Secretary, had established in Dublin.  The old watchmen had been so notoriously inefficient that it might have been expected that the change would have been hailed with universal approval and gratitude, but it met with a very different reception.  Many of the newspapers which had not yet forgiven the passing of Catholic Emancipation made it a ground for the strongest imputations on the Duke himself, some of them even going the length of affirming that he aimed at the throne, and that the organization of this new force was the means on which he reckoned for the attainment of his object.  No story is too gross for the credulity of the populace.  To hear of such a plot was to believe it; to believe it was to resolve to defeat it; and at the beginning of November the government received several warnings that a plan was in agitation to raise a formidable riot on Lord Mayor’s Day, when the King and the Duke himself were expected to dine with the Lord Mayor.  The Lord Mayor even wrote to the Duke to suggest the prudence of his coming “strongly and sufficiently guarded,” and the result of this advice was certainly strange.  The Duke cared little enough about personal danger to himself, but he regarded himself as specially bound by his office to watch over the public tranquillity, and to do nothing that might be expected to endanger it.  He was at least equally solicitous that a new reign should not open with a tumult which could in any way be regarded as an insult to the King; and, under the influence of these feelings, he took the responsibility of giving the King the unprecedented advice of abandoning his intention of being present at the Guildhall banquet.  Such a step had an inevitable tendency to weaken the ministry still farther by the comments which it provoked.  Even his own brother, Lord Wellesley, did not spare his sarcasms, pronouncing it “the boldest act of cowardice he had ever heard of;” while the Reformers ascribed the unpopularity which it confessed to the Duke’s declaration against any kind or degree of Reform; and, to test the correctness of this opinion, Mr. Brougham, who, in the House of Commons, was the most eloquent champion of Reform, gave notice of a motion on the subject for the 16th of November.  Before that day came, however, the ministry had ceased to exist.  On the preceding evening it had been defeated on a proposal to refer to a select committee the consideration of the Civil List, a new settlement of which was indispensable at the beginning of a new reign, and on the morning of the 16th the Duke resigned, not only advising the King to intrust the formation of the new cabinet to Lord Grey—­who was universally recognized as the head of the Whig party—­but recommending his Majesty also to be prepared to consent to a measure of moderate Reform, which, though he could not bring himself to co-operate in it, he was satisfied that the temper of the House of Commons, if not of the people out-of-doors also, rendered unavoidable.[216] The advice