The Sun.
London, England, 1844-08-29 00:00:00

Edward VI. allotted that consecrated chamber to the
great council of Parliament, the genius and virtue,
the dignity and rank, the wisdom and eloquence, of
the nation have been there represented. Treasures
of statesmanship have been lavishly poured forth in
that hall, which there was no prudent hand to gather.
There blushed the chivalry of Raleigh, there wept.the
servile patriotism of Coke, there recorded its protest the
faithful loyalty of Hyde. Its floor was once profaned
by the hasty step of the unhappy Charles, who left his
guards at the door as he faltered into the Speaker's
chair—once far more basely desecrated by the stamp
of Cromwell, as he crowded the benches of a truck-
ling assembly with the myrmidons of an usurper.
But fearfully was the insult avenged ; nobly have
those assaults of despotism been requited by the Acts
of freedom—the Habeas Corpus Act, the Bill of
Rights, and the Act of Settlement—those death war-
rants of tyranny which have since been read there as
law. There with an eye glowing fire eloquent as his
voice, Chatham spoke for immortality, and triumph-
ing over physical weakness and bodily decay, made
his very crutch an instrument of oratory—there the
great Commoner crushed the House of Bourbon, and
smote her power with that electrical shock which re-
verberated in another hemisphere. On that floor
the mighty Burke—great even in his failures—
threw down the dagger, as a specimen of the pre-
sents which French fraternity was preparing for his
countrymen. There Castlereagh walked proudly
up the House amid loud huzzas, with the Treaty of
Peace, signed at Paris, in his hand. There Canning
called the new world into existence, that he might
redress the balance of the old. By the table in that
Chapel, afterwards stained with Percival's blood, the
brow of the boldest warrior has grown pale, as he
stood up to receive the thanks of the House, and
with trembling voice stammered forth his gratitude.
Blake, and Albemarle, and Schomberg, Marl-
borough, and a greater even than that proud captain,
the hero of a hundred fights, the Duke of Welling-
ton, have drunk in there the pealing applause which
heralded Westminster Abbey. At that bar the
proudest of England's peers have bent the head to
deprecate the Commons' vengeance ; the governor of
millions—the Ministers of State—have there bowed
the knee, and in their impeachment confessed
the grandeur of ,the great national inquest.
There the noblest sons of genius—Bacon,
and Newton, and Wren, Addison, Gibbon,
Mitford, have sat mute but not inglorious.'
There Oglethorpe taught the lesson of humanity to
inspect our prisons, and Meredith and Romilly
pleaded, against capital punishments, that criminals
still were men. These walls have rung with shouts
of triumph as the slave-trade went down in its ini-
quity. Peals of laughter have awakened the echoes
of that chamber to generations of wits—Martin and
Coventry, Charles Townshend, and Sheridan, and
Canning. The hollow murmurs of sympathy have
there rung back the funeral tribute to the elder and
younger Pitt, to Grenville, and Horsier, to that
eloquent orator, conspicuous among his countrymen,
Grattan, who in his dying hour there poured forth
his soul. What exhilarating cheers, the only re-
wards to St. John, for those lost orations which
have perished for ever, have there rewarded the ef-
forts of Pitt and Fox, as they sunk back exhausted!
The forgotten oratory of • that chamber would more
than balance all that is recorded! Magni :cent as the
new building may be, adorned with paintings and
embellished with trophies of our progress in the arts,
far more convenient than the old chamber, in splendour
not to be compared, the palace of senators, and not
the mere hall—it can never rival, in the mind's eye,
that humbler room empannelled with living memories,
blazoned with illustrations of the past. The cloud of
light, which filled the old temple with the glory of
the Presence, far more than transcended the vivid
splendours of the new. Though the rising structure
cannot be for centures what St. Stephen's Chapel has
been, it will stand, we may rest assured,
as the former
House, the classical sanctuary of Britain's intellectual
greatness, the chosen palladium of her proudest attri-
butes—freedom, and eloquence, and power.—Towns-
end's Memoirs of the House of Commons.