that they had no intention of attacking the Chancellor, and had framed their resolution without any view to him.  Howe, from whose lips scarcely any thing ever dropped but gall and poison, went so far as to say:  “My Lord Somers is a man of eminent merit, of merit so eminent that, if he had made a slip, we might well overlook it.”  At a late hour the question was put; and the motion was rejected by a majority of fifty in a house of four hundred and nineteen members.  It was long since there had been so large an attendance at a division.

The ignominious failure of the attacks on Somers and Burnet seemed to prove that the assembly was coming round to a better temper.  But the temper of a House of Commons left without the guidance of a ministry is never to be trusted.  “Nobody can tell today,” said an experienced politician of that time, “what the majority may take it into their heads to do tomorrow.”  Already a storm was gathering in which the Constitution itself was in danger of perishing, and from which none of the three branches of the legislature escaped without serious damage.

The question of the Irish forfeitures had been raised; and about that question the minds of men, both within and without the walls of Parliament, were in a strangely excitable state.  Candid and intelligent men, whatever veneration they may feel for the memory of William, must find it impossible to deny that, in his eagerness to enrich and aggrandise his personal friends, he too often forgot what was due to his own reputation and to the public interest.  It is true that in giving away the old domains of the Crown he did only what he had a right to do, and what all his predecessors had done; nor could the most factious opposition insist on resuming his grants of those domains without resuming at the same time the grants of his uncles.  But between those domains and the estates recently forfeited in Ireland there was a distinction, which would not indeed have been recognised by the judges, but which to a popular assembly might well seem to be of grave importance.  In the year 1690 a Bill had been brought in for applying the Irish forfeitures to the public service.  That Bill passed the Commons, and would probably, with large amendments, have passed the Lords, had not the King, who was under the necessity of attending the Congress at the Hague, put an end to the session.  In bidding the Houses farewell on that occasion, he assured them that he should not dispose of the property about which they had been deliberating, till they should have had another opportunity of settling that matter.  He had, as he thought, strictly kept his word; for he had not disposed of this property till the Houses had repeatedly met and separated without presenting to him any bill on the subject.  They had had the opportunity which he had assured them that they should have.  They had had more than one such opportunity.  The pledge which he had given had therefore been amply redeemed; and he did