After the destruction of Magdala the expedition set out on its return, and the first detachment of troops arrived at Portsmouth on the 21st of June. The enterprise was skilfully planned and most effectively conducted from its commencement to its close. The thanks of both Houses of Parliament were voted to the troops employed in the expedition, and to their General, who was elevated to the peerage as Baron Napier of Magdala, and rewarded with a pension. The cost of the expedition amounted to upwards of £9,000,000 sterling. Loud complaints were made that the fact of its enormous expense was carefully concealed from the public until after the general election.

While the House of Commons was engaged in the consideration of Mr. Gladstone's resolutions the news was received of the death of Lord Brougham at Cannes, on the 7th of May, in the ninetieth year of his age. It attracted little notice, but thirty years before the demise of no other public man would have excited so much attention. From the time of his admission to the Scottish bar at the close of last century onwards, Henry Brougham was regarded as a person of gigantic abilities and extraordinary attainments. He was one of the founders of the Edinburgh Review. Sydney Smith, to whom the honour of the first suggestion of this celebrated periodical is due, 'had so strong an impression,' Jeffrey says, 'of Brougham's indiscretion and rashness, that he would not let him be a member of our association, though wished for by all the rest. He was admitted, however, after the third number, and did more work for us than anybody.' Brougham, indeed, continued for more than forty years to be one of the principal contributors to the work; and his articles, though not always judicious, were characterized by great ability, and contributed largely to the celebrity and success of the Whig organ. When he entered Parliament

He

few politicians ever brought to the business of practical politics a larger acquaintance with everything relating to the history and prospects of the human race. He devoted himself heart and soul to the cause of civil and religious liberty, and directed the thunders of his eloquence against such gross and glaring evils as colonial slavery, Orders in Council, flogging in the army, Roman Catholic disabilities, and the perversion of public charities. He was especially zealous in the cause of education and of parliamentary reform, and his eloquent advocacy of these and other kindred causes contributed greatly to their success. has been justly termed the hundred-handed Briareus of his party. There was nothing he did not touch, and with powerful effect. His industry was stupendous, it seemed impossible to exhaust his unwearied exertions in whatever he undertook. Apart from his labours in Parliament and in his own profession, which would have fully occupied the time of most men, Brougham found leisure to establish schools and write lectures for them, to superintend the composition and publication of books of popular science, to write articles for the Edinburgh Review and pamphlets, to compose treatises on refraction, on the integral calculus, on natural theology, on chemistry, on the objects, advantages, and pleasures of science, on the eloquence of the ancients, on colonial policy, on the state of the nation, on education, on the statesmen of the time of George III., and indeed on an endless succession of subjects. His intellect was quick, powerful, and brilliant, rather than sound; and his judgment was often warped by his prejudices and feelings. His eloquence was of a very high, though not of the highest order, and his natural talent for sarcasm made him a most formidable opponent in the House or at the Bar. His sustained flights of indignant or argumentative declamation-as in his defence of Queen Caroline, and in the case of Mr. Williams, tried for libel on the Durham

clergy-have rarely been equalled. rolled the stream of his eloquence, strong from conviction, vehement from passion, and burning with invective as the occasion demanded.' His moral qualities were unfortunately not equal to his intellectual powers. He was self-willed and imperious, with an irresistible passion for domineering and impatience of contradiction, and was habitually and notoriously actuated by ungenerous jealousy of every rival. One who knew him well affirmed that there never was a direct personal rival, or one who was in a position which, however reluctantly, implied rivalry, to whom he was just, and his envy often led to implacable hostility. Had it not been for his moral failings,' says Lord Cockburn, 'Brougham, inferior to no modern statesman in eloquence, and superior to them all in knowledge, enlightened views, industry, and fire, would have been the greatest inan in civil affairs of this age; but neither genius nor oratory, even when worthily exerted, can command their natural influence when combined with habits which create enemies hourly, or when exposed to the imputation of heartlessness or insincerity. Accordingly, with all his powers and celebrity, Brougham has never been at the head, as its trusted leader, of any party. He has compelled all the world to admire, and most of it to fear him, and for many years he has guided this nation in the formation of sound views throughout that revolution of opinion which has agitated men during his day, and has always been above the paltriness of pecuniary temptation, and his fidelity to his principles and party was never impeached till lately; yet he has never had any following of the heart, his very eloquence has often suffered from its disclosing insincerity, and this generally in passages which obtained and deserved the loudest applause.'

For a number of years before his death the once powerful and admired orator and statesman had passed almost out of sight. He ceased to take any part in public affairs,

The procedure adopted by the Government, in retaining office after they had been defeated by large majorities in the House of Commons, was severely condemned by a number of members on the Liberal side of the House, who denounced it as unconstitutional, and as an expedient to induce the House to give a two months' lease to a Government which they neither frusted nor were trusted by. They were prevented, however, from taking any active steps to eject the Government from office by their knowledge that Mr. Disraeli would in that case immediately dissolve the Parliament and appeal to the existing constituencies; and that, whatever might be their response, a second dissolution would necessarily require to be made in the following year, when the new Reform Bill came into operation. The Ministry, therefore, though in a considerable minority, were allowed to retain their places till the new election. Mr. Gladstone's two remaining resolutions, however, were put to the House and adopted, the Government declining to divide against them. A suspensory Bill was subsequently brought in by Mr. Gladstone, and carried in the House of Commons without much opposition, and in the Upper House by a majority of 192 votes to 97. By this measure the exercise of the Crown patronage in connection with the Irish Church, pending the disestablishment proposal, was in the meantime suspended, so that no new life interests could be created in connection with that body.

The Scottish and Irish Reform Bills were pushed forward as rapidly as possible. The Government underwent several mortifying defeats in connection with the former, and when the ratepaying clause was struck out another ministerial crisis took place, which, however, like the others, passed over very easily. The Bribery Bill decided that the jurisdiction of the House over cases of this sort should be transferred to the judges. The Boundary Bill and the Registration

The Irish Church, the fate of which was to be determined by the impending election, was an institution without precedent or parallel in the history of Europe. Sydney Smith, indeed, went further, and saidThere is no abuse like it in all Europe, in all Asia, in all the discovered parts of Africa, and in all we have heard of Timbuctoo.' It had long been a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence' to all unprejudiced and judicious men. A succession of Irish viceroys had earnestly recommended its reduction, and declared that it weakened instead of strengthening the connection between Great Britain and Ireland. Lord Brougham regarded 'the great abuse of the Irish Established Church as the master evil, the source of perennial discord.' One of his successors on the woolsack said, 'the Irish Church was at the bottom of all the unhappiness which Ireland suffered;' and another of them said he believed the Protestant Church in Ireland to be one of the most mischievous institutions in existence.' Earl Grey 'believed the Church of Ireland to be the main source of all that misery and oppression under which the Irish, for nearly three centuries, had suffered;' and Lord Lytton, Colonial Secretary in Lord Derby's Administration, said he considered the words "Irish Church" to be the greatest bull in the language. It was called the Irish Church because it was a

This alien church,' as it was termed, was obnoxious to the people of Ireland, not only on account of its origin and the restriction of its benefits to a small minority of the nation, but owing to the character of its clergy, who for more than two centuries were, as a body, scandalously negligent in the discharge of their duties. It was no uncommon thing for a cluster of parishes to be formed into a single benefice for the behoof of a man who contented himself with levying the tithes and spending them at Cheltenham, or on the shores of the Mediterranean, doing no duty whatever in any of his parishes, and not even appointing a curate to officiate in his absence. Dean Swift described the Irish prelates as men sunk in indolence, whose chief business it was to bow and job at the Castle. The only spiritual function, he says, which they performed was ordination, and when he saw what persons they ordained, he doubted whether it would not be better that they should neglect that function as they neglected every other. It is scarcely possible, indeed, to speak in too strong terms of the character and conduct of the men who, down to the close of last century, were appointed by the Government to the Sees, cathedral offices, and the best livings. in the Irish Church. Swift, in bitter irony, says that no doubt the English Ministers nominated excellent men to the bishoprics of Ireland, but unhappily they were waylaid and murdered by highwaymen on their