was commented on by the most influential English newspapers, and how some of the ablest orators of the Whig party fanned the sacred flame,' he is found writing to Lord Stowell:- It will require a master-head, such as Pitt had, and nobody now has in this country, to allay what is brewing—a storm for changes here, especially for reform in Parliament.' Yet when parliament met a new parliament elected while that French fever was raging-Lord Eldon and his immediate friends acted, it must now be sorrowfully admitted, as if it were their more urgent duty to revenge the emancipation, than to oppose the coming storm.' Mr. Twiss says:— The Catholic Emancipation had riven the Conservative body asunder; and through that chasm this mischief* forced its way.' One hostile vote of the High Tories in the new House of Commons induced the resignation of the Emancipating Cabinet: and the instant their successors were named, Lord Eldon and the other Anti-Catholic leaders clearly perceived the fatal folly of that one vote. But elsewhere than within the House of Commons the same passionate resentment still prevailed-and the influence of this extra-parliamentary feeling is not omitted-though we doubt if it has exactly its right place assigned it-in Mr. Twiss's eloquent enumeration of the concurrent influences which hurried England into a revolution far more serious than that which had just placed the son of Egalité on the throne of Louis XVI.-' a revolution,' in Mr. Twiss's words, not aiming at the mere change of a dynasty, but dissolving the entire frame of the British constitution.'

'It was on the 1st of March, 1831, that Lord John Russell propounded

Did Mr. Twiss, when he used this word, remember a certain remarkable letter of Gibbon, in 1792, wherein the historian discusses Mr. Grey's early motion for reform, and tells his correspondent, Lord Sheffield, Surely such men as **** have talents for mischief?'-Life and Correspondence, Milman's edition, p. 380.

the

the original Reform Bill to the House of Commons. The plan of it appeared, to most of his hearers on that night, too extravagant to have been intended seriously; and it was a pretty general opinion in the House that the Whigs, having little hope of retaining office themselves, started this invention with a view of so unsettling the popular mind as to make the government untenable by any other ministers. But when, on the following day, the public learned through the newspapers what it was that the King's servants were willing to do, and the King to sanction, it became instantly obvious that nothing was too excessive for the appetite of the time. The whole country took fire at once. The working people expected that they were to change places with their employers; the middle classes believed that, by breaking down the parliamentary influence of the Peers, they should get the governing power of the state into their own hands: and the Ministers, the contrivers of the design, persuaded themselves that the people, out of sheer gratitude, would make the rule of the Whigs perpetual. If, to all these interested hopes, we add the jealousy of the vulgar at all privileges not shared by themselves the resentment of the majority of the nation at the disregard of their sentiments respecting the Roman Catholic Bill-and the superficial notion that the direct representation of numbers is the principle of the elective franchise, we shall have a tolerably correct conception of the motives of a revolution which, while it has trebled the corruption of the electors, has debased the tone and character of the House of Commons, and come already to be scouted as a cheat by all classes of the nation-which, by shutting the doors of parliament against the variety of interests and intelligences formerly returned through the close boroughs irrespectively of local connexion, has resolved all other objects into a fierce engrossing struggle between the only two forces now left in the representation, the land and the towns-which has narrowed the Sovereign's choice of the public servants in the parliamentary offices of state to the very small circle of the persons having seats at their own command-which has wasted weeks and months of each session in harangues, delivered for no other purpose than to show the mob-constituencies that their Members are astir-which has choked the progress of all practical business, and left still unsolved, after twelve years of trial, the great problem propounded by the Duke of Wellington in the House of Peers," But, my Lords, how is the King's Government to be carried on ?"-vol. iii. p. 122-124.

From Mr. Twiss's book no one can expect new light as to the dessous des cartes of the Reform Bill. We get some, however, and curious light it is, from Part III. of Lord Brougham's Political Philosophy,' which has reached us as we write. Earl Grey's Chancellor here (p. 307) says, 'The Government carried the Bill through the Lords by the power which his late Majesty had conferred upon us, of an unlimited creation of Peers at any stage of the measure. It was fortunate for the constitution that the patriotism of the Peers prevented us from having recourse to

a measure

a measure so full of peril.' This is candid-but what is to be said as to his Lordship's revelations in the next page?

I have often since asked myself the question, whether, if no secession had taken place, and the Peers had persisted in really opposing the most important provisions of the Bill, we should have had recourse to the perilous creation? Twelve years have now rolled over my head since the crisis of 1832: I speak very calmly on this as on every political question whatever; and I cannot, with any confidence, answer it in the affirmative. Such was my deep sense of the consequences of the act, that I much question whether I should not have preferred running the risk of the confusion that attended the loss of the Bill as it then stood: and I have a strong impression on my mind that my illustrious friend (Earl Grey) would have more than met me half way in the determination to face that risk-(and, of course, to face the clamours of the people, which would have cost us little)—rather than expose the constitution to so imminent a hazard of subversion.'-p. 308. His Lordship says much more, which we should be glad to quote. Inter alia at p. 317, we find him enumerating the principal defects of the existing system of representation; and placing second on that list the want of close boroughs.' He is, however, far from agreeing with Lord John Russell that the Reform was a Revolution. If it had been a Revolution, says Lord Brougham, it must have brought to light some new men of high ability!

It appears, then, that the mischief' was, after all, consummated by means of a hoaxing threat. Lord Eldon was not, of course, one of the seceders; he stood to his post first and lasthow bravely, how ably, we need not tell.

He did his duty in the midst of the severest domestic afflictionfor his wife, whom he had watched over with unwearied tenderness during many years of painful malady, was taken from him when the reform mania was still at its height-and in brave contempt of innumerable personal insults, outrages, and perils, which he shared, as his Anecdote Book expresses it, even with the great chief to whom the English people owed the liberties they were abusing.' These vulgar injuries he soon forgot or forgave-the loss of her who had partaken in all his fortunes and all his thoughts he never entirely recovered. He continued his attendance in parliament, opposing in vain many equally absurd and baneful political innovations, the natural fruits of the mischief,' but opposing also, and with better effect, not a few rash and ill-considered projects of change within the department of the law. On purely legal questions his authority with the House of Lords remained to the end supreme; and, the storm once abated, his venerable presence in that assembly unquestionably contributed most essentially to the public good.

Few

Few of our readers can have forgotten the affecting scene that occurred in the theatre at Oxford after the installation of the Duke of Wellington as Chancellor (July, 1834), when, Lord Eldon being seated by his Grace as High Steward of the University, Lord Encombe was introduced as his Unicus Nepos,' to be admitted to an honorary degree. That scene fills a charming page in Mr. Twiss's third volume, and it is only one of many pages that will delight everybody, as proving how complete was the reconciliation between Lord Eldon and the political friends from whom he had for a time been alienated. Three years later Lord Encombe presided at the triennial celebration of Mr. Pitt's birthday; his grandfather was too feeble to be present; and the Duke, in proposing the young chairman's health, concluded with these words:

We have all of us the most respectful and affectionate recollections of Lord Eldon. Attachment to him, I may say, is almost a part of the constitution of the country.'

Unlike his not less illustrious brother, Lord Eldon retained to the last a complete possession of all the great and varied powers of his mind. He foresaw distinctly the near termination of a disorder under which for several years his physical strength had been gradually sinking, afforded an example of Christian resignation and endurance to the few surviving members of his affectionate family, and expired placidly in Hamilton-place on the 13th of January, 1838, anno ætat. 87. He was buried by the side of his Elizabeth at Encombe.

ART. V.-1. Report of the Commissioners of Inquiry for South Wales. Presented to both Houses of Parliament by command of Her Majesty.

2. Letters addressed to the Rate-payers in the Swansea Union. By J. H. Vivian, Esq., M.P. 1843.

No quarter of the British Islands has, for a long course of

years, occasioned less disquietude to its rulers, or attracted less of public attention to its internal concerns, than the principality of Wales. The inhabitants of the mountainous and agricultural districts, of which so large a part of that country consists, have been chiefly known to their English neighbours as a patient, industrious, and hard-faring race, tenacious of the traditions and customs of their forefathers, disliking change, and not easily aroused to enterprise; of a temperament somewhat sluggish and unimaginative, but warm and choleric in their feelings when excited, and capable of no small degree of pertinacity and dogged resolution in the pursuit of their objects. Far more influenced in their

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