118 THK LATE AND PRESENT MINISTRY. 



mania for humbling the people himself. Had he retired from the 

 political arena when the Reform Bill was carried, the undivided 

 praises of the empire would have accompanied him, and been more 

 grateful, we apprehend, to him, than the spirit his rashness on the 

 Irish Persecution Bill has conjured up to pursue him with lasting 

 rancour. 



The Examiner, with a felicity of thought and diction peculiar to 

 that journal alone, says (but our extract, of course, loses its ori- 

 ginal brilliancy, as we only quote from memory), " Twenty, aye, 

 even ten years ago, Earl Grey would have been a great statesman. 

 But the age has outgrown him. A minister, to be effective, must 

 march with the times. Like a traveller in a snow storm, if he stop 

 he is smothered ; and a disposition to sleep is the forerunner of 

 death." The noble earl mistook existence for exertion, and failed to 

 perceive that it was not sufficient to place the Reform Bill in the 

 hands of the people, without being prepared to regulate his paces. by 

 the movement of the many. He had acquired, somehow or other," a 

 reputation for dignity justly we believe as most men but, with 

 singular perverseness, he essayed in his last speech, as a minister of 

 the crown, to demolish that opinion ; and, as far as a single effort 

 could go in that respect, pretty well succeeded. His pretext for 

 calling for the extraordinary powers of the coercion act was, that the 

 past conduct of himself arid colleagues was a sufficient guarantee 

 against their abuse of those powers. Yet in leaving office, he calls 

 upon the upper house to vest those very powers in the hands of any 

 administration, regardless of the probability of their being abused or 

 not. Now, this conduct, to say the least of it, was anything but 

 dignified ; more especially when we reflect that even his co-partners 

 in office repudiated the principles of the bill he was so anxious to 

 thrust upon their lordships' acceptance. Again, he attempted (and 

 what an attempt!) to defend his notorious provisioning of his innume- 

 rable progeny and their relations, on the score of their being fitted to 

 the offices to which he appointed them. With singular ill grace, he 

 asked the right reverend proprietors of lawn sleeves, did they not 

 think that Dr. Grey was very well fitted to the See of Hereford; or 

 that Hereford was very well fitted for him ? Cheers, as might be ex- 

 pected, were the response of the fathers in God. It was a weakness, 

 amiable, no doubt, but still a weakness, on the part of the venerable 

 premier, to see mountains of religious efficiency and political saga- 

 ciousness in his consanguineous Greys, where a more disinterested 

 man would have been unable to detect mole-hills of the like virtues. 

 But to call upon the public to recognise these very minute affairs, 

 through the same distorting and magnifying medium, was rather a 

 bold demand, even from Earl Grey, who hesitated not to demand a 

 total disruption of the principles of the constitution, to suit his poli- 

 tical bias. We could not but admire the extreme naivete of his re- 

 capitulating the good deeds of his administration. The recital cer- 

 tainly \vas of brevity calculated to suit the ennui of the most fasti- 

 dious ; and the paucity of his materials defied the embellishments of 

 rhetoric. " It is said," observed the noble premier, " that we have 

 done nothing. Is the Reform Bill nothing ? The renewal of the 



