house, and afterwards of inserting the grounds of it. Instances of the former occur not unfrequently at the period of the reformation; but the latter practice was little known before the long parliament. A right that Cato or Phocion would have prized, though it may sometimes have been frivolously or factiously exercised! _State of the commons._--The House of Commons, from the earliest records of its regular existence in the 23rd year of Edward I., consisted of seventy-four knights, or representatives from all the counties of England, except Chester, Durham, and Monmouth, and of a varying number of deputies from the cities and boroughs; sometimes in the earliest period of representation amounting to as many as two hundred and sixty; sometimes, by the negligence or partiality of the sheriffs in omitting places that had formerly returned members, to not more than two-thirds of that number. New boroughs, however, as being grown into importance, or from some private motive, acquired the franchise of election; and at the accession of Henry VIII. we find two hundred and twenty-four citizens and burgesses from one hundred and eleven towns (London sending four), none of which have since intermitted their privilege. _Question as to rights of election._--I must so far concur with those whose general principles as to the theory of parliamentary reform leave me far behind, as to profess my opinion that the change, which appears to have taken place in the English government towards the end of the thirteenth century, was founded upon the maxim that all who possessed landed or movable property ought, as freemen, to be bound by no laws, and especially by no taxation, to which they had not consented through their representatives. If we look at the constituents of a House of Commons under Edward I. or Edward III., and consider the state of landed tenures and of commerce at that period, we shall perceive that, excepting women, who have generally been supposed capable of no political right but that of reigning, almost every one who contributed towards the tenths and fifteenths granted by the parliament, might have exercised the franchise of voting for those who sat in it. Were we even to admit, that in corporate boroughs the franchise may have been usually vested in the freemen rather than the inhabitants, yet this distinction, so important in later ages, was of little consequence at a time when all traders, that is all who possessed any movable property worth assessing, belonged to the former class. I do not pretend that no one was contributory to a subsidy, who did not possess a vote; but that the far greater portion was levied on those who, as freeholders or burgesses, were reckoned in law to have been consenting to its imposition. It would be difficult probably to name any town of the least consideration in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which did not, at some time or other, return members to parliament. This is so much the case that if, in running