M.H.R.

He re-entered public life in no half-hearted spirit, but plunged into the thick of it. The same year that saw his election to the Superintendency witnessed his election as a member of the House of Representatives. It was a notable event. The greatest Governor the Colony had known stooped from his viceroyalty to take his seat as an ordinary legislator in the popular chamber of a country which he had once autocratically ruled. The page 183event was yet not quite unprecedented. Half-a-century earlier John Quincy Adams, one of the most distinguished of American presidents, returned to the legislature where he had once sent messages as a sovereign, and likewise took his seat in the popular chamber. Twenty years earlier Grey's greatest rival, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, the real founder of the colony of New Zealand, entered the newly-created legislature, and he also sat in the more powerful chamber. Grey was to surpass both Adams and Wakefield in the brilliancy he shed upon the office.