562
PARLIAMENTARY REFORM.
even its outworks—who, indulging in a vein of playful and elegant pleasantry, to which no man listens in private with more delight than myself, knowing how well it becomes the leisure hours and familiar moments of my noble friend, delivered with the utmost purity of diction, and the most felicitous aptness of allusion—I was going to say a discourse— but it was an exercise, or essay—of the highest merit, which had only this fault—that it was an essay, or exercitation, on some other thesis, and not on this Bill. It was as if some one had set to my noble friend, whose accomplishments I know—whose varied talents I admire, but in whom I certainly desiderate soundness of judgment and closeness of argument, a theme de rebuspublicis, or de motu civium, or de novarum rerum cupiditate,—on change, on democracies, on republicanism, on anarchy ; and on these interesting but somewhat trite and even threadbare subjects, my noble friend made one of the most lucid, most terse, most classical, and, as far as such efforts will admit of eloquence, most eloquent exercitations, that ever proceeded from mortal pen. My noble friend proceeded altogether on a false assumption ; it was on a fiction of his own brain—on a device of his own imagination, that he spoke throughout. He first assumed that the Bill meant change and revolution, and. on change and revolution he prelected voluminously and successfully. So much for the critical merits of his performance ; but, practically viewed— regarded as an argument on the question before us— it is to be wholly left out of view ; it was quite beside the matter. If this Bill be change, and be revolution, there is no resisting the conclusions of my noble friend. But on that point I am at issue with him ; and he begins by taking the thing in dispute for granted. I deny that this Bill is change in the