the front bench below the gangway, which for seven years was occupied by
Mr. Labouchere, and which for the five years of Mr. Gladstone's Ministry
of 1880 to 1885 was occupied by Lord Randolph Churchill when he was the
chief of the dead and buried Fourth Party. That seat is the natural
point for a sharpshooter and guerilla warrior. Indeed, the first seat
below the gangway seems just as marked out by fate for such a man as
Jimmy Lowther, as one of the high fortresses on the Rhine for the work
of the bold freebooter of the Middle Ages. But for some reason or other,
Jimmy did not attain his heart's desire, and he is compelled to sit on
the front Opposition bench. This would not seem an affliction to
ordinary men. Indeed, the desire to sit on one of the front benches may
be regarded as the root of all evil in Parliamentary nature--the desire
to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge which is as fatal to nature
born without original political sin as that disastrous episode in the
annals of our first parents.

[Sidenote: A recollection of Disraeli.]

One of the most curious episodes in the career of Disraeli was that he
insisted on sitting on the front Opposition bench before he had ever
held office--an act of unprecedented and unjustifiable daring which
throws a significant light on that habit of self-assertion to which he
owed a good deal of his success in life. For what a seat on the front
Opposition bench means is, that the holder thereof has once held office
in an administration, and so is justified for the remainder of his days
in regarding himself as above the common herd. But Jimmy isn't as
ordinary men. A place on the front Opposition bench, with all its
advantages, has the countervailing disadvantages of binding to a certain
decency and decorum of behaviour, and nothing could be more galling to
the free and full soul of the distinguished steward of the Jockey Club.