ates and Tullus
Hostilius declaimed on the horrors of drinking gin. Nor is it to be
wondered at that the House grew angry when such reports as the following
professed to be a faithful account of its proceedings: "Colonel Barre
moved, that Jeremiah Weymouth, the d---n of this kingdom, is not a member
of this House." Even when the reporters triumphed, the public were
little benefited. Nothing can be more tantalising than such statements
as these, which we meet with in old parliamentary reports: "Mr. Sheridan
now rose, and, during the space of five hours and forty minutes,
commanded the admiration and attention of the House by an oration of
almost unexampled excellence, uniting the most convincing closeness and
accuracy of argument with the most luminous precision and perspicuity of
language; and alternately giving force and energy to truth by solid and
substantial reasoning, and enlightening the most extensive and involved
subjects with the purest clearness of logic, and the brightest splendour
of rhetoric." Sheridan's leader fared no better. "Mr. Fox," we are
told, "was wonderfully pleasant on Lord Clive's joining the
administration." Equal injustice is done to Mr. Burke. We read, "Mr.
Burke turned, twisted, metamorphosed, and represented everything which
the right honourable gentleman (Mr. Pitt) had advanced, with so many
ridiculous forms, that the House was kept in a continual roar of
laughter." Again: "Mr. Burke enforced these beautiful and affecting
statements by a variety of splendid and affecting passages from the Latin
classics." It is no wonder, then, that a prejudice should have existed
against the reporters. On a motion made by Lord Stanhope, that the
short-hand writers employed on the trial of Hastings be summoned to the
bar of the House to read their minutes, Lord Loughborough is reported, in
Lord Campbell's life of him, to have said, "God forbid that ever their
lordships should call on the short-hand writers to publish their notes;
for of all people, short-hand writers were ever the furthest from
correctness, and there were no man's words they ever had that they again
returned. They were in general ignorant, as acting mechanically and not
by considering the antecedents, and by catching the sound and not the
sense they perverted the sense of the speaker, and made him appear as
ignorant as themselves." At a later period, the audacity and impudence
of the reporters increased; loud and numerous were th