in Parliament. Parliamentary corruption had not been necessary and had probably not been largely practised in the first years of the century, but great sums which would once have been devoted chiefly to rewarding English politicians were now employed in securing Irish parliamentary influence. Between 1755 and 1761 the Pension List rose from 38,000l. to more than 64,000l. Even in the House of Commons there was a strong sense of the enormity of the rise. In 1756 a measure for obliging members who accepted places of profit or pensions from the Crown to vacate their seats was only rejected by eightyfive to fifty-nine, and in the following year resolutions against the abuses in the Pension List were carried in the House, and the Commons, with the Speaker at their head, placed them in the hands of the Lord Lieutenant to be forwarded to the King. Whatever doubt there might be of the sincerity of the members of Parliament, there was at least none of the feeling beyond its walls. An energetic and enlightened, though as yet purely Protestant, public opinion had grown up. The dread of revolution and confiscations which had once dominated over all other questions of internal politics had passed away. The writings of Swift and Berkeley had sunk deeply into Irish Protestant opinion. A determination to place Irish government on the same constitutional basis as the government of England, to obtain for the Irish Protestants what English Protestants had obtained by the Revolution of 1688, and to make the Irish Parliament a really representative and independent body had spread far and wide, and when the death of George II., in 1760, dissolved the Parliament which had lasted through a whole generation, all the great constitutional questions rose rapidly into prominence. Meetings and associations were formed demanding

NEW PARLIAMENT, 1760

3833

septennial Parliaments; the reduction of the Pension List; the immovability of the judges; the enactment of a Habeas Corpus Bill and the independence of Parliament, and at the election which took place in the following year a large number of members were returned pledged to support such

measures.

VOL I.

A

HENRY FLOOD

It was in the last year of the long Parliament of George II. that Henry Flood, the subject of the present biography, first appeared in the field of politics. He was the son of the Chief Justice of the King's Bench in Ireland. He entered Trinity College as a fellow-commoner, but terminated his career, as is still sometimes done, at Oxford, where he applied himself with much energy to the classics, and especially to those studies which are advantageous to an orator in forming a pure and elevated style. For this purpose he learned considerable portions of Cicero by heart. He wrote out Demosthenes and Eschines on the Crown, two books of the Paradise Lost,' a translation of two books of Homer, and the finest passages from every play of Shakespeare. Like most persons who combine great ambition with great powers of expression, he devoted himself much to poetry, his principal production being an Ode to Fame,' which appears to have been much admired by his friends, and is written in the formal, florid style that was then popular. He was also passionately devoted to private theatricals, which were very fashionable in Ireland and which contributed not a little to form his style of elocution.

The portraits drawn by his contemporaries are exceedingly attractive. They represent him as genial, frank, and open; endowed with brilliant conversational powers, and the happiest manner, the most easy and best-tempered

ANTHONY MALONE

35

man in the world, as well as the most sensible.' His figure in early manhood was exceedingly graceful, and his countenance, though afterwards soured and distorted by disease, of corresponding beauty. He was of a remarkably social disposition, delighting in witty society and in field-sports, somewhat prone to dissipation, but readily conciliating the affection of all classes.

Lord Mount

morres, who knew him chiefly in his later years, and was inclined to judge him with severity, describes him as a pre-eminently truthful man and exceedingly averse to flattery. He married a member of the great house of Beresford, who brought him a large fortune, and as his father was a man of wealth and position, he was at no time embarrassed by pecuniary difficulties, and was enabled to devote himself exclusively to the service of his country. When we add to this that he was a man of great natural eloquence, indomitable courage, and singularly acute judgment, it will be seen that he possessed almost every requisite for a great public leader.

He entered Parliament in 1759 as member for Kilkenny, being then in his twenty-seventh year, and took his seat on the benches of the Opposition.

It was not probable that a Parliament constituted like that of Ireland should have given much scope for eloquence, and it was not until the reign of George III. that its debates were reported, but the Parliament of George II. contained at least one orator who appears to have been very remarkable. This was Anthony Malone, the father of the well-known editor of Shakespeare. He was a lawyer in large practice, a prominent member of more than one Government, and though no fragments of his speeches have survived, his calm and perspicacious judgment and his eminently judicial eloquence made a

1 Grattan.

NB

deep impression on some of the most enlightened of his contemporaries. Grattan describes him as a man of the finest intellect that any country ever produced,' and he quotes a remarkable saying of Lord Sackville, who was Irish Secretary in 1753, that the elder Pitt, Murray, and Malone were the three ablest men he had ever known, and that of these three, if a question had to be argued before twelve wise men, he would have preferred Malone. Gerard Hamilton, another very able Irish Secretary, has attested the extraordinary power of his speaking, and at a time when the question of making an Irishman Chancellor was first raised, Lord Camden, while maintaining that an Englishman should always be chosen, declared that if this rule were broken the acknowledged superiority of Malone placed him above all competitors. He appears to have been a man of high and independent character, and the accusation of timidity which was sometimes brought against him was probably only due to his constitutional repugnance to violent words or actions. He was an early advocate of the mitigation of the penal code against the Catholics, and although he always abstained from factious opposition, he was twice dismissed from a lucrative office on account of the course which he pursued. He was deprived of the office of Prime Serjeant on account of his opposition to the alteration of the Money Bill in 1753, and of the office of Chancellor of the Exchequer because he objected to sending over a Money Bill originating in England as the ground for summoning the first Parliament of George III. He was, however, at this time in the decline of life, and he does not appear to have taken any considerable part in the new reign.

Another remarkable man was Hely Hutchinson, who belonged to a later generation, and whose political career was almost exactly contemporary with that of Flood. He