of its success to his Parliamentary skill as a tactician, and to be a Member of a Liberal Administration. There were few finer, manlier-looking men in the House of Commons than Thomas Milner Gibson. At any rate, I thought so as I watched him, after the delivery of a most effective speech in Drury Lane Theatre on the Corn Laws, step into a little ham and beef shop close by for a light for his cigar. At that time, let me remind the reader, waxlights and matches were unknown. The electoral body in Ipswich was not a large one. At the Reform Act period it consisted of 1,800. At that time the constituency had been increased by adding to the freemen, of whom little more than three hundred remained, the ten-pound householders within the old borough, which included twelve parishes. It is curious to note that, in 1839, Mr. Milner Gibson, who had resigned his seat on his becoming a Liberal, was rejected, the numbers being—Sir Thomas Cochrane (Conservative), 621; Milner Gibson, 615. Ipswich seems always to have been undergoing the excitement of a General Election—and, it is to be feared, enjoying the profits of an election contest, as no sooner was an election over than it was declared void—and a new writ was issued. In 1837 Thetford, no longer a Parliamentary borough, returned two M.P.’s, one Conservative and one Liberal. A little more has yet to be written relative to smaller East Anglian boroughs. Lynn, under the influence of the Duke of Portland, in 1837 returned two distinguished men to Parliament: Lord George Bentinck, then a great racing man, but who was better known as the leader of the Protectionist party, and Sir Stratford Canning, the great Eltchi, who was to reign imperiously in the East, and at whose frown Turkish Sultans trembled. Maldon returned two Conservatives. It has long very properly ceased to exercise that privilege. Great Yarmouth, which has now an electorate of 7,876, at the General Election in 1837 returned two Liberals, but the highest Liberal vote was 790, and the highest Tory vote 699. Money was the best friend at Yarmouth, as in most boroughs. In accounting for the loss of his seat at Weymouth in 1837, one of our greatest East Anglians, Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, writes:—“My supporters told me that it would be necessary to open public-houses, and to lend money—a gentle name for bribery—to the extent of £1,000. I, of course, declined.” Yet, as a boy, I must own I enjoyed the fun, the excitement, the fighting of the old elections, much more than the elections of later times. If now and then a skull was cracked, what mattered, while the Constitution was saved!