Had he lived in the days of Russell and Sidney, he had perhaps shared their fate, and paid the penalty of unpopular politics on the scaffold. That bold spirit which he has ever manifested, exciting his great talents in the advocacy of repugnant theories, would not have feared the restraints which a ruder age encouraged despotic kings to put upon freedom of political action. Luckily, he has been living in an age which respects independent thought and proscribes the conscience of no man. While he is certainly premature in his theories of equality, the tendency of popular feeling is toward him rather than from him. Tory policy to-day was Whig policy a century ago. Walpole would have sustained the younger Pitt, and Derby and Lyndhurst will hardly dispute the benefits of the reform of 1832. Mr. Bright was returned to Parliament for Manchester, in 1847, and again in 1852. This great town, which is the market for Rochdale, and consequently in which he was well known, sent him to the Commons by a handsome majority of eleven hundred. In the early session of 1857, Mr. Cobden introduced a motion condemning the war into which the administration had entered with China, on which the government was defeated. Mr. Bright, though absent on account of ill-health, used his influence in favor of the motion, by reason of which, on the appeal of Lord Palmerston to the country, during the summer of that year, he was defeated in his constituency by over five thousand votes; his successful opponent, though agreeing with him in general, being a supporter of the Chinese war. In 1859, he was reinstated in Parliament, by the electors of Birmingham, of whose manufacturing interests he had always shown himself a consistent and ardent friend. For this constituency he is now member. He has been twice married; first, to the daughter of Jonathan Priestley, Esq., of Newcastle-on-Tyne, who died in 1841; and secondly, to his present wife, the eldest daughter of W. Leatham, Esq., of Wakefield, York.