Our wonderful minister, as you all know, formed a new plan, a plan insigne, recens, indictum ore alio, a plan for supporting the freedom of our Constitution by court intrigues, and for removing its corruptions by Indian delinquency.  To carry that bold, paradoxical design into execution, sufficient funds and apt instruments became necessary.  You are perfectly sensible that a Parliamentary reform occupies his thoughts day and night, as an essential member in this extraordinary project.  In his anxious researches upon this subject, natural instinct, as well as sound policy, would direct his eyes and settle his choice on Paul Benfield.  Paul Benfield is the grand Parliamentary reformer, the reformer to whom the whole choir of reformers bow, and to whom even the right honorable gentleman himself must yield the palm:  for what region in the empire, what city, what borough, what county, what tribunal in this kingdom is not full of his labors?  Others have been only speculators; he is the grand practical reformer; and whilst the Chancellor of the Exchequer pledges in vain the man and the minister, to increase the provincial members, Mr. Benfield has auspiciously and practically begun it.  Leaving far behind him even Lord Camelford’s generous design of bestowing Old Sarum on the Bank of England, Mr. Benfield has thrown in the borough of Cricklade to reinforce the county representation.  Not content with this, in order to station a steady phalanx for all future reforms, this public-spirited usurer, amidst his charitable toils for the relief of India, did not forget the poor, rotten Constitution of his native country.  For her, he did not disdain to stoop to the trade of a wholesale upholsterer for this House,—­to furnish it, not with the faded tapestry figures of antiquated merit, such as decorate, and may reproach, some other houses, but with real, solid, living patterns of true modern virtue.  Paul Benfield made (reckoning himself) no fewer than eight members in the last Parliament.  What copious streams of pure blood must he not have transfused into the veins of the present!

But what is even more striking than the real services of this new-imported patriot is his modesty.  As soon as he had conferred this benefit on the Constitution, he withdrew himself from our applause.  He conceived that the duties of a member of Parliament (which with the elect faithful, the true believers, the Islam of Parliamentary reform, are of little or no merit, perhaps not much better than specious sins) might he as well attended to in India as in England, and the means of reformation to Parliament itself be far better provided.  Mr. Benfield was therefore no sooner elected than he set off for Madras, and defrauded the longing eyes of Parliament.  We have never enjoyed in this House the luxury of beholding that minion of the human race, and contemplating that visage which has so long reflected the happiness of nations.