Dear Ellis,—­I have little news for you, except what you will learn from the papers as well as from me.  It is clear that the Reform Bill must pass, either in this or in another Parliament.  The majority of one does not appear to me, as it does to you, by any means inauspicious.  We should perhaps have had a better plea for a dissolution if the majority had been the other way.  But surely a dissolution under such circumstances would have been a most alarming thing.  If there should be a dissolution now, there will not be that ferocity in the public mind which there would have been if the House of Commons had refused to entertain the Bill at all.  I confess that, till we had a majority, I was half inclined to tremble at the storm which we had raised.  At present I think that we are absolutely certain of victory, and of victory without commotion.

Such a scene as the division of last Tuesday I never saw, and never expect to see again.  If I should live fifty years, the impression of it will be as fresh and sharp in my mind as if it had just taken place.  It was like seeing Caesar stabbed in the Senate House, or seeing Oliver taking the mace from the table; a sight to be seen only once, and never to be forgotten.  The crowd overflowed the House in every part.  When the strangers were cleared out, and the doors locked, we had six hundred and eight members present,—­more by fifty-five than ever were in a division before.  The Ayes and Noes were like two volleys of cannon from opposite sides of a field of battle.  When the opposition went out into the lobby, an operation which took up twenty minutes or more, we spread ourselves over the benches on both sides of the House; for there were many of us who had not been able to find a seat during the evening. ["The practice in the Commons, until 1836, was to send one party forth into the lobby, the other remaining in the House.”—­Sir T. Erskine May’s “Parliamentary Practice.”] When the doors were shut we began to speculate on our numbers.  Everybody was desponding.  “We have lost it.  We are only two hundred and eighty at most.  I do not think we are two hundred and fifty.  They are three hundred.  Alderman Thompson has counted them.  He says they are two hundred and ninety-nine.”  This was the talk on our benches.  I wonder that men who have been long in Parliament do not acquire a better coup d’oeil for numbers.  The House, when only the Ayes were in it, looked to me a very fair House,—­much fuller than it generally is even on debates of considerable interest.  I had no hope, however, of three hundred.  As the tellers passed along our lowest row on the left hand side the interest was insupportable,—­two hundred and ninety-one,—­two hundred and ninety-two ,—­we were all standing up and stretching forward, telling with the tellers.  At three hundred there was a short cry of joy,—­at three hundred and two another,—­suppressed however in a moment; for we did not yet know what the hostile force might be.  We knew, however, that