by a majority of one.  But directly afterwards the Government was defeated on an amendment in Committee, and promptly appealed to the country.  Parliament was dissolved on the 23rd of April.  “Bold King! bold Ministers!” wrote Sydney on the 25th.  Popular feeling was now really roused.  “The Bill, the whole Bill, and nothing but the Bill” was the war-cry from Caithness to Cornwall.  Lord John Russell, who had brought the Bill into Parliament, was the hero of the hour.  He contested Devonshire at the General Election, and Sydney, who had a vote for the county, met him at Exeter.—­

“The people along the road were very much disappointed by his smallness.  I told them he was much larger before the Bill was thrown out, but was reduced by excessive anxiety about the people.  This brought tears into their eyes!”

At this juncture Sydney composed (and published in the name of an imaginary Mr. Dyson), a “Speech to the Freeholders on Reform”—­

“Stick to the Bill—­it is your Magna Charta, and your Runnymede.  King John made a present to the Barons.  King William has made a similar present to you.  Never mind common qualities, good in common times.  If a man does not vote for the Bill, he is unclean—­the plague-spot is upon him—­push him into the lazaretto of the last century, with Wetherell[100] and Sadler[101]—­purify the air before you approach him—­bathe your hands in Chloride of Lime, if you have been contaminated by his touch....

“The thing I cannot, and will not bear, is this;—­what right has this Lord, or that Marquis, to buy ten seats in Parliament, in the shape of Boroughs, and then to make laws to govern me?  And how are these masses of power re-distributed?  The eldest son of my Lord is just come from Eton—­he knows a good deal about AEneas and Dido, Apollo and Daphne—­and that is all; and to this boy his father gives a six-hundredth part of the power of making laws, as he would give him a horse or a double-barrelled gun.  Then Vellum, the steward, is put in—­an admirable man;—­he has raised the estates—­watched the progress of the family Road-and-Canal Bills—­and Vellum shall help to rule over the people of England.  A neighbouring country gentleman, Mr. Plumpkin, hunts with my Lord—­opens him a gate or two, while the hounds are running—­dines with my Lord—­agrees with my Lord—­wishes he could rival the South-Down sheep of my Lord—­and upon Plumpkin is conferred a portion of the government.  Then there is a distant relation of the same name, in the County Militia, with white teeth, who calls up the carriage at the Opera, and is always wishing O’Connell was hanged, drawn, and quartered—­then a barrister, who has written an article in the Quarterly, and is very likely to speak, and refute M’Culloch; and these five people, in whose nomination I have no more agency than I have in the nomination of the toll-keepers of the Bosphorus, are to make laws for me and my family—­to