lay waste all around you, and restore Sherwood Forest as an acceptable gift to the crown in its former condition of a royal chase, and an asylum for outlaws?  Are these the remedies for a starving and desperate populace?  Will the famished wretch who has braved your bayonets be appalled by your gibbets?  When death is a relief, and the only relief it appears that you will afford him, will he be dragooned into tranquillity?  Will that which could not be effected by your grenadiers, be accomplished by your executioners?  If you proceed by the forms of law, where is your evidence?  Those who refused to impeach their accomplices, when transportation only was the punishment, will hardly be tempted to witness against them when death is the penalty.  With all due deference to the noble lords opposite, I think a little investigation, some previous enquiry, would induce even them to change their purpose.  That most favourite state measure, so marvellously efficacious in many and recent instances, temporising, would not be without its advantage in this.  When a proposal is made to emancipate or relieve, you hesitate, you deliberate for years, you temporise and tamper with the minds of men; but a death-bill must be passed off hand, without a thought of the consequences.”

In reference to his own parliamentary displays, and to this maiden speech in particular, I find the following remarks in one of his Journals:—­

“Sheridan’s liking for me (whether he was not mystifying me, I do not know, but Lady Caroline Lamb and others told me that he said the same both before and after he knew me,) was founded upon ’English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.’  He told me that he did not care about poetry, (or about mine—­at least, any but that poem of mine,) but he was sure, from that and other symptoms, I should make an orator, if I would but take to speaking, and grow a parliament man.  He never ceased harping upon this to me to the last; and I remember my old tutor, Dr. Drury, had the same notion when I was a boy; but it never was my turn of inclination to try.  I spoke once or twice, as all young peers do, as a kind of introduction into public life; but dissipation, shyness, haughty and reserved opinions, together with the short time I lived in England after my majority (only about five years in all), prevented me from resuming the experiment.  As far as it went, it was not discouraging, particularly my first speech (I spoke three or four times in all); but just after it, my poem of Childe Harold was published, and nobody ever thought about my prose afterwards, nor indeed did I; it became to me a secondary and neglected object, though I sometimes wonder to myself if I should have succeeded.”

* * * * *

His immediate impressions with respect to the success of his first speech may be collected from a letter addressed soon after to Mr. Hodgson.

LETTER 90.  TO MR. HODGSON.