Renew the youth of the State.  Save property, divided against itself.  Save the multitude, endangered by its own ungovernable passions.  Save the aristocracy, endangered by its own unpopular power.  Save the greatest, the fairest, and most highly civilised community that ever existed, from calamities which may in a few days sweep away all the rich heritage of so many ages of wisdom and glory.  The danger is terrible.  The time is short.  If this bill should he rejected, I pray to God that none of those who concur in rejecting it may ever remember their votes with unavailing remorse, amidst the wreck of laws, the confusion of ranks, the spoliation of property, and the dissolution of social order.”] Sir Thomas Denman, who rose later on in the discussion, said, with universal acceptance, that the orator’s words remained tingling in the ears of all who heard them, and would last in their memories as long as they had memories to employ.  That sense of proprietorship in an effort of genius, which the House of Commons is ever ready to entertain, effaced for a while all distinctions of party.  “Portions of the speech,” said Sir Robert Peel, “were as beautiful as anything I have ever heard or read.  It reminded one of the old times.”  The names of Fox, Burke, and Canning were during that evening in everybody’s mouth; and Macaulay overheard with delight a knot of old members illustrating their criticisms by recollections of Lord Plunket.  He had reason to be pleased; for he had been thought worthy of the compliment which the judgment of Parliament reserves for a supreme occasion.  In 1866, on the second reading of the Franchise Bill, when the crowning oration of that memorable debate had come to its close amidst a tempest of applause, one or two veterans of the lobby, forgetting Macaulay on Reform,—­forgetting, it may be, Mr. Gladstone himself on the Conservative Budget of 1852,—­pronounced, amidst the willing assent of a younger generation, that there had been nothing like it since Plunket.

The unequivocal success of the first speech into which he had thrown his full power decided for some time to come the tenor of Macaulay’s career.  During the next three years he devoted himself to Parliament, rivalling Stanley in debate, and Hume in the regularity of his attendance.  He entered with zest into the animated and manysided life of the House of Commons, of which so few traces can ordinarily be detected in what goes by the name of political literature.  The biographers of a distinguished statesman too often seem to have forgotten that the subject of their labours passed the best part of his waking hours, during the half of every year, in a society of a special and deeply marked character, the leading traits of which are at least as well worth recording as the fashionable or diplomatic gossip that fills so many volumes of memoirs and correspondence.  Macaulay’s letters sufficiently indicate how thoroughly he enjoyed the ease, the freedom, the hearty good-fellowship, that reign within the precincts of our national senate; and how entirely he recognised that spirit of noble equality, so prevalent among its members, which takes little or no account of wealth, or title, or indeed of reputation won in other fields, but which ranks a man according as the value of his words, and the weight of his influence, bear the test of a standard which is essentially its own.