suffered terribly, that is the truth, rather in body than in mind, and I often wish I could lie down and sleep without waking. But I will fight it out if I can. It would argue too great an attachment of consequence to my literary labours to sink under critical clamour. Did I know how to begin I would begin again this very day, although I know I should sink at the end."

The writer who transcribes these words, and who follows with a feeling which is more than sympathy the last awful pause of coming impotence which shadows over this valiant ever-labouring soul, can scarcely see the lines for tears.

Thus he fell who had worked, we believe, as never man worked before, with a steadiness, a bravery, an indomitable gaiety of heart, which raises him as high among the heroes of his race as his genius does among its poets. This last prodigious effort was to clear his honest name, and to preserve the dear home which had been for so long the delight of his heart; and if he himself had helped to make the ruin which he sought single-handed to repair, it was not his kind profusion, his congenial magnificence, that was the sole, or indeed the chief, causes of that overthrow. But what others had done he only struggled to undo-struggled till the pen fell from his feeble hand-till the last ray of light sunk and faded from his despairing soul. He felt the light and the power steal away from him as the darkened days went on. His wife died by his side when he most wanted solace; yet, with one faithful child standing by him of all his once joyous family, his daughter Anne, he still toiled and struggled on until nature refused to struggle more.

We need not attempt to touch on the last despairing journey to Italy. He went to Rome, Naples, places he would have loved to roam about and

take into his heart, with one sad moaning cry everywhere to get home -to die at home. And so he did. They took him back to his Abbotsford for the last scene of all. From that dearest familiar place his most Christian, most honest, most courteous, noble, and gentle soul must have known its way better to the open gates of heaven.

And what can we say of Walter Scott which all the world has not said already? His last fierce and terrible struggle against those giant powers of Debt and Shame, which are to this generation what dragons and devouring monsters were to the past, humbling, as he felt it, and as many a man has felt it, was in reality the greatest, if saddest, glory of his career. It was the thing he could bear worst, and he bore it like a hero. The greatest works of his genius pale before this work of his life. We shake our head and sigh over the fatal darkness that enveloped his end. He himself mournfully speaks of the degradation which, in the public eye, attends the author who works for his bread. But if such a degradation ever existed, he made an end of it; and never was battle against the most chivalrous of foes on the noblest field more splendidly fought than this dark and desperate battle against the modern demons whose grip is ruin, and whose conquest gives no fame.

His bones are laid by the Tweed, as he would have had them. But the heirs and descendants for whom he laboured have all but died out of the land, a pathetic moral to his tale of tenderest and most natural ambition. Yet Scott has not lived in vain; for Scotland is his monument, and the nation his heir, proud to her heart of her poet, the type of our race, the flower of our genius, the noblest and truest, as well as most gifted, of all Scots who glory in that name.

THE dead-lock in the management of public affairs, of which we complained last month, seems to be growing more decided, and more pregnant with mischief to the commonwealth, every day. Not over either House of Parliament can her Majesty's Ministers pretend that they are able any longer to exercise the smallest legitimate control. By a desperate and most unwise expedient they are endeavouring, it is true, to regain their influence with the House of Commons; and it remains to be seen how far the end will justify the means even in the eyes of those who are consenting parties to it. But as to the other House, that has got quite beyond their management. Mutterings about a collision are now as little regarded there as threats of dissolution are seriously thought of elsewhere; and the consequence is a state of things, so far as legislation is concerned, to which modern history presents no parallel. The Commons, when appealed to in their proper chamber, where alone both law and constitutional usage require that appeals to them should be made, have thus far taken their own measure of each case as it came before them, and dealt with it after the humour of the moment. Crowding beside and behind the Ministerial benches, and professing confidence in Mr Gladstone so far as that they resist every overt attempt to displace him, they still meet his proposals as he brings them forward with just that measure of cold respect which is, even more than carping and disjointed querulousness, mortifying to the head of an Administration. If the bill brought forward deal with some trivial matter-if it be a lectionary bill, for example, or some

thing of the sort which can hardly provoke controversy, and therefore raises none-they vote for and pass it without much discussion. If it touch points that affect in any way the wellbeing of the State, they look at it in all its possible bearings; and, having wrangled over it for weeks together, either compel the Minister to withdraw it, or carry for him just as much or just as little of his scheme as renders both the measure itself and the authors of it ridiculous. Such has undeniably been their manner of proceeding up to the present date, and the results are before us. For who can speak of the controversy on the Army Regulation Bill as other than a virtual defeat to Mr Gladstone in his own House of Commons? Sustained at the second reading by a majority of a hundred and twenty, it received in Committee such rough treatment, that before the proposal to read it a third time had been made, it had entirely changed its nature. Even that incident, however, failed to reconcile the House to the proposed object and the mode of attaining it. Sixty-two out of the hundred and twenty members who had greeted the scheme in the earlier stages with approval, withdrew their support; and it went to the House of Lords at last not only mutilated and worthless, but affirmed by a majority of not more than fifty-two votes.

We have recapitulated all this, because it is necessary that our readers should keep in view the ups and downs of the one solitary important measure which a Government more numerously supported than any that has ruled in Downing Street for wellnigh forty years has been able, between February and August, to

carry in the House of Commons. At what expense of character they succeeded even thus far-how facts were distorted to meet difficulties, and figures misplaced-no one who followed the course of the debate needs to be reminded. But the point which we desire especially to press upon public attention is this, that all else undertaken by the Government, as such, has been a failure; that their bill for the better management of expenditure in English counties, their Liquor Bill, their Scottish Education Bill, with many more which we cannot stop to particularise, because their name is Legion, have with difficulty been advanced to the first or second stage in their progress, there to be stopped, and in due time formally withdrawn. The measures referred to may have been good or bad in themselves that is a question which in no way touches our present argument; they were certainly not, upon the face of them at least, revolutionary. But they all equally miscarried. Why? Because in one direction, and only in one, Mr Gladstone appears to be capable of moving. He can put in order plans for the overthrow of a Church, or for breaking down the rights of property, or abolishing charitable endowments, and so state his case as to receive the support, willing or unwilling, of his party; but the moment he is called upon to construct or to conserve, if it be even by passing a bill for the better protection of life in a disturbed district of Ireland, his right hand forgets its cunning. A more thoroughly inefficient Minister than he, except to unsettle men's minds, and in doing so to bring the whole machinery of Parliamentary government into dis

repute, never presided over the destinies of this or any other constitutional monarchy.

Among other expedients to keep himself in place, Mr Gladstone has taken up of late the question of the Ballot, to which, throughout the whole course of his political career, he had declared himself, on every fitting occasion, uncompromisingly hostile. The reasons which he assigns for this change of opinion are as disingenuous as the change itself is a blunder. He tells us that the franchise has ceased to be a trust, because it has been conferred on householders, and even on lodgers; and that there no longer exists that necessity for exercising it, subject to the control of public opinion, which, while the privilege was more restricted, rendered public voting a moral obligation. Now, in the first place, as we need hardly stop to point out, the franchise, though greatly extended, has not as yet changed its character even in boroughs. There are conditions on which both householders and lodgers can alone exercise the privilege, such as residence in the same tenement for a specified period of time,* maturity of age, and so forth; while householders and lodgers together do not now, nor ever will, make up the sum-total of the population even in boroughs. Women, minors, children, domestic servants of both sexes, all these are just as much interested in the work of legislation as their husbands, fathers, and masters. If, therefore, it were the case, which it is not, that each particular borough sends its one or more members to Parliament charged with the interests exclusively of the place for which they sit, the franchise, or right to vote, would still

be a trust; which, as the voter holds it for the benefit of his neighbours not less than for his own, he is bound to exercise conscientiously, and to satisfy the world that he does so. But reasoning of this sort is, in truth, out of place on such a question. No member of Parliament, whether he represent a borough or a county, enters the House of Commons as a mere delegate. He goes thither to legislate for the whole empire; and the electors who choose him, keeping this before their eyes, cannot rid themselves, however willing they may be to do so, of the responsibility that attaches to their act. All this is so obviously true, that we need not go with Mr Walter into the palpable absurdity of applying to counties a device which is clearly inconsistent with their political condition, whatever may be said of its fitness for the political condition of boroughs. No doubt we have brought down our rural franchise pretty low. Still, a twelve-pound house in the most thickly-peopled county of England is the residence of less than one out of every ten, or, it may be, of one out of every twenty, of the householders of the division. If the right of voting which the last Reform Bill conferred upon the master of that house be not a trust, then we must arrive at the conclusion that the franchise never was a trust at all, but a mere personal privilege or property.

Mr Gladstone's argument will not hold water for a moment, and he knows it. The expression of it seems to have escaped him in an unguarded moment. He is well aware that, if gravely advanced in debate, it would be knocked to pieces, and therefore keeps himself judiciously in the background. But he has done more than this. Not content to abdicate his proper functions in favour of another-not satisfied to put Mr Forster forward, and to take

his own place among the supporters of that gentleman-he prepares the way for a successful campaign on the Ballot question by the most extraordinary, and, we must be allowed to add, the most unconstitutional, extra-Parliamentary proceeding on record. We need not say that party meetings outside the Houses of Parliament, when great questions are pending, and the fate of Ministries is known to hang in the balance, are well-understood things. They have always been held in times past, and always will be held in times to come, so long as there are constitutional questions to be discussed, and constitutional parties to discuss them. Not to go farther back than to times within the memory of living men, we may remember that the late Lord Derby, when about to fight the battle of his Electoral Reform, called his friends together and opened to them his mind-just as Lord Palmerston and Lord John Russell, when respectively at the head of Administrations, had on momentous occasions done before him. But in each of these cases, and in all others to which our personal recollection extends, the meetings so called were made up of Lords as well as of Commons. They were fair, honest, straightforward gatherings of noblemen and gentlemen-the members of both Houses -to whom the Minister was desirous of explaining his views, and whom he was anxious, before taking any decided step towards advancing them, to consult, because without their hearty support he knew himself to be powerless. Mr Gladstone has inaugurated an tirely novel mode of procedure. He explains nothing to his party beforehand. He launches his great measure, with its endless complication of details, first, and then, and not till then, considers how it is to be carried. His party treat him on

this occasion as they had treated him on many others they read his bill twice. But scarcely is this done ere they give notice of amendments by the score, the prospect of fairly considering which, as they become successively mature, is appalling. How does he act? He invites his party to meet him in a private room. Observe that not a single member of the House of Lords receives an invitation to be present at this meeting. Why should 'Peers be invited? He is not going to hold a party consultation. He has no policy to explain, no measure to submit for the consideration of others, no advice to ask or receive. His object is to set up a caucus." The party, therefore, which meets him, consists exclusively of that section of the House of Commons on which he is accustomed to rely; and which, conscious of his own lack of power to manage them when in their proper places, he is desirous of fettering one by one in private conclave. Not having ourselves been present at the gathering, we must take our report of what passed from others; but the following statement of facts we believe to be substantially correct.

66

Mr Gladstone, we are told, who looked anxious and worn, began by deprecating discussion at the meeting. The tone in which he made this appeal was more than ordinarily gentle and conciliatory, and he carried the sympathies of his audience with him. He then proceeded, amid profound silence, to explain the position in which the Government found itself, his explanation amounting to this: We, the Government, have given you a Bill which shall for the future render compulsory secret voting both in municipal and Parliamentary elections. We must pass it, for to that we are pledged; and if we fail to redeem the pledge, with the appearance, before the world, of having done so

in a high-handed manner, we shall lose our character altogether. We have shown you how we propose to effect our end; but the details of our measure seem in many particulars to be unsatisfactory to you; and you, on whom we depend, have given notice of endless amendments in Committee. This course on your parts we hold to be at once unreasonable and inexpedient. But, knowing of what stuff you are made, we despair of being able, after the Bill gets into Committee, to prevail upon you to abandon your crotchets. Understand, therefore, beforehand, that we are willing to humour you, each and all, to the very verge of not making ourselves contemptible. Tell us in private what you severally desire, and depend upon our meeting your wishes as far as it is possible to do so consistently with the success of our measure. What we deprecate is, pressure in the House. Do not formally withdraw your amendments so as to give time for the enemy to make them their own; but so bear yourselves, that whatever concessions are made shall seem to be made by the Government spontaneously, not to be wrung out of them by the pertinacity of their own friends. It will never do to carry this Bill, as we did the Army Regulation Bill, to the Lords, modified and remodified at the dictation of outsiders; and when all is done, floating it perhaps, at last, through the House of Commons, on the shoulders of less than half of our recognised majority. And the first condition towards this amount of success is, that there shall be as little speechmaking as possible. I myself intend to hold my tongue. It will be a great privation, an almost intolerable constraint; but so satisfied am I of the wisdom, indeed the necessity, of the procedure, that nothing, as far as can at present be foreseen, shall induce me to break