Another peculiar evil resulted from the admission of this crowd, and of its composition. Every casual collision of debate became personal. The most trivial play of pleasantry was embittered into an insult; the simplest sting of passing controversy was often to be healed only by a rencounter in the field. For the whole was acted on a public stage, with the _elite_ of the nation looking down on the performance. The hundreds of bright eyes glancing down from the gallery, were critics whose contempt was not to be resisted; and no public assembly, since the days of the Polish pospolite, ever settled so many points of debate in the shape of points of honour. At length Opposition rallied, and resolved to make a general assault upon the Administration. Like their English friends, they had been stunned for a while by the suddenness of the outbreak. But as the Turkish populace, in a conflagration or the plague, no sooner recover from their first fright than they discover the cause in the government, and march to demand the head of the vizier; the popular orators had no sooner found leisure to look round them, than they marshalled their bands, and demanded the dismissal of all antagonist authority. _I_ was first to be torn down. _I_ stood in the gate, and while I held the keys, there was no entrance for expectant ambition. _I_ waved the flag in the breach, and until the banner was swept away, the storm was ineffectual. Yet this turning the whole weight of party vindictiveness on my head, gave me a new courage, the courage of passion, the determination which arises from a sense of injury, and which magnifies with the magnitude of the trial. In other times, I might have abandoned the struggle; but, with the eyes of a nation thus brought upon me, and all the ablest men of the opposite benches making my overthrow the very prize of their victory, I determined "to stand the hazard of the die." The eventful night came at last; for days before, every organ of public opinion was in the most feverish activity; lampoons, pamphlets, and letters to the leading journals, the whole machinery of the paragraph-world was in full work round me; and even the Administration despaired of my being able to resist the uproar--all but one, and that one the noblest and the most gifted of them all, my friend the chancellor. I had sat long past midnight with him on the eve of the coming struggle; and I received his plaudits for my determination. He talked with all his usual loftiness, but with more than his usual feeling.