viction of the errors of others, ever betrayed him into any uncandid construction of motives, or any asperity towards the conduct of his opponents. His loss was great, and would long be regretted."
Sir S. Romilly said, "that the long and most intimate friendship which he had enjoyed with the Honourable Member, whose loss the House had to deplore, might, he hoped, entitle him to the melancholy satisfaction of saying a few words on this distressing occasion. Though no person better knew, or more highly estimated, the private virtues of Mr Homer than himself, yet, as he was not sure that he should be able to utter what he felt on that subject, he would speak of him only as a public man.
"Of all the estimable qualities which distinguished his character, he considered as the most valuable, that independence of mind which in him was so remarkable. It was from a consciousness of that independence, and from a just sense of its importance, that, at the same time that he was storing his mind with the most various knowledge on all subjects connected with our internal economy and foreign politics, and that be was taking a conspicuous and most successful part in all the great questions which have lately been discussed in Parliament, he laboriously devoted himself to all the painful duties of his profession. Though his success at the bar was not at all adequate to his merits, he yet stedfastly persevered in his labours, and seemed to consider it as essential to his independence, that he should look forward to his profession alone for the honours and emoluments to which his extraordinary talents gave him so just a claim.
"In the course of the last twelve years the House had lost some of the most considerable men that ever had enlightened and adorned it: there was this, however, peculiar in their present loss. When those great and eminent men, to whom he alluded, were taken from them, the House knew the whole extent of the loss it had sustained, for they had arrived at the full maturity of their great powers and endowments. But no person could recollect how, in every year since his lamented friend had first taken part in their debates, his talents had been improving, his faculties had been developed, and his commanding eloquence had been rising with the important subjects on which it had been employed how every session he had spoken with still increasing weight and authority and effect, and had called forth new resources of his enlightened and comprehensive mind and not be led to conjecture, that, notwithstanding the great excellence which, in the last session, he had attained, yet if he had been longer spared, he would have discovered powers not yet discovered to the House, and of which perhaps he was unconscious himself. He should very ill express what he felt upon this occasion, if he were to consider the extraordinary qualities which Mr Horner possessed apart from the ends and objects to which they were directed. The greatest eloquence was in itself only an object of vain and transient admiration; it was only when ennobled by the uses to which it was applied, when directed to great and virtuous ends, to the protection of the oppressed, to the enfranchisement of the enslaved, to the extension of knowledge, to dispelling the clouds of ignorance and superstition, to the advancement of the best interests of the country, and to enlarging the sphere of human happiness, that it became a national benefit and a public blessing; that it was because the powerful talents, of which they were now deprived, had been uniformly exerted in the pursuit and promoting of such objects, that he considered the loss which they had to lament as one of the greatest which, in the present state of this country, it could possibly have sustained."
Mr W. Elliot.—"Amongst his other friends, sir, I cannot refuse to myself the melancholy consolation of paying my humble tribute of esteem and affection to the memory of a person, of whose rich, cultivated, and enlightened mind I have so often profited, an whose exquisite talents—whose ardent zeal for truth—whose just, sedate, and discriminating judgment—whose forcible, but chastened eloquence—and, above all, whose inflexible virtue and integrity rendered him one of the most distinguished members of this House, one of the brightest ornaments of the profession to which he belonged, and held him forth as a finished model for the imitation of the rising generation.
