town, and had pledged himself to stand as soon as it had been elevated into a Parliamentary borough.  The Tories, on their side, brought forward Mr. Michael Sadler, the very man on whose behalf the Duke of Newcastle had done “what he liked with his own” in Newark,—­and, at the last general election, had done it in vain.  Sadler, smarting from the lash of the Edinburgh Review, infused into the contest an amount of personal bitterness that for his own sake might better have been spared; and, during more than a twelvemonth to come, Macaulay lived the life of a candidate whose own hands are full of public work at a time when his opponent has nothing to do except to make himself disagreeable.  But, having once undertaken to fight the battle of the Leeds Liberals, he fought it stoutly and cheerily; and he would have been the last to claim it as a merit, that, with numerous opportunities of a safe and easy election at his disposal, he remained faithful to the supporters who had been so forward to honour him with their choice.

The old system died hard; but in May 1832 came its final agony.  The Reform Bill had passed the Commons, and had been read a second time in the Upper House; but the facilities which Committee affords for maiming and delaying a measure of great magnitude and intricacy proved too much for the self-control of the Lords.  The King could not bring himself to adopt that wonderful expedient by which the unanimity of the three branches of our legislature may, in the last resort, be secured.  Deceived by an utterly fallacious analogy, his Majesty began to be persuaded that the path of concession would lead him whither it had led Louis the Sixteenth; and he resolved to halt on that path at the point where his Ministers advised him to force the hands of their lordships by creating peers.  The supposed warnings of the French Revolution, which had been dinned into the ears of the country by every Tory orator from Peel to Sibthorpe, at last had produced their effect on the royal imagination.  Earl Grey resigned, and the Duke of Wellington, with a loyalty which certainly did not stand in need of such an unlucky proof, came forward to meet the storm.  But its violence was too much even for his courage and constancy.  He could not get colleagues to assist him in the Cabinet, or supporters to vote with him in Parliament, or soldiers to fight for him in the streets; and it was evident that in a few days his position would be such as could only be kept by fighting.

The revolution had in truth commenced.  At a meeting of the political unions on the slope of Newhall Hill at Birmingham a hundred thousand voices had sung the words: 

 God is our guide.  No swords we draw. 
 We kindle not war’s battle fires. 
 By union, justice, reason, law,
 We claim the birthright of our sires.