lowing March, however, a seat fell vacant, which the interest of Mr. Fremantle obtained for him, without stipulation or pledge of any sort, except to resign whenever his politics should differ from those of the person who had the means of recommending him to the seat; and accordingly Mr. Horner again entered the House, as Member for St. Mawes. One of the first votes he gave was in opposition to a resolution proposed by Sir Henry Parnell, to allow the importation of corn under a graduated scale of duties, and in favour of continuing the corn laws in the state they were left in at the end of the war, when the corn trade was in fact perfectly free. Mr. Horner was a steady and consistent supporter of the principle of free trade, in corn and everything else, and at a later period of his life, when he was in Italy, we find him lamenting over the spectacle of cargoes of wheat going to supply the wants of every country in Europe, except England.

Mr. Horner seems to have exerted himself more after his reelection, and there are notices of several of his speeches on different occasions. He appears to have been received very favourably in the House, and Sir James Mackintosh is reported to have said, in allusion to his speeches upon the corn question and that of Genoa, that two such speeches had never been made in the House of Commons by the same person in one week, or at least not for a great many years.

Bonaparte's return from Elba gave rise to a difference of opinion among the Whigs, as to the policy to be pursued with relation to France, and Mr. Horner voted in a small minority against declaring war. This vote was in opposition to the opinions of Lord Buckingham, to whom he owed his seat, and he accordingly wrote to that nobleman offering to resign it. His Lordship, replied in very handsome terms, assuring him that at present he saw no reason to accept his resignation. It is not necessary, to enable us to appreciate the manliness with which Mr. Horner adhered to his convictions when almost alone, and amidst the warlike ferment which pervaded the country, and in opposition to almost all his friends, that we should agree with him as to the justice of those convictions. Nor is this the place to discuss the question, whether our declaration of war at that time, and our invasion of France for the purpose of reinstating the Bourbons, were just or politic. Mr. Horner adhered throughout to his unfavourable opinion of our conduct in that supplementary war, and his sympathies were with the French, as soon as it came to be a question of invading their territory. The grounds on which his opinions were formed appear in his letters:

"A war renewed now upon the footing of the Treaty of Paris will be in truth a war for the restoration of the Bourbon family, coupled with a still more indefensible principle, that of proscribing an individual to destruction. No successes would ever reconcile me to such a war; but by so recommencing it we should multiply all the chances against us. The entrance of foreign troops upon French territory will give the Emperor, at once, all the strength of French national enthusiasm, certainly not weakened by having been suppressed for a year, nor by the insults which it has recently submitted to. If the Austrians march across the Rhine, I suppose they will detain the Empress and the young boy, as hostages; and that cannot fail to give Bonaparte an advantage in the war, both among his own people and foreigners, of all the interest and sympathy which such a circumstance must naturally inspire: and all this is to be done, with the hope of forcing upon France a family who, in a year's possession of the throne, could not secure a dozen bayonets to keep them in it, and who were so utterly insignificant, that they were not molested in their flight.”

"I never felt any interest in wars, either reading of them, or looking on in our own days, except on the side of the invaded; and whether they be Greeks or Persians, Russians or French, my wishes have always been in favour of each in their turn, for the success of their defence. Conceive me to hate Bonaparte as you do, but yet to wish, as I do fervently, for a successful resistance by France to the invasion of the Allies, and you are pretty nearly in possession of all my present politics. Could I make the future to my mind, sponte mea componere curas, I would balance the success of the war upon the frontiers of old France very evenly, and would keep up the struggle for power at Paris between Napoleon and the Constitutional party."-Vol. ii. p. 273.

Waterloo, however, "made the future" not at all to Mr. Horner's mind. The occupation of the capital by foreign troops filled him with something of a Frenchman's indignation, and he exclaimed against the ungenerous policy of sending Napoleon to St. Helena.

"It was a very painful circumstance in my last visit to Scotland, from the little politics I talked with anybody, to find myself so far asunder from my best friends in our views of foreign affairs. To me, it is losing the chief relish of life not to feel alike with them upon things which make us all feel strongly. And I have laid nothing so much to heart for many years as the difference which I imagine exists among us, respecting the nature and character of the present crisis of European politics. All the opinions which I have ever cherished seem, on this occasion, concentrated, and all the principles which have been gaining strength and confirmation in my mind every year of my life, seem put in peril at once. It is a question, whether all the good fruits of the French Revolution, dearly and cruelly as they have been earned, are to be lost to France: and whether it is not to be settled in the instance of that country, that the greatest and most civilized people may, by the

confederacy of courts and the alliance of armies, be subjected to the government of a family whom they despise and detest. It is a question whether the very first principle of slavery, that the people are the property of certain royal families, is not to be established as a fundamental maxim in the system of Europe; and whether the vital principle of our English liberty and our Revolution is not to be antiquated as a Jacobinical heresy by the force of English arms. The degradation of our army in being the main instrument of this warfare against freedom and civilization, the stain upon the national name in making so ungenerous a use of our triumph over our rival in arms, our keeping the Police of Paris to protect the Bourbons, while they are murdering with judicial forms those who tried the fortune of war with us, and to whom we in words, and they by fact and deed, gave warrant of an amnesty; these are incidental subjects of grief and shame, which embitter the pain with which one contemplates the course of events, and which will leave wounds upon our honour, even if the future struggle should take a favourable turn; but the struggle to which I look is that of the French people against the Bourbons and against the Confederate Sovereigns. And the most anxious and the most depressing reflection that perpetually recurs upon me, is the conviction, that for the success of this great contest, the principles of liberty must rely for their principal support upon the enlightened men of England, while most of these are not yet awakened to a sense of what is doing, and of what the consequences will inevitably be."

I fancy you will not agree with me," he says to Mr. Hallam," in being sorry to see, that nothing has been said by anybody, upon the bills relating to the prisoner at St. Helena, expressive of a regret that it was cast upon this country to execute so odious a part of the arrangements to which the victory of Waterloo has led. You know all my sentiments about the man, how little I share any of the admiration which his extraordinary fortunes and character have imposed upon some persons, and how much I execrated all along his tyranny and military ambition, and enmity to all civil liberty. At the height of his power I expressed myself more strongly against him than I should permit myself to do publicly now. In the treatment he has met with, I feel no inclination to deny, that the sparing his life is an act of humanity, such as is not recorded of any of those former ages in which such characters and events are to be found; yet I cannot but feel at the same time that when a few years more are gone by, and we can all look back upon these transactions from some distance, it will be our regret and mortification that the Government of this day could see no safety for Europe against a single man, but in transporting him to a rock in the Ocean, and that in leaving him his life, we have taken all that can make life anything but a torment. I do not mean to make any stronger imputation, than that we have been wanting in magnanimity, where the opportunity was obvious and commanding. But this country has reached too high a station to be at liberty to miss such opportunities. Our virtues must rise with our fortune, or we shall be thought to have been unworthy of it. A large and secure generosity is one of the conditions by which we VOL. VI. No. 23.-New Series.

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are to hold our greatness. Instead of this we have treated our captive with the timid severity of a little republic; and have lowered ourselves to the notions of our despot allies, who know nothing of safety but in force and bonds.”—Vol. ii. p. 316.

These extracts may serve to give some notion of the style of Mr. Horner's parliamentary speaking, which unquestionably derived much of its effect from its suitableness to the known character of the man. It had nothing affected in it. And from the unimaginative tendency of his mind, and his want of wit, it may readily be inferred that his oratory would be of an argumentative cast. In fact strength of reasoning, and that perspicuity which arises from a thorough comprehension of his subject, are what form the chief merits of all his compositions. His speeches have, besides, an unusual degree of vigour and force, produced evidently by the earnestness with which he strove to impress his own convictions upon his hearers. He laboured indefatigably from a very early age in improving his style, and bestowed, perhaps, more attention upon it than one is apt to suppose an accomplishment of that sort deserves. His speech in the debate of the 20th Feb. 1816, on the Treaties of Peace, is better reported than ordinary: and enough of it is given to account, in some measure, for the great effect it is said to have produced in the House, and for the praises which were bestowed on it, It is a forcible denunciation of the Ministry, for having deluded this Country as well as France by false pretences; having declared when they entered on the campaign that their purpose was not to interfere with the internal government of France; and by that means having not only obtained several votes in the House, which they would not have had, if it had been understood from the first that their object was to replace the Bourbons, but also having neutralized many Frenchmen who would otherwise have joined the banner of Napoleon.

Just before the delivery of this Speech, Mr. Horner had brought before the House a Bill to regulate the proceedings of Grand Juries in Ireland. An illegal practice, it seems, had long prevailed in that country, of finding Bills of Indictment upon the mere productions of the depositions before the magistrates, without examining any of the witnesses. So far back as 1762, when Mr. Justice Aston, who had recently gone over to Ireland from Westminster Hall, told the Judges there that their practice in this respect was a direct violation of the law, they solemnly decided that it was very good law for Ireland. The magistrates who had taken the depositions were themselves, in that

ill-governed country, influenced by party spirit and other such motives to such an extent, that when one magistrate committed, his neighbour would often interfere to bail, and it was common for cross-informations to be sworn, that the delinquent and the party aggrieved might be placed on an equal footing, both being sent to stand their trial. It may readily be conceived what confusion and injustice must have been the consequence, and how mere a nullity the finding of the Grand Jury, from depositions alone, must have become. Mr. Horner introduced a Declaratory Act to remedy this abuse, which was passed the same Session, though not without much opposition on the part of the Irish Judges, who felt it as casting a reflection on their previous conduct. Those very Judges, we are told, in a few years after the reform was carried into operation, concurred with all the other parties whom it affected, in approbation of it; and the introduction of it must be looked upon as one of the most valuable of Mr. Horner's services in Parliament.

These were among the last acts of his political life. On the first of May following he made another attempt to prevail on the House to do something towards correcting the evils arising from the state of the currency, by moving for the appointment of a Select Committee "to enquire into the expediency of restoring the cash payments of the Bank of England, and the safest and most advantageous mode of effecting it." The motion was negatived by a large majority. Mr. Horner's speeches on this occasion are remarkable, both as pointing out the exact course which was pursued three years afterwards, and as bringing forward the argument which was then used by Sir Robert Peel in support of it; the approximation, namely, in the value of bullion and of notes, which had recently taken place in consequence of a peculiar juncture of circumstances.

Mr. Horner's last speech in the House of Commons was on the subject of Catholic Emancipation. His health had never been very vigorous, and, this summer, symptoms of a disease in the chest began to make their appearance. He was ordered to abstain from public speaking and every kind of exertion, and in the autumn his medical advisers recommended him to go abroad, as his only chance of recovery. His brother Leonard accompanied him through France into Italy, and Pisa was selected for their winter quarters. His mind remained as clear as ever, and he occupied himself in reading Machiavel and Dante, and in forming a plan of his studies and intellectual exercises for the future. The disease, however, was not to be baffled, and on the 8th of February 1817 he expired. On examining the body it was found that his complaint was not consumption,