than Burke himself; but when, broken by years and sorrows, he accepted a pension from the Crown, a Whig Duke of fabulous wealth, just thirty years old, had the temerity to charge him with a discreditable departure from his former principles of economic reform. The Duke was a booby: but his foolhardiness enriched English literature with "A Letter to a Noble Lord on the Attacks made on Mr. Burke and his Pension." To read that Letter, even after the lapse of 110 years, is to realize that, in spite of all corruption and all abuse, pecuniary rewards for political service need not be dishonourable or unreasonable. But corruption and abuse there were, and in sufficient quantities to justify all the bitter fun which "Peter Plymley" poured upon the Cannings, the Jenkinsons, and the Percevals. The reform of the Pension List became a cardinal object of reforming Radicals; and politicians like Joseph Hume, publicists like Albany Fonblanque, pursued it with incessant perseverance, "Till Grey went forth in 'Thirty-two to storm Corruption's hold." In 1834 the first Reformed Parliament overhauled the whole system and brought some curious transactions into the light of day. Whereas up to that time the Pension List amounted to £145,000 a year, it was now reduced to £75,000; and its benefits were restricted to "servants of the Crown and public, and to those who by their useful discoveries in science or attainments in literature and the arts had merited the gracious consideration of their Sovereign and the gratitude of their country." Vested interests were, of course, respected; for had we not even compensated the slaveholders? Two years ago one of these beneficiaries survived in a serene old age, and, for all I know, there may be others still spared to us, for, as Mr. G. A. Sala truly remarked, it never is safe to say that any one is dead, for if you do he is sure to write from the country and say he is only ninety-seven and never was better. A typical representative of the unreformed system was John Wilson Croker (1780-1857), whose literary efforts Macaulay trounced, and whose political utterances were thus described by Lord Beaconsfield:-- "There never was a fellow for giving a good hearty kick to the people like Rigby. Himself sprung from the dregs of the populace, this was disinterested. What could be more patriotic and magnanimous than his jeremiads over the fall of the Montmorencis and the Crillions, or the possible catastrophe of the Percys and the Seymours? The truth of all this hullabaloo was that Rigby had a sly pension which, by an inevitable association of ideas, he always connected with the maintenance of an aristocracy. All his rigmarole dissertations on the French Revolution were impelled by this secret influence; and, when he moaned like a mandrake over Nottingham Castle in flames, the rogue had an eye all the while to quarter-day."