Search -
Life and Correspondence of John Duke Coleridge; Lord Chief Justice of England
Life and Correspondence of John Duke Coleridge Lord Chief Justice of England Author:Ernest Hartley Coleridge General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1904 Original Publisher: William Heinennam Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you c... more »an select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER III PARLIAMENT -- continued Soon shalt thou thrill the Senate with thy voice; With gradual Dawn bid Error's phantoms flit. Or wither with the lightning's flash of Wit. S. T. Coleridge. During his first session, and while Mr. Gladstone still led the House of Commons, Coleridge made two other speeches which attracted notice and applause. The first, delivered April 20, 1866, was on the Second Reading of the Representation of the People Bill, a half-hearted measure of reform which proposed to substitute a £7 and £14 limit for the £10 and £50 of the great Reform Bill of 1834. " Is it not a little one ? " is the burden of Coleridge's argument, and with the exception of an interlude on the " English Aristocracy," there is little in the speech worth transferring from the pages of Hansard. The dramatis persona are John Bright and Lord Burghley : I do not pretend to agree with the hon. Member for Birmingham in everything which has fallen from his lips ; indeed, this being a free country, I take the liberty of saying that I dislike and differ from many things which he has uttered, while I still more decidedly disapprove the tone in which he has occasionally expressed himself. I should have said that he is, in my opinion, at times unfair to the English aristocracy. But my noble friend the Member for Stamford favoured us the other day with a statementwhich is somewhat humbling to the plebeian mind, for he told us that he never had any means of knowing what the feelings and opinions of the aristocracy were. If, however, a noble Lord, who is the heir to one of t...« less