A somewhat dreary dinner, relieved by a speech of Lord
Granville's on Lord Russell's character as a debater and a talker, was held at the Cannon-Street Hotel on Tuesday, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts. It is always a somewhat funereal task to celebrate the death and burial even of a grievance, and Lord Granville, who could hardly be dull even if he tried on-an ordinary topic, was decidedly dull, becoming historical and even solemn on the subject of testa. He only brightened up when he came to the present day, and began rallying the opponents of the Burials Bill on their formerly avowed conviction that the passage of that measure would result in the im- mediate abolition of the House of Lords and the destruction of the Monarchy. Mr. Forster, too, was very dull on the repealed tests, for he evidently wanted to speak on the danger of assuming an English Protectorate for Asia Minor, and did get in a half-protest against it, when the logic of the occasion unfortunately forced him back into the long story of the abolished grievances, and the dim features of one, Mr. William Smith, who had worked hard in his day, in Parliament and out of it, to get rid of these tests, and whose benevolent features were familiar to Mr. Forster in his youth. The speeches delivered were not of a kind to encourage the practice of disinterring at fixed intervals the remains of half- forgotten grievances, in order to weep over them afresh. There was nothing fresh about the weeping of any one.
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