appeared that innocence would again triumph. The two parties
seemed to have exchanged characters for one day. The friends of
the government, who in the Parliament were generally humble and
timorous, took a high tone, and spoke as it becomes men to speak
who are defending persecuted genius and virtue. The malecontents,
generally so insolent and turbulent, seemed to be completely
cowed. They abased themselves so low as to protest, what no human
being could believe, that they had no intention of attacking the
Chancellor, and had framed their resolution without any view to
him. Howe, from whose lips scarcely any thing ever dropped but
gall and poison, went so far as to say: "My Lord Somers is a man
of eminent merit, of merit so eminent that, if he had made a
slip, we might well overlook it." At a late hour the question was
put; and the motion was rejected by a majority of fifty in a
house of four hundred and nineteen members. It was long since
there had been so large an attendance at a division.

The ignominious failure of the attacks on Somers and Burnet
seemed to prove that the assembly was coming round to a better
temper. But the temper of a House of Commons left without the
guidance of a ministry is never to be trusted. "Nobody can tell
today," said an experienced politician of that time, "what the
majority may take it into their heads to do tomorrow." Already a
storm was gathering in which the Constitution itself was in
danger of perishing, and from which none of the three branches of
the legislature escaped without serious damage.

The question of the Irish forfeitures had been raised; and about
that question the minds of men, both within and without the walls
of Parliament, were in a strangely excitable state. Candid and