Seymour, the leader of the minority, declared that there could be no freedom of debate while such clamour was tolerated.

Some old Whig members were provoked into reminding him that the same clamour had occasionally been heard when he presided, and had not then been repressed.

Yet, eager and angry as both sides were, the speeches on both sides indicated that profound reverence for law and prescription which has long been characteristic of Englishmen, and which, though it runs sometimes into pedantry and sometimes into superstition, is not without its advantages.

Even at that momentous crisis, when the nation was still in the ferment of a revolution, our public men talked long and seriously about all the circumstances of the deposition of Edward the Second and of the deposition of Richard the Second, and anxiously inquired whether the assembly which, with Archbishop Lanfranc at its head, set aside Robert of Normandy, and put William Rufus on the throne, did or did not afterwards continue to act as the legislature of the realm.

Much was said about the history of writs; much about the etymology of the word Parliament.