he owes
every political privilege that he enjoys. The time will come when
history will do justice to the Whigs of England, and will faithfully
relate how much they did and suffered for Ireland. I see on the
benches near me men who might, by uttering one word against Catholic
Emancipation.--nay, by merely abstaining from uttering a word in favour
of Catholic Emancipation,--have been returned to this House without
difficulty or expense, and who, rather than wrong their Irish
fellow-subjects, were content to relinquish all the objects of their
honourable ambition, and to retire into private life with conscience
and fame untarnished. As to one eminent person, who seems to be regarded
with especial malevolence by those who ought never to mention his name
without respect and gratitude, I will only say this, that the loudest
clamour which the honourable and learned gentleman can excite against
Lord Grey will be trifling when compared with the clamour which Lord
Grey withstood in order to place the honourable and learned gentleman
where he now sits. Though a young member of the Whig party I will
venture to speak in the name of the whole body. I tell the honourable
and learned gentleman, that the same spirit which sustained us in a just
contest for him will sustain us in an equally just contest against him.
Calumny, abuse, royal displeasure, popular fury, exclusion from office,
exclusion from Parliament, we were ready to endure them all, rather than
that he should be less than a British subject. We never will suffer him
to be more."] In spite of this flattering reception, he seldom addressed
the House. A subordinate member of a Government, with plenty to do in
his own department, finds little temptation, and less encouragement,
to play the debater. The difference of opinion between the two Houses
concerning the Irish Church Temporalities Bill, which constituted the
crisis of the year, was the one circumstance that excited in Macaulay's
mind any very lively emotions; but those emotions, being denied their
full and free expression in the oratory of a partisan, found vent in the
doleful prognostications of a despairing patriot which fill his letters
throughout the months of June and July. His abstinence from the passing
topics of Parliamentary controversy obtained for him a friendly, as well
as an attentive, hearing from both sides of the House whenever he
spoke on his own subjects; and did much to smooth the progress of those
immen