Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/70

 In the short biography of General Thomas Perronet Thompson by his son General Charles William Thompson, included among the Obituary Notices of the Proceedings of the Royal Society, No. 116, 1869, it is stated that Colonel Thompson "was, as he expressed it, 'laid down and robbed at the door of the House of Commons' to the amount of £4000 by a petition of which none of the charges were proved before the Committee."

There are some touches in Colonel Thompson's Letters to his Constituents that give a picture of the interior of the House of Commons. In a letter dated London, February 11, 1837, he says:—

"The debate on the Irish Municipal Corporations, which had been adjourned at twelve on Tuesday night, was resumed on Wednesday Sir Robert, in place of his usual argumentative manner, was boisterous and loud, and he indulged to excess in the not very agreeable habit of turning his back to the Speaker and the House, and in that position keeping the little boys on his own benches in a roar of

"On the present occasion he quoted Tom Thumb and others of the classics with eminent success. The school-boys, in the House and out of it, will be the death of us."

As already remarked, since the question of the Corn Laws began to be discussed in Parliament in