rs and
reporting the debates have been the means whereby many of the most
distinguished of our lawyers have been enabled to struggle through the
days of their studentship and the earlier years of their difficult
career.

The last attempt of the House of Commons against the press culminated in
Sir Francis Burdett's coming forward in its behalf, and, in an article
in Cobbett's paper, among other things he asserted that the House of
Commons had no legal right to imprison the People of England. In acting
thus, Sir Francis amply atoned for the ridiculous attempt which,
prompted by wounded vanity, he had made a few years before to engage the
interference of the House of Commons in his behalf in what he called a
breach of privilege--the said breach of privilege consisting merely in
an advertisement in _The True Briton_ of the resolutions passed at a
public meeting to petition against his return to Parliament. The results
of his bold attack upon the power of the House of Commons, his
imprisonment, the riots, and lamentable loss of life which followed, are
so well known as to render any particularizing of them here unnecessary.
Originating with this affair was a Government prosecution of _The Day_,
the upshot of which was that Eugenius Roche, the editor--who was also
proprietor of another flourishing journal, _The National Register_--one
of the most able, honorable, and gentlemanly men ever connected with the
press, of whom it has been truly said that 'during the lapse of more
than twenty years that he was connected with the journals of London, he
never gained an enemy or lost a friend,' was most unjustly condemned to
a year's imprisonment.

The next important event is the trial of the Hunts for a libel in _The
Examiner_ in 1811. Brougham was their counsel, and made a masterly
defence; and, though Lord Ellenborough, the presiding judge, summed up
dead against the defendants--the judges always appear to have done
so--the jury acquitted them. Yet Brougham in the course of his address
drew the following unfavorable picture of the then state of the press:

'The licentiousness of the press has reached to a height which it
certainly never attained in any other country, nor even in this at
any former period. That licentiousness has indeed of late years
appeared to despise all the bounds which had once been prescribed
to the attacks on private character, insomuch that there is not
only no personage so im