generally admitted, that the conduct of every individual eminently
concerned in that great historical transaction was characterised by the
rarest and most admirable quality of public life, moral courage. The
Sovereign who dismissed a Ministry apparently supported by an overwhelming
majority in the Parliament and the nation, and called to his councils the
absent chief of a parliamentary section, scarcely numbering at that moment
one hundred and forty individuals, and of a party in the country supposed
to be utterly discomfited by a recent revolution; the two ministers who in
this absence provisionally administered the affairs of the kingdom in the
teeth of an enraged and unscrupulous Opposition, and perhaps themselves
not sustained by a profound conviction, that the arrival of their expected
leader would convert their provisional into a permanent position; above
all the statesman who accepted the great charge at a time and under
circumstances which marred probably the deep projects of his own prescient
sagacity and maturing ambition; were all men gifted with a high spirit of
enterprise, and animated by that active fortitude which is the soul of
free governments.

It was a lively season, that winter of 1834! What hopes, what fears, and
what bets! From the day on which Mr. Hudson was to arrive at Rome to the
election of the Speaker, not a contingency that was not the subject of a
wager! People sprang up like mushrooms; town suddenly became full.
Everybody who had been in office, and everybody who wished to be in
office; everybody who had ever had anything, and everybody who ever
expected to have anything, were alike visible. All of course by mere
accident; one might meet the same men regularly every day for a month, who
were only 'passing through town.'

Now was the time for men to come forward who had never despaired of their
country. True they had voted for the Reform Bill, but that was to prevent