I called on Lord Lansdowne on Sunday.  He told me distinctly that he expected the Bill to be lost in the Lords, and that, if it were lost, the Ministers must go out.  I told him, with as much strength of expression as was suited to the nature of our connection, and to his age and rank, that, if the Ministers receded before the Lords, and hesitated to make Peers, they and the Whig party were lost; that nothing remained but an insolent oligarchy on the one side, and an infuriated people on the other; and that Lord Grey and his colleagues would become as odious and more contemptible than Peel and the Duke of Wellington.  Why did they not think of all this earlier?  Why put their hand to the plough, and look back?  Why begin to build without counting the cost of finishing?  Why raise the public appetite, and then baulk it?  I told him that the House of Commons would address the King against a Tory Ministry.  I feel assured that it would do so.  I feel assured that, if those who are bidden will not come, the highways and hedges will be ransacked to get together a reforming Cabinet.  To one thing my mind is made up.  If nobody else will move an address to the Crown against a Tory Ministry, I will.

Ever yours

T. B. M.

London:  October 17, 1831.

My dear Ellis,—­I should have written to you before, but that I mislaid your letter and forgot your direction.  When shall you be in London?  Of course you do not mean to sacrifice your professional business to the work of numbering the gates, and telling the towers, of boroughs in Wales. [Mr. Ellis was one of the Commissioners appointed to arrange the boundaries of Parliamentary boroughs in connection with the Reform Bill.] You will come back, I suppose, with your head full of ten pound householders instead of eroes and of Caermarthen and Denbigh instead of Carians and Pelasgians.  Is it true, by the bye, that the Commissioners are whipped on the boundaries of the boroughs by the beadles, in order that they may not forget the precise line which they have drawn?  I deny it wherever I go, and assure people that some of my friends who are in the Commission would not submit to such degradation.

You must have been hard-worked indeed, and soundly whipped too, if you have suffered as much for the Reform Bill as we who debated it.  I believe that there are fifty members of the House of Commons who have done irreparable injury to their health by attendance on the discussions of this session.  I have got through pretty well, but I look forward, I confess, with great dismay to the thought of recommencing; particularly as Wetherell’s cursed lungs seem to be in as good condition as ever.