or the number of his quarterings. But when the hearty, tolerant (once in a way stupid) Englishmen of the smoking-room or the terrace flock in at the division-bell to speak, as it were, "ex cathedrâ," in the name of England, ruler of the waves, they even yet call up before my memory the cruel, unteachable, repellent power of those old days when to me the most delightful prospect in all great London was the Euston railway platform, because it was the way out of it. It may, perhaps, denote a vulgar taste, but the truth is that the only pang I felt in quitting the House of Commons (as I supposed for the last time) was in parting with the doorkeepers and the policemen. Of these I will always preserve a memory as pleasant as the spring. It is, perhaps, chiefly because their friendship was not born of our later years' good fortune as the associates of ministers and (the malicious said) their masters, but dated from the ancient agonistic days when our friends were few and our enemies seemingly irresistible as fate. I dare say it was the healthy human sympathy of the onlooker for the under-dog, that cannot be got to let go; and we were always the under-dog, hopelessly the underdog, then. At all events, there they were, attendant or policeman, always ready with a smile, with an umbrella, with a topcoat, after they had been kept long hours out of their beds by some late Irish conclave in the smokeroom. I doubt whether any company of dukes or capitalists would have found as smiling faces. Not that life was without its compensations in those far-off times when we only knew cabinet ministers as our jailers. There is no wine of France to compare with the joy of the forlorn hope. Few of us can survey our present thinned and divided ranks without a sigh for the days when, if practically all the world was against us, all the world was young, and there was at least one small corner of the world, shamrock-spangled, that was with us to the brave and loving heart of it, and that to us was worth more than all the world besides. Then the underdog had fairly vigorous teeth, too. How often, half-a-dozen of us poor unfriended Irish gorsoons getting out of the Irish mail-train at Euston, and finding all the mighty life and energies of the great metropolis throbbing around us, exulted to think that over the very throttle valve of the English Empire we possessed a grip which would yet harness in the cause of Ireland all that opulence and prejudice and million-handed power. What would have been the feelings of Caractacus (was it Caractacus?) in Imperial Rome, if instead of wailing over the fate of his hut in Britain, he could march up to the Golden House of the Cæsar, and match himself with his Imperial Majesty beard to beard on his own hearthstone? Never did the comrades of any Odyssey with a more frolic welcome take the sunshine or the thunder than did ours. There were nights, after all, through which to have lived was very heaven. For example, the first time when in Morrison's Hotel in Dublin, Mr. Parnell intimated to us (months before the paragraphs in the Leeds Mercury astounded England) that the foremost statesman of the century was a Home Ruler, and invited suggestions as to the future Home Rule Bill, or the night when the hunted Irishmen first heard the declaration of Irish liberty from that Treasury Bench from which denunciations had so often thundered on their heads. Nor were certain noctes cœnæque altogether wanting-although on a very humble hillock of Olympus. When the House was not sitting, a few of us, usually Mr. Sexton, Mr. Healy, Mr. Harrington, and myself (Mr. Dillon was away in Colorado in broken health) would dine together at a frugal chophouse off the Strand, which has long since given place to a flaring restaurant with golden pilasters and French mirrors. Sometimes "T. P." surged in upon us like a burst of sunshine; sometimes it was Mr. Parnell, gentlest and least obtrusive of companions, from whom there would escape some of those unpretentious aphorisms, flavored with his own peculiar, mildly cynical | may be constructing the next nitrowit and wisdom; like his smiling comment on the eagerness of the younger men to fight Lord Spencer's Coercion Act, tooth and nail-"My dear —, I don't intend to go to jail myself any more, but I haven't the slightest objection that anybody else should go." Sometimes, the cénacle broke up in time for half-price back seats in the pit of a theatre; sometimes, to the wonder of the waiters, we lingered over our tankards of lager beer until the closing hour, as merry as campaigners in their mess tent, for between men of the stamp of Sexton and Healy and "T. P." when they were at their best, there was an exchange of wits rich enough to make the fortune of a comedy. Here, too, would Mr. Biggar now and again sit and listen, cuddled up in his corner with an expression of beatific glee; but to the theatre proper he was not to be wiled. "My dear sir," he would say, "the House of Commons is the best theatre in London. It's all real there, mister." What a grim pleasantry the collocation of some of the above names would seem now! Neiges d'antan, alas! And it is one of life's little ironies one of Ireland's peculiarly tragic ironies-that all the severing of old comradeship and all the tumult of injustice that followed should be the work chieny of men whose names were never heard of in council or in battle shock in the brave days of old. This slight gossip is not, however, intended to be polemical. It is only, after all, the familiar Banshee wail that croons forever and forever through Irish history if "we return to Kinkora no more." A favorite haunt of mine on Sunday evenings was the tiny French church of Notre-Dame in a tiny street off Leicester Square. How many Londoners have ever suspected that in that nest of foreign birds of prey, suspected by Mrs. Grundy and by the police within a stone's-throw of where the ladies of the ballet pirouette in the uncelestial firmament of the Alhambra, and of the back street where, for all we know, the next Vaillant or Caserio glycerine bomb-they could behold a scene of Catholic piety as beautiful and as true as ever transfigured a Breton village on a May Sunday morning? It was impossible, even in Ireland, to witness a finer scene of simple-hearted devotion than in that tiny oratory of Notre-Dame at vesper hour. One of the charms of the place was the delicious French vesper canticles; another was, perhaps (all earthly motives are so mixed), to improve one's French by listening to the French sermon. I was there again during my late visit to England. In a London that had changed so much, here was the only true unchangeable-the ministry that never goes out, the sanctuary lamp that has a way of going on burning through the ages after the statesmen and the scientists, the poets and the conquerors, have all in their little hour flickered out into the night. There were the mites of French boys in their scarlet soutanes, cherub-like as SO many heads by Sir Joshua; there was the procession of young girls in their first Communion dress, with their white chaplets of flowers and their long veils, breathing a piety as pure as if we stood not within hail of Piccadilly, but on the sands of Paimpol with M. Pierre Loti seeing a Corpus Christi procession go by, or with M. Ferdinand Fabre at some chestnutshaded mountain fête in the Cevennes. Governments rise and fall, but there from the choir rises the everlasting address to the Throne: "In Te, Domine, speraavle: nōng congfōngdarr in æternoom!" and there in the same two front rows of chairs before the altar sit the nuns of the hospital-as on a front treasury bench (if one may, without irreverence, use the simile), from which no fickleness of popular passion will ever dislodge them until they are raised to an Upper House, in which there will be moth or rust no more! Then the charming prayers of the congregation for the Church, for France, for the conversion of England, for the sick in the hospital; and-oh! so touching and so French-for the intentions of a mother gravement soucieuse pour son seul fils. | ing"-swelling not merely in the miles What a picture it conjures up of some black-eyed, brown-cheeked boy, lost in some den of London-perhaps a young anarchist, living as Vaillant lived, to die as Vaillant died-and the heavyhearted mother imploring her brother and sister exiles to pray with her to Notre-Dame of her old Breton village to save him! It was all as of old; and as I went out into the night air, penetrated with the something divine that always perfumes the mind in such a place, it seemed strange not to find Leicester Square illuminated with a brightness beyond the brightness of all the electric lights of the Alhambra façade. When I first found myself all alone in London, a timid boy, all but thirty golden years ago, I saw more of London in a week than I saw in the thirteen years of my parliamentary residence there. That is to say, the London of the country cousin-whom the Crystal Palace dazzles and the Beefeaters at the Tower bore not, and to whom the climb into the black fogs around the dome of St. Paul's is among the most exhilarating of life's adventures. I was glad to find in myself a good deal of the country cousin feeling in revisiting London, and to discover once more that the National Gallery has treasures as glorious as its cupola is ugly, and that the Abbey has mediæval corners more wonderful than aught the modern mason can build out of all the wealth of London, and that the ghosts of Dr. Johnson and Goldsmith are still to be seen in and around Pump Court. It was curious to compare my impressions of London as it lives and moves to-day with my impressions the first morning I set out from a little hotel in Essex Street, which has long since disappeared, to a famous optical surgeon in Harley Street, who is long since dead, through a tangle of Soho streets which were long ago carved up into avenues of violently red brick magnificence. If I were asked to say how the old and the new cities strike a stranger, I should say that London is, in the language of Sam Weller, "wisibly swell over which it is spreading its prodigious arms and legs into the fields, but in the wealth, health, and energy with which it supports its mighty carcase. I never saw London in such monstrous health. The carriages were more numerous and more splendid than ever; there were fewer of the wan-faced men who sit on the park seats as long as the policemen would let them, and turn the pleasure gardens of the County Council into such ghastly sarcasms; the hideous struggle for life in the streets, with the policeman standing solemnly in the centre of it all to see that too many bones were not broken, was never so fierce or, in spite of wood pavement and asphalte, and the opinion of M. Alphonse Daudet, so deafening; the well-dressed throngs glittering, eddying, and swelling around the theatres, the jewel shops, the restaurants never so filled with the sublime self-confidence of Britons who had got the men, and got the ships, and got the money too. No suggestion of a fin de siècle here; none of the sickly nonsense about Tout lasse, tout casse, tout passe; but more than ever the burly British energy and appetite, seeking what it may devour. London streets looked as thriving as if they had just bolted the tremendous budget surplus that was flowing over from the chancellor of the exchequer's coffers, and were, in the picturesque American phrase, "feeling good." The evening newspaper boys flying through the streets screaming "the winners," know their public. Nothing wins like "the winners"-not at the City and Suburban alone, but wherever Anglo-Saxon men hustle for success, and push the weakest to the wall. I have myself an old-fashioned weakness for people who can still find something to say for "the losers." There, at all events, was the modern Babylon in all its pride of life, and with its full share, too, of the modern Babylon's unconquerable self- righteousness-with the electric lamp of Mr. Wilson Barrett's "Sign of the Cross" at the Lyric Theatre streaming down upon all the wicked Comus rout of Piccadilly Circus, like the eye of some ancient Puritan caught in one of the unholy orgies of the Restoration. It was all very great, greater, perhaps, than anything the world has ever yet seen, in its triumphantly materialistic way. Is it too shocking to confess that, in spite of it all-may be because of it all?-my enthusiasm for the Euston railway platform remained - fresher than ever? From The Nineteenth Century. BY THE RIGHT HON. W. E. GLADSTONE. The British nation is commonly just, and even more than just, to those who have served it in the conduct of public affairs. Its sentences of condemnation are few, its tributes of honor numerous, its errors probably more frequent ou the side of favor than on that of severity, or of neglect. Still, the measures by which justice is meted out are necessarily wanting in precision, and this being so we must expect to find, when examination is closely instituted, that merit has sometimes fallen short of its due reward. So it was, as I think, in the case of Sir James Graham. So, and to a remarkable degree, with the unpretending, and now almost forgotten, name of Joseph Hume. Stepping a generation farther back into the past, we encounter in Sheridan another instance of inequality in awards. Not only was Sheridan lacking in the prerogative of birth, which defect a century ago was no small affair, but he had also the twin misfortune of being a painstaking and highly successful dramatist, and the almost lifelong manager of Drury Lane Theatre. It is difficult to conceive two more absorbing occupations than those of an active parliamentary leader in stirring times, and of the master of a great theatre, respectively. The combination of the two during thirty-one years of parliamentary life, and a still longer period of theatrical possession, is among the most remarkable tours de force, so far as my knowledge goes, of which any man has ever made himself the victim. It was also a grave drawback, if not a misfortune, for Sheridan at his date to be an Irishman. Mr. Fraser Rae, already well known to political readers as the author of a useful volume in which he associated the name of Sheridan with those of Fox and of Wilkes, has produced this biography in acknowledgment of the lack of justice under which Sheridan has hitherto suffered, and aims at correcting it. This is the main purpose of his work, and it is with reference to this main purpose that it ought to be judged. The path of a biographer may be a flowery path, but it is beset with snares, especially as to the distribution of his materials and the maintenance of a due proportion in presenting the several aspects of his subject. These, in the case of Sheridan, were especially numerous and diversified. He was a dramatist, a wit, and something of a poet. He won his wife by duelling, and by a trip which might be called an elopement. In society he quickly grew to be a favorite, almost indeed an idol. He came into Parliament by means which, if open to exception in point of purity, were due to no man's favor, but thoroughly independent. While a representative of the people, he sustained in a marked manner the character of a courtier, though the scene of his practice lay at Carlton House and not at Windsor. Here have been enumerated parts enough to fill the life of an ordinary, nay of something more than an ordinary, man. But interwoven with these and towering high above them were his claims as an orator, a patriot, and a statesman. It is in these respects, and especially in the two last, which are the most important of them, that, as Mr. Rae considers, justice has not yet been fully done to Sheridan. His main purpose, therefore, is one of historical rectification. No aim is of more durable consequence, and I cannot but think that in a great measure it has been attained. In the prosecution of this aim, he has been effectively aided by Lord Dufferin, who has prefixed a preface to his work. Succinct in its range, this preface is a production marked by singular grace and tact; nor is the skill less notable with which its author has extenuated failings heretofore too often dwelt upon, as if they had constituted the substance of the portrait of his ancestor. The failings of Sheridan, which have been quite frequently enough "dragged from their dread abode," constitute grave deductions from his character, but did not belong to its essence, which was just, generous, and true. He was to the last degree sanguine, credulous, impressionable, and sensitive. Powerful as were his mental faculties, they were associated with an emotional nature of such force as to derange, and sometimes overthrow, the balance of conduct; but, if he be credited as liberally with all the good that was in him, as he has been freely debited with the effects of his irregular impulses, it may be found that in the sum total he stands much above the level of average men. It is, however, with the public character of Sheridan that we are here mainly concerned. The general result of Mr. Fraser Rae's work is, that both the personal and the political presentation of Sheridan are improved. Personally we are introduced to one who is both more considerable and more amiable, than the person we had hitherto known under the name of Sheridan. In the second place, Mr. Rae amends the cast of parts at a juncture so remarkable in the parliamentary records of this country, that any one, desirous to supply a young student or a foreigner with a characteristic sample of the British House of Commons in its actual life and working, might not improbably, and not unwisely, be led to recommend for his purpose the study of this period in preference to any other. The period to which Sheridan thus belongs is, in its earlier years perhaps, the most brilliant of which the House of Commons, amidst all the wealth of its annals, has to boast. Grey, Wind ham, Erskine, North, Dundas, and Wilberforce, would of themselves have formed, in point of talent, a tolerable equipment for an average Parliament of the eighteenth century. But when we add to these the four superlative names of Pitt, Fox, Burke, and Sheridan, the decade, or two decades, of years which follow the fall of Lord North from power may challenge comparison with any and every other parliamentary period, and must be declared winner in the contest. It is true indeed that Burke's efficiency for debate, his command of the ready money of political conflict, bore no proportion to that power of reflection and philosophical exposition, in which he holds an undisputed primacy among all the writers upon politics in our language. It appears that he was sometimes effective; but more frequently not so or Sheridan never could have sorrowfully remarked that future readers of his speeches would learn with astonishment that during his life he did not stand by repute in the first order of speakers, nor even in the second.1 But, after making allowance for weakened impression in this behalf, the combination is extraordinary, and, as I think we must own, unmatched. What then was the place of Sheridan in his political partnership with Fox and Burke, at a later period with Fox and Grey? Strange as it may sound, yet it would appear that the theatrical manager was the great working horse of the team. It has been customary to think of him as a meteor that blazed with an almost intolerable splendor in the great oration of the Begums of Oude, and then sank into comparative silence and obscurity. Very different from this is the impression to be derived from the volumes of Mr. Rae. His career is characterized by the most constant attendance which was demanded in those days, and down to the Reform Bill of Lord Grey; by relentless industry, the utmost patience in the scrutiny and adjustment of detail, and an attention ever ready alike for the 1 Life of Sheridan, ii. 237. |