not greatly care whether or not he acted with them." When taunted with returning to the House which he had threatened to quit for ever, he made this mild and memorable reply, “I certainly thought that was the last opportunity I should have of addressing your lordships. I felt myself called upon by a sense of duty which I could not resist from the moment when my sovereign called me to a seat in this House, as long as my strength permitted me, to offer myself and my opinions to the suffrages and approbation, or to the dissent and reprobation of my fellow-subjects, and to them I boldly appeal after the delirium of this day shall have passed away."

CHAPTER XI.

THE LIFE OF LORD ELDON CONCLUDED.

THOUGH his impressive warnings were too slightly heeded, Lord Eldon, the Nestor of the House in age, and the Scævola of his profession in experience, still persisted for a few years subsequent to the passing of the Reform Bill in urging appeals upon the assembled peers against a too facile compliance with popular demands, or any surrender of their undoubted privileges. "The high in rank," he said, "the high in mind, the high in opulence, ought to unite in securing the independent powers of the House of Lords." He denounced with patriotic firmness the unconstitutional scheme, which a majority of the Grey cabinet had advocated to their shame, of stifling the expression of opinion in that branch of the legis lature by a large creation of unilateral peers.

"He would fearlessly affirm that any of the acts of James the Second were as excusable as would be the act of that monarch, who should give his sanction to such a measure:" a bold but memorable declaration. "His life," he declared, "was of little value, and his property might be transferred to fructify in the pocket of some otherwise pennyless financier. He could not think with satisfaction on the effect of a system which might send the sovereign of a country abroad to provide for himself as a teacher of music, or mathematics, and import him back as a Citizen King. Bred as he had been in loyalty, living under the law, and revering the constitution of his country, now that he had arrived at the age of eighty he would solemnly declare that he would rather die in his place than not state, that the proposition that the Peers of England had no interest in these popular questions, was the most absurd one that had ever been propounded there or elsewhere. He would not belie every act of his former life." At the age of eighty it was not in the course of nature that

he could long 'vex the dull ear of the House,' or 'lag, superfluous veteran, on the stage.' His voice had become too feeble to be audible beyond the verge of the peers who sat immediately around him. He was listened to indeed with grateful assent, or respectful silence, for none could refuse their tribute of admiration to the vigorous spirit, and unswerving sincerity, of the octogenarian statesman. They could even forgive the testiness natural to his time of life, into which these perpetual innovations betrayed him. "Their lordships lived in times in which nothing surprised him. He should not be surprised if a north-west passage were discovered to-morrow: he should not be surprised if the discovery of the longitude, that desideratum through so many ages, should immediately follow the former discovery; but if any thing could surprise him, he should be surprised at hearing that any man could sit in either house of parliament without taking the oaths which by law were required." The startled peer was soon exposed to a surprise still more unpleasant, the agitation of legislative measures, then first openly avowed by men in authority, for alienating the revenues of the Church of England established in Ireland. "He would solemnly deny that the State had any right to appropriate the property of the Church at all. He now left behind him as his most solemn and deliberate declaration that no lawyer on earth could prove that, according to any known principle of law, the surplus in question could be appropriated to any other than Church purposes.”

In 1834-35, as the infirmities of age stole upon him, he began to relax in the punctuality of his attendance, and to withdraw from consultations over which he exercised a waning influence, and which, in his opinion, neither tended to the good of his Church, nor the safety of his King and Country. One of the last legislative proceedings in which he took a part was the Liverpool Freemen's Disfranchisement Bill, a vindictive party measure, and opposed to his sense of political justice. True to himself, he resisted this as he had every former attempt of a similar nature, and to his great content succeeded. Against the Municipal Corporation Bill, though too much enfeebled to attend the discussion, he protested loudly in private, with feverish alarm, as leading directly to

confusion. Its interference with vested rights shocked his sense of equity even more than the sweeping clauses of the Reform Act. To set at nought ancient charters as so many bits of decayed parchment, and destroy the archives of townhalls, seemed in the eyes of the old Magistrate, for so many years the guardian of corporate rights, a crowning iniquity. He would have gladly voted a special commission, according to Sir Charles Wetherall's joke, though far from sharing in his merry humour, to try the Cabinet for corporation-breaking. Pale as a marble statue and confined to his house in Hamilton Place by infirmity, he would deprecate equally the temerity of ministers and the madness of the people; and his vaticinations, like the prophet's scroll, were full to overflowing with lamentations and woe. His correspondence for some years previously had borne marks of the troubled gloom with which he viewed the changes gradually darkening over all he had loved and venerated, till he felt almost a stranger to the institutions of his native land. I was favoured by his friend, the late Sir Robert Vaughan, the hospitable Tory baronet of North Wales, with the following letters highly characteristic at once of the old Earl's urbanity and depression.

"Dear Sir Robert,

"I owe to your kindness, and I beg you to accept my best thanks for, some moor game which I received here yesterday. You cannot conceive how this token of long-continued kindness to me exhilarates the old man who has through life esteemed you.

"The House of Lords seems at last to have thought that it ought to do its duty.

"I think the Houses will be involved in collision when they

meet.

"I trust the cause of my country to that Great Being who alone can say to the madness of the people, as he can to the raging waves of the ocean, 'IIither shall you come, and no further.'

"Let us begin to do, and persevere in doing, our duty; and then, discouraging as the prospect is, we may hope for better days.

"Encombe, 8th Sept.

"Your much obliged,

"ELDON."

The letter of a later date is marked by a tone of equal despondency.

66

"Dear Sir,

Many, many thanks to you for your kind remembrance of me. "Your kindness gives a support to my constitution, almost worn out by age; and which, nevertheless, will survive, I fear, if it has not already survived, the constitution of my country.

"Again many thanks to you from

"Your obliged and faithful friend and servant,

"ELDON."

To his intimate friend and protégé, Mr. Wm. V. Surtees, his confidential letters form equally a Jeremiad of threatening prophecy :

"You mention Ireland, and you mention reduction of rents. These are melancholy subjects.

"That rents must, after being already greatly reduced, be still more and largely reduced I have no doubt; and the land owner, and the owners, indeed, of every species of property, have to look for more calamitous days than those descriptions of men have ever yet seen in England.

"As to Ireland, all I hear leads me to fear that the Union will be repealed. I thought when I struggled against the Roman Catholic Bill that this might, nay, must be, the consequence; and now England, favouring the Catholics in Ireland in all things, has driven the Protestants, the Orangemen, to join, I fear in this project of repeal.

"This country is certainly in a worse state than you and I have ever known it; and I see no signs of improvement."*

His note of a later date, though still prophesying in the spirit of Cassandra, did not anticipate the last and, perhaps, the greatest change of all, the repeal of the corn laws.

"I am very glad to hear so good an account of the Norfolk crops; but I confess I don't consider (if Mr. Willis's letters to me are right as to fact) that these great crops will be as beneficial to the landlord or tenant as one might, in other circumstances, have hoped; for he assures me that they have very good crops, but that the corn imported from abroad is already in quantity so great that our corn cannot sell so as to enable the farmer to get a price which will enable him to pay his taxes and his rent. As to the political changes which are going on abroad, and which are leading to political changes here, it seems by no means improbable that even

* Sketches by Mr. W. E. Surtees.