Ever yours

T.B.  M.

On the 29th of January, 1833, commenced the first Session of the Reformed Parliament.  The main incidents of that Session, so fruitful in great measures of public utility, belong to general history; if indeed Clio herself is not fated to succumb beneath the stupendous undertaking of turning Hansard into a narrative imbued with human interest.  O’Connell,—­criticising the King’s speech at vast length, and passing in turns through every mood from the most exquisite pathos to downright and undisguised ferocity,—­at once plunged the House into a discussion on Ireland, which alternately blazed and smouldered through four livelong nights.  Shed and Grattan spoke finely; Peel and Stanley admirably; Bulwer made the first of his successes, and Cobbett the second of his failures; but the longest and the loudest cheers were those which greeted each of the glowing periods in which Macaulay, as the champion of the Whig party, met the great agitator face to face with high, but not intemperate, defiance.["We are called base, and brutal, and bloody.  Such are the epithets which the honourable and learned member for Dublin thinks it becoming to pour forth against the party to which he owes every political privilege that he enjoys.  The time will come when history will do justice to the Whigs of England, and will faithfully relate how much they did and suffered for Ireland.  I see on the benches near me men who might, by uttering one word against Catholic Emancipation.—­nay, by merely abstaining from uttering a word in favour of Catholic Emancipation,—­ have been returned to this House without difficulty or expense, and who, rather than wrong their Irish fellow-subjects, were content to relinquish all the objects of their honourable ambition, and to retire into private life with conscience and fame untarnished.  As to one eminent person, who seems to be regarded with especial malevolence by those who ought never to mention his name without respect and gratitude, I will only say this, that the loudest clamour which the honourable and learned gentleman can excite against Lord Grey will be trifling when compared with the clamour which Lord Grey withstood in order to place the honourable and learned gentleman where he now sits.  Though a young member of the Whig party I will venture to speak in the name of the whole body.  I tell the honourable and learned gentleman, that the same spirit which sustained us in a just contest for him will sustain us in an equally just contest against him.  Calumny, abuse, royal displeasure, popular fury, exclusion from office, exclusion from Parliament, we were ready to endure them all, rather than that he should be less than a British subject.  We never will suffer him to be more.”] In spite of this flattering reception, he seldom addressed the House.  A subordinate member of a Government, with plenty to do in his own department, finds little temptation, and less encouragement, to play the debater.