the gallery; and there, with the heated imaginations of youth,
and every feeling trained by the theories of Greek and Roman
Republicanism, they sat, night after night, watching the ministerial
movements of a harassed monarchy.

What must be the condition of a minister, rising before such an audience,
to pronounce the grave doctrines of public prudence; to oppose argument to
brilliant declamation; to proclaim regulated obedience, in the midst of
spirits fantastic as the winds; and to lay restraints, essential to the
public peace, on a population proud of their past defiances, and ready to
welcome even civil war? I was not conscious of any natural timidity; nor
have I ever found occasion to distrust my nerve on any great demand; but I
must acknowledge, that when in some of the leading debates of that most
absorbing and most perilous period, I rose to take the initiative, the
sight of the vast audience to whom I raised my eyes, was one of the
severest trials of my philosophy. The members round me excited no alarm;
with them I was prepared to grapple; it was a contest of argument; I had
facts for their facts, answers for their captiousness, and a fearless
tongue for their declamation. But the gallery thus filled was beyond my
reach; its passions and prejudices were inaccessible by any logic of mine;
and I stood before them, less as in the presence of a casual auditory than
of a tribunal, and at that tribunal, less as an advocate than as a culprit
on the point of being arraigned.

Another peculiar evil resulted from the admission of this crowd, and of
its composition. Every casual collision of debate became personal. The
most trivial play of pleasantry was embittered into an insult; the
simplest sting of passing controversy was often to be healed only by a
rencounter in the field. For the whole was acted on a public stage, with
the _elite_ of the nation looking down on the performance. The hundreds
of bright eyes glancing down from the gallery, were critics whose contempt
was not to be resisted; and no public assembly, since the days of the
Polish pospolite, ever settled so many points of debate in the shape of
points of honour.

At length Opposition rallied, and resolved to make a general assault upon
the Administration. Like their English friends, they had been stunned for
a while by the suddenness of the outbreak. But as the Turkish populace, in
a conflagration or the plague, no sooner recover from their first fright
th