| <The Saturday Review March 14, 1857>
| <The Death-Rattle>
| <Lord Robert Cecil>
| Sir J. Bowring's luckless aspirations after tom-toms and 
| cock-feathers have committed an amount of havoc, as 
| well in England as in China, which, if notoriety be his 
| aim, will give him more of it than could be gained by the 
| most gorgeous procession along the streets of the 
| recalcitrant Cantonese.  Our constitutional saturnalia have 
| begun, and till they are closed, everything else must be 
| suspended.  All social or legal reform, every 
| philanthropic enterprise, the agitation of every important 
| question, must be hung up till the nation has disposed of 
| the merits of Dr. Bowring.  He has had many victims 
| besides Yeh and the savage barbarians whom we are 
| cannonading into gentleness and love.  At least half a 
| million ~~ probably a great deal more ~~ will be spent 
| within the next three months in inducing Englishmen to 
| exercise the franchise of which they are so
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| proud.  Many a budding patriot will shrink again into the 
| slender proportions of a village Hampden.  We shall lose 
| several well-known faces, and, we hope, several 
| well-execrated bores.  And among other losses, we trust 
| we shall bear it with fitting resignation if we should be 
| compelled to part with some of those agricultural divines 
| who are so fond of turning their ploughshares into swords, 
| and whose martial Protestantism has lately so much 
| edified the godly.  Doubtless they will carry their 
| principles into private life.  An evangelical coachman 
| who gets drunk and runs down other people's carriages, 
| and a T. P. (truly pious) gamekeeper who poaches their 
| neighbour's pheasants, will be as dear to their enlightened 
| hearts as a Premier who varnishes over an impotent 
| domestic policy by Protestant bishops at home and 
| profligate bloodshed abroad.
| Everywhere one may see the symptoms of approaching 
| dissolution.  The House is indeed the very picture of 
| desolate wretchedness.  <p> "Death is upon its closing 
| eye."  </p> All its old cheerfulness and vivacity is gone.  
| The hearty Opposition shout, renowned throughout the 
| House, is dumb.  The crowd of Ministerialists who used 
| to throng the shadowy corner behind the Speaker's chair, 
| and sleep and cheer, and cheer and sleep by turns, have 
| disappeared.  You will listen in vain for the merry hum of 
| conversation with which the Radical benches were wont 
| to beguile the weary periods of Lewis or of Wood.  
| Heavy perfunctory debates, with spasmodic efforts at 
| electioneering interspersed, have succeeded; but they are 
| delivered to scattered rows of long gloomy faces.  There 
| are no brothers Phillimore now, by rival cheers, to 
| encourage a floundering debater.  Their well-known 
| voices are still ~~ for the hand of Hayter is upon them, 
| and they are doomed.  Lord John Russell still sits <q> 
| </q>, as our Cannon-ball wit, Sir J. Tyrell, expressed it, 
| bravely maintaining his post in spite of the tempestuous 
| tea-pots of the City.  His thin anxious face is stamped 
| with the resolve which his whole life has exemplified, 
| that, if he cannot win, he will at least wound in falling.  
| And the giant veteran, Sir James, still sits on to the last; 
| but his face no longer wears that benignant, almost 
| paternal, smile with which it was his wont to listen to the 
| bitter insinuations flung at him by his former colleagues.
| <q> </q>
| gathers on his beaming countenance as he leans his chin 
| upon his stick.  He is wearily bethinking himself that the 
| time is drawing near when he must perform another stage 
| of that ceaseless pilgrimage of which Carlisle seems to be 
| both the starting-place and the goal.  All is sad and 
| spiritless.  The very Speaker has relaxed the reins which 
| he soon will cease to hold; and the elegant form of Sir 
| Charles Napier may be seen reclining in horizontal 
| gracefulness, and seeking ~~ shade of Manners-Sutton! 
| ~~ in the benches of the House of Commons a substitute 
| for his hammock.  Below the bar, there is a flux and 
| efflux of listless Peers.  Their own legislative energy has 
| been struck with paralysis by the late events ~~ assuredly 
| by no fault of their own, for they did their best, or worst, 
| to prevent it.  So they saunter in to see if there is any 
| more excitement to be got out of the Commons; and 
| when they find that the proceedings are, if possible, even 
| duller than their own, they saunter out again.  The only 
| persons who show signs of real animation are the Whips.  
| They are not the stormy petrels of the political horizon ~~ 
| the fiercer the tempest, the more merrily they fly hither 
| and thither.  Now is their hour.  Mr. Hayter is for the 
| moment a more important man than the Premier.  All 
| those whom he has wheedled in vain during four long 
| years will now feel the power of his arm.  His incessant 
| hurry, his weighted brow and compressed lips, betray that 
| he has a full consciousness of his position.  He slips in 
| and out of the House with the activity of an armadillo ~~ 
| now gliding on to the Treasury bench, and whispering in 
| a leader's ear ~~ now gently carrying off under his arm 
| some timid follower, who has broken his pledges and 
| dreads the hustings, and cheering him with flattering tales 
| of the skill of Coppock and the charms of place.  And, as 
| he passes, you may see the Opposition members making 
| way for him with a kind of sullen awe; for they have 
| heard that he has sworn to run a candidate in every field 
| in the United Kingdom, and his well-known success in a 
| hundred trying emergencies has inspired men with a 
| vague notion of his omnipotence.
| One thing amid all these hopes, and fears, and interests, 
| most men seem to have agreed to look upon with 
| indifference; and that one thing is legislation.  It is well to 
| dwell on, and to remember these scenes, for they teach us 
| what the result of annual Parliaments would be.  What is 
| now an exceptional degradation would then be the 
| constant condition of the House of Commons.  All 
| speeches would be electioneering manifestoes ~~ all 
| votes would be addressed to Bunkum ~~ all legislation 
| that was not recommended by some claptrap cry would 
| be passed over with contempt.  The transient orgy of 
| misrule in which whips govern and statesmen cringe, 
| would become the permanent order of Parliamentary 
| subordination.