peth, now Earl of Carlisle, Lord John Russell, and his friend, Mr.
Richard Cobden. Sir Robert Peel, who was at that time Prime Minister,
had always adhered to the protective doctrines of Pitt and Wellington;
and it was mainly due to the clear and cogent reasoning of Bright and
his associates, that the illustrious statesman at the head of the
Treasury finally yielded, with a magnanimity never surpassed in the
annals of ministerial history, to the enlightened policy of free trade
in respect to corn. The distress which had for years resulted from the
stringent enactments of Lord Liverpool's government to the lower class,
was, by this patriotic sacrifice of the first minister, done away with;
and not least among those who contributed to the accomplishment of so
auspicious a result, we must reckon the subject of this sketch. The Tory
party, headed by such chiefs as Wellington and Lyndhurst, in the Lords,
and Stanley and Disraeli, in the Commons, made a stern and pertinacious
resistance to the repeal; and no one was more feared by the intellectual
giants of that party than was Bright. His severe wit, his plain, blunt
manner of exposing the defects of his opponents, and his impulsive and
overwhelming declamation, were hardly exceeded by the fluent exuberance
of Stanley and the keen sarcasm of the Hebrew novelist, Disraeli.

While he generally acted with the party of which Lord Russell and Lord
Landsdowne were the chiefs, he did not place himself supinely under the
dictation of the caucus-room. Professing to be bound by the precepts of
no faction, acting frequently with the conservatives, although oftener
with the liberals, independent of ministerial control, and disdaining to
attain power by the sacrifice of any principle, he was excluded from a
participation in the government, when those with whom he in general
sympathized succeeded to the administration in 1846. He early adopted
ultra-liberal views, and has always been known as the advocate of
universal suffrage, the separation of Church and State, and the
diminution of the influence of hereditary nobles; and although he could
not but be aware that many of his doctrines were repugnant to those of
his auditors, and a majority of his countrymen, he has not hesitated to
uphold and express them with great perseverance and ingenuousness.

Had he lived in the days of Russell and Sidney, he had perhaps shared
their fate, and paid the penalty of unpopular politics on the scaffold.
T