coat with a stand-up collar, the whole handsomely embroidered in gold;
kerseymere small clothes, and silk stockings. He drives down to the
Luxembourg in his brougham, about three in the afternoon, dozes for
a couple of hours on a well-stuffed bench, goes home to dine, drink
coffee, play tric-trac, read the “Gazette de France,” or receive a
select circle of pensioned fogies like himself. He wakes up some fine
morning to find himself complimented in the “Moniteur,” and the gratified
recipient of the grand cross of the Legion of Honour. A member of the
French _Corps Législatif_ receives his wages in a comparative ratio, and
pursues an analogous cycle of “duties.” But look at an English member
of Parliament. He receives nothing a year, and in many cases has little
more than that problematical income, sometimes humorously characterised
as “midshipman’s half-pay,” to live upon. If he be rich, so much the
better; but wealth will not take away a tittle from his hard work. In the
early morning, over his tea and toast, he has an ocean of correspondence,
often frivolous, always wearisome, to wade through. Then he has his
blue-books to dive into, his authorities to consult, his statistics to
cram, his speeches to “coach,” his grievances to hunt up, his exordia to
study, his perorations to practise. Comes the hour of morning calls when
he must be at home, and give audience to the great army of Askers and
the legionary tribe of bores, men who will take no denial, importunate
clients, who want berths in the Post-office for themselves, or reversions
of tide-waiterships for their cousins’ cousins. Happily for the member
of Parliament, Mr. Rowland Hill’s penny-postage system has abolished the
frank-hunting torture, which brought many M.P.’s to death’s door, and
made more bitterly regret that they had ever been taught to write their
own names. And woe be to the legislator if he receive not his visitors
with courtesy! They probably are constituents, and a curt answer will
frequently send them away charged with the deadliest schemes against
that member’s vote and interest at the ensuing general election. As a
diversion during the morning calls, the M.P. has to receive some dozens
of applications for orders of admission to the Strangers’ Gallery of
the House, he having always a couple at his disposal. After this, he
has, perhaps, to wait upon the Prime Minister, in Downing Street, at
the head of a deputation respecting the disputed right in a cess-pool;
or he may be the chairman of some parliamentary committee, sitting, _de
die in diem_, to inquire into the hideous turpitude of a contractor
who has sewn so many pairs of soldiers’ boots without cobblers’ wax.
Then, he has to take a cab to attend the great public meeting for the
Evangelisation of Chinese beggars, held at the Mansion House. He is due
about this time in the board-room of the public company of which he is
a director; and at the special committee of the Benevolent Institution
in which he takes so much interest. A pretty hard day’s work this, you
will acknowledge. Add that the English member of Parliament has to be,
over and above all this, a man of business or pleasure: with a wife
and family very often, with a turn for literature, or art, or science,
or natural history. He is a merchant or banker, and must drudge in his
counting-house, like the meanest of his clerks, or gabble on ’Change
with the nimblest-tongued bill-broker. He is a great counsel: he cannot
plead the cause of “Stradlings _versus_ Styles,” by deputy, or allow
his junior to sum up in the great will case. He is a celebrity of the
fashionable world: he must pay his morning visits, ride in the Park, show
himself at the “Corner,” lounge through his clubs, drop in at the opera
at night; and, after all this, or rather in the midst of all this, and
pervading it like a nightmare, there is the real business of his life—the
“House.” He possesses some six hundred other colleagues, who are to the
full as busily occupied as he is during the day, yet manage, somehow, to
find themselves behind the Speaker’s chair, or at the gangway, at five
o’clock in the afternoon. He had better not be unpunctual or remiss in
his attendance. Those constituents of his, at Shrimpington-super-Mare,
will call him to a strict account of his stewardship at the end of the
session, and it may go hard with him at the Mechanics’ Institution or the
Farmers’ Ordinary. Under all these circumstances, do you think it so
very extraordinary that there should be occasionally a late debate in the
House of Commons?
You will remark that I have preserved, throughout, a decorous reticence
with regard to the House of Lords. Goodness forfend that I should have
to judge their Lordships by the same business-like work-a-day standard
which I have presumed to apply to the Lower House. Their Lordships meet
early and separate early, as becometh their degree; yet even the Lords
have their field-days, and their occasions when they sit up late o’
nights. Then the right reverend bishops come down, booted and spurred,
to vote against the heathen; and paralytic old peers are borne to the
House in litters, there to wheeze forth, in tremulous accents, their
unalterable attachment to Church and State, so dangerously menaced in
“another place,” and from their most noble pockets they pull forth
“proxies,” signed by other peers more paralytic than themselves. But
these field-days of the Lords are few and far between, and the _otium
cum dignitate_ is the easy, comfortable rule with their Lordships. It
is but doing them justice to say, however, that many peers have been
members of the Lower House in their time, and have sat up as late,
and battled in debate as fiercely, as any middle-aged member of her
Majesty’s Opposition. Nor are they all idle, parliamentarily, in the
day time. There are some noblemen—legal peers mostly—who disdain to
rest upon their laurels, and are content to spend the long forenoons in
listening to dreary disquisitions about the wrongs of Parsee traders,
and the visionary pedigrees of claimants to dormant peerages. The
Lords’ committee hear appeals, and it is a wondrous sight to see those
old boys snoozing and twiddling their thumbs on the crimson benches
of their golden chamber. They seem not to listen to the elaborate
word-entanglements of the bewigged pleaders; yet they make remarks full
of sense and pregnant with acumen. You are a young man or woman, dear
reader of this, I hope. You have not much time to lose. Go straight down
to Palace Yard, pass through Westminster Hall, and up the stone stairs,
by the giant brazen candelabra and the great stained-glass window. So on
through the Gothic vestibules and corridors—never mind the frescoes of
Messrs. Dyce and Company, they are not worth looking at just now. Hie
you quickly to a door-way half-screened by crimson drapery, and edge
your way into the House of Lords. An you take off your hat and hold your
tongue, you may stare about you as much as ever you please, and hear
your fill of the edifying, if not amusing, appeals. You may wonder at
the Lord Chancellor’s wrinkles and at his ruffles; you may listen to
Floorem, Attorney-General, and Botherem, Q.C., till your eyes begin to
wink, and your head to nod, and your whole mental framework to grow
desperately weary; but you must not go entirely to sleep. Somnolence
may entail a fall on the floor of the House, which would cause a noise,
and would never do; so, unless you are gifted, like a horse, with the
power of going to sleep standing, I would counsel you to take a cup
of strong green tea before you enter the House, and so string your
nerves up to wakefulness. For diversion, turn away your eyes from the
verbose barristers in their horse-hair, silk, and bombazine, and look
at their Lordships. There are not often more than half-a-dozen of them
present—seldom so many as that. You shall scarcely fail, however, to miss
that noble senator—a capital working man of business he is too—who is
possessed by the curious idiosyncrasy of dressing in the exact similitude
of his own butler: blue coat and brass buttons, yellow waistcoat,
pepper-and-salt pantaloons—not trousers, mind—and low shoes. I think,
even, that his Lordship’s head is powdered. You may object that there is
no reason why a gentleman of the old school, wedded to traditions and
reminiscences of _le bon vieux temps_, should not wear such a costume
as this, and yet look every inch a nobleman. Nor is there, indeed;
but glance for a moment at Lord Aspendale, and you will confess that,
from hair-powder to shoe-string, there is a permeating flavour of the
side-board and the still-room. Whether his Lordship likes it, or whether
his Lordship can’t help it, it matters little; but the fact is there,
plain and obvious.
Standing in the narrow Gothic railed-off space reserved for the
public—the throne at the opposite extremity of the House—you may see
on one of the benches to the right, almost every forenoon—Saturday and
Sunday excepted—during the session, a very old man with a white head,
and attired in a simple frock and trousers of shepherd’s plaid. It is
a leonine head, and the white locks are bushy and profuse. So, too,
the eyebrows, penthouses to eyes somewhat weak now, but that can flash
fire yet upon occasions. The face is ploughed with wrinkles, as well it
may be, for the old man will never see fourscore years again, and of
these, threescore, at the very least, have been spent in study and the
hardest labour, mental and physical. The nose is a marvel—protuberant,
rugose, aggressive, inquiring, and defiant: unlovely, but intellectual.
There is a trumpet mouth, a belligerent mouth, projecting and
self-asserting; largish ears, and on chin or cheeks no vestige of
hair. Not a beautiful man this on any theory of beauty, Hogarthesque,
Ruskinesque, Winckelmanesque, or otherwise. Rather a shaggy, gnarled,
battered, weatherbeaten, ugly, faithful, Scotch-colley type. Not a soft,
imploring, yielding face. Rather a tearing, mocking, pugnacious, cast
of countenance. The mouth is fashioned to the saying of harsh, hard,
impertinent things: not cruel, but downright; but never to whisper
compliments, or simper out platitudes. A nose, too, that can snuff the
battle afar off, and with dilated nostrils breathe forth a glory that
is sometimes terrible; but not a nose for a pouncet-box, or a Covent
Garden bouquet, or a _flacon_ of Frangipani. Would not care much for
truffles either I think, or the delicate aroma of sparkling Moselle.
Would prefer onions or strongly-infused malt and hops: something honest
and unsophisticated. Watch this old man narrowly, young visitor to the
Lords. Scan his furrowed visage. Mark his odd angular ways and gestures
passing uncouth. Now he crouches, very doglike, on his crimson bench:
clasps one shepherd’s plaid leg in both his hands. Botherem, Q.C., is
talking nonsense, I think. Now the legs are crossed, and the hands
thrown behind the head; now he digs his elbows into the little Gothic
writing-table before him, and buries the hands in that puissant white
hair of his. The quiddities of Floorem, Q.C., are beyond human patience.
Then with a wrench, a wriggle, a shake, a half turn and half start
up—still very doglike, but of the Newfoundland rather, now, he asks a
lawyer or a witness a question. Question very sharp and to the point,
not often complimentary by-times, and couched in that which is neither
broad Scotch nor Northumbrian burr, but a rebellious mixture of the two.
Mark him well, eye him closely: you have not much time to lose. Alas!
the giant is very old; though with frame yet unenfeebled, with intellect
yet gloriously unclouded. But the sands are running, ever running. Watch
him, mark him, eye him, score him on your mind tablets: then home; and in
after years it may be your lot to tell your children, that once at least
you have seen with your own eyes the famous Lord of Vaux; once listened
to the voice that has shaken thrones and made tyrants tremble, that has
been a herald of deliverance to millions pining in slavery and captivity;
a voice that has given utterance, in man’s most eloquent words, to the
noblest, wisest thoughts lent to this Man of Men by Heaven; a voice that
has been trumpet-sounding these sixty years past in defence of Truth, and
Right, and Justice—in advocacy of the claims of learning and industry,
and of the liberties of the great English people, from whose ranks he
rose; a voice that should be entitled to a hearing in a Walhalla of wise
heroes, after Francis of Verulam and Isaac of Grantham; the voice of one
who is worthily a lord, but who will be yet better remembered, and to all
time—remembered enthusiastically and affectionately—as the champion of
all good and wise and beautiful Human Things—HARRY BROUGHAM.
But I must not forget, as I am sorely tempted to do in Westminster
Hall, that it is two o’clock in the morning. This is the last night—the
honourable House are positively determined to divide to-night, even if
the Ministry go out—of the adjourned debate on the Gulliver Indemnity
Bill. The honourable House have been speechifying at a tremendous rate
for the last fortnight on the vexed question as to whether Samuel
Gulliver, master mariner, is or is not to have an indemnity. Lord
Viscount Palmerston, head of the government, says he shall. The Right
Hon. Benjamin Disraeli, ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer, and head of the
Opposition, says he sha’n’t. Honourable members in formidable numbers
range themselves on either side. Night after night the House has been
ringing with eulogies and denunciations of Gulliver and his indemnity.
The country is in a ferment, the press in arms, on the Titanic topic. A
monster meeting at Manchester has pledged itself, amid deafening cheers
in the Lancashire dialect and rounds of “Kentish fire,” to support the
indemnification of Gulliver by every legal and constitutional means.
The “Times” newspaper, on its part, declares the indemnity an impudent
swindle, and plainly announces that if Gulliver be indemnified, Great
Britain must be content to remain henceforth and for ever a second-rate
Power. The funds are going up and down like a see-saw, all with reference
to Gulliver. More bets are made in the clubs and sporting localities
_in re_ Gulliver than on the coming Derby, or that other vexed question
whether Bludgin Yahoo, who murdered the old lady with the crowbar (they
say he is beautifully penitent in Newgate, and that the sheriffs cry
to see him eat his daily beefsteak) will be hanged or not. The Emperor
of Brobdignag is vitally interested in Gulliver, and there were two
_attachés_ from the Lilliputian embassy in the Speaker’s gallery the
night before last. Never mind who Gulliver was, or what was the nature
of the losses for which he sought to be indemnified. It matters as
little now as whether Bolgrad was a hamlet or a town; and even while the
conflict was raging, I very much question whether a hundred members of
the House of Commons knew anything about Gulliver personally, or cared
two pins about him or his indemnity. In some respects politics are like
fox-hunting. You want a fast-running, doubling, artful question—the more
powerful in odour the better—to start with; but once run down the fox,
and the question goes for nothing. Sometimes Reynard is scarce; but even
then a red herring will serve at a pinch to bark at and run after.
We are in a spacious chamber, not very vast, not very lofty—for there
is a false roof of ground glass, for acoustic reasons—and not very
handsome. A sufficiency of oaken panelling, and windows veiled with
velvet curtains, brilliant but cunningly tempered light—the absolute
lamps invisible. Altogether a comfortable, well-to-do-place—say something
like an enlarged edition of the coffee-room of a terminus hotel, as they
are building terminus hotels now-a-days, or the newspaper-room of a club
fitted up for a general meeting of the members. A tinge of Gothicism
pervades the decorations, here and there tending to the Elizabethan, but
altogether leaning more to the “convenient” style of ornament. Everything
that skill and ingenuity (duly patented) can devise for the promotion
of light, warmth, general comfort, &c., are here. Enthroned on high,
slender galleries above him, is the Speaker. “Jove in his chair, of the
skies lord mayor,” is a sufficiently tremendous Pagan image. He must
find it a somewhat hard task to keep order on Olympus’ top occasionally.
Vulcan will be wrangling with Apollo and eyeing Mars askant: Venus
will be having high words with Juno, and Minerva boring the celestial
company generally with her strongmindedness; to say nothing of Bacchus,
in the plenitude of fermented grape-juice, volunteering a stave when
nobody wants one; Mercury, labouring under his eternal disability to
keep his hands out of the other gods’ and goddesses’ pockets; and the
arch mischief maker, Cupid, wantoning about on his flyflapper wings, and
setting everybody by the ears. But Jupiter-Speaker has a thrice more
difficult task! Fancy having to preserve discipline among six hundred
and a half gentlemen—young, old, and middle-aged gentles, all fond of
the sound of their own voices; many of whom have dined copiously, to the
making of them noisy; some who have not dined at all, to the making of
them fretful and peevish, not to say quarrelsome. Poor Mr. Speaker! how
weary he must be of the honourable House and of its honourable members
in general, and of the Gulliver’s Indemnity Bill in particular! Yet
there he sits, the image of urbanity and equanimity, graceful, composed,
dignified, though taciturn; his wig unmoved, his bands and ruffles
uncrumpled. How devoutly he must wish that the bill were “in committee,”
when the mace might lie under the table, and he himself “leave the
chair!” But, alas! the atrocious measure has not yet been read a second
time. The country need be liberal and the House courteous to the Speaker.
Surely, if any man deserves a handsome salary, free quarters, and a
peerage on retirement, it is that Right Honourable Gentleman. To have to
listen, night after night, to drowthy verbosities, phantasm statements,
nightmare gibberings of incoherent statistics, inextricable word-chaoses
of statements and counter-statements, sham declarations of sham
patriotism bellowed forth with sham energy; to have to hear these tales,
full of sound and fury, told by honourable idiots full of unutterable
“bunkum” (an Americanism I feel constrained to use, as signifying
nothingness, ineffably inept and irremediably pin-perforated windbaggery,
and sublimated cucumber sunbeams hopelessly eclipsed into Dis)—these
must be trials so sore that they need the highest of wages, the best of
living, to be endured even. To induce a man to keep a turn-pike or a
lighthouse, to work in a gunpowder mill, or to accept the governorship
of Cape Coast Castle, you must offer heavy reward. Of old, in France,
glass-blowing was considered to be a trade so dangerous, and requiring
so much abnegation of self, that its professors were not ranked with the
meaner sort of mechanics. Your glass-blower was entitled to wear a sword,
a privilege extended since, I believe, to printers: (it is lucky they
do not exercise it now, or I should be run through and through a dozen
times a day by compositors infuriate at illegible spider manuscript.)
He could blow glass without tarnishing his ’scutcheon, and was called
“_Gentilhomme Verrier_.” Touching the Speakership, I think that the mere
obligation of hearing men who hate each other, bandying the epithet of
“honourable friend” so many hundred times in a night, is in itself worth
two thousand a year.
The House has commenced. The peers’ gallery, ambassadors’ seats,
strangers’, Speaker’s gallery, all full of attentive listeners.
“Distinguished foreigners” are present. The Emperor of Brobdignag’s
ex-Minister for Foreign Affairs has come down from the Travellers’,
where he has been playing whist with the Hospodar of Wallachia’s _Chargé
d’Affaires_, and lurks in ambush behind the Speaker. The sparkling
eyes of ladies, seeing but unseen, look down, as at Evans’s, upon the
hall. The members’ benches—oaken covered with green leather, carved
ends—are full. The members’ gallery (stretching along both sides of
the House) is, to tell the truth, not full, but it is possibly occupied
by honourable members who have retired thither to—listen to the debate,
of course. Oddly enough, they find that the assumption of a horizontal
position is the very best for hearing that which is going on below; or,
perhaps, they only imitate in this Fortunio’s gifted servant. To turn
the face to the wall, also, seems a favourite method of stimulating the
auditory nerve; and some honourable gentlemen are so engrossed in the
exciting debate proceeding in the House, that, at two o’clock in the
morning, they sometimes give vent to their overworked-up feelings in a
deep stertorous nasal sound resembling a snore.
Up in the reporters’ gallery there, the gentlemen who submit to “work on
an intellectual treadmill for three hundred pounds a year,” are having
hard times of it. The “turns” of stenography are getting shorter and
shorter; but, alas! they have been terribly frequent during the debate.
How unmerciful have been the maledictions bestowed on Gulliver and his
indemnity since five p.m. when the Speaker was at prayers! Gulliver
would be a bold man to venture into the cushion-benched chamber behind
the gallery where the gentlemen of the Press retire to transcribe their
notes. O’Dobbin of the “Flail” has been dying to hear Tamberlik in
“Otello” these six weeks past. His chief gave him a stall this morning.
Gulliver sits in it like a ghoule on a grave. Dollfus, of Garden Court,
Temple, was invited to Jack Tritail, the newly-made barrister’s, “call”
carouse in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Gulliver is sitting at the hospitable
board, gulping down the claret like Garagantua. Little Spitters, who was
always a ladies’ man, was to have been a “welcome guest” at a neat villa
not far from Hammersmith Broadway. The fiend Gulliver is at this moment
being called a “droll creature,” and is flirting with the eldest Miss
Cockletop.
[Illustration: TWO O’CLOCK A.M.: A LATE DEBATE IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS.]
The great chief of the Opposition has spoken. Gloomy, saturnine,
isolated, yet triumphant, sits the eloquent and sarcastic Caucasian.
Those once brilliant black corkscrew ringlets are growing slightly gray
and wiry now, the chin tuft has disappeared, and time and thought have
drawn deep lines in the sallow visage of Benjamin Disraeli, ruler of the
Opposition. His attire, too, is sober compared with the myriad-hued garb,
the flashing jewellery, and vests of many colours, with which Benjamin
was wont to dazzle our eyes in the days before he slew Robert Peel, and
hired himself to the Protectionists—all in a parliamentary sense. People
say, when he wrote “Venetia” and the “Revolutionary Epic,” he used to
wear laced ruffles at his wrists and black velvet inexpressibles. He is
wiser now. He has turned the half century, and only wears a vest of many
colours when he dons his gold robe as Chancellor of the Exchequer. He has
worn it once, and would very much like to wear it again. He has made a
very long, telling, brilliant speech, in which he has said a multitude of
damaging things against Gulliver, his indemnity, and especially against
the noble Viscount at the head of the Government. He has never been
abusive, insulting, coarse, virulent—oh, never! he has not once lost
his temper. He has treated the noble Viscount with marked courtesy, and
has called him his right honourable and noble friend scores of times;
yet, hearing him, it has been impossible to avoid the impression that if
any man was ever actuated by the conviction that his right honourable
and noble friend was an impostor and a humbug, with a considerable dash
of the traitor; and that—without hinting anything in the slightest
degree libellous—his right honourable and noble friend had been once
or twice convicted of larceny, and had failed in clearing himself from
the suspicion of having murdered his grandmother, that man was Benjamin
Disraeli, M.P. for the county of Bucks. He did not begin brilliantly.
He was not in the slightest degree like Cicero or Demosthenes, Burke
or Grattan, or like thee, my Eglintoun Beaverup, when thou descantest
upon the “glorious old cocks,” the “real tap, sir,” of antiquity. He
was, on the contrary, slow, laboured, downcast, and somewhat ponderous;
nor even at the conclusion of his magnificent harangue, did he throw
his arms about, smite his breast, stamp his foot, or cast his eyes
up to heaven—and the ceiling. The days of weeping and gesticulation,
of crumpling up sheets of paper, cracking slave-whips, flinging down
daggers, and smashing the works of watches, seem to have departed from
the House of Commons. Yet the eminent Caucasian contrived to create a
very appreciable sensation, and certainly shot those barbed arrows of
his—arrows tipped with judicious sarcasm and polite malevolence—with
amazing dexterity and with murderous success. He has made his noble
friend wince more than once, I will be bound. But you cannot see the
workings of that stateman’s face, for (save while addressing the House)
he wears his hat; and the light coming from above causes the friendly
brim to cast the vice-comital countenance into shadow.
A noticeable man this Hebrew Caucasian, Benjamin Disraeli, with his
byegone literary nonsenses, and black-velvet-trousered frivolities. Not
at all an English Man, trustworthy, loveable, nor indeed admirable,
according to our sturdy English prejudices. Such statesmen as
Shaftesbury, Ximenes, De Retz, any minister with a penchant for “dark
and crooked ways,” would have delighted in him; but to upright, albeit
bigoted, William Pitt, he would have had anything but a sweet savour.
Even Tory Castlereagh and Tory Sidmouth would but ill have relished
this slippery, spangled, spotted, insincere Will-o’-the-wisp patriot. I
should like very much to have known what manner of opinion the late Duke
of Wellington entertained of Benjamin Disraeli. It is, of course, but
matter of speculation; but I can’t help thinking, too, that if Arthur
Wellesley had had Benjamin in the Peninsula, he would have hanged him to
a certainty.