16 MAY 1868, Page 1

NEWS OF THE WEEK.

THE week has been comparatively a dull one. The Boundary dis- pute, which was expected to be so serious that the Government might dissolve on it, was averted by a compromise, and the intro- duction of Mr. Gladstone's Suspensory Bill was allowed on Thurs- day without a division, and with no particular opposition except from Colonel Knox. That " honourable and gallant " Member announced his resolution to be as obstructive as possible, and dis- played his capacity for leading the resistance by quoting a passage from some speech or book of Mr. Gladstone's defending the Irish Church, declaring that its mission was to teach loyalty, and that " it could not be destroyed except by the vote of a recreant senate and an apostate nation." Colonel Knox is no critic, or he would have recognized that the " eloquence" of that last sentence was strictly Irish ; but he affirmed whets challenged that Mr. Gladstone had uttered part in 1835, and embodied the other part in the fourth edition of his work. The words, as Mr. Gladstone showed, were from a speech by Mr. Whiteside delivered in 1866 ; and Colonel Knox, after a vain reference to "documents," sat down under a storm of cries of " Shame 1"