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rs and reporting the debates have been the means whereby many of the most distinguished of our lawyers have been enabled to struggle through the days of their studentship and the earlier years of their difficult career. The last attempt of the House of Commons against the press culminated in Sir Francis Burdett's coming forward in its behalf, and, in an article in Cobbett's paper, among other things he asserted that the House of Commons had no legal right to imprison the People of England. In acting thus, Sir Francis amply atoned for the ridiculous attempt which, prompted by wounded vanity, he had made a few years before to engage the interference of the House of Commons in his behalf in what he called a breach of privilege--the said breach of privilege consisting merely in an advertisement in _The True Briton_ of the resolutions passed at a public meeting to petition against his return to Parliament. The results of his bold attack upon the power of the House of Commons, his imprisonment, the riots, and lamentable loss of life which followed, are so well known as to render any particularizing of them here unnecessary. Originating with this affair was a Government prosecution of _The Day_, the upshot of which was that Eugenius Roche, the editor--who was also proprietor of another flourishing journal, _The National Register_--one of the most able, honorable, and gentlemanly men ever connected with the press, of whom it has been truly said that 'during the lapse of more than twenty years that he was connected with the journals of London, he never gained an enemy or lost a friend,' was most unjustly condemned to a year's imprisonment. The next important event is the trial of the Hunts for a libel in _The Examiner_ in 1811. Brougham was their counsel, and made a masterly defence; and, though Lord Ellenborough, the presiding judge, summed up dead against the defendants--the judges always appear to have done so--the jury acquitted them. Yet Brougham in the course of his address drew the following unfavorable picture of the then state of the press: 'The licentiousness of the press has reached to a height which it certainly never attained in any other country, nor even in this at any former period. That licentiousness has indeed of late years appeared to despise all the bounds which had once been prescribed to the attacks on private character, insomuch that there is not only no personage so im
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