itizen they did in effect draw the sword, and they would have been
cravens if they had left it in the scabbard. Lord Milton did something
to enhance the claim of his historic house upon the national gratitude
by giving practical effect to this audacious resolve; and, after the
lapse of two centuries, another Great Rebellion, more effectual than its
predecessor, but so brief and bloodless that history does not recognise
it as a rebellion at all, was inaugurated by the essentially English
proceeding of a quiet country gentleman telling the Collector to
call again. The crisis lasted just a week. The Duke had no mind for a
succession of Peterloos, on a vaster scale, and with a different issue.
He advised the King to recall his Ministers; and his Majesty, in his
turn, honoured the refractory lords with a most significant circular
letter, respectful in form, but unmistakable in tenor. A hundred peers
of the Opposition took the hint, and contrived to be absent whenever
Reform was before the House. The Bill was read for a third time by a
majority of five to one on the 4th of June; a strange, and not very
complimentary, method of celebrating old George the Third's birthday. On
the 5th it received the last touches in the Commons; and on the 7th
it became an Act, in very much the same shape, after such and so many
vicissitudes, as it wore when Lord John Russell first presented it to
Parliament.

Macaulay, whose eloquence had signalised every stage of the conflict,
and whose printed speeches are, of all its authentic records, the most
familiar to readers of our own day, was not left without his reward. He
was appointed one of the Commissioners of the Board of Control, which,
for three quarters of a century from 1784 onwards, represented the Crown
in its relations to the East Indian directors. His duties, like those of
every individual member of a Commission, were light or heavy as he chose
to make them; but his own feeling with regard to those duties must not
be deduced from the playful allusions contained in letters dashed off,
during the momentary leisure of an over-busy day, for the amusement of
two girls who barely numbered forty years between them. His speeches and
essays teem with expressions of a far deeper than official interest in
India and her people; and his minutes remain on record, to prove that he
did not affect the sentiment for a literary or oratorical purpose. The
attitude of his own mind with regard to our Eastern