on a motion of going into committee, Lord Grey dissolved; how the
country, shaken to its depths, gave the reformers such undreamed of
strength, that on July 8th the second reading of the bill was carried by
a hundred and thirty-six; how on October 8th the Lords rejected it by
forty-one, and what violent commotions that deed provoked; how a third
bill was brought in (December 12th, 1831) and passed through the
Commons (March 23rd, 1832); how the Lords were still refractory; what a
lacerating ministerial crisis ensued; and how at last, in June, the
bill, which was to work the miracle of a millennium, actually became the
law of the land. Not even the pressure of preparation for the coming
ordeal of the examination schools could restrain the activity and zeal
of our Oxonian. Canning had denounced parliamentary reform at Liverpool
in 1820; and afterwards had declared in the House of Commons that if
anybody asked him what he meant to do on the subject, he would oppose
reform to the end of his life, under whatever shape it might appear.
Canning's disciple at Christ Church was as vehement as the master.[50]
To a friend he wrote in 1865:--

I think that Oxford teaching had in our day an anti-popular
tendency. I must add that it was not owing to the books, but rather
to the way in which they were handled: and further, that it tended
still more strongly in my opinion to make the love of truth
paramount over all other motives in the mind, and thus that it
supplied an antidote for whatever it had of bane. The Reform bill
frightened me in 1831, and drove me off my natural and previous
bias. Burke and Canning misled many on that subject, and they
misled me.

While staying at Leamington, whither his family constantly went in order
to be under the medical care of the famous Jephson, Mr. Gladstone went
to a reform meeting at Warwick, of which he wrote a contemptuous account
in a letter to the _Standard_ (April 7). The gentry present were few,
the nobility none, the clergy one only, while 'the mob beneath the grand
stand was Athenian in its levity, in its recklessness, in its gaping
expectancy, in its self-love and self-conceit--in everything but its
acuteness.' 'If, sir, the nobility, the gentry, the clergy are to be
alarmed, overawed, or smothered by the expression of popular opinion
such as this, and if no great statesman be raised up in our hour of
need to undeceive this unhappy multitude,