se his eyesight, was receding from the arena on which he
had acted so remarkable a part during the preceding fourteen years; and
Mr. Fox and his adherents, returning again to their own natural orbit,
were vindicating their integrity and consistency in the maintenance of a
constitutional Opposition. Faction, weakened and dismembered, had fallen
before the genius of Mr. Pitt.

The principal measure in the Cabinet in 1785 was a Bill for the reform
of the representation in Parliament, by which Mr. Pitt proposed to
transfer the franchises of thirty-six boroughs to counties and
unrepresented towns. A clause in this Bill, for giving pecuniary
compensation to the disfranchised boroughs, was fatal to its reception.
Mr. Fox laid down the maxim, that the franchise was not a property, but
a trust: the House adopted that view of the question, and the Bill was
lost. But Mr. Pitt, nevertheless, discharged his pledge to the public by
thus initiating the principle of parliamentary reform.

The Marquis of Buckingham still continued a passive spectator of public
events, and the correspondence of this period possesses consequently
little political interest. We learn by a letter from his brother, Mr. W.
W. Grenville, that he had placed his proxy in the hands of Lord
Camelford, who was so embarrassed by the responsibility, that he took
counsel with Lord Sydney and Mr. Grenville as to the course he should
follow in reference to a particular vote. Mr. Grenville, exercising his
usual good sense and practical judgment, strongly recommended his
Lordship to withdraw his proxy altogether, rather than to have it
exposed to the chance of compromising his opinions.

The unhappy difference between the Marquis of Buckingham and his
brother, Mr. Thomas Grenville, was not yet adjusted; and time seems only
to have widened a breach which both deplored, and were equally anxious
to remove. The proud feelings of the Marquis, wounded by the injustice
with which he conceived he had been treated, were peculiarly sensitive
to every act on the part of his friends that departed in the slightest
degree from the line he had marked out for himself. Perhaps he expected
from them more in this respect than the obligations of public life could
be reasonably expected to concede; in this instance, at least, he
appears to have exaggerated into a personal wrong a vote which was given
on pure and independent grounds, without a suspicion that it was open to
so injurious an int