8 MAY 1841, Page 12

THE PASSING AND THE PROXIMATE PREMIER.

THIS Tariff Reform seems to puzzle Lord MELBOURNE and-Sir ROBERT PEEL to about nearly the same degree. Each expresses his sense of the awkwardness of the question after a characteristic fashion. When the Liverpool deputation to urge Tariff Reform on Lord MELBOURNE waited on his Lordship, they are said to have been saluted with—"Ah! gentlemen, why did you not come sooner ? Here we have been ten years in office, and you never said a word about free trade before. You know we are all freetraders." This from the nobleman who two years ago "declared to God" that the principles upon which Tariff Reform is now pressed were madness, is unsurpassed by any thing except SMOL.• LETT'S picture of the Duke of Newcastle in Humphrey Clinker. Sir ROBERT lacks the degagti off-handed effrontery of his rival. When the delegation from the Manchester Chamber of Commerce on Tariff Reform twice applied to him for an interview, he had not even the courage to reply to their letters. At last, Lord FRANCIS EGERTON having given him the hint that two members of the deputation were Conservatives, he at the eleventh hour, after Lord JOHN'S announcement of his motion on the-Corn-laws, intimated that be would admit them to his presence. What passed at the interview, we have not been able to learn; but we are ready to take odds that Sir ROBERT was extremely judicious, and eminently unsatisfactory when he was at last drawn, as sportsmen say of badgers.