through good and evil report, in deed as well as in name, a
Friend of the People. As far back as 1793, he declared: 'I am more
convinced than ever that a reform in Parliament might now be peaceably
effected. I am afraid that we are not wise enough to profit by
experience, and what has occasioned the ruin of other Governments will
overthrow this--a perseverance in abuse until the people, maddened by
excessive injury and roused to a feeling of their own strength, will not
stop within the limits of moderate reformation.' The conduct of
Ministers during the dark period which followed the fall of the Ministry
of All the Talents in 1807, was, in Grey's deliberate opinion,
calculated to excite insurrection, since it was a policy of relentless
coercion and repression.

He made no secret of his conviction that the Government, by issuing
proclamations in which whole classes of the community were denounced as
seditious, as well as by fulminating against insurrections that only
existed in their own guilty imaginations, filled the minds of the people
with false alarms, and taught every man to distrust if not to hate his
neighbour. There was no more chance of Reform under the existing
_regime_ than of 'a thaw in Zembla,' to borrow a famous simile. Cobbett
was right in his assertion that the measures and manners of George IV.'s
reign did more to shake the long-settled ideas of the people in favour
of monarchical government than anything which had happened since the
days of Cromwell. The day of the King's funeral--it was early in July
and beautifully fine--was marked, of course, by official signs of
mourning, but the rank and file of the people rejoiced, and, according
to a contemporary record, the merry-making and junketing in the villages
round London recalled the scenes of an ordinary Whit Monday.

On the whole, the nation accepted the accession of the Sailor King with
equanimity, though scarcely with enthusiasm, and for the moment it was
not thought that the new reign would bring an immediate change of
Ministry. The dull, uncompromising nonsense, however, which Wellington
put into the King's lips in the Speech from the Throne at the beginning
of November, threatening with punishment the seditious and disaffected,
followed as it quickly was by the Duke's own statement in answer to Lord
Grey, that no measure of Parliamentary reform should be proposed by the
Government as long as he was responsible for its policy, awoke the storm
wh