cyclone of repugnance, hatred, and menace. Mr. Bartley, then, has the
character for the obstructive, and he rose blithely on the waves of the
Parliamentary tempest. But he had to face a continuous roar of
interruption and hostility from the Irish benches--those converted
sinners who have abjured sack, and have become the most orderly and
loyal, and steadfast of Ministerialist bulwarks. And now and then when
the roar of interruption became loud and almost deafening, there arose
from the Tory bench below the gangway that strange new claque which on
that Monday night I heard for the first time in the House of Commons.

[Sidenote: Mr. James Lowther.]

One other figure rose out of the sea of upturned and vehement faces at
this moment of stress and storm. When the Irish Members were shouting
disapproval there suddenly gleamed upon them a face from the front
Opposition bench. It was a startling--I might almost say a menacing
exhibition. It was the face of Mr. James Lowther. I find that few people
have as keen an appreciation of this remarkable man as I have. In his
own party he passes more or less for a mere comedian--indeed, I might
say, low comedian, in the professional and not in the offensive sense.
His tenure of the Chief Secretaryship of Ireland is looked back upon, in
an age that has known Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, Mr. Balfour, and Mr. John
Morley, as a sublime and daring joke by Disraeli which belongs to, and
could only happen in an epoch when sober England was ready to allow her
Oriental juggler and master to play any kind of Midsummer's Night's
Dream pranks even with the sternest realities of human life. Yet
sometimes the thought occurs to me that if he were a little more
articulate, or, perchance, if the time came when a democracy had to be
met, not with bursts of Parliamentary eloquence, but with shot and
shell, and the determination to kill or be killed, the leadership of the