e rich
heritage of so many ages of wisdom and glory. The danger is terrible.
The time is short. If this bill should be rejected, I pray to God that
none of those who concur in rejecting it may ever remember their votes
with unavailing remorse, amidst the wreck of laws, the confusion
of ranks, the spoliation of property, and the dissolution of social
order."] Sir Thomas Denman, who rose later on in the discussion, said,
with universal acceptance, that the orator's words remained tingling in
the ears of all who heard them, and would last in their memories as
long as they had memories to employ. That sense of proprietorship in an
effort of genius, which the House of Commons is ever ready to entertain,
effaced for a while all distinctions of party. "Portions of the speech,"
said Sir Robert Peel, "were as beautiful as anything I have ever heard
or read. It reminded one of the old times." The names of Fox, Burke,
and Canning were during that evening in everybody's mouth; and Macaulay
overheard with delight a knot of old members illustrating their
criticisms by recollections of Lord Plunket. He had reason to be
pleased; for he had been thought worthy of the compliment which the
judgment of Parliament reserves for a supreme occasion. In 1866, on the
second reading of the Franchise Bill, when the crowning oration of that
memorable debate had come to its close amidst a tempest of applause,
one or two veterans of the lobby, forgetting Macaulay on
Reform,--forgetting, it may be, Mr. Gladstone himself on the
Conservative Budget of 1852,--pronounced, amidst the willing assent of a
younger generation, that there had been nothing like it since Plunket.

The unequivocal success of the first speech into which he had thrown his
full power decided for some time to come the tenor of Macaulay's career.
During the next three years he devoted himself to Parliament, rivalling
Stanley in debate, and Hume in the regularity of his attendance. He
entered with zest into the animated and manysided life of the House of
Commons, of which so few traces can ordinarily be detected in what goes
by the name of political literature. The biographers of a distinguished
statesman too often seem to have forgotten that the subject of their
labours passed the best part of his waking hours, during the half of
every year, in a society of a special and deeply marked character, the
leading traits of which are at least as well worth recording as the
fashionable or dipl