could not last forever. Justly proud of the immense success that they had bought by their resolution, their energy, and their perseverance, the ministers regarded the fall of Napoleon as a party triumph which could only serve to confirm their power. But the last cannon-shot that was fired on the 18th of June, 1815, was in truth the death-knell of the Golden Age of Toryism. When the passion and ardor of the war gave place to the discontent engendered by a protracted period of commercial distress, the opponents of progress began to perceive that they had to reckon, not with a small and disheartened faction, but with a clear majority of the nation led by the most enlightened and the most eminent of its sons. Agitators and incendiaries retired into the background, as will always be the case when the country is in earnest; and statesmen who had much to lose, but were not afraid to risk it, stepped quietly and firmly to the front. The men, and the sons of the men, who had so long endured exclusion from office imbittered by unpopularity, at length reaped their reward. Earl Grey, who forty years before had been hooted through the streets of North Shields with cries of "No Popery," lived to bear the most respected name in England; and Brougham, whose opinions differed little from those for expressing which Dr. Priestley, in 1791, had his house burned about his ears by the Birmingham mob, was now the popular idol beyond all comparison or competition. In the face of such unanimity of purpose, guided by so much worth and talent, the ministers lost their nerve, and, like all rulers who do not possess the confidence of the governed, began first to make mistakes and then to quarrel among themselves. Throughout the years of Macaulay's early manhood the ice was breaking fast. He was still quite young when the concession of Catholic emancipation* gave a moral shock to Macaulay was fond of repeating an answer made to him by Lord Clarendon in the year 1829. The young men were talking over the situation, and Macaulay expressed curiosity as to the terms in which the Duke of Wellington would recommend the Catholic Relief Bill to the Peers. "Oh," said the other, "it will be easy enough. He'll say, 'My lords, attention! Right about face! March!" G the Tory party from which it never recovered until the old order of things had finally passed away. It was his fortune to enter into other men's labors after the burden and heat of the day had already been borne, and to be summoned into the field just as the season was at hand for gathering in a ripe and long-expected harvest of beneficent legislation. On the 5th of April, 1830, he addressed the House of Commons on the second reading of Mr. Robert Grant's bill for the removal of Jewish disabilities. Sir James Mackintosh rose with him, but Macaulay got the advantage of the preference that has always been conceded to one who speaks for the first time after gaining his seat during the continuance of a Parliament—a privilege which, by a stretch of generosity, is now extended to new members who have been returned at a general election. Sir James subsequently took part in the debate; not, as he carefully assured his audience, “to supply any defects in the speech of his honorable friend, for there were none that he could find, but principally to absolve his own conscience." Indeed, Macaulay, addressing himself to his task with an absence of pretension such as never fails to conciliate the good-will of the House toward a maiden speech, put clearly and concisely enough the arguments in favor of the billarguments which, obvious and almost commonplace as they appear under this straightforward treatment, had yet to be repeated during a space of six-and-thirty years before they commended themselves to the judgment of our Upper Chamber. "The power of which you deprive the Jew consists in maces, and gold chains, and skins of parchment with pieces of wax dangling from their edges. The power which you leave the Jew is the power of principal over clerk, of master over servant, of landlord over tenant. As things now stand, a Jew may be the richest man in England. He may possess the means of raising this party and depressing that; of making East Indian directors; of making members of Parliament. The influence of a Jew may be of the first consequence in a war which shakes Europe to the centre. His power may come into play in assisting or thwarting the greatest plans of the greatest princes; and yet, with all this confessed, acknowl edged, undenied, you would have him deprived of power! Does not wealth confer power? How are we to permit all the consequences of that wealth but one? I can not conceive the nature of an argument that is to bear out such a position. If we were to be called on to revert to the day when the warehouses of Jews were torn down and pillaged, the theory would be comprehensible. But we have to do with a persecution so delicate that there is no abstract rule for its guidance. You tell us that the Jews have no legal right to power, and I am bound to admit it; but in the same way, three hundred years ago they had no legal right to be in England, and six hundred years ago they had no legal right to the teeth in their heads. But, if it is the moral right we are to look at, I hold that on every principle of moral obligation the Jew has a right to political power." He was on his legs once again, and once only, during his first session; doing more for future success in Parliament by his silence than he could have effected by half a dozen brilliant perorations. A crisis was rapidly approaching when a man gifted with eloquence, who by previous self-restraint had convinced the House that he did not speak for speaking's sake, might rise almost in a day to the very summit of influence and reputation. The country was under the personal rule of the Duke of Wellington, who had gradually squeezed out of his Cabinet every vestige of Liberalism and even of independence, and who at last stood so completely alone that he was generally supposed to be in more intimate communication with Prince Polignac than with any of his own colleagues. The duke had his own way in the Lords; and on the benches of the Commons the Opposition members were unable to carry, or even visibly to improve their prospect of carrying, the measures on which their hearts were set. The Reformers were not doing better in the division lobby than in 1821, and their question showed no signs of having advanced since the day when it had been thrown over by Pitt on the eve of the French Revolution. But the outward aspect of the situation was very far from answering to the reality. While the leaders of the popular party had been spending themselves in efforts that seemed each more abortive than the last-dividing only to be enormously outvoted, and vindicating with calmness and moderation the first principles of constitutional government only to be stigmatized as the apostles of anarchy-a mighty change was surely but imperceptibly effecting itself in the collective mind of their fellow-countrymen. For, while the tired waves, vainly breaking, Far back, through creeks and inlets making, Events were at hand which unmistakably showed how dif ferent was the England of 1830 from the England of 1790. The king died; Parliament was dissolved on the 24th of July; and in the first excitement and bustle of the elections, while the candidates were still on the road and the writs in the mail-bag, came the news that Paris was in arms. The troops fought as well as Frenchmen ever can be got to fight against the tricolor; but by the evening of the 29th it was all over with the Bourbons. The minister whose friendship had reflected such unpopularity on our own premier succumbed to the detestation of the victorious people, and his sacrifice did not save the dynasty. What was passing among our neighbors for once created sympathy, and not repulsion, on this side the Channel. One French revolution had condemned English Liberalism to forty years of subjection, and another was to be the signal which launched it on as long a career of supremacy. Most men said, and all felt, that Wellington must follow Polignac; and the public temper was such as made it well for the stability of our throne that it was filled by a monarch who had attracted to himself the hopes and affection of the nation, and who shared its preferences and antipathies with regard to the leading statesmen of the day. One result of political disturbance in any quarter of the globe is to fill the scene of action with young members of Parliament, who follow revolutions about Europe as assiduously as Jew brokers attend upon the movements of an invad ing army. Macaulay, whose re-election for Calne had been a thing of course, posted off to Paris at the end of August, journeying by Dieppe and Rouen, and eagerly enjoying a first taste of continental travel. His letters during the tour were such as, previously to the age of railroads, brothers who had not been abroad before used to write for the edification of sisters who expected never to go abroad at all. He describes in minute detail manners and institutions that to us are no longer novelties, and monuments which an educated Englishman of our time knows as well as Westminster Abbey, and a great deal better than the Tower. Every thing that he saw, heard, eat, drank, paid, and suffered, was noted down in his exuberant diction to be read aloud and commented on over the breakfast-table in Great Ormond Street. "At Rouen I was struck by the union of venerable antiquity with extreme liveliness and gayety. We have nothing of the sort in England. Till the time of James the First, I imagine, our houses were almost all of wood, and have, in consequence, disappeared. In York there are some very old streets; but they are abandoned to the lowest people, and the gay shops are in the newly built quarter of the town. In London, what with the fire of 1666, and what with the natural progress of demolition and rebuilding, I doubt whether there are fifty houses that date from the Reformation. But in Rouen you have street after street of lofty, stern-looking masses of stone, with Gothic carvings. The buildings are so high, and the ways so narrow, that the sun can scarcely reach the pavements. Yet in these streets, monastic in their aspect, you have all the glitter of Regent Street or the Burlington Arcade. Rugged and dark above, below they are a blaze of ribbons, gowns, watches, trinkets, artificial flowers; grapes, melons, and peaches such as Covent Garden does not furnish, filling the windows of the fruiterers; showy women swimming smoothly over the uneasy stones, and stared at by national guards swaggering by in full uniform. It is the Soho Bazaar transplanted into the gloomy cloisters of Oxford." He writes to a friend just before he started on his tour: "There is much that I am impatient to see, but two thiuch |