not to be bought, undismayed by Pitt's nose in
the air or Castlereagh's insolence, he was the
bugbear of the Tories, and the incessant object of
their bitter, untiring, and virulent hatred. It
vexed them to the soul to see an urbane and
amiable man of fortune friendly with the
democrats of the Crown and Anchor meetings, and
incessantly denouncing selfish and mischievous
wars, petty oppressions, dangerous tyrannies.

From first to last Sir Francis Burdett
advocated the widest toleration. Latterly he did
not advance; the advance of public opinion
distanced him, but he still loved the flag of his
youth, and was foremost in 1822 in trying to
heal the wounds of Ireland, and up to 1829 in
pressing for Catholic emancipation. Sir Francis,
irritatingly courageous, vexatiously good
tempered, was not to be crushed by the butt-end of
the crop of your parliamentary whipper-in. The
Tories could sneer at such popular leaders as
Hunt the farmer, Gale Jones the chemist,
discontented Lord Cochrane, Preston the lame
mechanic, Thistlewood the ruined gambler, and
Watson the ex-surgeon of a Greenland whaler;
but the rich Warwickshire baronet who had
married a fortune, the man of spotless integrity,
the authority in constitutional history, the
speaker of vehement eloquence, was to be
dreaded, and therefore to be hated and
persecuted. It was the Tory plan, in the time of
Burdett, to treat as a conspirator and Jacobin
any man who claimed for the people the right of
directing the expenditure of the taxes they
themselves paid, who condemned unrighteous,
costly, and unjust wars, or who objected to the
oppressions of such narrow-minded detectives
as Addington, and such coldly cruel men as
Castlereagh, whenever they set themselves above
the law.

There was not a jail door that closed on an
unhappy agitator but Burdett beat at it, demanding
justice for the man; no transport left Dover
with soldiers sent to perish fruitlessly in a half-
starved and unnecessary war, but Burdett
denounced the folly and wickedness of those who
sent them to perish. To give a list of his
exertions is to epitomise the national struggles for
liberty and right for full forty years of our
history. He denounced the war with revolutionised
France. In 1797, he advocated parliamentary
reform. In 1798, he condemned the cruel
taxation, declaring that the House seemed to meet
for the sole purpose of devising ways and means
of extracting large sums of money from the
poor of England. In the same session, this
gallant disciple of Horne Tooke opposed any
restraint on the freedom of the press, the press
being only dangerous to enemies of freedom.
In 1799, he refused his assent to the suspension
of the Habeas Corpus Act. In 1800, he
resisted the renewal of the Sedition Bill, and the
excessive severities practised in Ireland, and
resisted a government measure prohibiting
clergymen sitting in the House of Commons. In
1802, he supported Mr. Paull in his charge
against Lord Wellesley, the Governor-General
of India, and annoyed ministers by presenting
Dr. Parr, whom they detested, to a good
Lincolnshire living. In 1809, he condemned
the miserable expedition to Flushing, and the
small and then insufficient war carrying on in
Spain and Portugal. In 1810, he moved for a
committee to investigate the acquittal by a
court-martial of a Captain Lake, who had been
charged with leaving a man to perish on the
uninhabited island of Sombrero.

Could it be wondered at that Sir Francis was
a marked man by those whose short-comings
and misdoings he so courageously and unceasingly
denounced? Lord Sidmouth, of whose
order of intellect the old distich is sufficient
condemnation—

     Pitt is to Addington
     What London is to Paddington—

was a great enemy of his larger-minded
opponent. Any mean and unworthy advantage was
thought fair by ministers in those times of agitation.
In 1802, when Burdett was returned for
Westminster, after fifteen days' turbulent
contest, ministers discovered a flaw in the conduct
of the sheriffs, and declared the election void.
Returned again in 1806, by an immense majority,
Sir Francis fought a duel with Mr. Paull, who
had also set up as a candidate, and who had
practised some unworthy election tricks. Both
combatants were wounded.

If ministers could only catch their untiring
opponent napping, or at a moment when his
chivalrous impetuosity led him one step beyond
the bounds of prudence! — Malice is sleepless.
The occasion came. Mr. Gale Jones, the radical
chemist, having written a violent article in the
papers reflecting on the character and constitution
of the House of Commons, and more
especially of Mr. Yorke and Mr. Windham, the former
gentleman complained of it dolefully to the
House as a breach of privilege, contrary to
the Bill of Rights, that bill declaring that no
member can be questioned out of parliament for
any words spoken therein — an obsolete axiom
which, if reduced to practice, would render
nearly every leader in a daily paper a
treasonable matter. On February 21st, 1810, Gale
Jones was committed to Newgate by the Speaker,
to be detained " during the pleasure of the said
House."

Sir Francis instantly thundered and lightened
from Piccadilly. In 1809, he had denounced the
House of Commons in the House of Commons
as one hundred and fifty-seven borough-mongers,
who '' had traitorously usurped all but
the pageantry and outward show and forms of
royalty." A man who dared say this dared say
anything. In Cobbett's Weekly Register for
the 24th of March, Sir Francis published a
Ciceronian letter to Burdett's constituents,
"denying the power of the House of
Commons to imprison the people of England." It
bore at its head an inflexible motto from Magna
Charta, cap. 39:

"No freeman shall be taken, or imprisoned,
or be disseised of his freedom, or liberties, or
free customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any