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Title: What I Have Seen and Heard

Date of first publication: 1925

Author: J. G. (John Gordon) Swift MacNeill (1849-1926)

Date first posted: Jan. 21, 2023

Date last updated: Jan. 21, 2023

Faded Page eBook #20230134

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I have been so frequently requested to write my reminiscences that I have at length consented to make the somewhat considerable effort necessary to place on record the details of a number of incidents, selected out of an innumerable crowd of anecdotes which rush upon my mind. But I desire to impress on everyone who does me the honour of reading these pages that I am not writing an autobiography, but am simply recording my recollections of men and matters of interest as I have acquired them in the course of a long and somewhat strenuous life.

I anticipate the criticism that these stories are too often related in the first person singular. I am, however, in large measure stating what I have seen and heard; and I may perhaps also advance in excuse the suggestion that in giving full rein to the personal equation I am, at least in this one respect, following in the footsteps of recent Prime Ministers.

The late Lord Fisher once said to me, after question-time in the House of Commons: “Mr. MacNeill, you are a damned good fighter! I wish to God I had had you with me in the Navy.”

In view of this tribute, at which I was naturally flattered, it may perhaps seem appropriate that my earliest reminiscence should be of the first of the many controversies in which I have taken part. It occurred when I was four years old.

During the summer of 1853, while being taken by steamboat from Limerick down the River Shannon to the County Clare, the home of my mother’s family, I made friends with a spaniel. Suddenly, owing to the extreme heat, the dog had a fit. Naturally, I was terrified at the sight, but my fear quickly changed to horror when I saw the owner of the dog take out a penknife and proceed to relieve its pain by bleeding it. It was useless for anyone to tell me that he was doing the dog good: I was convinced that he was treating it most cruelly, and I attacked the kindly gentleman with great fury, hitting, kicking and screaming, and praying that the dear, good God would send him to hell.^[1]

I recollect that on the homeward journey, in the same year, we missed the steamer to Limerick by a few minutes at Kilrush. I perfectly remember the tears of vexation and disappointment in my mother’s eyes at this upsetting of our arrangements. But happy for us was this set-back! If we had caught the steamer we should, in the ordinary course, have been passengers in the train which was wrecked in collision at Sallins, a few miles from Dublin: one of the worst railway accidents of the nineteenth century.^[2]

My father,^[3] during these earliest years of my life, was Curate of St. James’s Church, Dublin. LORD SEATON The parish was, for the most part, an extremely poor one, and its requirements made great demands on the time, patience and energy of both my father and my mother. They, however, gave freely of all, living in simple fashion and being always ready to offer their help where it could do good. And in so doing they set an example which soon brought other workers to their assistance.

In the parish, stands the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, which was, until recent changes, a home for army pensioners, like the Chelsea Hospital in London. It was also the official residence of the Commander of the Forces in Ireland. When my father was at St. James’s the Commander of the Forces was Lord Seaton.^[4] He was a charming and kindly old gentleman of splendid physique. I remember my delight at seeing him on horseback with his staff at the reviews in the Phoenix Park. But it was not until many years afterwards that I realised that in him I had seen and known a maker of history—for he had been the military secretary of Sir John Moore and one of the pall-bearers at his funeral at Corunna in 1809, a distinguished commander in the Peninsular War, the originator and leader of the decisive movement of the 52nd Light Infantry at Waterloo, and at a later period the Military Governor of Canada during a crisis in which it became manifest that the establishment of responsible government is the way of salvation for the British Empire.

Lady Seaton, the daughter of an English clergyman, was very anxious to take part in parish work, and had charge of a class of little boys, of whom I was one, in the Sunday School. This was held in the Grand Jury Room of the Court House of Kilmainham,^[5] just outside the Royal Hospital. Lady Seaton was, I thought, a lady born to command: MY MOTHER her manner though gracious savoured of the stern. Once when she had directed the class to repeat a verse in Holy Scripture, which she had read out, she asked me why I had not a Bible. I told her that I could not read. “How is that?” she inquired. I told her, certainly not by way of complaint, but simply as a matter of fact, that my mother ^[6] had never taught me to read. I remember the dear old lady’s reply: “Your mother, my dear, must have had the very best of good reasons for what she did.”

In truth, so it was. I am one of the few persons since (in Lord Brougham’s words) “the school-master is abroad” who have perfect recollections of being illiterate. I was seven years old before I knew the letters of the alphabet. My parents had been advised by doctors not to teach me on the ground of what was termed my “precocity,” and my recovering from an attack of scarlatina was said to have been due to the fact that my little brain was not so susceptible to inflammation as it would have been had it been exercised. However this may be, when at last I began to learn, the task of teaching me seemed all but hopeless. I was not, I think, deficient in intelligence: I knew the Biblical stories: The Swiss Family Robinson and Robinson Crusoe, which were read to me by my mother, I think I had by heart. But to the work of learning to read I was wholly unequal. The drudgery of it was intolerable, and I am certain that to this day I should be an illiterate if it were not for the patience and devotion of my mother in teaching me. There is no patience like that of a mother, and nothing but the solicitude of mine would have enabled her to succeed in teaching me to read, although when that had been accomplished my subsequent progress in education was smooth and even rapid.

My great-grandfather Godwin Swift, who was born in 1740, frequently related an anecdote to his children (of whom my father’s mother, Anna Maria Swift, was one), who in turn repeated it to me. One day, when he was about four years old, he was brought into the drawing-room of his father’s home and placed on the knee of an old gentleman. As he sat there, gazing with childish interest into the face above him, his father impressively told him never to forget that he had sat on the knee of a great man. There is little doubt that the great man was Dean Swift, who died in 1745. My great-grandfather’s father and Dean Swift were first cousins and on terms of great affection and intimacy.

I remember that in my sixth or seventh year I met an old gentleman, who was tall and very intellectual looking, very refined and courteous. He was dressed in a swallowtail coat, with the frill that characterised the morning dress of the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, and I recollect being much impressed by a massive seal hanging on a black silk ribbon from his vest. He was a first cousin of my great-grandfather Swift, and bore the name of Deane Swift, after an ancestor, Admiral Deane the Regicide. This Mr. Deane Swift had been one of the foremost leaders of the United Irishmen and a powerful assailant of the Government as a pamphleteer in the insurrectionary movement of 1798. His name appears in the list of proscribed persons in the Fugitive Act of 1798. While in hiding near Dublin Castle he had a narrow escape from detection and arrest, which in his case would have meant trial by court martial for high treason, certain conviction and death. He was walking in disguise through the streets, when an officer grew suspicious of his identity and to test him hissed in his ear as he passed, “Deane Swift.” With great presence of mind he passed on without giving the slightest sign that the words had any meaning for him, and so escaped.

Mr. Deane Swift’s father, Theophilus Swift, was celebrated in his day for scholarship, eccentricity, pungency as a pamphleteer, and passionate attachment to the Crown, the last being a subject on which there was no possibility of agreement with his son, although divergence of views on public matters did not interfere with their attachment for one another.

After the duel of the Duke of York with Colonel Lennox ^[1] in 1789 Theophilus Swift sent a challenge THEOPHILUS SWIFT to Colonel Lennox for having the arrogance to fire at the King’s son. They met, and Swift was very dangerously wounded. Eventually he recovered, and many years later, in 1807, when Colonel Lennox had become Duke of Richmond and Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, he attended the first Viceregal Levée. Making a pun, he humorously reminded the new Lord-Lieutenant of the duel. “When last I had the honour of waiting on your Grace,” he said, “I received better entertainment, for on that occasion your Grace gave me a ball.” The Duke smiled. “Then,” he said, “the least I can do now is to give you a brace of balls.” And he instructed his comptroller to send out immediately the invitations for two festivities in Swift’s honour.

While practising at the English Bar Theophilus Swift achieved notoriety by appearing as counsel for Renwick Williams, commonly known as “The Monster,” who was accused and convicted of stabbing women indiscriminately in the streets. The crime was so detestable that several gentlemen of the Bar had refused to undertake the defence—a duty which Swift accepted, vindicating his action in a very able pamphlet.

After Swift left the English Bar to look after his property in Ireland he became defendant in one of the most curious prosecutions for libel ever instituted. One of the Fellows of Trinity College, Dublin, had dared “to dub his son ^[2] a blockhead, to stab both the fame and fortune of an ingenuous but modest youth”; while another had disparaged his proficiency in Latin verse by saying publicly “that Latin verse was nothing but a knack.” Theophilus removed his son from Dublin to Oxford and issued a pamphlet entitled, “Animadversions on the Fellows of Trinity College, Dublin,” in which, amongst other things, he denounced the Fellows for marrying against an express statute of the University. He was prosecuted for criminal libel, convicted, and sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment. A Dr. Burrowes, subsequently Dean of Cork, against whom Swift in his pamphlet had been particularly caustic, published a defence of the Fellows, in which he in his turn cast aspersions on Swift. For this Burrowes was prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment. He was then actually placed in the same cell in the Dublin Newgate as Theophilus Swift, and in this very extraordinary situation the two enemies established a warm friendship!

These trials, which took place in 1794, created a very great sensation in Dublin. Sir Jonah Barrington, who was one of the counsel for Swift, has placed on record a capital score made off him while he was cross-examining one of the college witnesses. “I examined,” he writes, “the most learned man in the whole University, Dr. Barrett, a little, greasy-looking, round-faced Vice-Provost. He knew nothing on earth save books and guineas, never went out of the college, held but little CHIEF JUSTICE LEFROY intercourse with men and none at all with women. I worked at him unsuccessfully for more than an hour. Not one decisive sentence could I get him to pronounce. At length he grew tired of me, and I thought to conciliate him by telling him that his father had christened me. ‘Indeed?’ he exclaimed. ‘I did not know that you were a Christian.’ ”

I have some few further recollections which form links with the eighteenth century, and these I may give here, although to do so removes them from their chronological position in these reminiscences.

Early in 1866 I saw presiding over the Court of Queen’s Bench in Dublin the Right Hon. Thomas Lefroy, who was then still retaining his office as Chief Justice of Ireland, although in his ninetieth year. His appearance can best be described as “mummified,” and, his eyes being closely shut, he seemed entirely unconscious of his surroundings. My old friend, the late Lord Morris and Killanin, who nearly twenty years afterwards was himself Lord Chief Justice, was pleading in Court. Suddenly the apparently inert judge opened his eyes, and in a clear voice put a question to counsel which showed him to be mentally alert, with a full grasp of the bearings of the argument.

In the previous year the Lord Chief Justice had exhibited such extreme physical feebleness while trying a murder case that Mr. Lawson (afterwards Mr. Justice Lawson), then the Attorney-General, was compelled to place before him the curial portions of the death sentence, written in large hand, and actually to stand beside him on the Bench, dictating and prompting, while the aged judge repeated word after word.

Needless to say, the Chief Justice’s retention of his office in these circumstances was considered a public scandal, and it was openly stated that his reason for so doing was a desire that a Tory Government, rather than the Whig Government which was then in power, should have the appointment of his successor. It was also stated, though probably with more humour than truth, that the Chief Justice’s son, Mr. Anthony Lefroy, who was at the time one of the Members for Dublin University, had already applied for exemption from service on Committees in the House of Commons—on the ground of increasing years. It is, of course, impossible to say whether rumour was correct in her interpretation of the Chief Justice’s motive in retaining his office, but the fact remains that directly the Whig Government fell and the Tories came into power his resignation was tendered, and he retired to enjoy an honourable old age.

I have a very perfect recollection of a Mr. Ellis, whose daughter married a first cousin of my mother’s. When I saw him in the late fifties of the last century he was more than ninety years old, but in full possession of his intellectual faculties. His son, an eminent doctor in Dublin, attained his hundredth year. In 1798 Mr. Ellis was staying at Killybegs, ANNE ARMSTRONG one of the principal towns in the Division of Donegal, which I, a century later, represented in the House of Commons. While at Killybegs Mr. Ellis saw in the offing a ship which he took to be a British man-of-war, and he set out in a small sailing-boat to visit it. But the ship proved to be French, and Mr. Ellis was kept as a prisoner. The ship was subsequently captured in the English Channel by a vessel of the British Fleet, and Mr. Ellis, although in reality an ultra-loyalist, was believed by the British commander to be a disaffected Irishman in the service of the enemy. It was only the earnest entreaties of the commander of the French ship, who solemnly pledged his word of honour as to the truth of Mr. Ellis’s story, that saved him from instant death.

Probably the longest-lived person that I have met was a woman of the peasant class, Anne Armstrong, who, when I saw her at Milton Malbay, County Clare, in 1897, was in her one-hundredth-and-fifteenth year. Parish records show clearly that she spent upwards of ninety years in Milton Malbay, and was already married when she came there. She distinctly remembered the time of the Insurrection of 1798, and was able to point out a seaside lodge rented in the second decade of the nineteenth century by my grandparents when my mother and her brothers and sisters were little children.

My maternal grandmother, Mary Delahunty, daughter and co-heiress of Thomas Delahunty, of Ballyorta, County Clare, was fifteen years old when the Union was carried, and had a lively recollection of the sensation it produced. When she grew up she often heard it condemned by members of the old Irish Parliament, with many of whom she became on intimate terms.^[3] In her later years in Dublin one of her greatest friends was Mr. Thomas Parnell, a great uncle of the Irish Parliamentary leader and the youngest son of Sir John Parnell, the Irish Chancellor of the Exchequer, who, like Mr. James FitzGerald, the Prime Serjeant, was dismissed from office for refusing to support the Union proposals. Mr. Thomas Parnell, like my grandmother, was much given to good works, and was a fervent member of the Evangelical party in the Irish Established Church. My grandmother and he conversed for the most part on religious topics, but there were frequent references to the days of their youth and to the Irish Parliament and Irish Parliamentarians whom they had known and to whom they were related. I think it was these references, which I so frequently heard in my boyhood, that first turned my interests towards Irish parliamentary and political history.

The Crimean War is to me not a mere historical term, but a matter of reality. Our house in Dublin overlooked the King’s Bridge Railway Terminus, and I have a perfect recollection of the Scots Greys leaving the city for embarkation at Cork on their way to the front. The regiment was attired, of course, not in the khaki worn on active service in the present day, but in magnificent scarlet uniforms, just as they appear in Lady Butler’s great picture of an earlier period, “Scotland For Ever.” They were escorted by the bands of other cavalry regiments and were cheered with great enthusiasm. My mother held me up in her arms to view the pageant, which filled me with delight. I turned round and saw the tears streaming copiously down my mother’s cheeks, and my joy was quickly turned to grief. The abrupt transition in feeling has indelibly impressed the incident on my memory, in the form of a picture for which I am thankful, as I have thereby a perfect memory of my mother’s face and figure as a young woman, in a time of life at which I have no likeness of her.

I was sent when nine years old to a private school in Dublin, Bective House Seminary, the Headmaster of which was the Rev. J. Lardner Burke, LL.D., a former scholar of Trinity College, Dublin. I was fairly good at my lessons, and enjoyed my life. The school at that time was one of the best, if not indeed the best, in Dublin, and was famous for the number of its former pupils who had had distinguished careers in the University. The house is a very magnificent one, No. 2 North Great George’s Street.^[1]

My home was upwards of two miles from the school, to which I used to go by omnibus in the morning, returning on foot in the afternoon. While walking home one afternoon I was prevented from passing Trinity College by a very large crowd in which were mingled cavalry and mounted policemen. I was told that there was a disturbance, and that as traffic was suspended I must go home by another way. This was on March 12th, 1858, on the occasion of the public entry into the city of the Earl of Eglinton and Winton as Lord-Lieutenant in succession to the Earl of Carlisle, who had retired owing to the resignation of the Palmerston Ministry. The disturbance began with a number of students throwing squibs and crackers from within the MY SCHOOL DAYS rails of the college, with the result that the horses of the cavalry and police became restive. An attempt forcibly to remove those who were responsible for this dangerous method of celebration was met by stone-throwing, and very quickly the affair developed into a fierce riot. Colonel Browne, the Commissioner of Police, read the Riot Act, and then cleared the space between the college and the front railing by a charge of mounted police, in which some very serious blows were exchanged, although there were fortunately no fatal results.^[2]

Nearly fifty years later, at an opening meeting of the Trinity College Historical Society, I heard the late Lord Justice FitzGibbon tell, in the presence of Dr. Chadwick, the Bishop of Derry, the story of their valiant deeds as combatants on that occasion. “Who would think,” he asked, “on looking at the Bishop now, that he would have done his best to drag a policeman from his horse, while I held the reins and narrowly escaped a blow from a policeman’s baton?”

As I have said, I was returning from North Great George’s Street when I came upon the scene of this riot. I note as a somewhat curious coincidence that it was in the very same house, where at the time I happened to be visiting Mr. John Dillon, that more than half a century later I heard the news of the outbreak of the insurrection of April, 1916, and that my subsequent walk home again took me past Trinity College, although on this occasion I went into the College in search of protection.

In 1858 my father accepted the Curacy of St. Catherine’s Parish, Dublin, which he held for nearly twenty years, declining several offers of preferment in England and Ireland.^[3]

St. Catherine’s Parish, like St. James’s, is among the poorest in Dublin. It is, however, associated with many historic events. Lord Edward FitzGerald, the leader of the insurrection in 1798,^[4] was arrested in a house in Thomas Street, the principal street in the parish, and there, until the building was TERENCE BELLEW MACMANUS altered in 1860, some stains on the floor of one of the rooms were exhibited as marks of the blood shed on that occasion.

Because of its historical associations, Thomas Street was always selected as a portion of the route of political processions through Dublin, and it was customary for the crowd to uncover as it passed in front of St. Catherine’s Church as a tribute to the memory of Robert Emmet, the leader of the insurrectionary movement of 1803, who was executed on that spot. The first of these demonstrations that I witnessed was the funeral of Terence Bellew MacManus, on Sunday, November 10th, 1861, but naturally I, a child of twelve, had little knowledge of the significance of that procession of fifty thousand men.^[5]

Guinness’s Brewery was in St. Catherine’s Parish, and I remember well Sir Benjamin Guinness, the father of Lord Ardilaun and Lord Iveagh. He was a medium-sized man of a kindly, benevolent expression, with a manner which seemed an unconscious imitation of the old style. He seldom came to St. Catherine’s Church, except on the occasion of services in aid of charities, but he took the heartiest interest in the welfare of the poorer people. He spoke with great affection of my father and mother and of their work among the poor of the parish, very many of whom, of course, worked at his brewery. My mother took particular interest in this work, instituting fathers’ and mothers’ meetings in the school-house; and I remember Sir Benjamin once saying to her: “You are equal to at least five ordinary clergymen.”

Guinness’s was then a very great institution, although I doubt if it had attained to a tenth of its present size and importance. The brewery originally belonged to a family named Rainsford, a name still preserved in Rainsford Street in that neighbourhood. It was purchased for a very small sum by Sir Benjamin’s grandfather, and then attained great prosperity in the time of his father, Mr. Arthur Guinness (whom O’Connell called “that miserable old apostate,” because he had opposed him at the Dublin election of 1836). This prosperity was the direct result of the first attempt to carry out the system subsequently known as boycotting. Guinness’s porter was boycotted throughout Ireland, and the immediate diminution in its consumption led Arthur Guinness, a man of much resource, to open out the trade with the Dominions, which MR. GLADSTONE by the present day has made the brewery one of the greatest business concerns in the world.

Sir Benjamin Guinness, who succeeded his father, was also exceptionally able in administration, and under his control the well-laid foundations of the business were much strengthened. He was, as I have said, a man of great personal charm and genuine amiability, as well as of real public munificence. He it was who restored St. Patrick’s Cathedral when it was practically falling into ruin, an act undoubtedly to the credit and benefit of the City of Dublin, and one which might have been spared the jests which were levelled at the idea of the restoration of a cathedral with money obtained in the drink trade. Many of these jibes were ill-natured; but it must be admitted that they were not without wit. I remember one to the effect that the preacher at the opening service after the restoration would be bound in all propriety to take the text of his sermon from the “He-brews.”

This reference to St. Patrick’s Cathedral leads me to record that it was there that I first saw Mr. Gladstone, whom in all his greatness I was destined for many years to hear and admire in the House of Commons, and of whose notice of myself I have always been proud. While paying a short visit to Ireland in the autumn of 1877 Mr. Gladstone attended a Sunday afternoon’s service in the Cathedral. It was known that he intended to be present, and an immense congregation came to see the author of the Disestablishment and Dis-endowment of the Irish Church, then a comparatively recent fact, in that Church’s principal place of worship. It was on this occasion that I witnessed the only instance I have seen of “pulpit-fright.” The canon in residence, over-awed, apparently, by one member of his vast audience, paused in his discourse, lost the thread of his ideas, and finally brought his address to an abrupt close. Having regard to the fact that the preacher was speaking as the ambassador of the King of Kings, such a display of nervousness at the presence of a mere man, however great and learned, would surely seem unaccountable; yet it undoubtedly occurred. It was a painful and disconcerting incident, and no one appeared more grieved at it than Mr. Gladstone himself, who showed that sympathy and pity which so invariably characterised him, even in the case of those who were his bitterest opponents.

The residents in St. Catherine’s Parish were humble people, a few Protestants in the midst of a large Roman Catholic population. They were good and kindly and grateful for kindness shown to them, and, not being blessed with a very ample share of this world’s goods, were prone to set their hearts on things above. Yet, poor as they were, unknown to them lay many treasures in their homes, for I have seen impoverished rooms in Dublin in those early years which contained exquisite specimens of furniture by Adams, Sheraton and Chippendale. The worth of these articles was then unrecognised; but in later days the treasure was MR. CECIL RHODES discovered by the furniture dealers, by whom vast profits must have been made by their purchase and re-sale. Many years after that period I was the guest of Mr. Rhodes in his lovely residence, Groot Sheen, near Rondebosh, a suburb of Cape Town, and I was unable to refrain from expressing admiration at the wonderful furniture of the library and reception rooms. Mr. Rhodes told me that the greater number of those articles of furniture came from Dublin. “Why,” I said, “I did not think you were ever in Dublin.” “Nor was I,” he replied, “but one of my brothers was A.D.C. to Lord Londonderry when he was Lord-Lieutenant, and I told him to buy up all the old Dublin furniture he could and not mind the price.” I thought as I looked at those exquisite pieces of furniture, then thoroughly restored and renovated, that I may have been renewing my acquaintance with some of the very chairs and tables and cabinets that I had seen in vastly different circumstances in St. Catherine’s Parish.

In the whole of that parish there had been during my father’s curacy but one other man who, in the vulgar acceptation of the term, would be reckoned as of the estate of a gentleman. This was Mr. Edward Houston Caulfield, the grandfather of the present Lord Charlemont. Beginning life with ample fortune, he fell as a young man into pecuniary embarrassment and was pitchforked by his influential political friends into the position of Governor of the Dublin Marshalsea, the Debtors’ Prison, which stood within St. Catherine’s Parish. Naturally, Mr. Caulfield became a leading figure in the neighbourhood, and no parochial meeting was deemed complete without him. He was a man of very aristocratic presence and charming manners: moreover, he knew everyone who was worth knowing in Dublin society. His home was presided over by his sister-in-law, a Miss Geale,^[6] his wife having died long before I, as a little boy, first came to know him.

Mr. Caulfield and his daughter and Miss Geale were on terms of the greatest intimacy and friendship with my father and mother, whom they greatly amused and interested with their accounts of the life of society, especially in Dublin Castle, the stories having a poignancy of their own in their contrast with the simple life of doing good amongst the poor to which my parents had absolutely devoted themselves.

Mr. Caulfield was, of course, a Tory of Tories, and he was seldom more happy than when he found gentlemen of his own social position among the prisoners in his charge in the Marshalsea; he would then show them the greatest courtesy and kindness, frequently inviting them as guests to his own table.

I have already said that Mr. Caulfield was almost MR. CAULFIELD an invariable attendant at the parish meetings; but though his presence was regarded as essential, he took little part in the proceedings, beyond uttering a few obvious generalities to which no one paid particular attention. On one occasion, however, he won an oratorical triumph which made him a hero for the moment throughout the parish. The Disestablishment of the Irish Church aroused his keen indignation, and he attended a meeting of protest and addressed an audience largely composed of young men and women, shop assistants and factory workers. His remarks received scant attention until he broached a subject which procured him a hearing and even enabled one to appreciate the “greater silence” with which St. Paul was heard when he spoke in the Hebrew tongue. He was glad, he said, to see so many young men and women at the meeting. These meetings were useful for introductions; these introductions led to acquaintanceship, then to friendship, then not infrequently to marriage, and then to children; so that we should soon have springing up amongst us a race of young Protestants to defend our beloved Church from spoliation and Papal aggression! These sentiments, uttered in all seriousness by a dignified, middle-aged gentleman, were received with shrieks of laughter and a deafening applause, amid which the speaker resumed his seat in obvious, but puzzled, embarrassment.

Mr. Caulfield’s zeal for matters on which he held strong opinions at times exceeded the bounds of prudence. At the General Election of 1868 Sir Arthur Guinness (afterwards Lord Ardilaun) and Mr. David Plunket (afterwards Lord Rathmore) were Conservative candidates in the Church interest for the City of Dublin, then a two-member constituency. Sir Arthur was returned with a Radical colleague, but on an election petition, tried by Mr. Justice Keogh, he was unseated on the ground of bribery committed without his knowledge by his agents. During the trial of the election petition it was proved that Mr. Caulfield had allowed several of the Marshalsea prisoners to leave his custody in order to vote for the Conservative candidates: on a pledge, which was honourably observed by them, that they would return to the prison. This proceeding was certainly questionable. Mr. Justice Keogh, whose own conduct in Parliamentary elections had been a subject of scathing stricture, asked Mr. Caulfield why he placed such reliance on these gentlemen. “I would,” he said, turning to the Judge, “rely on their word of honour just as much as I would rely on yours.” The Judge flared up and threatened to commit him for contempt. Mr. Caulfield looked him straight in the face and expressed astonishment at his words conveying any offence, which was absolutely unintended. “I simply said,” he declared, “that I had implicit trust in these gentlemen, that I trusted their word just as much as I would trust yours. What higher tribute could I give them or you?”

The learned Judge, who in the course of a stormy, JUDGE KEOGH political career had been accused of public falsehood by eminent personages (amongst them being Lord Mayo, who had been Chief Secretary for Ireland and was then Governor-General for India), again attacked Mr. Caulfield. He reserved, however, his final philippic for the delivery of his judgment, when he expressed himself in language that created a great sensation and aroused much sympathy with Mr. Caulfield.

Later, Mr. Caulfield’s daughter, then a very young and attractive girl, had an amusing encounter with Judge Keogh, which she subsequently related to me with great glee. She recognised the Judge, with whom she was personally unacquainted, at an evening party in Dublin Castle, and, remembering her father’s treatment at his hands, she determined, as she afterwards put it, “to teach him a lesson.” At supper she contrived to sit close to her victim, and then, turning to a young officer who sat next to her, asked in a voice loud enough for the Judge to hear: “Do you know Judge Keogh?” The officer was unacquainted with Dublin celebrities, and replied that he did not. “Do you?” he asked, saying, naturally enough, exactly what he was required to say. “Oh, no,” replied the girl, “I should be very sorry to know him.” “Why so?” said her friend. “Who is this Judge Keogh and what has he been doing?” “Oh,” she answered, “have you not read that vulgar judgment of his the other day? He ought to be kicked off the Bench.” Keogh, who had been attracted by the mention of his own name, had of course been listening. Eventually he quite forgot himself, and in accents of great irritation he exclaimed, “I am obliged to you.” Miss Caulfield looked at him in surprise, and preserved that maidenly silence which is expected of young ladies when they are addressed by someone to whom they have not been introduced.

I think that to the Caulfields, to whose conversation with my father and mother I was admitted, I owe my first acquaintance, however distant, with public affairs; for it was from them that, with all the zest for such gossip of a boy, I first heard of the doings of that set of men and women who called themselves “society” in the gingerbread Court of Dublin Castle. And it was certainly through the Caulfields that I first met, in any real sense of the word, an Irish public man.

This was the Right Hon. Edward Litton. To-day that name is entirely unknown, and it does not find a place in any biographical dictionary with which I am acquainted; yet in his own generation Mr. Litton occupied a very considerable position in public life. When I first saw him he was well on in the seventies and the holder of an office long since abolished—that of Master in Chancery. At the Irish Bar he had been a leader both in the Equity and the Common Law Courts, and was regarded as a very adroit and subtle cross-examiner and a powerful and impressive speaker. He had often encountered O’Connell in the Courts and was MASTER LITTON considered to be fully able to hold his own in conflict with the Liberator.

Mr. Litton was a Protestant, and in the forties of the last century he was returned to the House of Commons in the Orange interest for the Borough of Coleraine. Unfortunately, like many other lawyers, he did not gain any success in Parliament equal to that which he had had at the Bar. His first speech, an elaborate attack on the policy of O’Connell, savoured too strongly of nisi prius, and was extremely rhetorical in style. O’Connell chose to refuse to take it seriously. When the House was better acquainted with the new Member, he declared, they would put the same value on his utterances as he did himself; and then, in a grossly disorderly aside which did not reach the Speaker’s official ear, but was heard in every other part of the House, he exclaimed as if to himself: “Ah, good old Ned!”

Mr. Litton was high-minded, resolute and a hater of compromise, with the result that he was disliked by Sir Robert Peel, then the Leader of the Tory Party: he was too true-hearted—Peel would probably have said “quite too violent”—to commend himself to that somewhat shuffling statesman. Consequently, he was passed over as a candidate for a law officership. It was said that he would have received a judgeship if he had abstained from voting on one particular occasion, but so far from abstaining he spoke and voted against the Government. Eventually he was appointed a Master in Chancery, a position admittedly below his deserts, and although he was frequently mentioned as being in the running for vacancies in high judicial offices, such as the Lord Chancellorship and the Mastership of the Rolls, none of these ever fell to him.

Master Litton (to give him his correct title) was kind enough to notice me and to condescend to be my friend, and some of the most delightful hours of my life were spent in his company, listening to his conversation and to his anecdotes of men and things. His eldest son, the Rev. Edward Arthur Litton, had a very distinguished career at Oxford, but, to the Master’s horror, developed decidedly Radical tendencies and even expressed opinions in favour of Irish Church Disestablishment. This appeared such unspeakable heresy to the Master that, when offered a baronetcy, he refused it on the ground that it would be inherited by a “damned Radical.”

The Master had a great respect and affection for my dear parents, and this admiration led him to draw pointed contrasts between my father’s character and those of certain bishops—“Episcopal puppets,” as he termed them.

On one occasion, when my father was dangerously ill, Master Litton wished for a consultation, and when my mother refused to question the skill of the doctor in attendance, he entirely lost his temper with her, accusing her of “damned obstinacy.” My father recovered without alteration in his medical advice, and no one was more delighted than Master LORD CHANCELLOR NAPIER Litton. But my mother, horrified at the Master’s levity of manner and tendency to profane language, began to fear that, notwithstanding all his goodness of heart, he failed to attain the Christian standard. In a little book which she called her “Book of Remembrance” she was accustomed to write the names of the persons whom she mentioned every day in her prayers, and, speaking very seriously to the Master, she told him that his name was in the list. He replied, with an admirable affectation of seriousness, “How can I ever requite such devotion, of which I am wholly unworthy?”

The Master was a prime favourite in the legal profession, although, as was natural for a man of such high honour and sensitive temperament, at times he formed strong dislikes. In particular he had a most contemptuous aversion for Lord Chancellor Napier. This lawyer, as Mr. Joseph Napier, had acquired a great reputation for piety by addressing Young Men’s Christian Associations and cultivating the affections of the Irish clergy at missionary and other religious meetings. Yet his genuineness was more than once in question. His manner was, to use a vulgar expression, “gushing” in the extreme. He invariably shook with both hands even men whose names he could not remember, and without doubt he would have made a fortune on any stage in the part of “Mr. Chadband.” Despite—or possibly in consequence of—this manner, he was generally regarded as a lying, deceitful, double-faced hypocrite, with a profession of religion which was altogether false. Indeed, he went by the name of “Holy Joe.” Needless to say, the frivolity and brusqueness of Master Litton were a sore trial to this good man, and on one occasion at least they came into almost violent collision.

During Mr. Napier’s Chancellorship a puisne judgeship became vacant. The Irish Attorney-General did not desire it, and it was understood that the Solicitor-General was not to have the offer of it. In these circumstances Master Litton applied for the position both to the Lord-Lieutenant ^[7] and to the Lord Chancellor. From each he received a most favourable and sympathetic reply, that of Lord Chancellor Napier being especially cordial in its tone. Yet the appointment was conferred elsewhere. The Master was naturally mystified at this result, until he received a letter from the Lord-Lieutenant to the effect that the opposition of the Lord Chancellor to Litton’s appointment had been so strong and vehement that much against his will and with great pain and regret he had been compelled to yield to it. The next morning on his way down to Court the Master called on Napier and was shown into his study. The Lord Chancellor rose, put out both hands to Master Litton and, with a semblance of intense emotion, tears filling his eyes, said, “My dear Litton, I did my very best, and I have failed. It was not my fault. I am indeed LORD CHANCELLOR NAPIER grieved.” Litton looked at him steadily, and then produced and read the letter of the Lord-Lieutenant. “Holy Joe” was stricken dumb, and Litton left the room, turning at the door to say: “Lord Chancellor though you are, you are none the less a damned liar and a damned blackguard! Good morning.”

It was in this period of my life, in 1865, when I was sixteen years old, that I first attended a gathering of a political character. My father took me to the examination hall of Trinity College to hear the proposing and seconding of candidates for election to Parliament as Members for Dublin University. The candidates included Mr. Whiteside (afterwards Lord Chief Justice of Ireland), Mr. Anthony Lefroy (the son of the Lord Chief Justice Lefroy of whom I have already spoken), and Dr. Ball, Q.C. (afterwards Lord Chancellor).

The top of the hall, in which the proceedings took place, was separated from the remaining portion by a strong wooden barrier designed to prevent the incursions of the students, who, however, remained as spectators and were able to interpolate into the speeches remarks often as witty as they were offensive. An archdeacon who referred to notes written on sermon paper while he was proposing Mr. Lefroy was caustically asked to put up his sermon and preach, for once, extempore. A reference to Mr. Lefroy’s father produced the suggestion: “Tell us something about his grandfather,” a sally which was greeted with yells of immoderate laughter, the reference being to the supposed illegitimacy of the Lord Chief Justice.

The ablest speech made that day, I thought, was that of Dr. Ball, who, amid a running fire of interruptions, denounced Toryism and eulogised Liberal principles, declaring, with a vehemence that might almost be regarded as an anticipation of the doctrines of Bolshevism, that the time had come for the complete abolition of the present unbearable state of affairs. Dr. Ball’s subsequent political career after this outburst is not without interest. At that election, standing as Radical candidate, he was defeated. But at the very next General Election, only three years later, he stood as Tory Attorney-General and was elected; and eventually, still remaining a Tory, he became Lord Chancellor.^[8]

Dr. Ball’s variation of principles was the subject, some years later, of an excellent joke made at his expense by Mr. Dowse ^[9] when Attorney-General for Ireland. At question-time in the House of Commons Dr. Ball pressed Mr. Dowse to give the exact date of some incident. Mr. Dowse assumed a reluctance. Dr. Ball was still more insistent, and then Mr. Dowse seized the opportunity he had designedly made. “I DR. BALL cannot give the right hon. gentleman the exact date,” he said, “but I will give him the best approximation I can. It was between the time when he contested Trinity College as a Radical and was defeated and the time when he contested Trinity College as a Tory and was elected.”

In July, 1866, at the age of seventeen, I matriculated in Trinity College, Dublin, obtaining first place on the first day of the examination. Among the examiners on that occasion were John Kells Ingram and John Pentland Mahaffy, each of whom, in a different way, has since won an undying reputation.

Dr. Ingram, a gentleman of the very widest and most profound erudition, a great historian, a great Greek scholar, and a great exponent of philosophy, was a man of medium size, with hair prematurely grey and wonderfully penetrating bluish-grey eyes. He had a very kindly, reassuring manner, with a quiet and dignified demeanour which invariably commanded respect.

He is best remembered as the author of that immortal national ballad, “The Memory of the Dead,” which is more popularly known from its first line as “Who fears to speak of ’98?” This was written one evening in his rooms at Trinity College some time before he obtained his Fellowship. He was then a young and ardent Irish Nationalist, leaning towards the Young Ireland Movement, which was at that time springing into existence and was destined eventually to destroy the constitutional movement of Mr. O’Connell. Subsequently, however, he took little, if any, part in active political life, and his winning of the Fellowship and consequent devotion to study were the subject of one of Mr. O’Connell’s jibes, that “the bird who once sang so sweetly is now caged and silent in Trinity College.”

It was a matter of general regret amongst those who knew him that Dr. Ingram was not appointed to the Provostship of Trinity College when it became vacant in 1881. But he had not entered into Holy Orders, and indeed it was whispered to his detriment that he held Positivist views which would be unsuitable in the head of a college founded for the advancement of true religion and useful learning. Yet although his failure to reach that office may have caused disappointment to him, he had the consolation of knowing that in the estimate of the world of learning he was the best man for the place. He was emphatically a man of books rather than of action, and a very great ornament to the college in which he was universally beloved and admired.

Dr. Mahaffy, on the other hand, did attain the Provostship, and was in many respects the greatest holder of that office. When I first knew him he was in the late twenties, an athletic-looking, splendidly-built man, with a wealth of bright brown hair and with a marked individuality of manner which DR. MAHAFFY characterised him to his dying day. In conversation with him more than fifty years later, I reminded him that at my first examination, when he came to take up the paper on which I had been writing answers to his questions, I wished to add something more and held on to it; but he pulled it from me, saying with the kindest of smiles, “No, no, this won’t do at all. You must learn to economise your time.” When I reminded him of this, I mentioned that he had given me practically full marks for my paper. “What a mistake I must have made!” was his reply.

Dr. Mahaffy, even when I first knew him, was known as “The General,” because of the wide variety of the subjects which he studied: like Bacon, he had taken all knowledge for his province. He touched nothing in which he did not excel. He has been accused of being a seeker after the great and the highly-placed. In point of fact they sought him much more eagerly than he ever sought them. It is true that he did not suffer fools gladly, and, yielding at times to an astonishing quickness of apprehension and readiness of wit, he said things too good to be forgotten and too true to be forgiven. In commenting once on a certain ungenerous high official who received a large salary intended to defray the expense of frequent entertainments—which, however, were not given—Mahaffy said: “His house was no doubt badly maintained and very dingy: but there were no mice in it.”

Dr. Mahaffy’s greatness as a historian, scholar, divine, antiquarian, and musician have been acknowledged throughout the world; but it is not so generally known that he was a firm believer in supernatural manifestations and had on more than one occasion seen apparitions. He has told me of some of his thrilling experiences of the supernatural.

Despite his nervous sensibilities and a highly-strung temperament, he was a man of great physical courage. On April 24th, 1916, the day of the outbreak of the insurrection to which I have already referred, as I sought sanctuary in Trinity College I saw Dr. Mahaffy in the Provost’s Garden, and he beckoned me to join him. The whole of Dublin was at the moment in uproar. The sound of rifle fire from St. Stephen’s Green could distinctly be heard, the people in the streets were in a state of panic, and no one could tell to what part of the city the terror would next spread. Yet Dr. Mahaffy conversed with me on the situation with perfect quietude of manner. He seemed as he walked up and down the garden to be as calm and free from alarm as if nothing exceptional had been happening, and as if there was nothing to prevent his enjoying studious ease in an academic bower.

I may perhaps record it as a curious coincidence that the late Mr. Rowland Ponsonby Blennerhassett, K.C. and I entered Trinity College on the same day in 1866, and matriculated on the same day in Christ Church, Oxford, in 1868. Mr. Blennerhassett was an undergraduate at Oxford in 1872 when he was elected to Parliament in the Home Rule interest REV. THOMAS GRAY at a by-election in Kerry. This was the last open vote by-election in Ireland, for five months subsequently the Ballot Act received the Royal Assent and the death-blow was given to electoral intimidation. The contest in Kerry was not so much one between the candidates (Mr. Dease and Mr. Blennerhassett) as a struggle between the principles of Whiggery and those of Nationality, and its result made the Home Rule Movement an acknowledged factor in the politics of the United Kingdom.

Until recently the Vice-Provost of Trinity College was the Rev. Thomas Gray, a man little known in the world at large, but loved by every student of the college within the last fifty or sixty years. He died in December, 1924, after these words, which I hoped would meet his eyes, had first been written. At the time of his death he was grey-haired and a nonagenarian. In my time he was a young man with thick, black curly hair. He was a most accomplished scholar and a profound theologian, but his chief repute arose from his extraordinary kindness and sympathy, his constant desire to befriend the students and his readiness to assist them out of scrapes. When Junior Dean, a position to which large disciplinary powers are attached, he controlled the most unruly spirits, not by instilling a fear of fines and penalties, but by arousing in them a genuine dislike of giving him any personal annoyance. Mr. Gray once reminded me that in my student days he saved my life. In an outbreak of rowdyism, in which I was taking my full share, I was bodily seized in order that I might be thrown over the railings of the lawn in one of the college quadrangles. These railings were spiked, and since, needless to say, I was struggling and doing my best to encumber my captors, it is probable that I should have alighted on the railings instead of beyond them and have sustained serious and very likely fatal injuries. Suddenly Mr. Gray walked calmly to the scene, and in a second all thought of rowdyism vanished.^[1]

Scholarships in Trinity College, unlike those at Oxford and Cambridge which are conferred as the result of examinations at entrance, are given as the result of an examination held once a year at which students of one, two, three, or even four years’ standing may compete, and are regarded as high academic distinctions. Scholars have the parliamentary franchise of the University, and are regarded in some respects as part of the governing body of the College, whose formal proceedings are described as those of “The Provost, Fellows and Scholars of Trinity College.”

At the scholarship examination in 1868, having won three first honours in Classics in the preceding year, I stood as a candidate among the Senior Freshmen, that being the name given to second-year students. The Fellows of Trinity of fifty years ago, like their successors of the present day, were kind-hearted and considerate, their desire being to make REV. THOMAS STACK the lives of the students in their charge as pleasant as circumstances permitted. In examinations they aimed at the discovery, not of ignorance, but of knowledge. But in any large body of men there are invariably some who fail to conform to the spirit and tone of their associates, and in this instance the exception to the rule of kindness and cordiality was the Rev. Thomas Stack, who, from his ferocious manner at the examinations, was known by the soubriquet of “Stick, Stack, Stuck.” He was a short, pale-faced man whose clerical attire included a monocle, a tie that had once (according to popular legend) been white, and an immense expanse of shirt-front which proclaimed unmistakably that he did not conform to Wesley’s maxim on the relation of cleanliness to godliness. The viva voce portions of scholarship and fellowship examinations were to him so many opportunities for the exhibition of a cowardly brutality towards those temporarily placed in his power. He seemed to come to his task as an inquisitor rather than as an examiner. One of the candidates on this occasion had been deprived of the use of his legs in a riding accident and had to be carried to his place in the hall. With natural sympathy, the other examiners came down from the daïs to save him the trouble and pain of being moved; but Mr. Stack showed no such consideration. He summoned the candidate to come to him, and when the difficulty was explained to him he turned to another of the examiners and said, in a voice loud enough to be heard everywhere in the hall: “Do you know that we have got a cripple here?” Then he walked to the table at which the “cripple” was seated, banged down his books, and said in a loud, rasping tone: “Now, sir, do you see what you have made me do?”

When my own turn arrived I was treated in a manner which would not have been permitted by the Bench in the cross-examination of a perjured witness. I was standing merely to test my strength with a view to winning the scholarship at the next examination, and I was fully prepared for a defeat. But I was not prepared for the treatment meted out to me by Mr. Stack. As it happened, with four of the five examiners I obtained marks that would easily have brought me high up in the list of scholars, and I was afterwards assured by my coach that my answers to Mr. Stack’s questions should have won equally high marks from him; but they did not. Yet it was not his apparent unfairness that affected me, but his demeanour. I left the daïs with a sense of having been subjected to humiliation and outrage and with the feeling that if I went in again for the examination I should be submitting myself to fresh insults. I therefore left Trinity College in the autumn of 1868, and entered Oxford University.

In those days the scholarship examinations of the various Oxford colleges were not held on the same day, and it was the practice for candidates, if they failed at one college, to submit themselves for examination at others until they were successful. I tried first to obtain a Demyship at Magdalen, but failed.^[1] The next examination was for exhibitions at Christ Church, and there I obtained a Slade Exhibition in addition to a First Exhibition.

The Dean of Christ Church was then Dr. Liddell, the great lexicographer: an outstanding figure, stern in manner, but kind in heart. He was highly sympathetic in all his relations with the undergraduates, by whom, none the less, he was held in awe for the gravity and austerity of his manner. For my own part I greatly admired and respected him; but I was never at ease in his presence.

On one occasion the Dean was condemning with great severity a good classical scholar who had been plucked at the Little-go through complete ignorance of mathematics. The youth gently murmured in excuse that Mr. Gladstone himself had been plucked at that examination.^[2] “Mr. Gladstone,” said the Dean, “came up from Eton with no knowledge of mathematics. It is true that he was plucked in that subject at the Little-go, but he was so much ashamed of himself that he worked at it and eventually obtained a First Class. It is so easy to imitate Mr. Gladstone in his failure: see that you imitate him also in his success.”

I do not think that adequate recognition has ever been paid to Dr. Liddell for his influence in the formation and moulding of the characters of the young men at Christ Church. He was comparable, almost, to Jowett in Balliol, or to Dr. Coffey at the present time in University College, Dublin. He was perhaps at his best in the Cathedral pulpit—a splendid specimen of both physical and intellectual manhood. I remember being present at a friendly undergraduate discussion in college, at which one man, a distant relation of the Dean, said: “I know DEAN LIDDELL him better than any of you, and in my judgment the Dean approaches as nearly as any man, in character and conduct, to the highest Christian ideal.” That was the opinion of one of the Dean’s students given to other students, and is, indeed, a worthy tribute to his greatness.

In Dublin, many years later, I had the happy privilege of meeting the Dean on a footing of greater equality than, of course, had ever been possible in my undergraduate days. He inspired the same feeling of respect, I may say indeed of reverence, in me, in manhood as in boyhood. On one of these days I accompanied the Dean and Mrs. Liddell to a celebrated Dublin photographer’s. Mrs. Liddell begged me to “go and chaff the Dean in order to make him look pleasant in his photograph.” “Chaff the Dean!” I replied. “I could no more chaff him now than I could have done fifteen years ago at Christ Church.”

I was privileged during that visit of the Dean’s to Dublin on more than one occasion to be his guide through the city. I accompanied him and Mrs. Liddell to Dublin Castle, where Sir Bernard Burke, the Ulster King-of-Arms, showed us some of the State papers preserved in the Ward Robe Tower. “Froude and Lecky,” he explained, “both worked here.” “Surely not together?” exclaimed the Dean. “Oh, no,” was the answer. “If they were put here together they would be certain to fight.” Many years later I related this incident in the House of Commons in the presence of Mr. Lecky. He took it very seriously, and interposed, looking unfeignedly grieved, “Mr. Froude and I were never, so far as I am aware, in Dublin at the same time.”

In the Viceregal Court, until recently, forms and ceremonies were observed with a strictness which savoured of the ridiculous. Ladies on leaving the dining-room for the drawing-room made a profound obeisance to the Lord-Lieutenant. The late Lord Londonderry held the Lord-Lieutenancy at that time, and I recollect Mrs. Liddell confiding to me how difficult she found it to refrain from laughter at thus doing homage to one whom she had known as a youth at Christ Church. It was perhaps an anomalous position; yet I do not question that Lord Londonderry could with all sincerity and even with awe have paid a similar compliment to the Dean.

In my undergraduate days, the Rev. C. L. Dodgson, better known by his nom de plume as “Lewis Carroll” and immortalised as the author of Alice in Wonderland, was one of the Students of Christ Church (as the Fellows of that College are called), and a Lecturer in Mathematics. He did not look what he was, one of the wittiest writers in the English language, and the teaching of Euclid seemed more in keeping with his manner as a somewhat serious and austere divine than indulgence in the revels of an unrivalled imagination. His lectures, too, were eminently prosaic and removed toto orbe from the style of the writings which have delighted the world.

Dr. Pusey was in those days one of the Canons DR. PUSEYof Christ Church and Professor of Hebrew. I never had the privilege of meeting him individually, but I remember him as an old gentleman, short in stature, and distinguished always by wearing a skull cap in the Cathedral. He was the preacher of beautiful, simple sermons delivered with a perfect intonation. Towards the close of his discourses the dear old man used to pause to look affectionately on the rows of young men sitting below him, and then would address them in his peroration as “My sons.”

Another Canon of Christ Church in my time was Dr. Heurtley, a very eminent scholar and a man of delightful personality, whose extreme evangelical views constituted, as I have always understood, a barrier to richly-merited episcopal preferment. He made a remark in a sermon in Christ Church which is strongly impressed on my memory as indicative of the trend of private conversation with at least one section of the young men of the time. “I would suggest to you,” he said, “that a wine party is not the most appropriate place for the discussion of the doctrines of the Christian faith.”

Canon Liddon, although one of the Students of Christ Church, was a Canon, not of the Cathedral, but of St. Paul’s. He had been Chaplain to Dr. Hamilton, a former Bishop of Salisbury, and had retained a great affection for the Cathedral of that diocese, coupled with a deep attachment to his former chief. In fact, after Dr. Hamilton’s death, as I have heard, he would never preach in the Cathedral for fear of not being able to control his feelings. He frequently, however, visited the city, and it was in Salisbury Cathedral that I saw him for the last time, some twenty years after I left Oxford. He was kneeling in prayer as I passed down the nave. When he rose from his knees he recognised me and held out his hand, saying, in tones that still showed the emotion he had just been feeling, “God bless you.”

In the first of my ’Varsity days Samuel Wilberforce, who was afterwards translated to Winchester, was Bishop of Oxford. He was illustrious as an orator, whether in the pulpit, on the platform, or in the House of Lords. Christ Church Chapel was the cathedral of his diocese, but the Bishop was seldom at the services, as his palace was several miles distant. In his absence, undergraduates sometimes had the temerity to occupy the episcopal throne, which was at the upper end of the building, far removed from the stalls of the dean and canons. On one Sunday afternoon I was in possession of the throne, when I noticed the undergraduates at the lower end of the Cathedral rising from their seats and bowing; and then, to my consternation, I saw the Bishop, attended by the Dean, walking up towards the throne. I tried to make a hurried exit, but was unable at first to open the door of the throne, so that it was not until the Bishop was directly in front of me that I managed to make way for him. Fortunately for me, the Dean permitted DEAN KITCHEN the incident to pass without official notice, but the throne was never again usurped by irreverent undergraduates.

Mr. Sidney James Owen was the Christ Church History Tutor and Reader in Indian History. His lectures, by the originality of his views, his power of expression and the anecdotes by which his doctrines were illustrated, constituted an intellectual epoch in the lives of his pupils. Indeed, his anecdotes, if collected, would form an anthology of good things. He himself used to relate with great relish that he once asked a former pupil who came to see him what he had been doing. “Not very much,” was the reply, “but I have been writing a thing or two for the magazines—rather original work which has attracted some little attention. You see, I took very careful notes of your lectures, and they keep me supplied with invaluable material.”

Another very great lecturer in Christ Church in my day was Dr. Kitchen, subsequently Dean of Winchester and eventually Dean of Durham. His lectures on Foreign History were delivered conversationally in quite an unconventional style. He would walk about, frequently looking out of the window, and at times appearing to be soliloquising rather than addressing a class of more or less eager students. He rarely consulted notes, having as an original and attractive substitute a number of magnificent engravings of the actors in the scenes which he described with such unequalled vividness. These would be passed round the class. “I wish you, gentlemen,” he would say, “to be acquainted with the personages whose actions we are considering. Look at them, and you will have a better idea of them and be better able to estimate their characters.”^[3] It was, of course, the practice at Christ Church, as elsewhere, to receive the remarks of the lecturers in respectful silence. Dr. Kitchen had no scruple in illustrating past by present conditions, and once, in speaking of the struggle of small nationalities for self-government, he remarked that the Irish of that time (1871) seemed to have set their hearts on a Parliament of their own, and personally he saw no reason whatever against it. I heard that remark, casually as it was made, with considerable emotion, and was moved in the excitement of the moment to an expression of approbation. Dr. Kitchen subsequently told me that this unheard-of breach of decorum amused him not a little; but at the time he considerately affected to be unconscious of it.

If I have not studied jurisprudence during my life with some little intellectual advantage I have lived in vain. Curiously enough, however, my first lesson in law was given to me neither by a civilian DR. STUBBS nor common lawyer, nor by a layman, but by a cleric—Dr. Edward Stuart Talbot, afterwards first Warden of Keble College, and until recently the learned and revered Bishop of Winchester. As lecturer in Christ Church in those days on Real Property Law he was a most clear and able expounder of judicial principles.

Dr. Stubbs, the eminent historian,^[4] was then Regius Professor of History. When giving lectures he sat at the head of the table in the hall of Oriel College. His lectures were written, and he rarely, if ever, departed from the letter of his manuscript; but he had the habit of talking to himself, and his asides were eagerly watched for and treasured by his pupils. The mention of the name of King Henry VIII. was invariable followed by a clearly audible whisper: “That impure felon.” When he alluded to Mr. Froude, who was destined to be one of his successors in the Chair of History, his asides, to put it mildly, bordered on the uncomplimentary.

Dr. Stubbs’s immediate predecessor in the Chair of Modern History had been Mr. Goldwin Smith, whose brilliant eccentricities secured him at the time a notoriety which is now fast fading. He was a man of strong feeling and strong opinions, and amongst other peculiarities he had a strong disapprobation of some English institutions which eventually led him to migrate to a university in America. He had also a particular aversion for Mr. Disraeli and frequently chose him as a subject for scathing lectures. For some time Disraeli ignored these attacks, then he passingly alluded to Mr. Goldwin Smith as “that wild man,” and finally he lampooned him in his novel Lothair, in a description of an Oxford professor with a gift for “ornate jargon” who, thinking England not good enough for him, forsook the Old World for the New. Goldwin Smith, as Disraeli evidently wished him to do, recognised the portrait, and replied to it by characterising the attack as “the stingless insult of a coward.” In the late seventies I heard Mr. Goldwin Smith read a paper at a meeting in Trinity College, Dublin. He had by that time discarded his violence of manner, and it was difficult to reconcile his appearance with that of the “wild man” of earlier days. He had the quiet, dignified manner of the Oxford Don while his attire was distinctly American, and seemed to be modelled on that shown in contemporary pictures of President Lincoln.

Another holder of the Chair of History at Oxford was also an assailant of Mr. Disraeli. This was the late Professor Freeman, who once sought the suffrages of a constituency for the amiable purpose of “hurling the husband of the Viscountess Beaconsfield from his ill-gotten eminence.”

Mr. James Anthony Froude, “that ex-clergyman of the Church of England,” as Dr. Stubbs was wont to designate him, was at the time of his death Professor of Modern History at Oxford. I saw him only once, and that was many years after I left the University. MR. J. A. FROUDE At the General Election of 1892, when I was speaking in support of Home Rule from the platform at Salcombe, Mr. Froude, who lived in the neighbourhood, was pointed out to me among my audience. Mr. Froude was one of the most pronounced and able Unionists then living, but in the course of his writings he had said many hard things concerning English Government in Ireland; and as I had a close acquaintance with his works I yielded to the impulse of the moment to seek some humour at his expense. I told the audience that I would address them on the subject of the English Mis-Government of Ireland, not in my own words, but in those of the world-famous historian, Mr. Froude. “Take such and such a subject,” I said. “What does Mr. Froude say of this matter? He says so-and-so. How dreadful is that charge! But it is true. Take another subject. . . . Here again we have the reluctant testimony of Mr. Froude . . .” My victim at first assumed an impassive aspect. As I went on his magnificent, flashing dark eyes were turned on me with wrathful indignation. At last he rose to leave the room. As the audience saw him depart I remarked with as much sorrow in my voice as I could affect: “Alas! I see that some people do not desire to hear the truth even in the words of Mr. James Anthony Froude.”

The Right Hon. Montague Bernard, when I was at Oxford, was Professor of International Law, and I used to attend his lectures in a small room at All Souls’. As well as holding this professorship, Dr. Bernard was one of the International Commissioners at Geneva, a member of the Privy Council, and a jurist of such world-wide fame that he was given the refusal of a judgeship, although he had never seriously practised at the Bar. He was, in my day, an elderly, absent-minded man, lecturing in a conversational tone with the aid of a few notes on odd scraps of paper, and frequently seeming to lose consciousness of his audience while he spoke his carefully-prepared sentences as if in a reverie. He had, I remember, a curious habit of poking a fire with the shovel. His quietude of manner and simplicity of character were in strange contrast with his celebrity.

It was customary at that time for the undergraduates of Christ Church to attend occasional lectures delivered by the Fellows and Lecturers of other Colleges, apart from those of the Professors of the University. In this way I was brought into contact with Mr. Charles Neate, a Fellow of Oriel College, who lectured on Constitutional History. He was then a thin, spare man, well on in the sixties, with a warmth of manner which made men almost by two generations his juniors regard him not merely as a friend but almost as one of themselves. In earlier years he had won a First in Greats and a Fellowship at Oriel, so that when he was called to the Bar his prospects were of the brightest. But he was a man of excitable temperament, quick to take offence and forcible in all his doings, his language being of an exquisite directness which would have made him MR. CHARLES NEATE a serious rival to Lord Fisher. Soon after he was called to the Bar he was retained as junior counsel in an equity suit. In the course of the case he offered a suggestion to his leader, Mr. Bethell (afterwards, as Lord Westbury, Lord Chancellor of England), and received the reply: “Hold your tongue, you young fool!” He met Mr. Bethell later in one of the robing rooms, expressed his objection to being so addressed, and proceeded to break the stick of his umbrella across his leader’s back. Such an incident within the precincts of the Court could not be left unnoticed by the Benchers of his Inn, and Mr. Neate, refusing to apologise, was disbarred. He then returned to Oxford, became Professor of Political Economy, and signalised the close of the next term by winning one of the Oxford steeplechases. He was frequently approached with a view to his re-admittance to the Bar, first on condition of apologising and eventually without apology, but he resolutely declined to return. He became Liberal Member for the City of Oxford, and in 1865 he had the opportunity of voting on the motion of censure which compelled his old enemy to resign the Great Seal.^[5] He used to refer to this incident as “a real revenge on the damned old ruffian,” although as a matter of fact he voted, not for the motion, but in the minority against it.

It is needless to say that with this record Mr. Neate was a hero to the undergraduates. I think he had a greater faculty for imparting knowledge than anyone else with whom I have come in contact. His accounts of the struggle between the Throne and the House of Commons were as vivid as if he himself had been a participator therein, his own parliamentary experience enabling him to treat matters of constitutional history in a way that excelled that of even the most accurate of text-book writers. I may ascribe to his teaching as a practical politician my first introduction to the close study of constitutional law and history, and the trend of my reading and taste in that direction.

Mr. Neate I met at the close of his career. Mr. (afterwards Viscount) Bryce, another Fellow of Oriel, I met before he was known as a man of public affairs. He was Regius Professor of Civil Law, and was so devoted to his chair that he retained it when Under-Secretary of State for War, and did not resign it until he entered the Cabinet in 1893. His lectures resembled his speeches in their very clear, terse and emphatic enunciation of principle and practice. I treasure gratefully the recollection that Viscount Bryce was amongst the first to greet me with much warmth when, fifteen years later, I entered the House of Commons.

Dr. Jowett I never had the privilege of meeting. But during my rambles in the neighbourhood of Oxford I used not infrequently to see him taking a walk with one or two of the undergraduates of Balliol, and I remember passing him on the road DR. JOWETT when he was accompanied with Mr. Asquith, who has so frequently paid tribute to his indebtedness in intellectual training to this great Master of Balliol.

One of the noted academic characters in Oxford in those days was a Fellow of Lincoln, the Rev. George Washbourne West, commonly referred to as “Washey.” He was in many respects typical of the college recluse; a man of almost universal learning, who combined the deepest erudition with a great simplicity. He was eccentric even in the pulpit, and to this may be accounted the large audiences which came on the rare occasions when he preached. A famous sermon, which he delivered on several occasions on Good Friday, concluded with the memorable phrase: “Judas Iscariot was essentially a mean man, who perpetrated a mean crime for a mean reward.”

Mr. West, a Tory of the most reactionary type, acquired notoriety in the politics of his day by presenting an object lesson of the extraordinary abuse of “faggot” voting. When, at the Revision Court in Oxford in 1883, an objection was lodged against him on the ground that he did not occupy the house in respect of which he voted, it was stated that he was one of the largest “faggot” voters in England, and he admitted that at the last election, although obliged to miss seven places at which he was entitled to vote, he had nevertheless voted seventeen times. He claimed to be represented in Parliament by sixty-four members.

In Lincoln College there was also a noted Don who afterwards became President of Corpus, the Rev. Thomas Fowler, universally known as “Tommy,” and famous alike for his learning and his superabounding kindness of heart, notwithstanding the acidity of his criticisms. A characteristic specimen of his remarks may well be quoted. Dr. William Alexander, Bishop of Derry and subsequently the Irish Lord Primate and Archbishop of Armagh, although the winner of several University prizes and eventually of acknowledged eminence in the world of learning, had had, in common with many other such men, an unaccountable difficulty in passing the ordinary University examinations. As the result, he had been compelled, in accordance with the regulations, to migrate from Brasenose to one of the smaller halls, and remain there until he was successful at the examinations, when he was re-admitted to his college. In the University pulpit the preacher in the “bidding prayer” invites the congregation to join with him in giving thanks to God for the founders and benefactors of the University, and especially for the founder of his own college and the various colleges of which he has at any time been a member. On several occasions it fell to Dr. Alexander to recite the bidding prayer, and after one such event Mr. Fowler was heard to observe with apparent seriousness that Dr. Alexander had confined his remembrance to the founder of Brasenose, and had shown no gratitude to the founder of the hall in which he had once been compelled to take refuge.

In the autumn of the years 1868, 1869 and 1871, when I was an undergraduate at Oxford, my father sought a change from the work of his Dublin parish by taking charge of Kilcullen, a delightful country parish in the County of Kildare. About three miles away stood Harristown, a magnificent mansion which was the residence of Mr. John La Touche.^[1] In these circumstances I met his daughter, Miss Rose Lucy La Touche, although it was not until 1871 that my acquaintance with her became more intimate. She was then in the early twenties: of medium height, rather slightly built, with very luxuriant flaxen hair, a high forehead, beautifully chiselled features and eyes “blue as the azure.” She could not, perhaps, accurately be called beautiful, but she had a fascination of manner, an exquisite charm of voice, and a power of conveying her meaning in a few perfectly chosen words that I have not known to be excelled. She disclaimed all pretensions to learning, although she was one of the most cultured ladies of the time, and was—a rare thing in that day for a woman—a very considerable classical scholar. My father was amazed at her knowledge of Hebrew, his own favourite study. But scholarship and erudition were only a small part of her remarkable equipment: she was a good linguist, an accomplished pianist, a daring horsewoman, and at the same time very tender and sympathetic and genuinely feminine, a favourite with women and much beloved by the poor.

Her mother also was exceptionally brilliant in intellect. She wrote many beautiful and touching sonnets and had, indeed, an almost perfect command of the English language, which had been the means of first bringing her, while at Florence when Rose was only eight years old, into touch with Mr. Ruskin. He was then in early middle-age, still suffering from the effects of an unhappy and disastrous period of married life. Rose’s early signs of brilliancy drew his attention, which changed as she grew up, first to admiration and then to infatuation. She, no MR. JOHN RUSKIN doubt, was flattered by his notice, but that she could ever have had any idea of marrying this rugged man, who was old enough to have been her father, is unthinkable; yet his selfish persistence, even persecution, in seeking to marry her cast an impenetrable gloom over her short life, and undoubtedly was accountable for her loss of health and her death in her twenty-eighth year.

I have a very vivid remembrance of Mr. Ruskin at this time, although I never knew him. His lectures at Oxford, as Slade Professor of Fine Art, were delivered in the afternoons in the Taylorian Buildings. As might be expected of so exact a stylist, he wrote his lectures in full and read them with a perfect enunciation and a great deal of expression, so that his style, chaste and beautiful as it may be to the reader, seemed of even greater charm to those who had the privilege of hearing his lectures. He kept always near his desk a blackboard, and at times, with a light of enthusiasm shining in his eyes, he would illustrate his meaning with a rapid sketch in chalk.

At that time he was in the late fifties. In appearance he was uncouth, his features were irregular, his hair was thick and unkempt, and he was careless in his dress: but these apparent drawbacks rather tended to enhance his wonderful attractiveness. Yet he was the last man with whom one would have associated the idea of romance, and in spite of my acquaintance with Miss La Touche, I had then, and indeed until many years afterwards, not the slightest idea of the tragedy which was filling his life even while he was delivering those delightful lectures. I knew, of course, that Miss La Touche was interested in Mr. Ruskin, for she had asked me to give her a precis of his lectures; but I imagined that it was a public interest, shared by a very large number of cultured people in that day, rather than a personal one. Indeed, so little did I suspect the true state of affairs that when a very unflattering cartoon of Mr. Ruskin, with the title “The Realisation of an Ideal,” was published I sent Miss La Touche a copy of it. It was probably as a consequence of this gift that when next we met she made the only reference to Mr. Ruskin which I ever heard from her lips. “He is a very ugly but a very interesting man,” she said; and then: “What a mistake he has made in not devoting himself to painting, for he could paint better than he writes!”—an observation in which she anticipated many recent judgments.

I would not have mentioned the name of Miss La Touche in these reminiscences had it not been for the fact that Ruskin’s conduct towards her and the effect she undoubtedly had on his career and life have been revived by the biographers of Ruskin in a way which she of all others would have least desired. When I have read references to her as “an Irish girl,” brought in as a curious illustration of a great man’s idiosyncracy, I feel that I am not acting contrary to what would be her wishes in placing on record, in this brief manner, MISS LA TOUCHE an account of the truth concerning her, coupled with my judgment that to her were given as delightful a disposition and as exquisite an intellect as were ever bestowed on any of the children of men.

In earlier years noblemen and the sons of noblemen at Christ Church had received special privileges, dining by themselves and wearing beautifully corded silk gowns and velvet caps with gold tassels, from which they derived the soubriquet of “Tufts,” and social climbers the soubriquet of “Tuft hunters.”^[1] Shortly before my entry into the college this practice had been abolished by order of the Dean, on the ground that such distinctions were inappropriate in a republic of learning. But those of the “Tufts” who were still in the college retained their gawdy apparel until they went down, and I recollect seeing the gradually diminishing number of these LORD ROSEBERY tasselled caps and corded gowns during my first years at Oxford. In particular I remember Lord Rosebery, then an undergraduate, being wheeled in a sedan chair round Peckwater Quadrangle on a Sunday afternoon: he had endeavoured to improve his academic costume with the addition of a veil to his cap, and was receiving the salutations of his many admirers. Lord Rosebery left Oxford in my first term. I have never been introduced to him.

The charge frequently made against Oxford Dons of paying undue deference to accidental circumstances of social position was in my time wholly without foundation. Mr. Sidney James Owen, of whom I have already spoken, sometimes humorously apologised to some members of the audience at his lectures for being compelled to make observations of an uncomplimentary character concerning their ancestors; but in doing so he did not approach within recognisable distance of the suspicion of snobbery. On ransacking my memory, I can recall but one professor who, perhaps, was wont too frequently, when asking for replies to his questions, to single out a gentleman who was the possessor of a title; and I have always thought that in this case the preference (if indeed it was a preference) was due to the fact that in a large class of men from different colleges a lecturer would have difficulty in remembering the names of his pupils, and would naturally be attracted to a name distinguished by a title. I recollect that when H.R.H. Prince Leopold attended lectures in Christ Church, accompanied with a member of his household who took notes for him, it was customary for the other students to rise and bow as he entered or left the room; but apart from this no special respect was paid to him.

I have already mentioned Mr. Asquith, who came to Balliol a year or two after I entered Christ Church. In his manner, gestures, method of speech and general trend of thought he has not appreciably changed, as far as I can form a judgment, since I first met him very early in his university life. He was then, as now, able to come to a conclusion quite uninfluenced by the personal equation, and to act with a manly independence, irrespective of momentary or personal considerations. He had a wonderful combination of qualities which rarely go hand in hand: pre-eminent abilities, intense application, well-balanced judgment and good physical health.^[2]

As I have testified in the House of Commons, Mr. Asquith, even in those early days, was anxious for a settlement of the Irish question on the terms of self-government, and was determined to do his part towards that end. It is not so generally known that during the Franco-Prussian War he was unreservedly anti-Prussian and pro-French in his sympathies. When the fortunes of France were at the lowest ebb he moved in the Union at Oxford LORD OXFORD AND ASQUITH a motion of sympathy with the cause of the French people, and concluded his speech, in an attitude familiar in later years in the House of Commons, with the words: “If France has not achieved success, she has done the next best thing, she has deserved it.”

Many others of my contemporaries at Oxford were also with me in after years in the House of Commons. There, we used often to speak of our undergraduate days, and I recollect Sir Alfred Hopkinson, K.C. (afterwards Principal of Queen’s College, Manchester) telling me that I had once declared at Oxford that my greatest desires in life were a seat in the House of Commons and a University Professorship. I remember, too, Mr. Burdett-Coutts telling me that in his whole life he had never suffered such embarrassment as when in a speech at the Union he had been subjected to repeated interruptions and disorderly laughter: when I, as he told me reproachfully but not resentfully, was one of his persecutors.

Amongst others of those friends of old days were The O’Mahony, who as Mr. Pierce Mahony had founded a Home Rule Club at Magdalen in 1872; Lord (Mr. Justice) Coleridge, eldest son of the Lord Chief Justice, who had been a great light in a debating society of his own college, Trinity, and was famous in those days for his elevation of thought and his eloquence; and Sir Ellis Ashmead Bartlett, a success in the Oxford Union, of which he was at one time President, and also on the political platforms, where his presence was much valued by the organisers of the Tory Party—but, strange to say, an ineffective speaker in Parliament.

It was at Oxford that I met for the first time Mr. Atherley Jones, now a Judge of the City of London Court. He too is but little changed after fifty years. He had, as an undergraduate, the same love of liberty which he has displayed in the House of Commons and on the judicial bench. He was naturally very proud of his father, Mr. Ernest Jones, the great Chartist leader, who preferred to exchange material wealth and magnificent prospects for painfully straitened means and public obloquy, rather than sacrifice the principles in which he believed. I remember being greatly impressed, in Mr. Atherley Jones’s rooms at Brasenose, when he showed me a sketch done by his father while in prison. Drawn with a pin dipped in his own blood, on a half sheet of notepaper, it represented a political prisoner in a dismal cell, while through a high window at the back, well out of the prisoner’s sight, could be seen the rioting and conflagrations outside; the moral being that when the people are deprived of their leaders all restraining influence is removed and outrages are the inevitable consequence.

Prominent amongst my especial friends as an undergraduate was the late Mr. Frederick York Powell, a man of great intellectual strength, who was called from amongst us when in the prime of life. It was my privilege to know him well and to love him. He had all the elements of greatness MR. FREDERICK YORK POWELL and at once the strength and the weakness of genius. His knowledge was little short of universal, and his researches through the whole domain of learning were as miscellaneous as they were recondite. He was a delightful companion and a faithful friend: I do not know how he managed to work, for his time was always at the disposal of his friends. He seemed, indeed, to acquire knowledge by some intuitive process. He was singularly modest and retiring, but his talents pierced through the veil with which he vainly endeavoured to enshroud them. His goodness of heart was known and read of all men, and procured for him the warmest affection of many, even of those who differed widely from him not only on political matters but on questions of religion. For York Powell, in spite of the influence of Oxford, one of the great centres of practical Christianity, was an avowed materialist: although, inconsistent as it might seem, he had little ambition for material success. Honours coveted and even intrigued for by others were by him quite unsought and even undesired. Once when a sealed letter came to him, bearing every appearance of being an official document of importance, he put it aside unopened, and it was not until later that he discovered it to be a letter from the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, offering him the Regius Professorship of History.

Eventually he accepted this position, which he filled with conspicuous success. He had a great power of discernment of character and of talent, and a happy knack of stimulating thought and inspiring the enthusiasm of his pupils. The late Mr. Lawrence Irving, to whom Powell introduced me in later years, owed much of the historic imagination which so considerably contributed to his success as an actor to the influence of Powell, who had the very highest estimation of his abilities.

It was, I believe, through Powell’s friendship and some words that he had been kind enough to speak about me to Mr. Herbert Fisher ^[3] that, some forty-five years later, I was accorded the happiness of that gentleman’s acquaintance; and it was through that privilege that I was twice invited to be one of the guests of the evening at the Christ Church function known as “The Censors’ Gaudy.” This takes the form of a dinner at which those college dignitaries entertain their friends after the undergraduates have gone down at the end of the Michaelmas Term. There, in 1911 and 1913, I was able to give to a younger generation some account MR. GRANT ALLEN of the Oxford life that had preceded theirs by forty years, and, above all, to touch on the close association that has always existed between Christ Church and Ireland. It is, indeed, scarcely an exaggeration to say, as I did on those two occasions, that Christ Church, Oxford, has educated very nearly as many celebrities, Irish by birth or closely connected with Ireland, as has Trinity College, Dublin.

The late Mr. Grant Allen, the well-known philosophical writer and novelist, lodged in the same house with me at Oxford. He was a Post Master of Merton and his abilities were widely recognised. At “Greats,” however, contrary to all expectation, he failed to obtain more than a Second. I have frequently heard men of exceptional experience say that, while they find it hard to suggest an alternative system, they consider examinations to be anything but a satisfactory proof of efficiency; and it may have been that the result in the case of Mr. Grant Allen was one in point. I remember that on the evening of the day on which the Class Lists were published he came to my rooms and declared with great energy and conviction—and, I think, sincerity—that he regretted his Second, not so much for his own sake as for the repute of the University, which he had no doubt would eventually be proved to be in error in questioning his capabilities. I think it may fairly be said, after fifty years, that Mr. Allen was right and the examiners wrong when he was thus weighed in the balance.

There have, of course, been other great mistakes made in the schools. The Third Class of Cardinal Manning, the Second of Archbishop Whately and that of the Marquess Curzon of Kedleston ^[4] are instances in which the verdict of the Schools has been reversed in the world outside. But in undergraduate estimation even the winning of a Fellowship does not atone for failure to obtain a First Class.

I can relate an incident which illustrates this feeling of successful candidates towards their less fortunate brethren. The late Dr. Thomson, who eventually became Archbishop of York, in some unaccountable way obtained in the Schools only a Third Class. Once, while he was Fellow and Dean of Queen’s, Dr. Thomson was awakened at two or three in the morning, after an announcement of a Class List, by riotous sounds outside his rooms. Dressing quickly, he went to investigate the cause of the disturbance, and found that a candidate who had been celebrating his acquisition of a First Class was standing very unsteadily on the cupola in the quadrangle of Queen’s College, addressing a small crowd of his somewhat intoxicated friends. A slip would have meant his being dashed to pieces on the ground. The future Archbishop tried to persuade him to come down, but his efforts merely roused the orator to indignation. Dr. Thomson accordingly addressed him soothingly, in the hope that persuasion ARCHBISHOP THOMSON would prove more effective than coercion. “Yes, yes, Mr. So-and-So,” he began, “I can quite understand your feelings.” The reply came with withering contempt: “You understand my feelings? You, Thomson, who only got a damned Third!”

Throughout my residence at Oxford I was a member of the Union. It is, without doubt, one of the most fascinating of the University institutions, and there is never a time when the members of it do not include speakers of exceptional brilliance, who there obtain their first real experience in the art of oratory. During the first two years of my residence, the speakers of the greatest prominence were Mr. Creighton, subsequently Bishop of Peterborough and of London; Mr. Copleston, who was made Bishop of Colombo when he was barely of the canonical age qualifying him for admission to the episcopate; and Mr. Christopher Redington, who, having been barred from a Fellowship because he was a Roman Catholic, eventually became Resident Commissioner of National Education in Ireland. But the gentleman who, in my judgment, was the most powerful speaker BISHOP J. C. RYLE was Mr. Edwin Harrison, an Exhibitioner of Balliol, of whom great things were expected. As a result of overwork, however, this brilliant young man was smitten with brain-trouble, and, for the preservation of his life, he was compelled to abstain from all severe study and application and to avoid all scenes, and even topics, of excitement. His exceptional faculties remained unimpaired by this means, but he was precluded from putting them to any use and lived in complete seclusion for some fifteen years.

The Union was a great place for the making of friendships, and to it I owe some of the closest friends of my life. It was on the whole a brilliant gathering: many of its members were famous throughout the University for their wit, and the Union certainly gave them opportunities for its exhibition. I remember that there was a book in which members were permitted to write complaints that should come before the committee and suggestions with reference to the affairs of the Society; and this book, filled with recommendations which were anonymous although their authors were well known, was utilised for the most outrageous but wonderfully humorous badinage.

A particularly virulent exhibition of wit was once seen in the vestibule of the Union, where, beside the notices of the Society, were placed announcements of church services and sermons. The Rev. J. C. Ryle,^[1] well known in those days as the writer of pamphlets dealing with religious subjects in a popular manner which appealed to tens of thousands of readers, was announced to speak at St. Aldgate’s. One day, across the announcement, was scribbled in pencil the couplet:—

The author of these lines, in which wit so predominates over profanity that I once dared, with many apologies, to recite them to an archbishop, was well known. He now holds, I believe, a very high judicial position in South Africa.

It was at the Union, in 1868, in the first few weeks of my life as an undergraduate, that I first saw and heard Sir William Harcourt, who was then on the eve of his illustrious parliamentary career. I was deeply interested in the General Election of that year, for it was to decide the fate of the Irish Church. Sir William was standing as one of the Liberal candidates for Oxford City, and so greatly did his views appeal to me that, disregarding the censure of Dons who reprimanded me for absenting myself from college lectures “to listen to such stuff as Harcourt’s speeches,” I followed Sir William and Mr. Cardwell, the other Liberal candidate, from meeting to meeting.

Sir William was then in the early forties, a man of bold and handsome features and magnificent physique. His style of speaking, even in those early days, was exactly that with which I became so SIR WILLIAM HARCOURT familiar twenty years afterwards in the House of Commons—a style that always compelled attention. At this period he was particularly fond of analogies, even if they were a trifle far-fetched and forced. He told his audience at one meeting, I remember, that the disestablishment of a State church which was not the general church of the people was no new thing, for had not episcopacy been disestablished in Scotland? He was also very happy in repartee. At the nomination, at which I was present, the Tory candidate, Dr. Deane, a celebrated ecclesiastical lawyer of the time, promised that in the event of his election he would acquire for the City of Oxford a plentiful supply of water. Sir William remarked humorously that when his learned friend spoke of water what he really meant was beer. Sir William apologised to the electors for not being with them for the whole day at the polling, as he had to go to London “to vote against a Tory alderman.” He begged the voters to poll early, so that even before he left Oxford he could have the assurance that all the candidates would occupy their proper places at the declaration of the poll: “Mr. Cardwell first, where he ought to be; I myself second, where I ought to be; and, above all, Mr. Deane where he ought to be, at the bottom of the poll.” This desire of Sir William’s was exactly carried out.

In 1871 I proposed a motion in the Union in favour of a Parliament for Ireland.^[2] I was, of course, not surprised when the motion found but little favour and was heavily defeated. I well remember an incident in that debate, which was held in the room which is now the Library, the ordinary debating hall not being built till many years later. A gentleman seated not on or near the platform but in the middle of the hall rose to speak. His manner was unpretentious and, speaking in very quietly modulated tones, he at first attracted little attention. As he proceeded, however, the audience began to listen, until there fell upon the meeting that silence which is the highest tribute to the power of a speaker, while, very unobtrusively but with consummate skill and force, he put the Irish question from the Irish point of view as he, an Englishman, conceived it, concluding with an appeal to his audience to do unto others as they would that others would do unto them. He resumed his seat somewhat abruptly. There was a pause, and then there arose from the audience with one accord, despite difference of opinion, a chorus of cheers again and again repeated. The speaker, whom I had never previously met and whom I never saw again, was Mr. J. R. Green, eminent afterwards as an historian.

In 1872 I was a candidate for the Presidency of the Union. It was a three-cornered contest, and I was well aware that my political views precluded me from any chance of success. Mr. Sinclair, afterwards Archdeacon of London, was elected. I came second, and the late Mr. Herbert Richards, HOME RULE MOTIONS afterwards Vice-Provost of Wadham, came third on the list.

On November 4th, 1873, I visited the Cambridge Union, then under the Presidency of that highly-distinguished and charming scholar, the late Professor A. W. Verrall, to move a resolution in favour of Home Rule. The debate, in which I well remember the brilliant contributions of Sir Perceval Lawrence, subsequently a judge of great eminence in South Africa, and Professor Courtney Kenny, was an animated one and was eventually adjourned until the next meeting. By that time I had gone down from Oxford, but the news came to me in Ireland, to my great gratification and somewhat I must confess to my surprise, that the Home Rule motion had been carried.^[3]

The 4th of November in 1913 fell on the same day of the week as the 4th of November, 1873, and, noticing this, I was inspired by a sentimental desire to move on that day in the Cambridge Union the same motion that I had moved there exactly forty years before. I therefore wrote asking to be accorded the favour of being allowed to do so, and this was most generously granted. Mr. Gilbert Talbot, the President of the Oxford Union, was invited to come to oppose the motion. Mr. Talbot proved to be a most attractive man, strikingly like his father, Dr. Edward Stuart Talbot, whom I have already mentioned as having been one of the lecturers at Christ Church while I was an undergraduate. Mr. Talbot’s speech was admirably delivered, and I do not think he omitted any argument which could be urged against the motion. He treated me with a very stately courtesy and, with real feeling which I did not fail to appreciate, he expressed sympathy (which I thought misplaced although without doubt sincere) with me in that I had laboured for forty years in a cause which, as he confidently asserted, was doomed to failure. I am glad to be able to say that this Home Rule motion, like its predecessor of that day forty years before, was carried.

One of the best speeches of that evening—a speech that would have made a reputation if delivered in the House of Commons—was delivered by a young man of genius who, like Mr. Talbot, was destined to die from the effects of his service in the Great War. This was Mr. Gordon Butler, a son of the illustrious Master of Trinity, and at that time the Secretary of the Cambridge Union.

In the year 1873, after I had gone down from Oxford, I returned in order to be present at the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Union. A banquet was held in the Corn Exchange, and there, for the first time, I heard Cardinal Manning, Earl Stanhope (the historian), Matthew Arnold, Lord Salisbury, Lord Selborne and Sir John Coleridge (afterwards Lord Chief Justice of England). The CARDINAL MANNING dinner, of course, was intended to be strictly nonpolitical in character. Sir John Coleridge, however, was then the Attorney-General. In speaking of the many members of the Union Society who had attained distinction in after life, he referred to some of the principal Cabinet Ministers of the time. He then began a sentence with the words: “If you get rid of the Government . . .” and was interrupted with boisterous applause. When at last this abated Sir John continued: “Well, suppose that laudable object of getting rid of the Government is achieved, still—you cannot get rid of Oxford, which will be as well represented by our successors.”

But the speech on that occasion which made the greatest impression on me was that which contained Cardinal Manning’s very tender allusion to Dr. Samuel Wilberforce. Cardinal Manning and Bishop Wilberforce were brothers-in-law, and also, in their early years, devoted friends, but Manning’s departure from the Church of England involved a heart-breaking severance between them. Both were to have been present at this celebration of the Union’s jubilee, but very shortly after writing his acceptance to the invitation the Bishop had been killed by a fall from his horse. There was therefore great poignancy in Cardinal Manning’s touching tribute to the memory of the man who, associated with him by the very closest bonds of affection as well as by relationship, had been the bosom friend of his early years, and then had had to endure the severance which both had recognised as one of sad necessity. The Cardinal’s words, very few, very carefully chosen, were uttered with an emotion which he was powerless to conceal.

On the following night a debate was held in the Union. The President was then Mr. Robert Mowbray, the eldest son of Sir John Mowbray, Bt., who in his time had also filled the Presidency. It is a part of the established practice of the Union that when the President vacates the chair to take part in debate his place shall be taken by the senior ex-President who happens to be present. This rule provided Mr. Mowbray with an opportunity to arrange an exceedingly pleasant little incident, for, amid the very greatest enthusiasm, he purposely intervened in the debate so that his place in the chair could be taken once more by his father.

In April, 1891, when I had been for some years in Parliament, I went to Oxford, again to take part in a debate in the Union on Home Rule. At that time the Balfour régime of coercion and eviction in Ireland was in full swing, and there were constant collisions between the military and police and the people, besides numerous prosecutions, before tribunals of Resident Magistrates, of Irish Members of Parliament and others for inciting the people to refuse the payment of rent to the landlords when to do so would have entailed deprivation of the bare necessities of life. Several prosecutions, too, had been instituted against people who had sought to elude cordons of military and police in order to bring food to people who were resisting eviction. LORD HUGH CECIL Some Oxford gentlemen visited the scene of these occurrences to find out for themselves the true state of affairs, and, carried away by what they saw, assisted the beleaguered people against the police. A prosecution resulted, the victim being an undergraduate of Balliol, who was charged with “conspiring with one Benson ^[4] to induce the tenants against whom eviction decrees had been obtained to resist the execution of these decrees.”

At the meeting of the Union to which I am referring this undergraduate, a gentleman of very elegant deportment and address, detailed the enormities of which he had been accused—which, in simple language, amounted to the bringing of food to the houses of the impoverished people. From my seat on the platform I could see that two young men, one distinguishable for his almost flaxen hair and the other with raven locks, were acting in concert in interrupting, very cleverly and wittily, every speech that was in sympathy with the Irish claims. When the gentleman who had been prosecuted had detailed his various philanthropic endeavours on behalf of the persecuted tenantry of West Donegal, he raised himself to his full height and asked: “Now what did I deserve for this?” Instantly came the reply from the fair-haired interrupter: “Six months’ hard!” and the burst of uncontrollable laughter which followed completely marred the effect of an excellent and impressive speech. I asked subsequently the names of the pair of extraordinarily clever rowdies who had contrived this effect, and was told that the dark-haired one was Mr. Arthur Magee, a son of my famous fellow-countryman, William Magee, Archbishop of York, while the light-haired youth was Lord Hugh Cecil.

Upon graduating at Oxford in 1873 I went to live in Dublin with my father and mother. After much consideration and some negotiation in relation to a junior mastership in a great Public School, I determined to go to the Irish Bar, and I entered as a student at King’s Inns, Dublin. Irish Law students were in those days obliged to serve three terms at an English Inn of Court, and accordingly I entered also at the Inner Temple. This, however, implied no more than the partaking of a certain number of dinners in the Hall of the Inn, so that the necessary visits to London were completely devoted to amusement and holiday-making.

The Common Law Courts then sat at Westminster,^[1] and I well remember wandering into one of them and hearing Sir John B. Karslake arguing a case with consummate ability. He was at that time the Attorney-General, and had every prospect of a great political, forensic, and ultimately judicial career. I was much struck by his splendid physique and carriage and by his exceedingly handsome features; but I could not help noticing how he held any book or paper from which he was reading unusually close to his eyes. A short time later his brilliant career was cut short by the misfortune that this foreshadowed: failing sight compelled him to resign the Attorney-Generalship and shortly afterwards to give up his seat in the House of Commons. Later still I saw him, apparently quite blind, being led by a friend up the Hall of the Inner Temple to the Benchers’ table. I have often heard that he bore his overwhelming misfortune with courage, self-restraint and dignity, but I have always been affected by the bitter pathos of this and other similar incidents.

In Dublin, about the same time, I became aware of another tragedy, ending what promised to be a great career. At dinners in the Hall of the King’s Inns it was customary for barristers and students to take their places before the entry of the Benchers, who sat at a separate table on a slightly raised daïs. Among the Benchers I frequently noticed an old man who was literally bent in two, his head seeming to recline on his chest and it appearing impossible for him to stand erect. This was the Right Hon. Frederick Shaw,^[2] who from 1828 until a few months RIGHT HON. FREDERICK SHAW before his death in 1876 was Recorder of the City of Dublin. Between 1830 and 1848 he had been a Member of Parliament in the Tory interest, first for the City and then for the University of Dublin, and had been prominent in public life until he was stricken down with rheumatism and neuritis. Through this he became a physical wreck, his political career came to an end, and his chances of preferment were ruined. In this invalided state he lived for twenty-five years, discharging in comparative obscurity the duties of a subordinate position.

The tragedy of Mr. Shaw’s life was particularly acute both because he had been a man of noble presence and because of his supreme political ability. He was the acknowledged leader of the Irish Tory Party, and was regarded in the House of Commons as being in no respect inferior in debate to Mr. O’Connell. One of his greatest parliamentary achievements resulted in the rescinding of a resolution carried on the motion of Mr. O’Connell in 1834, by a majority of ninety-three, for the appointment of a select committee to inquire into the conduct of Sir William Cusac Smith, Bt., one of the Barons of the Irish Court of Exchequer, in introducing political topics into his judicial charges. In Sir Robert Peel’s administration of 1834-1835 Mr. Shaw could have had his choice of ministerial offices; but he did not take advantage of the opportunity, since to have done so would have entailed resignation of his Recordership, which, as a permanent position, was of greater value to him than any office in a ministry that was certain to be of short duration. He therefore declined a Cabinet office. He, however, accepted a Privy Councillorship, and exerted so much influence on Irish affairs that the government of Lord Haddington, the Irish Lord-Lieutenant under Peel, was known as “The Shaw Vice-royalty.” Unfortunately, while his power was growing in Parliament his popularity was lessening amongst his constituents, who were offended at “the progressing liberality of his views.” At the General Election of 1847 Mr. Joseph Napier (of whom I have already spoken) stood against him as an ultra-Conservative and succeeded in reducing his majority to so negligible a figure that he retired from the representation of the University in the following year. Then his ill-health supervened, and he was unable to seek another constituency.

There was a similarity in some respects between the tragedy of Mr. Shaw’s career and that of Mr. Justice Keogh, to whom I have previously referred. After being the idol of the Irish Tory Party, Shaw was accused of betraying its interests and by bitter attacks was forced to resign his position. Keogh was the favourite of the Irish National Party, and he also was attacked on the ground that he had betrayed his party’s interests, and for a generation was the object of hatred and bitter contempt, his appointment to a Law Officership of the Crown and subsequently to a seat on the Judicial Bench being regarded as the reward of his treachery. Yet Keogh JUDGE KEOGH was a man of quite exceptional brilliance, and his appointments were as little commensurate with his abilities as was that of the Recordership given to Mr. Shaw.

I first saw Mr. Keogh at an opening meeting of the Trinity College Historical Society in 1864, and subsequently I used to see him, side by side with Mr. Shaw, on the daïs of the hall of the King’s Inns. He was below the average height, inclined to corpulence, clean shaven, with a broad forehead, dark brown hair, blue eyes that flashed with the piercing strength usually accorded to black ones, and jaws and lips which seemed indicative of courage and tenacity of purpose. The stories which I have already related concerning him show him in an unfavourable light, and indeed he was a much-hated man. Many of his enemies disliked him purely on political grounds, as in the case of Mr. Alexander Martin Sullivan,^[3] one of the most eloquent members of Mr. Isaac Butt’s Parliamentary Party. Mr. Sullivan had come very intimately into contact with Keogh when Keogh was in the House of Commons, and had been his warm friend; but when Keogh abandoned National politics and became an official of the Irish Government, from which he had solemnly sworn not to accept office except under certain conditions which were not fulfilled, Mr. Sullivan severed the friendship and entertained for him a hatred that was as intense as his previous affection. I have seen the gleam of this hatred as Keogh passed in the Benchers’ procession while Sullivan, who went to the Bar late in life, stood beside me at the students’ table. Yet Mr. Sullivan told me at one of these dinners that in his opinion Keogh, had he been straight in his dealings, would have been as great a power for good in Ireland as was John Bright in England.

Other men hated Keogh for his conduct on the Bench, notably as Presiding Judge at the Fenian Trials, where the exchanges between him and the prisoners at the Bar were terrible and merciless. In court he was always severe. The flash of fury in his eyes was once, I well remember, directed on myself. This was in June, 1875, just after I had succeeded in obtaining the first place (with the First Exhibition) at the final examination of students for call to the Bar. I was naturally rather elated, for I had been a member of the Inns of Court only a little over two years, too short a time for the eating of the requisite number of dinners, so that my call was postponed till the following January. I had also been elected Auditor of the Law Students’ Debating Society. Perhaps this elation was bad for me: in any event, I was quickly put into a proper state of humiliation. A sensational action for libel and slander was attracting great public attention, and was proceeding before Mr. Justice Keogh and a special jury. The statement was made that the plaintiff, as a collector in a Protestant church, had stolen from the collecting-plate portions of the JUDGE KEOGH offerings of the congregation. The court was densely and inconveniently crowded, and Mr. Justice Keogh, who always suffered—in temper at least—from a heated atmosphere, severely reprobated the conduct of “a gossip-mongering public” who came out of idle curiosity to hear a painful case with which it had no direct concern. The case was of considerable interest to me from the forensic standpoint, the cross-examination of witnesses being in some instances particularly difficult, and I was anxious to be present. For the first two days I succeeded in finding a seat, but on the third I was refused admittance to the court, the policeman at the door saying that every inch of the building was filled. I appealed to the sub-sheriff, suggesting, possibly without sufficient diffidence, that as I was a law student a place ought to be found for me. The sub-sheriff was offensive, ridiculing my claim and saying that he did not care a damn who I was—I was not going into that court. I replied in suitable terms, which I fear bordered on profanity, giving my estimate of the sheriff’s own value both as an official and as a man. Shortly afterwards the judge appeared on the Bench and immediately rebuked the sub-sheriff for the crowded state of the court. “Oh, my lord,” was the answer, “you little know my difficulties. Why only a moment ago a young man outside, who claims as a law student to be present, abused me in all the moods and tenses for not letting him in.” “What?” thundered Keogh. “Bring him into court!”

I was standing in the hall of the Four Courts when I received the summons, which I did not take very seriously, imagining, since I had already discovered that the sub-sheriff did not always use the English language in terms of scrupulous exactitude, that I was merely being told that a place had been found for me. I began to think differently, however, directly I entered the court and found Keogh glaring at me with flashing eyes and features contorted with a rage that bordered on the demoniacal. He placed his elbows on the desk—a favourite attitude of his when excited—and, after gazing at me for a few seconds in order, no doubt, to bring me to a proper state of intimidation, he hissed out: “You, sir, say you are a law student and have a right to be here!” I attempted to explain, but he would not listen. “Have him removed from the precincts of the court,” he ordered, and officious policemen ushered me forth.

I confess that I thought myself grossly insulted, and I complained bitterly to Mr. Justice Lawson of the treatment meted out to me. I happen to know that this complaint had its effect. What form of remonstrance was made to Keogh I do not know, but later when, after my call to the Bar, Mr. Justice Keogh was Commissioner of Assize on the Munster Circuit, I was formally introduced to him; and although he made not the slightest allusion to the incident which had so offended me, he treated me in a manner that generously atoned for the indignity to which I had previously been subjected.

Through this introduction I was received into JUDGE KEOGH his friendship, and became a frequent partaker of his hospitality, so that I had the inestimable privilege of listening to his unrivalled wit and extraordinary brilliancy in conversation. For Keogh, fierce as he invariably was on the Bench, was kind, sympathetic and generous in his private life, and as great a friend to those he liked as an enemy to those he did not. And in these circumstances he was excellent company. What he said was good, but his method of saying it was indescribable—thanks to his naturally lugubrious countenance, set off with eyes which now, instead of flashing with rage, would beam with good-fellowship.

His conversation, when not personal, was in the main in relation to politics and history, a circumstance which I have often observed elsewhere in members of the judiciary. “Swift,” he said to me once, “are you a descendant of the Dean?” “No, sir,” I answered, “the Dean had no direct descendants. I am only collaterally related to him.” “Only collaterally?” repeated Keogh. “I wish to God I were even his bastard!” And then came, in a few brilliant sentences, a wonderful appreciation of Dean Swift’s life and work and character, as realistic as if he had known and loved the Dean as a contemporary.

Keogh was fond of anecdotes of parliamentary life, and particularly, perhaps, of reminiscences of scenes in which he had himself played a part. While in the House of Commons he once happened to be passing the Front Opposition Bench on which Mr. Disraeli was sitting. “Come, Keogh,” said Disraeli, “take a seat here with us.” “No, thank you, sir,” was the ready reply, “I don’t wish to sit there—nor do you!”

On one occasion he observed to me how surprising it was that every remark of Mr. Disraeli’s, even when savouring of the uncomplimentary, seemed to be regarded by those concerned with the pleasure usually reserved for compliments. Once, in talking casually with a certain high sheriff, Keogh had related that he had come into the dining-room of the House of Commons and found Disraeli taking a hasty meal in the course of the debate. “Well, Keogh,” said Disraeli, “who’s up?” “Mr. Finn, sir,” was the reply. “Oh, Finn!” said Disraeli. “He always interests me. I think he must be like those fellows who during the siege of Jerusalem rushed through the streets scantily clad and moaning: ‘Oh, oh, woe, woe!’ ” The next day the high sheriff referred again to the anecdote, saying how much pleasure it had given to his wife. “She is,” he added, “a daughter of Finn’s.”

I remember very vividly Keogh’s surprise at Parnell’s conduct in the House of Commons on the initiation of the “active” (or as it was commonly called “obstructive”) policy in relation to Irish affairs. “I saw him once,” said Keogh, “some years ago in reference to negotiations about the renting of a house. He seemed to be a highly sensitive, refined young fellow, the kind of man who would at once subside if you hinted at any disagreement with him. JUDGE KEOGH I cannot realise anyone of his refinement of manner and disposition defying the House of Commons and bearding the Speaker. It is one of the surprises of my life.”

In the intimacy of his private life Keogh’s affection for his family was very deep and very manifest, and the sudden death of his younger daughter shortly before the date when she was to have been married afflicted him pitiably. It was in his private life that I knew him: a man, as I have said, of deep sympathies and great generosity. Of his public life in politics, which ended before I knew him, and of the merits or demerits of his public conduct, I can here express no opinion. But the increasing public obloquy and the personal hatred under which he lived at length undermined his health and affected his reason, and on October 1st, 1878, he died.

From my earliest years I had always been enthusiastic in support of the restoration of the old Irish Parliament; and about the time when I entered the King’s Inns I joined the Home Government Association, which had been formed with the aim of accomplishing that object.^[1] The founder of the Association, Mr. Isaac Butt, had in his young days been on intimate terms with the families of both my father and my mother, although it happened that I had never previously met him. In early life he had been, like Mr. Gladstone, an intense Tory, and under the very strongest religious convictions. He had been, and remained till the last, an attached member of the Irish Protestant Church which, so far as it was a spiritual institution as distinguished from a political one, was then wholly and devotedly identified with the Evangelical school of thought. He held the Chair of Political Economy in Dublin University, and could, had he desired, have won a MR. ISAAC BUTT Trinity College Fellowship; but he chose instead to be called to the Bar, and there he achieved such immediate success that within six years of his call he took silk. When in the early thirties, he was already a power in politics and one of the acknowledged leaders of the Irish Tory Party. He was elected to the Dublin Corporation, and in 1843 he moved the rejection of Mr. O’Connell’s resolution in that assembly for the Repeal of the Union. His speech on that occasion was a masterly sketch of the parliamentary relations of Great Britain and Ireland before the Union, and an account of the defects of the Irish parliamentary system. Designedly or otherwise, however, he refrained from any statement or hint that his opposition to the restoration of an Irish Parliament was irreconcilable in the event of the removal of the difficulties that dismayed him. Mr. O’Connell in his reply drew attention to this omission, saying, “I have the satisfaction to tell you that Alderman Butt is as free to support Repeal if he should think fit to do so as I am. A man of his genius must have some yearning for his native land, and though the word Ireland may not sound as musically in his ear as in mine, depend upon it that Alderman Butt is in his inmost soul an Irishman, and that we will have him struggling with us for Ireland yet.” Butt told me himself, many years later, that after the debate O’Connell came over to him and, putting a hand on his shoulder, said with great affection, “Isaac, you are young and I am old. I will fail in winning back the Parliament, but you will do it when I shall have passed away.” And less than thirty years afterwards the prophecy had come so far true that Butt, as I have said, was leaguing together the supporters of the movement which before he had so strenuously opposed.

The story of Mr. Butt’s gravitation is a part of the history of Ireland. With that I am not here dealing. It is my province merely to give a sketch of the man as I knew him as one of the foremost figures in the Irish public life of his generation. When I first met him in 1873 he was just sixty, although he appeared to be appreciably older. He was tall, and had a wealth of snow-white hair, with a broad forehead, homely but pleasing features, and dark eyes of dazzling brilliancy. He had a warmth of manner and was of a disposition so charming that it seemed to give him pain to be constrained to form an unfavourable opinion of anyone.

He usually presided at the weekly meetings of the Council (of which I was a member) of the Home Government Association. He had, I thought, a great business instinct, a talent for organisation, and amazing alertness of mind. At those public meetings, which were generally held in the afternoon once every week or ten days and by reason of the inconvenience of the hour were somewhat sparsely attended, Mr. Butt delivered speeches which, being regarded in the light of pronouncements on the political situation, were published in extenso in the Irish papers, and appeared in summarised form in the British Press. They were delivered in an easy MR. ISAAC BUTT conversational manner. It was at the great mass meetings that he displayed the oratorical gifts which, when he rose to a worthy occasion in debate in the House of Commons, placed him in the same rank as Gladstone and Bright. Beginning very slowly and almost hesitatingly, he gradually exhibited greater warmth of feeling, catching as it were inspiration and enthusiasm from his audience. His voice would sink at one time to a whisper, and then would seem to ascend like the peal of an organ. His gestures were impressive. In exposition he generally pointed with his index finger at some invisible object. In the course of his speech he seldom failed to produce a small penknife from his pocket, open it, and then, using the open blade as a handle, twist it round and round in a way that made everyone apprehensive for the safety of his finger.

He had at this time, notwithstanding his grey hair and very aged appearance, great physical vigour. He never wearied amid incessant work in the Irish courts, going constantly to and fro between Dublin and London, and controlling a great political organisation; and he amazed everyone by his marvellous memory, his great intellectual resources, and his profound political genius.

It was, perhaps, as a host in his own house that his personality was most delightful. He lived in a mansion in a somewhat old-fashioned street in Dublin. I recollect that among his treasures was an organ used by Handel in Dublin when giving the finishing touches to his Messiah. At dinner, even on grand occasions, Mr. Butt would have on a chair beside him at the head of the table his favourite spaniel, which he always addressed as “My darling.” When in a reminiscent mood after dinner he would throw himself back in his chair and talk in a way that made his hearers actually see the scenes he described, in the College Historical Society in his youth, or in the courts with judges of other days, or in the House of Commons.

His charm of manner and his delightful anecdotage made him quite incomparable, and even Mr. Gladstone himself must in these qualities yield him the palm. Yet it was just these wonderful qualities, his amiability of disposition, his superabounding generosity and chivalry, and his charming though childish vanity, that unfitted him for parliamentary leadership of a party whose object could only be obtained, if at all, not by the courtesies and amenities of the ordinary party rivalry, but by a real fight. Butt himself admirably expressed his own position when he condemned “the bringing of the tactics of the field into the House of Commons.” He believed that by the creation of a public opinion in favour of Home Rule he could gradually persuade Parliament to accept the doctrine as one that was reasonable and equitable.

Consequently, as everyone knows, his star paled before that of Parnell. But to understand the position aright it is necessary to have some appreciation of the intricacies of his character. Two facts dominated him. He delighted in praise, no matter MR. ISAAC BUTT from whom, and was thus an easy prey to the designing flatterer; and, with all his great qualities of head and of heart, he had deplorable weaknesses, which, notwithstanding his position as acknowledged leader of the Irish Bar, plunged him into a hopeless morass of pecuniary embarrassment. The Conservative Government then in power took advantage of both these facts to paralyse his opposition to their policy. Through Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, the Chief Secretary for Ireland, Mr. Butt’s vanity was flattered by praise of his moderation and of his statesmanlike efforts to keep the Home Rule movement on strictly constitutional lines. Although Mr. Butt was the leader of a party with whom it was a matter of principle not to accept favours from any Government which failed to make the granting of Home Rule a cardinal measure in its policy, he was offered high judicial offices, including the position of Lord Justice of Appeal and the Lord Chief Justiceship of Ireland. I have heard, from an eye-witness, of an official letter coming to him from the Chief Secretary, of his immediately driving to the Chief Secretary’s Lodge in the Phoenix Park, of his returning home and stating that he wished to see his wife immediately in his study, and of Mrs. Butt coming out of the study shortly afterwards with streaming eyes, and stating to a confidential servant who was regarded as one of the family, “The master has refused the Lord Chief Justiceship when we are without a farthing.”

With the knowledge of such incidents one can view Mr. Butt’s failure in the proper light. Necessitous as was his condition, he could not, and would not, accept preferment; yet to a man of his guileless character such compliments were sufficient—as they were intended to be—to mitigate his strength of purpose against a Government that could pay such high tributes to his worth.

I have, in a footnote, already referred to the Rev. Joseph Allen Galbraith. Although his position as a Fellow and Professor of Trinity College and as a devoted member of the Irish Church might well have inclined him towards Conservatism, he joined the Home Rule movement, sacrificing personal friendships, congenial society, and probably advancement to the very highest position in his University, because he held strongly the belief that an Irish Parliament would be a benefit to the Irish people as a whole. He firmly believed that Irishmen, notwithstanding differences of race and creed, could work harmoniously together for the common good if left to themselves. He was fond of relating that the late Mr. A. M. Sullivan, of whom I have spoken, a leading Roman Catholic member of the Nationalist Party in the House of Commons, once declared to him that he would willingly accept the Irish Church Synod—of which Mr. Galbraith, despite his politics, remained the Honorary Secretary—as a Parliament for Ireland, in the full confidence that as a body of Irishmen it would inevitably, in a very short time, give full equality, religious and political, and freedom of opportunity, to all its fellow-countrymen.

Mr. Galbraith, when I first knew him, was a tall, well-built man in the fifties: he had keen blue eyes, refined and pleasing features, and a low and sweet but penetrating voice. His disposition was not excitable and his talents were solid rather than brilliant. Very different was his most intimate friend, another Fellow of Trinity College and Irish Protestant clergyman, the Rev. Samuel Haughton,^[1] who had all the dash, the energy and the versatility of genius. After winning his Fellowship at the age of two-and-twenty, when too young to enter Holy Orders, Dr. Haughton became a great theologian and a preacher who was famous not only in his own University but also at Cambridge. He was moreover an eminent mathematician, a Doctor of Medicine, and one of the most profound students of comparative anatomy of his day. As a raconteur he was brilliant and as a platform and after-dinner speaker he enjoyed unique popularity. He too, mainly it is believed under Galbraith’s influence, joined the Home Rule movement, without, however, throwing himself into the agitation with any zeal.

Indeed, Dr. Haughton never concentrated his LORD CHANCELLOR CAIRNSenergies. He was a man of wide interests who missed the fame that might have been his through not devoting himself to a single subject. His only master passion was directed against what he regarded as the intolerable degradation incurred by Dublin University in having its parliamentary representation utilised by a clique of place-seekers. He strongly resented the conferring of the highest honorary positions connected with the University on persons who did not belong to it and were not tied to it by the bonds of affection. On this subject he would frequently become vehement.

Lord Chancellor Cairns, who had been educated in Trinity College, Dublin, was appointed to the Chancellorship of Dublin University, but for many years he did not take the trouble, or did not find it convenient, to come to Ireland for his formal installation. When eventually he did send an intimation of his intention of allowing the ceremonial to take place, he accompanied it with a request that the honorary degree of Master of Arts should on the same occasion be conferred on his son-in-law, a Mr. Neville Sherbrooke, who had entered Holy Orders after some years’ service in the army, but had not graduated at a University. Not unnaturally in these circumstances, it was thought, and indeed very openly asserted, that Lord Cairns had treated the University that had conferred on him the very highest honour in its gift, very cavalierly; and his belated desire to be installed as Chancellor was interpreted as resulting only from the secondary object of obtaining for his son-in-law a degree which would assist in his preferment to one of the many high ecclesiastical offices within Lord Cairns’s disposition. Dr. Haughton found in this episode a prominent example of the abuse which he detested, and threw himself heart and soul into the work of persuading the Senate of the University to reject Lord Cairns’s proposal. But just as the question was about to be put to the vote, at which the suggestion would probably have been condemned, the Senior Master-Non-Regent tactfully exercised his personal power of veto against the Lord Chancellor’s protégé and thereby, greatly to Dr. Haughton’s chagrin, achieved the desired result in a manner which implied a far gentler rebuff to Lord Cairns than would have come from a refusal by vote of the whole Senate.

Another attempt by Lord Cairns to utilise the University for the benefit of his own relations may here be described. In 1875, by the promotion of Dr. Ball (of whom I have previously spoken) to the position of Irish Lord Chancellor, a vacancy was created in one of the parliamentary seats of Trinity College. For more than a generation the selection of representatives had been controlled by a small official clique, who in this instance were supporting Mr. Gerald FitzGibbon. But Lord Cairns, from his position as Chancellor of the University, forwarded the interests of his first cousin, Mr. Alexander Miller, Q.C., of the English Bar, who had had a distinguished LORD CHANCELLOR CAIRNS career in Trinity College. In so doing Lord Cairns created the understanding that Mr. Miller after a short tenure of the seat would be promoted to high office, when Mr. FitzGibbon could take his place. On this understanding Mr. FitzGibbon yielded to the pressure of the representations made to him, and stood aside.

If the matter had there been left, all would have been well: Mr. Miller would have gone first to Parliament and Mr. FitzGibbon would shortly have followed him. But the position soon became complicated. An intimate and life-long friend of FitzGibbon’s, Mr. Edward Gibson, who eventually became Lord Ashbourne, had been an unsuccessful Conservative candidate for Waterford at the General Election in the previous year. When his friend retired from the Trinity College contest, Mr. Gibson came forward to oppose Mr. Miller, proclaiming that he, at any rate, was not an importation from England unknown to the electors, and that he would go into Parliament, if elected, in the interests of his constituents and not as the office-seeking dependent of an English Lord Chancellor. The cry of “An Irishman for Ireland” aroused enthusiasm. Mr. Miller, despite his official influence, was defeated, and Mr. Gibson was returned at the head of the poll. Thus Mr. FitzGibbon was deprived of the seat, not, as it turned out, by Lord Cairns’s nominee, but by his own friend. It had been the action of Lord Cairns in trying to forward the interests of his cousin that had brought about the position, and to him must be ascribed both the loss to the House of Commons of a man of real political genius in Mr. FitzGibbon and the brilliant career which ensued for the, comparatively speaking, mediocre Mr. Gibson. Of both of these gentlemen I shall have more to say later.

It need scarcely be said that this second attempt by Lord Cairns to interfere with the privileges of the University did not escape the strictures of Dr. Haughton, whose sarcastic humour certainly proved a factor in securing Mr. Miller’s defeat. No one in Ireland can afford to be made publicly ridiculous, and Dr. Haughton was only too ready to use the weapon of ridicule against his antagonists.

During a vitriolic speech he genially referred to Mr. Miller as “Lord Cairns’s carrier pigeon.” The Lord Chancellor committed the blunder of writing to Dr. Haughton to ask on what grounds the phrase was used, and thereby laid himself open to a snub which Dr. Haughton promptly administered. The Doctor was censured by the Board of Trinity College for his disrespect as a Junior Fellow towards the Chancellor of the University, but that mattered little to him, and on the other hand served to raise him in the favour of the youthful element in the college. The censure, moreover, added to the publicity of the incident and drew attention to the happy phrase of “carrier pigeon.”

Very shortly afterwards the inaugural meeting of the annual session of the Trinity College Historical LORD CAIRNS’S CARRIER PIGEON Society was held,^[2] the Auditor, Mr. Matheson, afterwards Recorder of Belfast, delivering an address on “The Decline of Nationality.” The meeting was densely crowded and considerable excitement prevailed, the Auditor’s speech being punctuated by many interruptions and cheers for Home Rule and demands for a speech from Mr. Isaac Butt, who was amongst the many celebrities on the platform. Mr. David Plunket (afterwards Lord Rathmore), a popular favourite, was then allowed to move a resolution, but as he resumed his seat the pent-up feeling of the audience could no longer be restrained. Several young men in the body of the hall were carefully concealing boxes under their academic gowns. A signal was given, the boxes were opened, and out flew a number of pigeons. The terrified birds flew round and round the room amid cheers of derision for Lord Cairns and Miller. Events developed rapidly in the excitement, the platform was stormed, and the proceedings ended in a free fight. Needless to say, the carrier pigeons sealed Mr. Miller’s fate as far as the representation of Trinity College was concerned.^[3]

I have said that I would speak again of Mr. FitzGibbon. First, however, I must refer to his father, Mr. Gerald FitzGibbon, Q.C. He was called to the Bar in unprecedented circumstances. As confidential manager in some commercial concern he appeared as principal witness in an action to which his firm was a party, and the manner in which he gave his evidence so greatly impressed Mr. Justice Burton that he remarked: “That young man’s proper place would be at the Bar, where he would attain eminence.” FitzGibbon, who was struggling to support a family on a small salary, was much struck by this tribute. He thought the matter over very seriously, and at length determined to wait upon the judge and ask him whether the remark had been uttered casually or as a considered opinion. At that time, upwards of a century ago, Irish judges were accustomed to wear their official robes while they drove in their chariots from their residences to the courts. FitzGibbon called at Mr. Justice Burton’s house, and met him in the full official panoply just within the hall. The judge, with his thoughts full of other matters, failed to remember him. FitzGibbon recalled the occurrence, was treated to a stern and penetrating glance, and learnt that Mr. Justice Burton was not accustomed to indulge in levity in his remarks, that what he said he meant, and that his advice should be followed regardless of sacrifice or cost. FitzGibbon accordingly made up his mind, scraped together a little money, ate his dinners, and was called to the Bar, where, MR. GERALD FITZGIBBON after a severe struggle, he established himself, taking silk and becoming one of the recognised leaders of the profession. Eventually he was appointed a Master in Chancery.

Mr. Gerald FitzGibbon, with Mr. (afterwards Lord Chief Justice) Whiteside, was amongst the leading counsel for the traversers at the trial of O’Connell in 1844. At this trial occurred an unparalleled incident which had lasting effects. FitzGibbon complained with great bitterness in his address of the conduct of the prosecution by the Attorney-General, Mr. Thomas Berry Cusac Smith, a man of excitable temper, whom O’Connell had designated alternatively “Alphabet Smith” and “Vinegar Cruet Smith.” On hearing FitzGibbon’s complaints Smith sent a hostile message to FitzGibbon. FitzGibbon brought the matter to the notice of the court, and the judges expressed the gravest condemnation of the Attorney-General’s conduct. Apologies and explanations followed, and the sensational and discreditable incident was closed, except in its ultimate consequences, for the Attorney-General because of this incident was considered unfit for the office of Lord Chief Justice, which fell vacant a short time later, and was unable to rise higher than the Mastership of the Rolls.

FitzGibbon’s son was born in 1838, and as a boy of six was present at the O’Connell trial, to which he was brought by his father. Towards the close of his life—he died in 1909—he used to recall the incident and to claim to be one of the very few men then living who had heard O’Connell speak. In due course the son became Solicitor-General (at the time when Mr. Gibson was Attorney-General) and eventually Lord Justice of Appeal. He was friend and mentor of Lord Randolph Churchill, and I well remember that on one occasion, when Lord Randolph defended in the House of Commons a constitutional proposition by declaring that he had high authority in its support, cries of “FitzGibbon, FitzGibbon” rang through the Chamber amid cheers and laughter.

The curious and complicated election which I have described as resulting in the loss of a great political career and in all probability the Premiership to Lord Justice FitzGibbon had a parallel in the case of Lord Chief Baron Palles. That case is an example of the effects of a “split vote” and of the fact that a party’s interests may be served by putting up a candidate at an election, even if that candidate has not the slightest chance of success. Up till 1868 the City of Londonderry had for many years been regarded as a stronghold of Toryism, but in the General Election of that year Mr. Dowse, Q.C., wrested the seat from Lord Claud Hamilton and secured it in the Liberal interest so strongly that he was triumphant again on seeking re-election after his appointment as Solicitor-General. The seat then came to be regarded as safe for some time to come to the Liberals, and at the next election, when Mr. Dowse became Baron of the Irish Court of Exchequer, Mr. Palles, the Liberal candidate, was expected to LORD CHIEF BARON PALLES obtain an easy victory over Mr. Lewis,^[4] the representative of the Tories. This, no doubt, he would have done but for the intervention of a Home Rule candidate, who stood with no prospects of securing the seat, but with the direct intention of weakening the Liberal vote, so that the Liberal Government which was then in power should be deprived of a member. The Home Rule Party chose as its candidate Mr. Joseph Biggar, who subsequently became well known as the originator of the policy of obstruction in the House of Commons, and the plan was successful, Mr. Lewis being returned, and Mr. Palles being deprived of the seat.

Like FitzGibbon, Mr. Palles nevertheless attained eminence. In 1873, when the office of Lord Chief Baron had fallen vacant, a Government measure was drafted for its abolition. Before this could be passed, however, the Liberal Government was defeated at the General Election of the following year. Their Conservative successors would, it was known, preserve the office, and were prepared to recommend Mr. Justice (Lord) Morris for the appointment. But while the retiring Ministers were actually on their way to Windsor to deliver up their Seals of Office, Mr. Gladstone yielded to the earnest representations of Lord O’Hagan, the out-going Lord Chancellor of Ireland, and agreed to recommend Mr. Palles for the vacant post. Had Mr. Palles been a member of the House of Commons, he would doubtless have been considered too valuable to his party in opposition to be spared, but as it was his appointment was secured; so that, just as the subsequent career of Lord Justice FitzGibbon might be regarded as the unintentional effect of an action of Lord Cairns’s, so the eventual career of Chief Baron Palles might be considered a similarly unintended effect of the action of Mr. Biggar and the Home Rule Party. Mr. Palles was, however, pre-eminently a lawyer, and had a great career on the Irish Bench, which he adorned, whereas Mr. FitzGibbon was pre-eminently a statesman whose talents would have shed lustre on the House of Commons, of a seat in which he was deprived by a manœuvre which savoured more of dexterity than of chivalry.

It was during my earliest days as a law student that I had the happiness to become acquainted with Mr. O’Neill Daunt, who was one of the most remarkable men it was ever my privilege to know. He was a gentleman of ancient family and of some little property in County Cork. Early in life he had been on intimate terms with Feargus O’Connor, the Chartist Leader, to whom he was distantly related. Mr. Daunt was absolutely single-minded in his career in public life; he sought no favour for himself, and was devoted to the movement which he had at heart. For a few weeks he sat for Mallow in the unreformed House of Commons of 1830, but he was unseated on petition, and although many constituencies sought him as their representative, he never entered Parliament again. He was most deeply read in political and constitutional history, and his speeches, which were very striking and impressive, were characterised by an old-world style and form of eloquence which were attractive to men of a younger generation by their striking divergence from the conversational tone of speeches of the day.

He was also an accomplished and powerful writer.^[1] He was in his day the greatest authority on the question of the inequality of financial relations between Great Britain and Ireland. His work, Personal Recollections of O’Connell, was the result of his having been O’Connell’s private secretary and much in his confidence; it contains the most life-like picture we possess of that great man in his personal relations as contrasted with his public life.

Throughout his long life—he lived from 1807 till 1894—Mr. Daunt was renowned for his advocacy, both in the Press and on the platform, of the Irish National Cause, and his appearance at a meeting invariably aroused the highest enthusiasm. I first met him when he was General Secretary of the Home Rule Association, and I was with him at a Home Rule meeting at Enniskillen where I made my first open-air political speech. He was then a tall, slightly built man with a broad forehead and snow-white hair.

In conversation I found him both informative and delightful. He had an historic imagination not unlike that of Lord Macaulay, and to him I am indebted for any little power I may have of picturing to myself and putting into words the salient features MR. O’NEILL DAUNT of public life in Ireland at the time of the Union, and of the political régime of the O’Connell period. Of O’Connell and his contemporaries Mr. Daunt spoke with a personal knowledge which made the circumstances he related as actual as if they had been the occurrences of yesterday. He used to relate with gusto that his grandfather, the Rev. Thomas Wilson,^[2] was offered a bishopric by Lord Castlereagh at the time of the Union. When the letter containing the offer arrived, Dr. Wilson stooped to his study fire and placed the paper among the flames; then, showing his blackened hand to his wife, he exclaimed: “My hand can be blackened by coal, but it shall never be stained by the acceptance of a bribe.”

Mr. Daunt was familiar with a state of society in which duelling was the vogue; indeed, he used often to tell with much feeling how his father had fallen, in 1826, in what proved to be the last duel fought in the South of Ireland.

Of O’Connell Mr. Daunt had, of course, very much to relate, and I recollect that he used to describe one peculiarity of that great man’s which, so far as I am aware, has never been recorded. If O’Connell won a doubtful case in the courts or succeeded beyond expectation in a manœuvre in the House of Commons, he was wont to bestow congratulations, in the warmest language, on everyone whom he met, however remote may have been his share in the feat. I recollect, too, an example of O’Connell’s absent-mindedness and its effect in placing a limit to the generosity for which he was renowned. He offered to free Mr. Daunt from the pecuniary results of the petition that had unseated him, an act which would have been of the greatest service to Mr. Daunt, and to O’Connell would have meant little more than the walking from one Committee Room to another and handing in a formal document. But the promise, gratefully accepted, was never fulfilled, and Mr. Daunt was left to fight his difficulties unaided. Nevertheless, it is noticeable that Mr. Daunt retained no bitterness towards O’Connell, acknowledging his merits and serving him faithfully.

Perhaps Mr. Daunt’s greatest claim to popular interest lies in the fact that to him Mr. Lecky owed the first acknowledgment of his genius and the first encouragement to persevere in the work of historical research which has made his name famous; and this encouragement was given at a time when Mr. Lecky regarded himself as a hopeless failure and was inclined to abandon studies in which the trend of his genius peculiarly fitted him to excel. To use a modernism, Mr. Daunt may, indeed, be said to have “discovered” Mr. Lecky. In a letter to Daunt’s daughter after the death of her father, Lecky wrote: “My first connection with him dates from the beginning of 1862. In the preceding year I had published anonymously a rather crude little volume of Irish biographies from Swift to O’Connell, which THE O’GORMAN MAHON many years later made some noise in the world but which at its first appearance was an utter and absolute failure. The only exception to the general indifference was an article from the pen of your father which appeared in a Cork newspaper and which was equally remarkable for its kindness to myself and for its ample knowledge of the period I had treated.^[3] It was the first public recognition that there was some real merit in my writing, the first confident prediction that some future lay before me in literature. A letter of very sincere thanks which I wrote to the unknown critic was the beginning of a correspondence which continued at intervals to near the end of his life.”

In this period in my life I met also another gentleman who had been closely associated with O’Connell: Colonel Charles James Patrick Mahon, commonly known as “The O’Gorman Mahon.” Born on St. Patrick’s Day, 1800, at Ennis, County Clare, he lived till 1891. To the end of his life he retained his great mental and physical faculties; he was more than six feet high, he had a broad forehead, thick white hair and deeply-set blue eyes. When I first met him he was not a member of the House of Commons but was a great political and social celebrity in Dublin. He appears to have been the originator of the idea that O’Connell should become a candidate at a by-election for the County Clare in 1828, and it was certainly owing to his pressure that O’Connell took that momentous step.

The O’Gorman Mahon was the hero of a greater number of thrilling adventures and was associated with a greater number of supreme crises in the careers of other individuals than anyone else with whom I have come in contact. He fought no fewer than thirteen duels, and he once declared that in each instance the challenge had proceeded from him. In how many cases the result of the meeting proved fatal is not known. The fact that one of his duelling pistols was marked with three notches may be deemed significant.

In 1830 The O’Gorman Mahon was elected to Parliament by the County Clare, but was unseated on petition. In 1847 he became Member for Ennis, the principal town in the County Clare, but five years later he was defeated by Mr. J. D. Fitzgerald, Q.C., who subsequently became Lord Fitzgerald, one of the Lords of Appeal in Ordinary. In 1889 he secured a seat for the County Clare, defeating Mr. Peter O’Brien, who eventually (as Lord O’Brien of Kilfenora) became Lord Chief Justice of Ireland. It was on his motion that Mr. Parnell was in 1880 elected for the first time to the Chairmanship of the CAPTAIN O’SHEA Irish Parliamentary Party. In that year I was a witness of an incident which—though I little knew it at the time—was to result in a turning-point in Irish history. I was attending the session of the County Clare Court at Ennis. In the ordinary way on such occasions a sitting-room in Carmody’s Hotel was reserved for the use of members of the Bar, but owing to the overcrowding occasioned by the General Election which was then proceeding, this sitting-room had been converted into a bedroom and the barristers were relegated to the public coffee-room. On coming back from the court to the hotel for a hurried meal, I found Mr. Parnell at luncheon, and we exchanged salutations. A few minutes subsequently The O’Gorman Mahon walked into the coffee-room, accompanied by a slightly over-dressed man with a demeanour suggestive of the aggressive, whom he introduced to Mr. Parnell as Captain O’Shea, his friend and colleague in the fight for the two-member constituency of County Clare. It was this apparently trivial incident—the introduction of Parnell and O’Shea—which led eventually to the divorce court tragedy, the destruction of Parnell’s career, and the consequent setting back of the Irish national cause for a whole generation. The last public act of The O’Gorman Mahon, a few months before his death in 1891, was to send a challenge to Mr. Parnell for his conduct in not retiring from parliamentary life. The challenge, of course, was ignored.

In 1873 I made the acquaintance of Mr. John Martin, who was Mr. Parnell’s immediate predecessor in the representation of County Meath. Mr. Martin was a Presbyterian gentleman of independent means and a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, who had been drawn, partly by a study of Irish history and partly by extensive travel abroad and his reflections on foreign governmental systems, to the principles of Irish nationality. He threw himself into the movement whole-heartedly, and with such vigour that in 1848 he was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment for treason felony. On regaining his freedom he returned to Ireland and recommenced his activities. He was one of the founders of the Home Rule Association in 1870, and the first Home Ruler to be returned to Parliament.^[4] Much interest was taken in his appearance in Westminster as a member of a party of one only in that assembly. The House was genuinely impressed by his quietude of manner and his courteous and dignified bearing, and curiosity was aroused to a very high degree when he was seen standing by the Speaker’s Chair in close converse with its occupant. The surmise which gained most acceptance was that he was anxious to have the Speaker’s view on the question as to which part of the House his Party could most appropriately occupy; but, as he himself told me afterwards, he was in reality consulting the Speaker in a difficulty which a generation later would have presented no insoluble problem. He wanted to MR. PARNELL know whether it was necessary for him to wear a silk hat in the House, since to do so, although de rigueur in the Chamber, would be peculiarly irksome to him after the considerably less formal attire to which he had been accustomed in his exile for ten years!

In 1874 I first became acquainted with Mr. Parnell. After the General Election of that year, the Council of the Home Rule League (of which, as I have said, I was a member) met in their rooms over a tobacconist’s shop in Lower Sackville Street in order to discuss the suggestion, fervently supported by Mr. Butt, that it was in the interests of the party to contest, even unsuccessfully, at a coming by-election, the seat for the County Dublin.^[5] The idea was favourably received, the main outstanding question then being the selection of the most suitable candidate. At that moment Mr. Parnell, very elegantly but not foppishly dressed, came into the room and declared that he was prepared not only to contest the constituency but also to pay the expenses of the fight. The antecedents of Mr. Parnell, his quiet, unobtrusive manner, and his evident desire to help the cause at a considerable pecuniary sacrifice—even after it had been impressed upon him that there was no hope of success—appealed very strongly to Mr. A. M. Sullivan, Mr. Martin, and the other leading members of the Council, and his offer was gratefully accepted.

A short time later I was present at a great meeting in support of Mr. Parnell’s candidature held at the Rotunda, Dublin. A resolution of confidence in Mr. Parnell, pledging sympathisers to give him the utmost support, was carried with great enthusiasm. But the scene had a regrettable effect on Mr. Parnell. So much moved was he, that when he came forward to address the meeting he could only say a few disjointed words, then pause, then repeat himself, then try to make a fresh start, and finally abandon the effort and resume his seat. A more hopeless and humiliating breakdown I have never witnessed. Yet, as so frequently happens when a man makes an obvious failure in public, his audience was sympathetic, encouraging him with kindly cheers. But these appeared only to increase his confusion, and as he sat down he looked a beaten, humiliated man. The proceedings, of course, did not collapse; other resolutions were proposed and carried, but it was generally considered then that the candidate could be nothing more than a figure-head in his party, a man who could never possibly achieve personal success.

Mr. Parnell, however, was not overwhelmed by this first failure. He addressed many subsequent meetings during the election campaign, and in so doing gradually acquired self-possession. And even in those first days his speeches, I think, were marked by the directness of expression and the gift of saying plainly and forcibly what he desired to say, neither more nor less, which throughout his career were predominant.

Many years later, in the early days of my own MR. PARNELLparliamentary life, I met Mr. Parnell’s mother. The likeness, not only in appearance but also in manner, between her and her son was conspicuous; and there is little room for doubt that it was from her that he obtained the charm, not without aloofness, for which he was remarkable. I had on that occasion the honour of taking Mrs. Parnell in to dinner. She was attired with great taste and elegance—I remember, after a generation, the beauty of her lace mantilla.

She conversed not with animation but with a studied self-restraint. Parnell, of whom she spoke as “My son Charles,” was then in the zenith of his power. I can never forget her tone and expression as she said to me: “Irish politics have in the past broken the heart of everyone who has entered seriously into them.”

The late Right Rev. William Pakenham Walsh, Bishop of Ossory, was Curate of Derialossory, County Wicklow, when Parnell was born at Avondale in that parish in 1846, and to him fell the duty of baptising the future politician, who foreshadowed the storminess of his subsequent career by shrieking throughout the entire ceremony. Later Dr. Walsh became Parnell’s first teacher, and later still, when Dr. Walsh was a member of the episcopate and one of the greatest ornaments of the Irish Church, he came to see his former pupil in the House of Commons. Parnell received him with an unwonted cordiality, and on bringing him into the House exclaimed: “You used to teach me: come in here and see how I teach others.”

I had the acquaintance of Mr. Parnell for some years after I entered the House of Commons, and I was often flattered by the attention that he was good enough to pay to me. I shall necessarily have more to say of him elsewhere in these pages: here I merely give an impression of him in his early days in Ireland.

During the years when I was first a law student and then at the Bar I came into contact with many remarkable men who had entered the same profession as myself.

James Whiteside, the Lord Chief Justice of Ireland, to whom I have already referred, was one of the few practising barristers who have achieved a great parliamentary reputation. His readiness in debate, his wit, his instinct in catching the tone of the House, placed him in the very first rank of the parliamentarians of his day. The House of Commons is notoriously jealous of fame acquired in other spheres than on its floor, but the case of Mr. Whiteside is the exception to the rule. He had been the hero of many famous trials. O’Connell, to whom he was bitterly opposed in politics, had selected him as his counsel in the Irish State Trials of 1843, and he had in 1848 defended Mr. Smith O’Brien on trial for his life for high treason. When he entered Parliament he sat first for Enniskillen, then for Dublin University, and in the short administrations of Lord Derby in 1852 and 1859 he filled the offices, respectively, of Irish Solicitor-General and Irish Attorney-General.

In the early sixties of the last century he appeared in a cause célèbre in Dublin, Thelwall versus Yelverton, and obtained a verdict for his client by a speech which was regarded as an all but unparalleled forensic achievement. On appearing at the conclusion of this trial in his seat on the Front Opposition Bench in the House of Commons he was the recipient of an honour never before conferred by the House of Commons on a lawyer for mere advocacy, however brilliant, at the Bar. The whole House rose and cheered him for some minutes. He was at first unconscious that he himself was the object of this unique demonstration. On realising the situation he was wholly unable to restrain his emotion, and this led to a still more enthusiastic renewal of the plaudits.

It is somewhat remarkable that this great man set a smaller value on his fame as an orator than on the achievement of a great judicial reputation, which was denied him. He desired to be in Ireland the counterpart of Lord Mansfield in England as a great judge, whereas his splendid talents shone not so brilliantly on the Bench as at the Bar and in the CHIEF JUSTICE WHITESIDE House of Commons. It is said that he was prouder of a case in which his judgment had been overruled by other members of the Court of Queen’s Bench in Ireland but had been sustained by the House of Lords, than of any of his unquestionable forensic and parliamentary triumphs.

Mr. Whiteside, when the Conservative Party returned to office in 1866, aspired to the Lord Chancellorship of Ireland, from which he was debarred by the enmity of Lord Cairns, to whom his successful opposition in the House of Commons to an Irish Chancery Bill had given offence. Mr. Whiteside at first refused to take any other office than the Irish Chancellorship, and stated his intention of resigning his seat in the House of Commons and retiring from the Bar if Mr. Brewster, on whom it had been intended to confer the post, were appointed.

Eventually Mr. Blackburne, a gentleman in his eighty-sixth year, who had been Master of the Rolls, Lord Chief Justice, Lord Chancellor and Lord Justice of Appeal, was re-appointed Lord Chancellor. Mr. Whiteside became Lord Chief Justice, and Mr. Brewster eventually, on the resignation of Mr. Blackburne, when Whiteside’s indignation had abated, became Lord Chancellor.

Whiteside’s sallies of humour on the Bench were inimitable. A barrister in opposing a motion alleged to be founded on an Act of Parliament opened his arguments thus: “My lords, this motion cannot be granted!” “Really?” said the Chief Justice, “Has the Act of Parliament been repealed; and if so, when?”

“You ought not,” he said to an impetuous junior counsel, afterwards an ornament of the Bench, “to interrupt your leader.” “I have seen,” was the reply, “your lordship when at the Bar interrupting your leader.” “Well,” said the Chief Justice with an assumption of contrition, “if I did that of which you accuse me I must have been guilty of dreadful misbehaviour.”

His charges to juries were replete with wit. In advising on the question of damages in an action which savoured of the bogus, the Chief Justice with an air of great solemnity said: “Do not be forgetful of the maxim of St. Paul, ‘Let your moderation be known unto all men.’ ”

The funeral of Chief Justice Whiteside, at which I was present, was marked by a very painful incident. Whiteside and Lord Chancellor Napier, of whom I have spoken, were in college together, went the same circuit, were in the House of Commons together and were Law Officers of the Crown together. Whiteside, moreover, was married to Napier’s sister. Their intimacy was of the very closest and most affectionate character, and it was well known that at public meetings Napier, who had greatly lost the confidence of his political supporters, had relied on Whiteside’s popularity to protect him from a hostile reception. A few years before the close of Whiteside’s life Napier and he became estranged, and Whiteside passed away before there was a reconciliation between LORD FITZGERALD them. At Whiteside’s funeral, during the reading of the service in the Mortuary Chapel, Napier uttered a heart-rending groan and fainted.

One of Whiteside’s colleagues in the Court of Queen’s Bench was Mr. Justice James O’Brien (an uncle of Lord Chief Justice O’Brien), a very able lawyer and a kindly, charming gentleman, then in advanced years, who was known by the wags of the Bar, on account of his rubicund face and big red gown, as “Judy.” On one occasion counsel, a well-known humorist, failing to hear distinctly a question addressed to him by the Judge, said: “I beg your pardon, ma’am—I mean My Lord.”

Another of Whiteside’s colleagues was Mr. Justice J. D. Fitzgerald (to whom I have referred), who in 1882 was promoted to the position of Lord of Appeal in Ordinary, which he filled till his death in 1889. Lord Fitzgerald refused the Lord Chancellorship of Ireland, which was offered to him, on the ground that his acceptance of the post would deprive him of a seat in the House of Lords, which at that time was only held during the tenure of the office of Lord of Appeal. The incident led to the enactment of a provision in the Statute that after Lords of Appeal in Ordinary had ceased to hold office they should retain their seats in the House of Lords.

On Whiteside’s death in 1876 the Lord Chief Justiceship was offered to Mr. Chatterton, the Vice-Chancellor, who declined it. The office was also offered to Francis Fitzgerald, a Baron of the Court of Exchequer, by whom it was likewise declined. Mr. Fitzgerald, the memory of whom is fast fading, was one of the most gifted and high-minded men of his own or of any generation. He was for years practically a briefless barrister, and on one occasion is said to have returned a very valuable brief because he thought that pressure had been brought by friends to induce the solicitor to send it to him. At length his merits were recognised, and business flowed in on him in such volume that he was obliged to abbreviate his hours of sleep and endeavour to keep awake by snuff taking. He was in the zenith of his fame at the Bar, when, from a suspicion that an opinion given by him on a case had been hasty and unconsidered and that injury had been incurred through acting on his advice, he insisted on making good the loss by paying several thousand pounds to the supposed victim. His ability was such that although he had never held a brief in a criminal case he was retained with Mr. Whiteside in 1848 for the defence of Mr. Smith O’Brien on trial for high treason. He took sapient counsel as to whether he was bound to accept the retainer—a course to which he was adverse—and was advised that he was precluded by the etiquette of the Bar from a refusal. He accordingly appeared for the prisoner, and raised the only arguable point in the case on a motion for a Writ of Error.

Mr. Fitzgerald was raised to the Bench without any application or the exercise, direct or indirect, of any influence on his behalf. He considered that it was contrary to public interest that there should MR. FRANCIS FITZGERALD be any promotion from one judicial office to another. He accordingly refused not only the Chief Justiceship and a Lordship of Appeal, but the great office of Lord Chancellor, although he admitted that he would personally have wished to fill them. It is remarkable that this great and good man was known to be so extraordinarily tender-hearted that his colleagues on the Bench, by laudable artifice, precluded him from presiding in capital cases, so that he never actually pronounced the death sentence. Although in politics a Tory of the most pronounced type, he retired from the Bench upon the passage of an Irish Coercion Bill with a section (which, however, was never carried into operation) providing that under certain conditions trials for murder should be heard and decided by judges without the intervention of a jury: an enactment of this character he regarded as calculated to lower the dignity of the Bench and to encroach on the fundamental rights and liberties of the subject, and he considered that to sit on the Bench while such an enactment was on the Statute Book was not consonant with his self-respect.

The Lord Chief Justiceship rendered vacant by the death of Lord Chief Justice Whiteside was filled by Mr. May, Q.C. Mr. May had had a highly distinguished career at Cambridge University, where he was senior classic, Bell Scholar, and Fellow of Magdalene College. His practice at the Irish Bar, which was never large, was almost exclusively confined to Equity. In 1875 he was appointed Attorney-General for Ireland. On Chief Justice Whiteside’s death he claimed the position of Chief Justice, but was informed by the Chief Secretary that an Attorney-General had no right to the office. “Then,” said he, “an Attorney-General has, at least, another right.” “Pray, Mr. Attorney-General, what is that?” asked the Chief Secretary. “He has the right to resign,” was the immediate reply. In spite of—or perhaps as the result of—this passage of arms, Mr. May eventually became Lord Chief Justice, and then he astonished both friends and political opponents by his mastery of the principles of common and of criminal law and by his ability in their application. On two memorable occasions he allowed, however, his ardent political feelings to outrun his discretion. At a political meeting in Dublin, speaking as Attorney-General, he said that Mr. Butt and Mr. Sullivan, when advocating Home Rule, were concealing republicanism under cover of the Union Jack, just as Wainwright (the perpetrator of a murder which created sensation at the time) concealed the body of his victim under sailcloth. At the trial at Bar of Mr. Parnell and thirteen colleagues for conspiring against payment of rent in 1880-1881, Mr. May acted in a manner without parallel in legal and judicial history, by announcing his intention of not hearing the case, as his remarks on an application for the postponement of the trial had been much misrepresented. He had, in fact, been loudly accused of partiality by friends of the traversers, and he yielded to the storm raised “SINGLE FINGER JACK” against him. The trial proceeded under the presidency of two puisne judges, Mr. Justice Fitzgerald and his brother-in-law, Mr. Justice Barry; but the jury disagreed and Mr. Parnell’s position was strengthened.

The two puisne judges who presided at this trial in Chief Justice May’s absence were both remarkable men. Mr. Justice Fitzgerald (to whom I have previously referred) was the son of a Dublin trader. He was called to the Bar at two-and-twenty and took silk when in his thirty-first year. He was a leader of the Munster Circuit, and at the General Election of 1852 was returned for the Borough of Ennis, beating The O’Gorman Mahon by thirteen votes. He was a Member of the House of Commons for eight years, and having filled the offices of Solicitor- and Attorney-General, he was appointed in 1860 a Justice of the Court of Queen’s Bench. Fitzgerald’s manners were somewhat affected, and his efforts to achieve a polished literary style and to pass as a man of higher mental culture produced good-humoured merriment. On one occasion he referred to the Nemēsis which pursues the guilty. His pronunciation of the word produced an illuminating explanation from a critic, who asked the public to recognise their old friend Nemēsis under his newly-acquired designation Nemēsis. Fitzgerald’s attempt at playing the grand gentleman of distant manner led to his presenting one finger as a substitute for a handshake. This peculiarity procured for him the nickname of “Single Finger Jack.” Fitzgerald’s conduct of the trial of Parnell, and his masterly exposition of the law of criminal conspiracy in his charge to the jury on that occasion, were recognised by his appointment in 1882 to the position of Lord of Appeal in Ordinary with a life peerage. He was the first Irish judge to be appointed to that position, and his promotion was received with general approval.

His colleague and brother-in-law, Mr. Justice Barry, had a more chequered career. Like Fitzgerald, whose junior he was by eight years, he went the Munster Circuit; like him he had a large practice at the Bar, taking silk eleven years after his call; and like him he obtained a seat in the House of Commons for an Irish borough. In 1882, when he was Commissioner of Assize at Cork, he was promoted to the position of Lord Justice of Appeal in Ireland. He was betrayed into an amusing exhibition of undisguised vanity by appearing on the Bench in the Crown Court, for the trial of prisoners, in the gorgeous State robes of his new office.

Mr. Denis Caulfield Heron, Q.C., a leader on the Munster Circuit, was a brother-in-law of Fitzgerald and Barry. He was of the very highest ability, a man of wide reading and a delightful conversationalist. He posed as an “Admirable Crichton,” and claimed to be competent to speak with authority on every subject from Aristotelean philosophy to the best method of cooking. He likewise posed as a keen sportsman and a devotee to salmon fishing. He wished to be recognised as a man who had seen and known everyone worth MR. DENIS CAULFIELD HERON seeing and knowing, and had been to every place of interest throughout the world.

Mr. Heron was undoubtedly a profound lawyer and a most dexterous and brilliant advocate. His career from its beginning was stormy, and although now the incident is forgotten, he may be said without any exaggeration to have been a successful pioneer in the establishment of a system of university education in Ireland in consonance with the wants and wishes of the people. Heron was a Roman Catholic. He entered Trinity College, Dublin, and in June, 1843, he submitted himself as a candidate at the examination held for scholarships. Mr. Heron was not elected a scholar, although his answering was admittedly superior to several of the candidates who were so elected. He then presented a memorial by way of appeal from the electors of the college to the Visitors of the college, the Primate and the Archbishop of Dublin, urging that the fact of his being a Roman Catholic should not exclude him from a scholarship. The Visitors declined to comply with the prayer of the memorial, concluding that Heron had not made out a case for their interference, whereupon Heron caused a writ of mandamus to be issued out of the Court of Queen’s Bench commanding them to hear the appeal. To this the Visitors made their return and, after argument, judgment was given for Heron, a peremptory mandamus being issued in June, 1845, commanding the Visitors to hear and determine the appeal, which, however, was ultimately dismissed. Mr. Heron’s case created a great sensation, and public sympathy was extended to him as the victim of cruel injustice by reason of religious disabilities. He was shortly afterwards appointed Professor of Jurisprudence in the Queen’s College, Galway, a position which did not interfere with his practice at the Bar, and which he held till the year of his call to the Inner Bar.

The fight with Trinity College gave Heron a very favourable introduction to public life. His ability as a speaker had been recognised by his election to the Auditorship of the Trinity College Historical Society. His rise at the Bar was rapid. In 1866 he obtained the place of Lord Adviser to Dublin Castle, which he held for a few months till the fall of the Liberal Government. At a by-election in 1869 he contested in the Liberal interest the representation of Tipperary. O’Donovan Rossa, the Fenian leader, who was then in prison serving a sentence of penal servitude for life, was put forward in opposition to him and was placed at the head of the poll by a majority of 103 votes. O’Donovan Rossa was held to be disqualified by a resolution of the House of Commons, and as the result of a new election Heron was returned by a majority of 4 over C. J. Kickham, another Fenian leader. He sat in the House of Commons till the General Election of 1874.

An incident in Mr. Heron’s election campaign became as notorious as his fights for the Trinity College scholarship, but, unlike that episode, without doubt it postponed his preferment, which would MR. DENIS CAULFIELD HERON otherwise have been immediate. The statement was repeatedly made in the Press that Mr. Heron during the election contest had worn a green cravat bearing the representation of the harp without a crown, and had called on the crowd to give three cheers for the Fenian prisoners. He had only been a member of the House of Commons for a very few days when Mr. Bernal Osborne, the famous parliamentary wit, gave, amid loud outbursts of laughter, a description of Heron’s speech and of his cravat. Heron gave the most absolute and unqualified denial to the statement that he had ever, on the hustings or anywhere else, called for cheers for the Fenian convicts, and was stating that he had been the subject of undeserved misconstruction, when the redoubtable Bernal Osborne interposed with the remark: “I saw the cravat myself,” which, of course, destroyed the effect of Heron’s disclaimer.

The green cravat incident undoubtedly constituted a barrier for some years to Heron’s promotion. He, however, was eventually made a serjeant, a token that the ban on his promotion had been removed, and everything looked well with him when death summoned him away. He was fishing in Galway in April, 1881, when he suddenly collapsed, and died a few hours subsequently, without having regained consciousness.

One memory has much impressed me. Heron was counsel at the Limerick Assizes for a prisoner, a retired naval officer charged with embezzlement. The man was clearly innocent. At the conclusion of the trial Heron, in my hearing, in the Bar room at Limerick, attacked in severe terms the gentleman, afterwards a member of the judiciary, who prosecuted on behalf of the Crown; condemning him for having acted in excess of his duty in an undue effort to secure the conviction of a man whose innocence was undoubted.

Heron had a very attractive but more or less flamboyant method of addressing juries. He was counsel at the Cork Assizes for a Greek sailor who was convicted of murder on the high seas. He asked the jury to restore the prisoner to his freedom under the pellucid sky of his native land. Beside Mr. Heron sat an old gentleman whose faculties had decayed, but who retained a Crown Prosecutorship for many years, although he took no part in the proceedings. He had a curious habit of speaking to himself in a stage whisper, and at times making comments at once humorous and bitter on the proceedings. Heron’s reference to the “pellucid skies” restored him for a moment to his former alertness of mind and forcible method of expression: “There he is,” he muttered, “weltering in bathos.”

I have referred to Dr. Ball, but I have only mentioned the name of his opponent, Dr. Webb, in the Trinity College election in 1868, who styled Dr. Ball “the ambi-dexter hand-ball.” Dr. Webb’s career was marked by extraordinary incidents. He was an Englishman who graduated in Trinity College, obtaining at his degree examination a silver medal. He wrote a metaphysical book, The DR. WEBB Intellectualism of Locke, which brought him into great repute in learned circles, and he was for some years a successful private coach in the college. He was called to the Irish Bar, but at first had little, if any, business. At last, in the late thirties, when a married man with a family, the idea occurred to him of competing for a Fellowship in Trinity College, which then, and for many years subsequently, was won as the result of a competitive examination, which was regarded as the severest intellectual strain to which anyone could be subjected. On his first trial Dr. Webb was second in the list of candidates, and obtained the Madden Prize of £400 awarded to the man who came next to the winner of the Fellowship. The next year he submitted himself again for examination and won the Fellowship, an achievement which, having regard to his years and the difficulty of returning to a life of intense studious application after the lapse of a decade, was almost unparalleled.

Dr. Webb eventually turned Conservative and wrote pamphlets for the Unionist Party. He was made a County Court Judge, and he signalised his first year on the Bench by the increasing, on appeal, of sentences of Resident Magistrates for political offences under the Coercion Act. He was regarded by those who knew him as a man of supreme intellectual and literary powers, but wholly devoid of common sense. Late in life he set himself to learn the German language with a view to the rendering into English verse of Goethe’s Faust, and the result is regarded as one of the best translations of Faust into English. He was an encyclopædia of learning, but he lacked the gift of turning that learning to his own advantage, and was surpassed in the race for fame and honours by men without a tithe of his ability. His defence of some of the men tried for the Phoenix Park murders was considered a brilliant but futile performance. I have always thought that Dr. Webb would have been a great success in the House of Commons: his eccentricity of manner and great originality of thought, although of little effect at the Bar, would have secured him the ear of the House, and made him, moreover, a very general favourite in that assembly.

In these early days Mr. Jonathan Christian was a Lord Justice of Appeal. He was a sour-visaged, acrimonious, unamiable man, whose promotion to a law officership, a puisne judgeship, and a Lord Justiceship of Appeal, was a wonderful tribute to an ability heavily handicapped by a lack of sympathy, a poverty in friendships and a great power of making enemies. He had a peculiarly vitriolic tongue. The judgments of Lord O’Hagan, the Lord Chancellor, of whose intelligence he was contemptuous, were the subjects of his polished sneers and veiled impertinences. Counsel practising before him—one of whom he described as “a respectable County Court Judge posing as a Chancery Leader”^[1]—were LORD JUSTICE CHRISTIANlikewise the victims of his scorn. He was very witty at the expense of Mr. Gibson (Lord Ashbourne), who was then the Attorney-General, remarking that he regretted that he had so seldom had the advantage of his assistance as counsel in cases that came before the court, but suavely adding that this was no doubt because Mr. Gibson preferred “the pleasant short cut of politics” as a way to the judicial Bench rather than the more arduous route of practice at the Bar.

I have already referred to the Clare County Court, at the sessions of which I practised. That Court in my time had in immediate succession two remarkable men for its judges: Mr. John O’Hagan, Q.C., and Mr. Charles Kelly, Q.C.

Mr. O’Hagan, a very distinguished scholar and a man of very high character and unrivalled charm of manner, had been one of the most enthusiastic members of the Young Ireland Party of 1848, and a leading contributor in prose and verse to The Nation, the organ of that party. On the failure of the Young Ireland Movement he retired from active participation in politics, devoting himself to his profession and to literature, and married a daughter of Lord O’Hagan, the Irish Lord Chancellor, to whom he was not related. The extreme quietude of Mr. John O’Hagan’s manner and demeanour was in contrast with the energy of his language both in verse and prose. I remember asking him whether he would have any objection to my stating that he was the author of some stirring lines on the corruption of the Union, which I quoted in my writings. While not forbidding me to make the announcement, he intimated his disinclination to be credited with the authorship gently but so firmly that I, of course, could not immortalise him in this connection. He was then a Judge of the High Court and Judicial Land Commissioner. He was painfully, even morbidly, sensitive lest his activity in Irish National politics in his younger days should militate against his securing the confidence of the public as an upright, impartial judge. The Land Commission Court over which he presided was denounced in advance by its enemies before its establishment, as in heart and spirit a Land League Court. Great was the consternation of Mr. O’Hagan when, after his address on the formal opening of that Court, the Registrar, a gentleman of nervous temperament, declared not the Land Court but the Land League Court to be now open.

Mr. Charles Kelly, Q.C., was in every respect the antithesis of Mr. O’Hagan, except in knowledge of law and scholarship, in which they were both admirable. O’Hagan was quiet and solemn. Kelly was excitable and vivacious. O’Hagan would hear witnesses and counsel with patience, Kelly would hear neither. His quickness of apprehension, which was very great, enabled him to come to a rapid judgment which was usually, but, as might be expected, not invariably, right. He had French connections, had been brought up abroad, and had mannerisms which savoured of the French. He JUDGE CHARLES KELLY had also a certain superiority of manner, probably due to his high social antecedents and independent means, for he had great estates in Ireland and in Jamaica. Some of the interchanges of compliments between him and counsel and witnesses are, after the lapse of a generation, worthy of being recorded. When County Court Judge of Leitrim, he thus addressed Mr. (Justice) O’Shaughnessy ^[2]: “Mr. O’Shaughnessy, do you take me for a fool?” The reply was immediate: “That is a question which I have not yet considered.”

As if seeking for information, he asked a witness as to the good character of a prisoner: “Now you have given the prisoner a character, who is to give you a character?”

He was fond of taking out a bunch of keys, putting the rim of the bunch up to his eye as if it were an eyeglass, and asking a witness: “Now do you swear so-and-so?” and on being answered in the affirmative he would say: “I swear the reverse.”

This kindly-hearted, highly-strung gentleman, whose abilities were universally acknowledged, and who, if he had cared for it, could have had the highest promotion, was the very best man of his year in Trinity College, Dublin, of which he would have been a Fellow if he had not been a Roman Catholic. He used to tell with great delight a story of a former Provost of Trinity College, who had taken his degree at the same time that Kelly won the Large Gold Medal in Mathematics. This gentleman, whose conversation bordered on the vainglorious, was suddenly interrupted at a dinner party by a guest who exclaimed: “I wish to Heaven I knew Charles Kelly!” “Kelly, the County Court Judge?” said the Provost. “Why, you can easily meet him. But why are you so anxious to know him?” “Because,” was the reply, “I want to see the man who beat so great a genius as yourself!”

I have already referred to Mr. Justice Lawson. He was returned to the House of Commons for the Borough of Portarlington at the General Election of 1865, and in the Palmerston-Russell Administration was Attorney-General for Ireland. This administration fell in 1866, and Mr. Lawson failed to retain his seat in the election of 1868. He was an Equity lawyer of the very highest eminence, and in view of the office which he had already held he was justified in expecting that, on the return of his party to power, he would be appointed Lord Chancellor of Ireland. But in 1867 an Act had been passed making the Lord Chancellorship open to all persons without reference to their religious belief, and on the formation of the first Gladstone administration it was decided to signalise the new Act by the appointment of a Roman Catholic, Mr. Thomas O’Hagan. By way of consolation, Mr. Lawson was appointed to a puisne judgeship in the Court of Common Pleas which was rendered vacant by Mr. O’Hagan’s promotion, and was made one of the Irish Church Commissioners with a salary of MR. JUSTICE LAWSON £2,000 per annum. He also received the unusual honour of being sworn a member of the British Privy Council.

During the Land League agitation he presided at several sensational trials, notably at that of Francis Hynes, a young man who in 1882 was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of a land bailiff in the County Clare. This trial had a curious sequel. Mr. Edmund Dwyer Gray was at that time the proprietor of The Freeman’s Journal. He was also High Sheriff of the City of Dublin, and a member of the House of Commons. The Freeman’s Journal published a letter making the accusation that some of the members of the jury in the Hynes case had been intoxicated, and had indulged in coarse laughter and horse-play in the corridors of the hotel in which they were “locked up” during the trial; and to this letter was appended an editorial comment which included the words: “In what state of mind can those men have been when a few hours after they were called upon to decide whether a fellow-creature was to live or die? . . . We have heard of men hanging that jurymen might dine, but what of a man hanging because jurymen have dined not wisely but too well?” The letter and comment resulted in an application for Mr. Gray’s committal for contempt of court, and he was sentenced by Mr. Justice Lawson to three months’ imprisonment and a fine of £500. It was, of course, the duty of the high sheriff to take the accused into custody; but Mr. Gray was himself the high sheriff. The judge therefore called on the coroner. This gentleman, however, seemed unwilling to obey the order, saying that he had no precedent for it; whereupon the Judge said: “You are bound to carry out the order, sir, and if you do not do it at once I will call on the sheriff of the County of Dublin to do it.” The coroner then made the arrest. Mr. Gray asked for a short time to dispose of some of his private affairs, but was told by the judge that he would have plenty of time available for that purpose while he was in prison.^[3]

The severity of this sentence caused great surprise in Dublin. The amount of the fine was collected by public subscription, resolutions condemning the sentence and expressing sympathy with Mr. Gray were passed by the great majority of the public bodies throughout the country, and three weeks after his committal he was released. In the subsequent November the judge, who had become the object of public obloquy both for his conduct of the Hynes trial and for his treatment of Mr. Gray, was the subject of an attempted assassination by Patrick Delaney.^[4]

The dread of assassination is calculated to try MR. JUSTICE LAWSONthe strongest nerves. Mr. Justice Lawson was not proof against that dread. He once opened a press in his library and produced a miniature revolver, saying to me that he always brought the revolver with him into Court, to give a good account of himself if he were attacked. I can well remember, at his country residence (Clontra, near Dublin), Mrs. Lawson was presiding at a tea-table in a tent in the grounds when the shouts of some young people playing tennis so alarmed her that she became faint. She told me that the judge used to say when putting on his coat he never felt sure that he would be alive when it was taken off.

The passing over of Mr. Justice Lawson for the Lord Chancellorship, the odium attached to his name by one class in the community and the favour in which he stood with another, his attempted assassination and his majestic courage, made him an interesting and attractive public figure. He was, moreover, one of the very best classical scholars of his time, and had kept up his knowledge of Latin and Greek, which remained as perfect as when he took his degree. He was, moreover, a man of very deep religious convictions, and found, like Mr. Gladstone, an intellectual recreation in the translation of English hymns into Latin. He published some of these translations, which had a great circulation in learned circles and made his mark as a scholar. Under these circumstances I approached Dean Liddell of Christ Church and, without any preface, boldly importuned him to get the University of Oxford to confer on Mr. Justice Lawson the honorary degree of D.C.L. I received an almost immediate reply from the Dean that he would be only too glad to do his best, and asking me to procure for him letters from some of Lawson’s brethren on the Bench in commendation of him, and from some men whose attainments and careers would carry weight, and, above all, to observe strict silence on the matter. Needless to say, the credentials were obtained and the Oxford D.C.L. was conferred.

One incident in this little transaction I can never forget. The very first person to whom I applied in this connection was Mr. Edward Gibson, the future Lord Chancellor Ashbourne, who had been a member of the same circuit as Lawson, who had always professed great affection for him, and who was then member for Dublin University and a recognised leader of the Opposition. To my amazement I received a letter from Mr. Gibson so cold, restrained and ungenerous, and in such contrast with the other letters, that I felt that its presentation to Dean Liddell would be not a help but a hindrance. Shortly after the degree was conferred there was a dinner of the Leinster Circuit to which old members of that circuit were invited. Lawson and Gibson were both present, and Gibson, in a speech, profusely congratulated Lawson on the great honour conferred on him at Oxford, an honour which was, he said, far higher and more gratifying than any mere professional or political distinction could be. As MR. FRANCIS MACDONAGH Lawson listened to this panegyric he was well aware—since I had told him—of Mr. Gibson’s contribution towards his attainment of the honorary degree.

In my early years at the Bar I made the acquaintance of two men of resplendent powers as advocates, now scarcely known even by name: Francis Macdonagh, Q.C., and Richard Armstrong, Q.C., First Serjeant-at-Law. They were great rivals and were frequently pitted against each other in important cases. Their careers also crossed in politics. Armstrong had originally been a Tory, but he changed his politics and, standing as a Liberal at the General Election of 1865, he won from Macdonagh, a confirmed Tory, the seat for the Borough of Sligo.^[5]

Macdonagh was a very considerable success in the House of Commons. His concise language, a courtesy which bordered on the artificial, his very dignified presence and exquisitely chiselled features, snow-white hair, and old-world manner, secured him the attention of the House; while he was singularly adroit in carefully abstaining from taking part in any debate, however trivial the subject, in which he was not as fully equipped with information, in the minutest detail, as if he were briefed as counsel in a case. He likewise was a favourite in society. A story is told of him that in paying a formal visit to a great hostess at the close of the parliamentary session he expressed the hope of meeting her again when Parliament re-assembled. “Ah, Mr. Macdonagh,” she said, “I shall probably be not here but in Brookwood then.” Macdonagh, who thought Brookwood was a country residence and not a cemetery, said: “Madam, I will then give myself the honour of visiting you there.”

Armstrong, on the other hand, did not commend himself to the House of Commons, for his manner—the very antithesis to that of Macdonagh—showed a brusqueness bordering on the vulgar, with language that was direct rather than ornate. He fought with the bludgeon rather than with the rapier.

At the General Election of 1868 Armstrong was ousted from Sligo as he had ousted Macdonagh. A commission was appointed to inquire into corrupt practices at Sligo elections, which resulted in the disfranchisement of the Borough, Macdonagh and Armstrong being both scheduled as guilty of corrupt practices. This incident was regarded at the time, and for some years afterwards, as constituting an impassable barrier to their promotion. Their position at the Bar, however, remained unaffected, and then again there came a fierce antagonism and clash of interests between these men, who seemed to be mutually destructive. In the year 1873 a District Inspector of the Royal Irish Constabulary named Montgomery was placed on trial at Omagh for the murder, for the purpose of robbery, of a bank manager named Glass. Macdonagh was SERJEANT ARMSTRONG retained specially for the defence. In this and in a subsequent trial there was a disagreement of the jury. On the third trial Armstrong was appointed by the Crown to prosecute with the Attorney-General (Lord Chief Baron Palles), and a verdict of guilty was returned, the conviction being due, as was stated at the time, to Armstrong’s conduct of the case, his force in emphasising its leading features and his masterly demolition of Macdonagh’s defence.

Armstrong’s abilities were so pre-eminent, and his personal popularity, both at the Bar and with the public at large, was so great, that the Sligo episode was ultimately condoned, and he was appointed to go as Commissioner of Assize on a circuit, a position in which he gave the very greatest satisfaction. And then a strange thing happened. In the second Disraeli Administration of 1874 a considerable number of members for Irish constituencies of diverse politics were crossing the Channel from Kingstown to Holyhead. Armstrong, who was known to everyone, was on board. He talked, not of the politics of the early seventies, but of those of the late sixties, speaking of the Disestablishment of the Irish Church and kindred subjects, that were things of the past, as impending events. It was quickly perceived that he was labouring under mental aberration. On his arrival at Holyhead the Serjeant was brought back to Dublin and placed in a mental home, where, after a period of restraint, he was completely restored to reason and to full possession of his great faculties. He then resumed his practice at the Bar, which was greater than ever, but apprehension was always felt lest he should have a sudden return to insanity. On one occasion this reached a climax. He rose to cross-examine an expert in handwriting. He looked at him and asked: “What about the dog?” The witness was amazed and silent. Armstrong asked the question in a louder tone, to the consternation of everyone present—a maniacal outburst being expected. The witness said he did not understand the question. “You swear that?” said Armstrong. The witness bowed his assent. “Then,” said Armstrong to the infinite relief and amusement of the audience, “what about the dog that Mr. Baron Dowse said he would not hang on your evidence?”

Armstrong, however, met his match once or twice in his cross-examination of witnesses. He asked the late Mr. A. M. Sullivan, who was renowned as a fighting politician: “Mr. Sullivan, who is the greatest firebrand in Ireland?” Mr. Sullivan, wishing to be cautious in his answer, said: “Do you mean a legal firebrand?” Armstrong asked another witness whether he plumed himself on his power of invective. The witness answered with humility in the negative, but added he had done his best to take the learned Serjeant for his model and was conscious of his failure.

Serjeant Armstrong gloried in antithesis and poignancy of contrast. On one occasion he was retained against the late Mr. Mitchell Henry, a well-known member of the House of Commons in the SERJEANT ARMSTRONG seventies and eighties of the last century, and at that time a man of great wealth and the owner of Kylemore Castle, County Galway. He thus alluded to Mr. Henry’s portly figure and corpulent habit: “He is no doubt the owner of vast possessions—his palatial residence in Galway is known as the Jewel of the West—he has considerable social position; but, gentlemen, you must take him as he is. Look at him there, and what is he after all but a platter-faced voluptuary!”

Finally, Serjeant Armstrong was again afflicted with loss of reason, and from this he never recovered.

Mr. Macdonagh, a man of humble birth who affected the fine gentleman, used always to come down to the courts in his carriage, attired in wig and gown and wearing lavender kid gloves. He was attended by a valet known as “the faithful Rooney,” who brought him his luncheon in a basket of great elegance. The faithful Rooney was always near him. When Macdonagh was at Brighton Rooney walked a few paces behind his master, who was very elegantly attired and, as I have said, of distinguished carriage and bearing. He is said to have asked Rooney whether he had chanced to hear any remarks made about him as he passed through the crowd. “Yes, sir,” was the reply. “I frequently heard people say what a pity it was that such a nice old gentleman had to be put in charge of a keeper.”

Macdonagh till the last retained his eminence at the Bar, and at the State trials of 1881 he reminded the Court that he alone of all the counsel employed on either side in the O’Connell trials of 1844 was living, and he thanked God for his continued health and strength.

Another Irish barrister of whom I have very pathetic recollections was Serjeant Sir Colman O’Loghlen, the eldest son of Sir Michael O’Loghlen, Master of the Rolls in Ireland, who was the first Roman Catholic since the Revolution of 1688 to be raised to a judicial office either in England or Ireland. Sir Michael O’Loghlen has also the distinction of being one of the few judges who since the revolution have been the subject of a vote of censure by a House of Parliament. In 1839 the Lords, after a long and angry debate, solemnly passed such a vote on him because he had given directions that no juror should be set aside merely on account of his political and religious opinions.

Sir Colman O’Loghlen, who inherited the great popularity of his father, had been one of the counsel for O’Connell in the State trials of 1844. He had taken silk, was made a County Court Judge, and gave up the position to enter the House of Commons in 1865 for the County of Clare, retaining his seat till his death in 1877. He was a gentleman of singularly amiable and kindly disposition and of marked ability. Mr. Gladstone in his first Administration appointed him to the position of Judge Advocate-General, a position which he resigned two years subsequently owing to the harassing strain of pecuniary embarrassment for which he was not in any sense to blame. Sir Colman in his years of parliamentary life was a SIR COLMAN O’LOGHLEN universal favourite in the House, and was influential in the passing of many measures intended to remove religious disabilities. He was a very loyal member of the Liberal Party, and a master of the rules of procedure of the House of Commons. He, however, fell on one occasion into a ludicrous and to him most painful error. When the House of Commons was in Committee on the Court of Chancery (Ireland) Bill, a Government measure, he went into the wrong lobby and carried by his vote the question that the Chairman do leave the Chair, which had the most sinister effect on the progress of the Bill. He stated his case to the Speaker when the sitting was resumed, but was told that as he had heard the question put there was no remedy for his mistake.

By virtue of his position as Serjeant-at-Law Sir Colman was entitled to a brief in every Crown case tried in the Munster Circuit. It was there that I had the happiness to make his acquaintance. He used to come over from London to the Munster Assizes, but waived his privilege of holding Crown briefs in the County of Clare, which he represented in the House of Commons. In July, 1877, on the eve of his departure for Ireland for the Assizes, he bade good-bye very impressively to three members of the House of Commons, saying that he would not see them again. One of these gentlemen thought that he simply referred to the fact that he would not return to London before the end of the parliamentary session. The other two felt that he spoke with a melancholy presage of death. When the mail boat arrived at Kingstown from Holyhead Sir Colman was found dead in his cabin. He had been accustomed to take chloral as a preventive of sea-sickness and had taken an overdose. The sad news of his death was telegraphed to his family solicitor, the late Mr. Timothy Bunton, of Ennis, whom I knew well. Mr. Bunton told me that he at once drove to Drumconora, Sir Colman’s country residence a few miles from Ennis, where his two sisters lived. These ladies met Mr. Bunton on the steps of the entrance to their house, and before he had uttered a word one of them said: “Mr. Bunton, we know that you have come to tell us Colman is dead. We both saw our dead mother in the drawing-room last night.”

The late Sir John Mowbray, to whom I have already referred, used to say that when a baby in arms he had seen Napoleon, although he retained no recollection of him. Mr. Thomas De Moleyns, Q.C., the Father of the Irish Bar, had the advantage of Sir John Mowbray in having seen Napoleon and heard him speak, and in retaining a vivid memory of him. Mr. De Moleyns was born in 1807 and died in March, 1900. He was a midshipman on board H.M.S. Bellerophon when Napoleon was received in that vessel after the Battle of Waterloo. Mr. De Moleyns was County Court Judge of Kilkenny, but under the system that then prevailed Irish County Court Judges, as I have said, were not precluded from practising at the Bar. Mr. De Moleyns was Senior Crown Prosecutor MR. THOMAS DE MOLEYNS for some of the towns in the Munster Circuit, and went on circuit mainly because he enjoyed the society of his brethren at the Bar, with whom he was a universal favourite. He was an erudite lawyer and had written a much used work dealing with the law of landlord and tenant in Ireland, which is replete with shrewd remarks and genial witticisms. He was a man of noble presence, very tall, erect in carriage, with broad forehead, aquiline nose and piercing dark eyes.

The Munster Bar entertained the Judges in Cork during the Assizes in that city. On these occasions the festivities were enlivened with music and song, and Mr. De Moleyns was wont to sing Moore’s song, “Those Evening Bells.” When he came to the words, “And other tongues shall sing your praise,” he turned pointedly towards the younger members of the Bar whose enthusiastic cheers had played havoc with his singing. Mr. De Moleyns had a most extensive acquaintance with celebrities and a wonderfully retentive memory. His humorous sallies, made with a perfect command of his countenance, were thrilling. A scandal in high life had created a very great sensation, and the conduct of a noble co-respondent in not marrying the respondent whom her husband had divorced was strongly reprobated in conversation. “I do not see,” said Mr. De Moleyns, “that Lady —— has any reason to complain. I could not imagine myself more happy than if I were to be beloved and then betrayed and best of all forsaken.”

A leader on the Munster Circuit, the very antithesis to Mr. De Moleyns, was Mr. William O’Brien, afterwards a Judge of the High Court of Justice, who presided with conspicuous ability over the trials arising out of the Phoenix Park assassinations. O’Brien was a sour-visaged man of ascetic aspect. He had begun life as a reporter on a Cork newspaper, had spent several years in America, had come back to Ireland and had been called late in life to the Bar. His practice was very modest, but his learning and abilities were universally recognised. He was on the most intimate terms with Sir Edward Sullivan, Master of the Rolls and subsequently Lord Chancellor, to whom he owed his promotion to the Bench.

O’Brien was one of the best informed men of his own or of any time, and was deeply versed in military strategy. His wit, which was acrimonious, was frequently at his own expense. He once concluded his cross-examination of a prevaricating witness with the question: “Will you swear that I am a handsome man?”

He was unmarried. His house in Merrion Square was filled with rare editions, splendid specimens of the old masters and priceless porcelain in a disordered litter on dining-tables and even on the floors. His generosity was princely, and an unkind manner and an uncouth appearance concealed a very warm, tender heart. He believed he would be a success in the House of Commons, and twice contested the Borough of Ennis unsuccessfully in the Liberal MR. JUSTICE WILLIAM O’BRIEN interest against Mr. Parnell’s nominee. On the last occasion, towards the end of the election campaign, he announced himself prepared, as an independent Irishman, to vote for the establishment of an Irish Parliament. His powerful friend Sir Edward Sullivan prevailed to secure his pardon for this temporary dereliction from the straight path of Unionism, and his promotion to the Judicial Bench soon followed. On his appearance on the Bench it was observed that his judicial robes were not new but old and worn, the red gown being spattered with ink. It subsequently transpired that he had purchased the robes, paying for them the full price of new robes, from the crier of Mr. Justice Fitzgerald, that judge having worn them for two-and-twenty years in the Queen’s Bench Division before his promotion to a Lordship of Appeal in Ordinary.

I frequently came in contact with Mr. Baron Dowse, whose witticisms when member in the House of Commons for the City of Londonderry from 1868 till 1872 were remembered for many years in that assembly. His remarks were as pungent on the Bench as in Parliament and at the Bar.

During Mr. Balfour’s coercion régime in the eighties of the last century, on a matter coming before the judges for decision on a case stated by the Resident Magistrates, Mr. Baron Dowse said that an Irish Resident Magistrate could no more state a case than he could write a Greek ode—words which were reported, “ride a Greek goat.” The mistaken report created great merriment at the time.^[6]

Baron Dowse died suddenly at the Assizes in Kerry in March, 1890. The judgeship thus vacated was not filled for more than two years in the hope that Mr. Chatterton, who had held the Vice-Chancellorship of Ireland for three-and-twenty years, would resign and thus make room for Mr. Madden, the Irish Attorney-General, as his successor; while in the event of Mr. Chatterton proving obdurate Mr. Madden would fall back on the puisne judgeship before the resignation of the Tory Government, whose defeat at the polls in the coming General Election was certain. It was said at the time that a diplomatic intermediary, a member of the Irish Bar, had sounded Mr. Chatterton on the subject of resignation and had come out of the Vice-Chancellor’s chamber at the conclusion of the interview looking as scared as if he had seen a ghost, while a very few days afterwards Mr. Chatterton appeared in a new judicial wig—an outward and visible sign that resignation was far from his thoughts. The good man held his office till 1904, having filled it for LORD HEMPHILL seven-and-thirty years. He was the first and the last Vice-Chancellor of Ireland.

I cannot omit from these pages a reference to Charles Hare Hemphill, the first Lord Hemphill, who, even after his accession to the peerage, was always known as “the Serjeant.” From 1892 till 1895, in the Gladstone-Rosebery Administration, he filled the position of Solicitor-General for Ireland, and he was raised to the peerage in 1905. He was very popular both at the Bar and in the House of Commons, and undeviating in the maintenance of principles to which, despite all allurements, he clung with a high-minded consistency. His ambitions were always for a political career rather than for one on the Bench, but he did not succeed in entering the House of Commons until he was well on in the seventies. He had previously contested in the Liberal interest the representation of the City of Cashel (now long dis-enfranchised) at the General Elections of 1857 and 1859, the Derby Division of Liverpool in 1886, and Hastings in 1892. Eventually, however, he was successful at North Tyrone, where he retained the seat for ten years.

His defeats at Cashel were due to his high standard of electoral morality. The constituency was notoriously corrupt. Hemphill, who was a Protestant, had heard that the Roman Catholic priest had denounced from the altar electoral bribery and corruption, as a sin against God. As he was taking a walk in the neighbourhood of Cashel a day or two afterwards Hemphill met some of the voters with whom he entered into conversation, and, gently alluding to the priest’s sermon, inquired what would be its probable effect on the results of the election. “Oh, your honour,” was the reply “votes is riz. They were selling at between £5 and £6 on Saturday, but after Sunday when we heard our souls would be damned for selling them no vote will go under at least £20.”

Mr. Hemphill being passed over for the Lord Chancellorship—to which, on the coming into office of the Campbell-Bannerman Government in 1905, his claims were of the strongest—was a shameful withholding from him of an object of life-long ambition.

Sir Samuel Walker was Lord Chancellor of Ireland in the Gladstone-Rosebery Administration of 1892-1895, and again, in the Campbell-Bannerman-Asquith Administration, from 1905 till his death in 1911. Mr. Walker, whose ambitions, unlike those of Lord Hemphill, were forensic rather than political, first entered the House of Commons in 1884 as Solicitor-General for Ireland. He was then little acquainted with parliamentary ways, and looked on with astonishment at the conduct of a debate, which seemed to him in poignant and most unpleasant contrast with the conduct of a trial in the Law Courts. Sitting on the Treasury Bench although a parliamentary novice, he listened to a full-dress House of Commons’ debate with an amazement he made no effort to disguise. “Well,” said one of his colleagues, “what do you think of it LORD CHANCELLOR WALKER all?” “Oh,” was the reply, “I could scarcely believe my senses, as I heard men on either side making serious statements without even a scrap of an affidavit to support them.”

Sir Samuel was celebrated for his powers of repartee and for a gift of describing a situation with accuracy in a dozen words. He once described a book—the life of a certain Lord Chancellor who figured in many questionable and stormy episodes in public life—in a sentence which entitles him to a high place in the world of criticism. “The book,” he said, “is of the very highest interest, as the life of a very great rogue written by a very great fool.”

I am inclined to think that to me alone belongs one uncoveted distinction: for I was the subject of boycotting notices issued by the Irish Land League, ordering solicitors to refrain from employing me. These orders were given on the ground that I had appeared as counsel for the landlord in cases in which the interests of landlord and tenant were in conflict, and more especially in ejectment cases. The publication of these notices created a very considerable sensation at the time, and the incident was regarded as an attempt to intimidate members of the Bar—whose professional attitude is, of course, always strictly impersonal—into the refusal of a certain class of business, to attack their independence as advocates, and to identify counsel with the merits or demerits of the cases in which they are retained. These manifestos were issued in 1880. I took no notice of them, attending the ensuing sessions of the THE DUBLIN DAILY EXPRESS County Court as usual, but I suffered an appreciable loss in my business, although the resolutions were in many instances disobeyed and were eventually withdrawn.

This incident in my life, which I believe to be unique, leads me to touch here on another somewhat similar matter. After the General Election of 1874, at which with deep regret I declined the offer of a seat in Parliament, I took little if any interest for some years in public life, devoting myself almost exclusively to reading for my call to the Bar, and subsequently to the practice of my profession. It therefore came as a considerable surprise to me when in 1880 I was asked whether I would write leading articles for The Dublin Daily Express. Before accepting the invitation I had an interview with the proprietor of the paper, Mr. John Robinson,^[1] an ideal gentleman and one of the most honourable men I have ever met, and told him frankly that my views were in the main Conservative. I said that Home Rule for Ireland was a question which might be adopted either by Conservatives or by Radicals, without any abrogation of the distinctive principles of their parties, and that when Home Rule became a distinct political issue I would throw in my lot with any party, Conservative or Radical, who made the restoration of an Irish Parliament a cardinal principle of its policy. Mr. Robinson was kind enough to thank me for my candour, and to state that my views were in accordance with his own on these matters. I therefore accepted the proposal, and during my very pleasant association with the paper, which lasted for a couple of years, I never in the least deviated from my convictions, which were known to everyone who knew me. Nevertheless, when in later years I entered the House of Commons as an Irish Nationalist, it was a favourite topic of reproach to me that I had been a writer of leading articles for the principal organ of Irish Conservative opinion.

The fire-place of the Law Library of the Four Courts in Dublin was in those days a centre of gossip and of wit which was always pungent and sometimes mordant. When it is remembered that for every person appointed to high judicial office there were at least ten others as well if not better fitted for the appointment, and that with very few exceptions practice at the Bar declined with advancing years, it will be realised that the number of disappointed and in some cases soured men was considerable. And it is natural that the opinions of such men were expressed with freedom, and were sometimes more truthful than flattering. A disappointed and shunted Queen’s Counsel was once asked by someone who wished to please and flatter him whether he was a member of the family of a certain peer who bore the same name as himself. “I have always understood,” was the reply, “that his lordship belongs to an illegitimate branch of my own family.” The same IN THE FOUR COURTS gentleman, in reference to a title, on which he was asked to advise, said his work had been difficult and melancholy, because the whole county in which the lands that were the subject of the title were situate seemed to be filled with lunatics, illegitimates, and women of doubtful virtue.

Another shunted Queen’s Counsel, when the conversation turned on the strange circumstance of criminals sleeping soundly on the eve of their execution, which was explained by several recondite theories, said that he did not think it remarkable that persons should sleep well in such circumstances. “They know,” he said, “that they will be called in time in the morning.”

When the engagement of a member of the Bar who frequently participated in these conversations had been announced someone observed that he did not of late frequent the fire-place of the Law Library. “Of course,” was the comment of a disappointed Queen’s Counsel, “he does not come here because he knows what he would be likely to say of anyone who was making so foolish a match.”

At times this acidity approached the vitriolic. A member of a family who for several generations were the principal jewellers in Dublin and had amassed considerable wealth, was practising at the Bar and had taken silk. His weakness consisted in being touchy in relation to the source of his wealth—of which he should have been proud. He likewise had the reputation of being inclined to cultivate the society of people by reason of their adventitious position rather than their worth; and he entertained very largely—his brethren of the Bar sometimes not being represented at the festivities. The fame of one of these exquisitely exclusive dinners having reached the courts, an old gentleman, whose practice at the Bar was no longer as extensive as it had at one time been, accosted the follower of other people’s greatness with the words, “Well, Henry, we have all been hearing of the wonderful dinner you gave the other evening.” “Oh,” was the answer, “I just had a few friends to dinner. I couldn’t ask everyone at the same time.” “Ah,” said the old gentleman, “but this was a very grand affair. I hear that the table looked lovely. It was literally groaning with the weight of the family plate.”

Among my contemporaries as law students and at the Bar was Mr. John Francis Moriarty, whose career was probably unique. His father was a very well-known solicitor in Mallow, and when J. F. Moriarty was called to the Bar, apart from his own high intellectual powers, he had all the help of influential friends and of people who were under considerable obligation to his father. He got rapidly into business, and his affairs seemed so full of promise that he used to say that, as Philip Yorke had become Solicitor-General for England within five years of his call to the Bar, he failed to see why he should not become Solicitor-General for Ireland within the same period. When the position of Crown Prosecutor at the Dublin Commission at Green Street (the Irish Old Bailey) fell vacant, Moriarty expected that he would LORD JUSTICE J. F. MORIARTY be appointed, more especially since it was in the gift of the Irish Attorney-General, who held the seat at Mallow largely through the support and influence of Moriarty’s father. The appointment, however, was given elsewhere, and Moriarty became not only disappointed but eager for revenge. An opportunity soon came, if not against the Attorney-General, at any rate against the Whig Government to which that official belonged. The Attorney-General, Mr. Johnson, was promoted to the Bench, and a by-election became necessary at Mallow. Mr. Naish, the Irish Solicitor-General, was standing in the Liberal interest for what was deemed a safe seat. Moriarty came forward in opposition also as a Liberal candidate, and the resulting split Liberal vote led to the defeat of Mr. Naish and the return of the Nationalist. So Moriarty obtained his revenge, but the door was shut upon his chances of promotion.

Realising this, he abandoned his practice at the Bar, and, drifting, became a constant attendant at turf meetings and a heavy better. A considerable period of his life suffered almost total eclipse. Then after several years he returned to the Bar, finding himself unknown and practically briefless, and in a very different position from that which he had thrown up long before. His skill was recognised in some quarters, but his record precluded him from advancement. The Attorney-General of the day would have given him a Dublin Police Magistracy, but was peremptorily forbidden to do so by the late Lord Cadogan, who was then Lord-Lieutenant. At last his masterly conduct as counsel in the “remount scandal” cases of the Boer War, which attracted considerable attention at the time, brought him unexpectedly a very considerable practice. In 1904, twenty-seven years after his call, he took silk, and was junior at the Inner Bar to many men called long after him. He was made a Serjeant-at-Law, thereby obtaining precedence next after the Law Officers of the Crown; he became successively Solicitor-General and Attorney-General, and finally was promoted to the Bench as a Lord Justice of Appeal. Thus his career forms an instance, almost unique in the history of the Irish Bar, of the rehabilitation of a man whose personal character has been besmirched.

Lord Carson, as Mr. Edward Carson, was called to the Irish Bar in the same year as Mr. Moriarty. I was his senior by a year, and I recollect that I lent him my note-books for the final examination. In early life Carson gave no indication of his great abilities: his is, I think, one of the few cases on record in which marked development of intellect has taken place in later years. In the Land League agitation Carson became an understudy in Crown prosecutions of Mr. Peter O’Brien (afterwards Lord O’Brien and Lord Chief Justice). In fact, Mr. O’Brien, although on the Munster circuit while Carson was on the Leinster circuit, may be said to have “made” the future Ulster leader, by bringing him into what, in the coercion régime in Ireland, was known as Crown business.

Carson, at this time, was anxious to change his LORD O’BRIEN circuit. It may be noticed as having a bearing on future political history that his ambition then was not to join the Ulster circuit but that of Munster. Mr. O’Brien canvassed for his admission, but did not finally propose him, and the matter accordingly dropped.

My notice of Lord O’Brien, whose career is well-known even by persons only moderately acquainted with the history of his generation in Ireland, must necessarily be brief, the more especially as he has written and published his own reminiscences. But it is not generally known that he was once in imminent danger of death at the hands of a British soldier.

The future Chief Justice attended his uncle, Mr. Justice James O’Brien, as his registrar in the Munster circuit when the country was disturbed by the Fenian insurrection. When the Judges of Assize were in Cork, Peter O’Brien dined one evening with the members of the Bar, and remained somewhat late. When he reached the judges’ lodgings he was challenged by the sentry on guard. Treating the matter lightly, he made a chaffing reply to the sentry’s demand for a password. The soldier immediately presented his bayonet at O’Brien’s chest, and ordered him not to move at the peril of his life. He was fortunately rescued from this somewhat unpleasant position by his uncle’s valet, who heard the disturbance and came to the door.

It is also not commonly known, I believe, that Mr. Peter O’Brien was very nearly appointed to the Irish Lord Chancellorship on the death of Lord Fitzgerald, a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary, in 1889.

Lord Ashbourne, then Lord Chancellor of Ireland with a seat in the Cabinet, was offered the vacant position as Lord of Appeal in Ordinary, with the object of his supersession as Lord Chancellor in favour of O’Brien. The proposal was, of course, a gentle hint that the Cabinet found itself able both to live and to thrive without Lord Ashbourne’s assistance, and recognising this fact, he declined the offer, with the result that he held his Lord Chancellorship and O’Brien’s opportunity was lost. Instead O’Brien was appointed Lord Chief Justice of Ireland in the room of Sir Michael Morris, who was promoted to the Lordship of Appeal in Ordinary.

For some years—on political but certainly not on personal grounds—friendly relations between O’Brien and myself were suspended. At length someone told me that his daughter, whom I had known as a child, had written a very clever novel, and the suggestion was made that I should do my best to get it reviewed. I, of course, gladly undertook to do what I could. Some weeks subsequently I was speaking to a friend in the street when I saw the Chief Justice approaching, and, to escape the unpleasantness of having to avoid catching an unfriendly glance, I held my friend in close converse till he should have passed. Suddenly I received a very smart tap on the shoulder, and on looking round I saw O’Brien beaming on me with affection, while he greeted me with the words, “Well, MR. T. M. HEALY Swift, glad I am to see you.” Our friendship was thus renewed, and thereafter it was only severed by his death. He and I, after that incident, frequently strolled through the streets of Dublin arm in arm, and I believe that passers-by were struck by this strange friendship between two political antagonists. He was one of the most sagacious and far-seeing men I have ever met. In him acuteness, that is to say cunning divested of any unpleasant connotation, amounted to genius. I can never forget a remark that he made to me upwards of twenty years ago: “If Carson did not prefer Ulster, he would succeed Balfour as Leader of the Tory Party.”

In 1882 I was elected by the Benchers of the King’s Inns to the Professorship of Constitutional and Criminal Law in the Honourable Society of the Inns. There, at my lectures, I had as pupils three law students with whom in after days I was in frequent contact in the House of Commons: Mr. T. M. Healy, Mr. John Redmond, and Mr. William Redmond. Mr. Healy was a student in the first term of my Professorship, and the Redmonds in the second term.

Mr. Healy was a great figure in Irish politics even in those early days. He had accompanied Mr. Parnell as his secretary on his American tour in 1879-1880, and had been returned to Parliament for the Borough of Wexford at the General Election of 1880. Almost immediately on his entry into the House of Commons he earned considerable reputation for legal acumen, alertness of mind and initiative in debate, during the discussion of the Irish Land Bill. It was currently declared at the time that only three members of the House understood the details of that complicated measure, and they were Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Hugh Law (the Irish Attorney-General, who subsequently became Lord Chancellor of Ireland), and Mr. Healy. He it was who succeeded in obtaining a most important addition to the Bill: a clause to the effect that rent should not be charged on tenants’ improvements.^[2] The Attorney-General accepted the clause without much discussion, and the Opposition failed to realise its extremely important effect. I have heard that when the clause was passed Healy whispered to a friend, “These words put millions into the pockets of the tenants.”

Healy was a great power also on Irish platforms. Both he and Davitt had been prosecuted in 1883 under an old Statute of Edward III. which enabled imprisonment to be inflicted without the production of a definite accuser or the imputation of any definite crime on persons charged as “rogues and vagabonds” if they declined to give bail to be of good behaviour. Davitt was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment, and Healy to three months. At their trial in the Queen’s Bench Division Mr. (Sir) William Johnson, the Irish Attorney-General, prosecuted in person. He was a very kindly, courteous gentleman, and before the judges came into Court he shook hands with Healy, with whom, as a fellow-member of the House of Commons, he was acquainted. His action MR. T. M. HEALY in so doing—in shaking hands with a criminal whom he was about to prosecute on behalf of the Crown—was the subject of acrimonious comment and attack in both the Irish and the British Press, and was, it is said, the direct cause of his almost immediate removal from his office—by the tactful course of promotion to the Judicial Bench.

When Healy attended my classes at the King’s Inns, I, knowing the position he held, was somewhat chary of asking him questions in class, but the temptation presented by the cleverness and originality of his answers overcame my scruples. He could correct me from his practical experience in matters of constitutional law. I once had occasion to speak of the settled principle of parliamentary law by which a member of the House of Commons, once duly elected, cannot relinquish his seat; and in order to evade the restriction, as I remarked, a member who wishes to retire accepts a nominal office under the Crown, thereby compelling himself to vacate the seat. I mentioned that the office usually selected by British Members for this purpose is that of the Steward or Bailiff of His Majesty’s three Chiltern Hundreds, while Irish Members applied for the Escheatorship of Munster. A day or two afterwards Healy remained to speak to me at the conclusion of my lecture, and told me that when he desired to vacate his seat at Wexford in order to contest that in County Tyrone against Mr. (Justice) Monroe, he was informed that the office of Escheator of Munster had been abolished, and that he, although an Irish Member, must apply for the Chiltern Hundreds.

Healy, as a law student, treated me with great deference; but candour compels me to state that he fully atoned for this in later days in Parliament by singular directness of language, whether of approval or disapproval. His attacks against me in the House of Commons sometimes bordered on the vitriolic; but I must say that they gave me neither disturbance nor distress, and—at the risk of not being believed by persons not acquainted with Mr. Healy—I can add that there are few men more kindly or more tender-hearted than he. At a time when political feeling was running high and Healy and I were on opposite sides and meeting, when we met, with the formalities of strangers, he happened to hear that I was broken by a desolating bereavement, and, forgetful of all quarrels and of the vituperation with which he had been belabouring me, he came to offer me his heartfelt sympathy.

As I have said, the Redmonds were not students at the King’s Inns at the same time as Healy, and I had not known either of them before they became students at my classes. Mr. John Redmond, when he was called to the Bar in his thirtieth year, had already sat for two constituencies in Parliament. He had, moreover, had experience of parliamentary practice, having filled for some years the position of a junior clerk in the House of Commons. The subjects of my lectures were therefore well known MR. WILLIAM REDMOND to him and his answering of questions was very correct: but it lacked Healy’s originality.

Mr. John Redmond’s associations with me were interesting. We were both born in the same street in Dublin, Upper Rutland Street, he being a few years junior to me. While he was my pupil at the King’s Inns he came down in 1887 to South Donegal for the purpose of introducing me to that constituency. On my election he was one of my formal introducers to the House of Commons, and for nearly eighteen years he was the leader in the House of the party of which I was a member. A stranger inversion of the positions of pupil and lecturer could hardly be imagined.

By the time Mr. William Redmond attended my lectures I had become a Member of Parliament. In 1883 he was returned for the Borough of Wexford. I recollect his asking me, in view of our parliamentary relations, to put to him as few questions as possible at the classes. In the House of Commons, as on the field of battle in which he sacrificed his life, Mr. William Redmond was the very soul of moral and physical courage, but in the lecture room he was restrained and quiet and even nervous—with me, of all persons in the world. In 1890 Mr. William Redmond joined with me and some other Members of Parliament to oppose, as a matter of the gravest constitutional importance, the cession of Heligoland by Great Britain to Germany.^[3] I can never forget Mr. William Redmond’s expression of amused contempt, while he was almost suffocated, not with shame but with derisive laughter, when he was sententiously rebuked by Mr. W. H. Smith, the leader of the House of Commons, for the impropriety of a question as to whether the proposal for this cession originated with Great Britain or with Germany. It is one of the grim ironies of history that the man whose conduct in this matter was stigmatised by a British statesman as disloyal should have lost his life in the Great War, which would have been impossible if the opposition to the cession of Heligoland had been successful.

My appointment to the Chair at the King’s Inns, to which I was indebted to the influence of Mr. Justice Lawson, Mr. Justice Murphy, Mr. Justice William O’Brien, and Mr. Jellett (the Equity Leader of the Irish Bar), was very congenial to me, and was—and still is—esteemed by me as a high honour, just as I also esteem my appointment some time previously as a public examiner in the law school of Dublin University, a distinction so gratifying as to atone for any irritation I had felt towards that institution for its examining methods. In preparing my lectures I discovered, almost as a revelation, the great differences between the Irish and British constitutions, which until then I had hardly realised. I then perceived in all their fulness the amazing distinctions in the practice and law of those constitutions: that the essential preservatives of the British Constitution and the fundamental laws MR. JOHN BRIGHT of Great Britain were in some cases not extended to Ireland for centuries after their enactment in England; that in other cases they were not extended to Ireland at all; and that even those that were so extended came only after long intervals and in mutilated form. I came to the conclusion that the aim of the Irish patriot party, in and out of Parliament, was to extend to Ireland the rights gained by England at the Revolution, and thus to apply the British Constitution to Ireland in spirit as well as in form; whereas the aim of the English Government was, on the contrary, to make the Irish Constitution (in the words used by Mr. Fox in the English House of Commons) “a mirror in which the abuses of the English Constitution are strongly reflected.”

I made a list of the chief differences and distinctions between the Irish and the British Constitutions as disclosed in the course of my studies, and towards the end of 1885 I published a little book with the title, The Irish Parliament: What It Was, and What It Did, which has had a large circulation. Mr. Gladstone wrote to the publishers: “The book contains, I think, within a wonderfully narrow compass, the heart and pith of a large as well as a sad chapter of Irish history.” On the death of Mr. Bright one of his sons sent me his father’s copy of my little book, very carefully underlined in pencil, initialled at the end with the date on which he finished reading it, and with traces on its leaves of tobacco ashes which fell from John Bright’s pipe. That copy, with deep gratitude to its sender, I carefully preserve among my chief treasures.^[4]

In view of the admittedly random character of these reminiscences, it will perhaps not be out of place here to say more of Mr. Bright. Although I sat in the House of Commons with him from 1887 till his lamented death in 1889, I never had the privilege of hearing him speak nor of being introduced to him. Then, at the end of his life, he struck me as a man who regarded the House of Commons as a scene that had outgrown him: he seemed to feel that the incidents there enacted belonged to a world no longer his. At a time when his counsels would have been of inestimable value, and when, if he had been kindly and respectfully treated, he could probably have settled the legislative relations of Great Britain and Ireland, a sense of estrangement from politics was forced on his extraordinarily sensitive temperament. It came from the heart-rending severances of old friendships, from the misunderstanding on political grounds with Mr. Gladstone, from a heedless and callous remark by a man of the kindliest temperament to the effect that his intellectual powers were failing. To me it is pleasant to remember that the eulogy MR. JOSEPH CHAMBERLAIN pronounced on Mr. Bright in the House of Commons after his death by Mr. Justin McCarthy, then the Vice-Chairman of the Irish Party, has gained an abiding place in literature as one of the most touching tributes of respect and affection ever uttered.

It was the speech of Mr. Chamberlain on the same occasion that first inspired in me the personal admiration which I have always felt for him, notwithstanding our differences, however acute. Mr. Chamberlain’s reference to Mr. Bright’s affection for dogs and cats, which he himself shared, was criticised at the time as beneath the dignity of the occasion; but its effect on myself was to make me realise for the first time that Mr. Chamberlain was a kindly, tender-hearted man, very human in his sensibilities, who, if he had been treated with sympathy and not with insult, might have proved a friend instead of a foe to the Irish cause and a powerful factor in a successful settlement of the Irish question.

At the General Election of 1874 (the first General Election after I had come of age), at that of 1880, and at that of 1885, when Mr. Parnell had announced that the restoration of the Irish Parliament would henceforth be the sole aim of the Irish National Party, I could, had I so desired, have been returned to the House of Commons. But I thought the time was premature.

The book that I issued in 1885 (which received, as I have stated, Mr. Gladstone’s commendation) was followed in the spring of 1886 by another volume, written at Mr. Gladstone’s suggestion and request, under the title, English Interference with Irish Industries. Then, on the eve of the introduction of the Home Rule Bill in April, 1886, I went to London for an interview with Mr. Parnell, who received me courteously and even cordially. He had asked me so far back as 1879 to enter the House of Commons. I told Mr. Parnell that I was now prepared to join the Irish Party and enter the House of Commons in the event of the offer of a seat. But at the General Election of that year no seat was available, and I went to Scotland and spoke on the Liberal platforms on behalf of the Home Rule candidates.^[1] In the following year I stood for South Donegal and was elected.

I was then still lecturing at the King’s Inns. The Benchers, knowing little of the circumstances, resented my going into Parliament, and regarded my adhesion to Home Rule as a betrayal of themselves. To my very great sorrow, old and dear friends became estranged. A dinner given in my honour by the students of the King’s Inns, over which Mr. John Redmond presided, gave great offence. Complaint and remonstrance were made of my attendance in Parliament on lecture days, although the other Professor, Mr. Dunbar Barton, now Sir D. Plunket Barton, proved a true friend, despite the fact that he was opposed to me in politics, and took my lecture days when I was absent.^[2] I am very chary of saying anything to the disparagement of men who are no longer with us, and of whom I desire to think with kindness and not with bitterness; but I am constrained to say that the Benchers MR. SPEAKER acted unworthily in this matter. They clearly desired to enforce my resignation while shrinking from dismissing me. They even passed a resolution that in the future a Professor on becoming a Member of the House of Commons should vacate his Chair; and, led by Lord Ashbourne, who had once professed to be my friend, they showed an open hostility towards me which was intended to hurt my practice at the Bar. Necessarily, since their hostility amounted to a moral boycott, that effect was achieved.

Mr. Gladstone once felicitously compared the House of Commons with a school. A school it most strikingly resembles—a school of which the Speaker is the headmaster. It is not perhaps generally realised that the House of Commons without a Speaker is a body without a head, and, as such, of necessity wholly powerless. There are Deputy-Speakers and Chairmen and Deputy-Chairmen, but these officials, if the Speakership be vacant, are like bars from which the electric current has been removed. Their official existence is suspended when there is no Speaker. The Speaker is the representative of the House of Commons. He is the “Moderator of Debate,” the maintainer of order, whose rulings are regarded, to all intents and purposes, as absolute. A successful appeal to the House against a ruling of a Speaker would be incompatible with his retention of the Chair for an instant. His rule is practically despotic, and the powers with which he is invested are so great and comprehensive that their strict enforcement would render debate impossible. The Speaker is usually the most trusted and most respected member of the House and on terms of esteem and regard with every member. His vast powers he holds and exercises, not as the master of the House, but as the exponent of its wants and wishes and as a trustee for its benefit. In two-and-thirty years’ experience I have heard very few rulings from the Chair which have not been in consonance with the general sense of the House, and I have never heard a ruling from the Chair, whether its occupant was Speaker or Deputy-Speaker or Chairman or Deputy-Chairman, to which the most remorseless critic could honestly impute conscious bias. I have served under three Speakers, Mr. Peel, Mr. Gully and Mr. Lowther, with all of whom I have had differences, but to whose high sense of duty and majestic impartiality I have unreservedly paid my tribute.

Mr. Speaker Peel occupied the Chair during the first eight years of my life in the House of Commons. He was a highly-strung, sensitive man. He inherited the temperament of his father, Sir Robert Peel, the great Prime Minister.^[3] Mr. Peel’s first election to the Chair was due to Mr. Gladstone’s love for his father, with whom the great Liberal leader, in early years, had been a prime favourite. Before his MR. SPEAKER PEEL elevation to the Speakership Mr. Peel, as I have heard from Mr. Parnell, showed extreme hostility to the Irish National Party and was bitterly opposed to Home Rule. His previous attitude on the Home Rule question undoubtedly affected Parnell against him. Peel’s efforts, in the main successful, to exercise self-control and to master irritation were magnificent. I have seen him wince at things which his judgment precluded him from ruling out of order. When rising from the Chair in an endeavour to quell disorder he has appeared to me, in form and expression and gesture, as a replica of the statue of his father in Westminster Abbey. His smile always reminded me of O’Connell’s terrible description of the smile of Sir Robert Peel, “like a gleam of sunshine on the plate of a coffin.”

Mr. Peel had a loud but not discordant voice, and his calls to order were given in the tone of an officer in command of troops. I confess I never felt at ease in speaking in the House of Commons with Peel in the Chair, and I often had the idea from his movement from one side of the Chair to the other and his constant handling of the order paper that he was “on the pounce” to call me to order. I also had the feeling that he was endeavouring to be fair to me, and he was, I am bound to say, successful in that endeavour. I was never violently in conflict with him. I was never required by him to withdraw anything I had said, but he has frequently called me to order for “irrelevance,” a matter of which he was the sole judge. I often thought his judgment mistaken, and these episodes led me to study the rules of debate and standing orders with an intense application, which eventually secured me from Mr. Peel’s stentorian cry of order unless—what a confession!—I was a conscious offender.

Mr. Peel was not, in my judgment, a great Speaker, but at one supreme moment he rose to the occasion. In July, 1893, when the House of Commons was in committee, some highly provocative language used by Mr. Joseph Chamberlain created much excitement and bad feeling. An altercation between Sir Edward Carson and Mr. Logan induced one of Carson’s friends to intervene in the interest of peace. The intervention was taken as an act of hostility by one of Logan’s friends. There followed blows and then a mêlée. Peel instantly resumed the Chair, which he had left when the House was in committee, and in a few words splendidly intonated called the House to a sense of its dignity and implored it to refrain from tarnishing its renown.

Mr. T. M. Healy, who had many encounters with Mr. Peel and in his régime was frequently suspended, made against him one of the cleverest and most adroit attacks ever made on a person in authority. In debate on a new standing order giving increased powers to the Speaker, Mr. Healy said he would not object to such a standing order if conferred on the present occupant of the Chair, in whose judgment and fairness there was universal confidence, but he felt men might attain the Chair in succession MR. T. M. HEALY to the present Speaker in whom such confidence would not be reposed. A gentleman of the Speaker’s exalted qualities was not likely to succeed him. Mr. Healy, speaking from a corner seat just below the gangway, described a possible Speaker who might be a subservient drudge of the Treasury Bench, always ruling with an eye to the favour of the Government and amenable to social influences. The Speaker bore this veiled attack in silence. Mr. Healy then with candour told the Speaker that, much as the Irish members admired him, he would not have been their choice. The Irish members were not sufficiently numerous to be able to place one of their own party in the Chair, otherwise they would have placed there a man who excelled even the present Speaker in the qualities essential for the Chair; he alluded, of course, to his friend the member for Cavan. The member referred to was Mr. Biggar, who was then notorious as the protagonist of obstruction. The Speaker’s patience at length was overcome. “I call,” he said in thundering tones of rage, “on the hon. member no longer to pursue this line of argument.” Healy assumed an air of embarrassment and confusion. “I hope,” he said, “the member for Cavan will not be offended by my having compared him even remotely with you.”

That Mr. Speaker Peel was able to overcome his prejudice against Irish Nationalists is proved by the fact that he wished his son to seek for hints as to the method and manner of parliamentary speaking from Mr. Sexton, the great Irish parliamentary orator of whom Mr. Gladstone once wrote, “What a master he!”

I remember being immensely amused at seeing Mr. Peel himself, when he had resigned the Chair and had become a peer, being betrayed into a breach of order in the House of Commons, over which he had presided with éclat. He came into the Peers’ Gallery of the House of Commons, and on sitting down, forgetful of the rule that peers must be uncovered in their gallery of the House of Commons, he wore his hat until an attendant came to call him to order.

Mr. Speaker Gully succeeded Mr. Peel as the result of a contest for the Speakership, an incident for which in just sixty years there had been no parallel, the majority being the narrow one of eleven votes. The new Speaker had taken little if any part in parliamentary proceedings. Mr. Balfour, with more candour than geniality, told the House of Commons he did not know Mr. Gully even by appearance till he became a candidate for the Chair. He was an eminent leader on the Northern Circuit who had refused a puisne judgeship because he did not think his seat—Carlisle—was safe for the Liberal Party, of which he was a member. On Mr. Peel’s resignation in 1895 Mr. Courtney, who had served as Chairman of Committees from 1885 till 1892, would have been acceptable to the Conservatives. But Mr. Courtney, as Chairman of Committees, had caused Mr. Labouchere to be suspended from MR. SPEAKER GULLY the service of the House by “naming” him for stating he did not believe Lord Salisbury’s denial of having helped a highly-placed personage, charged with a detestable crime, to leave the country. The propriety of Mr. Courtney’s action was strongly questioned at the time, and it was said that Mr. Gladstone was prepared to put down on the paper a resolution condemnatory of the ruling that Mr. Labouchere’s words were out of order. The incident undoubtedly deprived the House of Commons of a man splendidly equipped for the office of Speaker.

Mr. Gully came to the Chair without the usual parliamentary experience. He studied the rules and had the invaluable assistance of the clerks at the table, but he brought to the Chair qualifications which suited him better for a judgeship than a Speakership. He was inclined to treat the Orders of the House as a judge would regard rules of court, as rigid and not elastic nor capable of being varied to suit circumstances. He was, moreover, fairness itself, as fairness would be regarded in a judge; but not as fairness is regarded in a Speaker of the House of Commons, whose duty it is to secure a fair hearing for the minority, but to lean, owing to the necessity of the discharge of business, to the majority. Mr. Gully, moreover, was inclined to regard a motion in the House of Commons from the standpoint of a judge trying a record in a court, and to intervene in a manner quite suitable to a judge but wholly unsuitable to a Speaker. His genuine kindness of heart, sweetness of temper and wit won all hearts to him, and his tenure of the Speakership would have been, if not a success, at least not a conspicuous failure, had it not been for the deplorable error in bringing in police constables to the House of Commons in March, 1901, in order forcibly to remove eleven Irish members for refusing either to leave the Chamber or to take part in a division in which without any criticism being allowed from the Irish benches—no Irish member had been called on to speak—several millions were voted. This terrible mistake, in which no unworthy motive was imputed—it was regarded as an error of judgment—would, if Mr. Gully had not resigned the Chair in 1905, have rendered his re-election the subject of an acrimonious opposition.

Mr. Gully’s sallies of humour were quite irresistible. Here are a couple of which I was the victim. He had told me at question-time that I was not asking for information but imparting it. Sir William Harcourt, the leader of the Opposition, was absent, and some of his colleagues on the Front Opposition Bench, in reference to some disputed matter, began each of them in succession an explanation with the words, “Speaking only for myself.” Two or three of the wiseacres having adopted this formula, I rose in a chaffing humour and began with much solemnity, “Speaking only for myself . . .” When the roar of laughter had subsided the Speaker gently said: “Order! Order! The hon. gentleman had no right to speak for himself MR. SPEAKER GULLY or for anyone else. This whole proceeding has been out of order.”

He informed an aggrieved member, who complained that he had been in the House of Lords and had missed a division in the House of Commons, of which notice had not reached him, that attendance at the Lords’ debates was not a duty but a luxury, and that he had in consequence no redress.

Mr. Gully was not above a mild practical joke. In some debate, in which I desired at a later stage to intervene, I rose, not to catch the Speaker’s eye, but to intimate to him that I would like to be called later on. I had no idea, as the Speaker must have known, of his calling on me to speak at that time. To my amazement I heard my name. “Did you call me, sir?” I said. The Speaker quietly said: “Yes,” amid an outburst of good-humoured laughter. I was wholly unprepared and was taken completely aback.

Mr. Speaker Gully was the subject of a motion of censure in connection with a ruling from the Chair which led to the suspension of Mr. Dillon from the service of the House. Mr. Dillon, in a debate during the Boer War, interrupted a speech of Mr. Chamberlain’s by saying that someone, whose conduct Mr. Chamberlain was commending, was a traitor. Mr. Chamberlain paused, stared at Mr. Dillon, and said: “The hon. gentleman is a good judge of a traitor.” This immediately produced from Mr. Dillon the unparliamentary appreciation of Mr. Chamberlain as “a d——d liar.” The Speaker, in discharge of his absolute duty, called on Mr. Dillon to withdraw that expression, which he refused to do unless Mr. Chamberlain were called on to withdraw the description he had given of him as a good judge of a traitor. The Speaker refused Mr. Dillon’s request and named him to the House.

That veracious chronicler, the late Sir Henry Lucy, in describing the scene, said that my voice could be heard in loud protest above the shouts of all the other participators in disorder. I happened, however, to be at the time not in Westminster but in Edinburgh. Notice of motion of a vote of censure on the Speaker was immediately given by Mr. Redmond, but the Government refused a day for its discussion. By the fortune of the ballot an opportunity was given for the discussion of the matter. It caused much interest, as no motion for censuring a Speaker had been brought forward for eighty years. The motion was, of course, defeated, but its discussion beyond all question weakened the position of Mr. Gully in the Chair, and indeed lessened the moral force exercised by him. It so happened that Mr. Gully had called me to order some time previously for saying in debate that Mr. Chamberlain was an expert in honour. I remembered the incident, as it was one of the very few occasions on which any exception to my words had been taken by the Chair. I gave the Hon. Edward Blake, a former Prime Minister of Ontario, who made the principal speech in support of the motion of censure, the record of my delinquency and of the call to order MR. SPEAKER GULLY by which it was visited, pointing out that Mr. Chamberlain’s words: “A good judge of a traitor,” were not visited by condemnation from the Chair although at least as strong as mine. The ordeal to which the Speaker was subjected, of presiding in the House of Commons over a debate on a motion of censure on himself, was little short of moral torture. Mr. Balfour’s defence of his conduct and the distinction he drew between the innocence of Mr. Chamberlain’s expression in reference to Mr. Dillon in the excitement of the moment and the enormity of my description of Mr. Chamberlain in cold blood, were very ingenious and were relished as an exercise in sophistry by no one more than myself.

Mr. Gully had a charming personality, and his popularity, which was very great, was undoubtedly enhanced by his delightful wife, whose maiden name—Selby—he took for his title as a peer. Mrs. Gully was a fascinating hostess. I remember walking on the Terrace one afternoon with her when she was holding a tiny grandchild by the hand. I suddenly turned round and saw to my horror the little girl on the very point of falling into the basement area. I rushed and caught her. Next day I complained to Mrs. Gully with as much solemnity of expression as I could command of the base ingratitude of the Speaker at question-time that afternoon in forgetting my services to his little grandchild and “dancing on me”!^[4]

Viscount Ullswater, better known as Mr. Lowther, was the last Speaker of the House of Commons in my time. He was, in my judgment, the very best Speaker of all the Speakers in the whole history of Parliament, and in him were combined all the qualities which tend to the formation of a great Speaker. He had previous parliamentary experience both below the gangway and on the Treasury Bench. He had ten years’ experience as Chairman of Committees of Ways and Means and as Deputy-Speaker of the House of Commons, and attained a great and deserved reputation in that capacity. He was a House of Commons man, and the history of the House of Commons from its earliest beginnings can be traced in the history of Mr. Lowther’s family, a member of which was returned to the House of Commons in the reign of Edward I. But Mr. Lowther had one enormous advantage in being bred to the law and having a legal training without experience of actual practice at the Bar, which is a disadvantage to a Speaker, as it entails a tendency to a strict enforcement of rules despite grave objection to their operation in particular and exceptional cases. Mr. Lowther had, moreover, the gift of humour, of knowledge of character, of inspiring confidence and of making every member of the House of Commons regard him as a friend. He had, likewise, another great advantage which alike increased the power of the Chair and secured the avoidance of drastic action. That advantage was the establishment of the new standing order, which enables a Speaker, VISCOUNT ULLSWATER by reason of grave disorder, to adjourn for a time the sitting of the House. This order had been passed in the time of Mr. Gully, but it was first put into operation by Mr. Lowther when in the Chair as Deputy-Speaker. It has prevented wholesale suspensions of members and lasting bitterness of feeling: its exercise has restored good temper and good sense, and has relieved the Speaker of a position of all but insuperable difficulty and intolerable embarrassment.

The most touching incident I have ever witnessed in the Palace of Westminster was on the occasion of the silver wedding of Mr. and Mrs. Lowther in May, 1914. There was then a presentation, on behalf of the House of Commons as a whole, of gifts, very simple in themselves, but of great significance when associated with the glowing tributes paid by the leaders of all parties in the House to the affection and esteem in which Mr. and Mrs. Lowther were most deservedly held. If these words are read by Viscount Ullswater, he will, I am quite certain, acknowledge the truth of my statement that his wife, whose kindness, sympathy and charm of manner made her revered by the members of the House of Commons, was a most powerful factor in his great success in the Chair.

I have already said that one of my introducers to the House of Commons was the late Mr. John Redmond. The day on which this introduction took place was memorable for the introduction that immediately preceded my own: that of Mr. (Viscount) Goschen, who had first been returned to the House of Commons, as member for the City of London, in 1863, four-and-twenty years previously. He had been a Cabinet Minister so far back as 1866, when he had only attained his thirty-first year. Mr. Goschen, who was a renowned parliamentary fighter, had sat for several constituencies when he lost his seat for East Edinburgh at the General Election of 1886. Although he had been all his life a Liberal, he was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Salisbury Government early in 1887, on the resignation of Lord Randolph Churchill, VISCOUNT GOSCHEN who had “forgotten Goschen,” and he was then returned for the safe Unionist seat of St. George’s, Hanover Square, which he held till his elevation to the peerage in 1900. Mr. Goschen was one of the ablest parliamentary debaters of his own or of any time, and as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1887 till 1892 took a leading, almost the principal, position on the Unionist side in Irish debates. He played the part of “whipping boy” to Mr. Balfour in the early period of his Irish Chief Secretaryship, on which Mr. Balfour entered with a limited experience, and, as it seemed at first, a very modest intellectual equipment for an office beset with extraordinary difficulties.

Mr. Goschen had a weak, hoarse, uninteresting voice, and short sight which compelled him, when referring to a document, to hold the paper close to his eyes. He had, however, a perfect knowledge of the House of Commons in all its moods and tenses, a retentive memory and extraordinary alertness by which he never missed a good debating point. He had, moreover, acquired to perfection the conversational style and method of implied appeal to the good sense of the House of Commons, which were irresistible. He actually invited interruptions of his speeches, and then turned such interruptions to deadly effect by his well-considered rejoinders.

I remember one occasion when his opponents, by refraining from interrupting, made his speech a comparative failure. Mr. Goschen asked what could the honourable gentlemen say in reply to such and such a statement of facts? Could they deny its accuracy? When his opponents, who had agreed amongst themselves to allow him to go on undisturbed, took in an obvious manner to conversation, he asked whether it was kind to treat him thus, and urged that the assumed indifference arose from the fact that there was not—there could not be—any reply to his argument. The long-expected interruptions never came, and Mr. Goschen sat down discomfited.

This great man had a strange dislike of being reminded of his Jewish antecedents, and Mr. Labouchere, in one of his waggish moods, while defending boycotting in Ireland, said, with an admirably assumed solemnity of manner, that he could not see the reason of Mr. Goschen’s repugnance to boycotting, which was not much more than exclusive dealing, to which Mr. Goschen surely could not object, since “we read that the Jews had no dealings with the Samaritans.”

Very soon after the General Election of 1886 a very strong reaction in favour of Liberalism set in, by-election after by-election resulting in the loss of seats to the Unionists. In an outdoor speech in 1889 Mr. Goschen declared, in reference to these defeats, that the Government would “yield neither to time [the reference being to Mr. Gladstone’s advanced years] nor to crime [disorder in Ireland].” The expression, which was deeply resented at the time, elicited from Mr. Gladstone the remark that the times and the seasons were in other hands than SIR CARNE RASCH ours, and there was nothing particularly noble in the project of playing the Septennial Act against an old man’s life.

A few weeks after I had become a member of the House of Commons I went down to speak at a meeting at Southend, and attacked the sitting member, whom, of course, I did not know, merely on political grounds as a member of the Unionist Party. A day or two afterwards a gentleman of very soldierly bearing came up to me and said in the most charming way imaginable: “I see you have been giving me a bad quarter of an hour the other night in my constituency.” I said that I was quite sure I had said nothing unkind of him, that I was merely attacking his party as he would attack mine, and I added with a smile that if I had seen him I should have been completely disarmed.

This was the beginning of a friendship of a very close and intimate character which existed between Major Rasch (afterwards Sir Carne Rasch) and myself till his lamented death.^[1]

I was on terms of too great intimacy with Rasch to ask him, when he did not of his own accord tell me, how he got his baronetcy, though I would have liked to know, since to a gentleman of his antecedents it was no social elevation whatever. I can, however, say he got it by no fawning sycophancy and no subservient adulation of the powers that be.

Mr. Gerald Balfour, when Chief Secretary for Ireland, in debate on the conditions of severe distress and the imminence of famine in the Irish congested districts, said, no doubt thoughtlessly and on the spur of the moment, that he had not chicken and champagne to give to these people. Speaking from the Ministerial side, Rasch severely censured Mr. Gerald Balfour’s words, to which, he said, it would be hard to find a parallel unless in the famous expression of Marie Antoinette.^[2]

Again, I brought forward a series of grave charges against the War Office for deeds of commission and omission. Rasch followed me, saying that he thoroughly agreed with every word I had said, but would only touch on the points he wished specially to bring before the attention of the House. Within a very short time after these speeches the Government bestowed a baronetcy on him: a true friend, whose loyalty to his party was apparent notwithstanding his plain speaking.

I would wish to say a word about a class of men whose names seldom appear in the newspaper press, and who seldom intervene in debate, but who, nevertheless, wield great influence in the House, where their talents and learning and force of character are universally respected. I would name the late Mr. Herbert Robertson as typical of such men. His knowledge in every domain of intellectual achievement was almost unrivalled. LIEUT.-GENERAL LAURIE A strangely diffident manner and a careful keeping of himself in the background were fatal to recognized success in the House of Commons, and he suffered himself to be “hustled” by persons with no pretensions to his ability. He won, however, two notable triumphs for his party: by the defeat of Mr. Fletcher Moulton for South Hackney in 1895, and by his subsequent defeat of Horatio Bottomley. In recognition of the first of these successes he was given the compliment of seconding the address to the Crown on the opening of the Parliament of 1895. He was greatly delighted when I told him I heard a gentleman sitting near me as he was speaking remarking to a friend: “This man has a clever wife who won the election for him.” Mrs. Robertson, a lady of ancient Irish family, to whom I am proud to be related, has devoted her life and ample means to Christian and philanthropic work among the poor, and was, no doubt, a powerful factor in her husband’s success in winning and retaining a seat associated with Radicalism.

Yet another member of the House of Commons who rarely intervened in debate was Lieut.-General Laurie, C.B., a Crimean hero and most distinguished soldier, who had previously sat in the House of Commons of the Dominion of Canada, where he had large estates. His advice on all matters in relation to the army was sought by men of all parties although he was an ardent Conservative. I remember I had questioned Mr. St. John Brodrick (Earl of Midleton), who was then Secretary of State for War, in reference to the suppression in an official report during the Boer War of the name of the Dublin Fusiliers, and the substitution therefor of the name of another regiment, to whom was attributed the Irishmen’s gallant conduct. I received from Mr. Brodrick a very curt reply, followed by an unqualified refusal to inquire into the matter. The day following a letter reached me from Sir Redvers Buller stating that he had heard of my question in the House of Commons and Mr. Brodrick’s reply, and that the mistake in the dispatch was a clerical error which should be corrected. I mentioned the incident to General Laurie, who knew that at the time the relations between Mr. Brodrick and Sir Redvers Buller were strained. He at once said: “Buller clearly wishes you to read the letter in the House.” I accordingly did so by way of a personal explanation, to the discomfiture of Mr. Brodrick, who thought I had risen to apologise to him for some error into which I had fallen in my question.

The House of Commons is a good judge of character, and quickly discerns the self-seeking hypocrites who are loud in their religious professions. It, however, respects and admires men who consistently endeavour to bring the principles of Christianity into the work of Parliament and thereby to ennoble and purify parliamentary life. The late Sir John Kennaway, the Father of the House of Commons, a man whose devotion not merely to the profession but to the practice of the highest LORD AVEBURY ideals of Christian life resembled that of Wilberforce in another generation, was, though he seldom participated in debate, a powerful factor in the elevation of the moral tone of the House, and everyone seemed the better for his presence.

And then there were, in my time in the House of Commons, men of the very highest ability and of the most richly-stored minds, whose speeches, to the few who were undeterred by their unattractive manner of speaking, were mines of information from which men of inferior intellectual capacity could cull material for more attractive speeches. Dr. Laurence, in the Parliaments of the close of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, and Mr. Kinglake, the great historian of the Crimean War, at a later period, were types of this class of parliamentarian. That unfortunate class was also represented by Sir John Lubbock (Lord Avebury), who will always live in literature and the world of scientific research, and was an ideal university member. Nevertheless, his speeches, replete with information, with facts and arguments of great ingenuity and originality, splendidly marshalled and, if I may say so, magnificently presented, were never listened to save by a select few who did not disdain a delightful intellectual treat because the treasures of wisdom and learning were placed before them by a gentleman who spoke in an apparently languid fashion and had an uninteresting voice from which the “bow-wow” tone was wholly absent.

And then I have known men in Parliament of the very highest parliamentary ability who, if they had so desired, could have been a distinct power in the House of Commons, but who simply did not care to take what lay ready to their hands without effort—while others have spent years of their lives in the vain attempt to achieve success. Mr. Bromley Davenport, for instance, rarely if ever intervened in debate, although he was constant in attendance in the House of Commons. He could have been taken as typical of the silent member. When, however, a dispute between the owner and the workers in a mine became so serious as to engage the attention of Parliament, Mr. Bromley Davenport astonished his friends by the ability, energy and great debating skill and power with which he entered into the defence, through thick and thin, of the mine-owner. Then, when the crisis was at an end, he relapsed into silence, indifferent to the parliamentary fame which was actually pressed on his acceptance.

The titular leader of the House when I entered Parliament was Mr. W. H. Smith (who died in 1891 on the same day as Parnell), an elderly man, the realisation of English middle-class respectability, the head of the great firm of W. H. Smith & Son, newspaper vendors and booksellers. Mr. Smith would have been an improvement on Hogarth’s “Industrious Apprentice.” He would have been an ideal Chairman of a Young Men’s Christian Association. He was constantly referring to his duty (he pronounced the word “dooty”) to the MR. W. H. SMITH House and the country, and was known as “Old Morality.” His look and attitude of firm rebuke at what he deemed to be infractions of parliamentary propriety were excruciatingly comic, although they were meant to be the expression of offended dignity.^[3] He sat erect on the Treasury Bench, fixed his eyes on the ceiling and, placing his right leg over the other, protruded the limb at a right angle. I remember, in the House of Commons one evening, a lady said to me she would so love to see a parliamentary row. I told her that there was not much chance of it that evening, but that perhaps when she went up to the Ladies’ Gallery I would be able to make Mr. W. H. Smith assume his attitude, which I described to her, of virtuous indignation. By an interruption of a speech I succeeded completely in my amiable object.^[4]

Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman told me a good story of the youth of Mr. W. H. Smith. Sir Henry had been studying for matriculation at Cambridge with the vicar of a parish in Kent. In the neighbourhood, the father of Mr. W. H. Smith, who had attained wealth and was socially ambitious, had taken a residence. The family were gradually deserting Nonconformity for the Established Church. Mr. W. H. Smith was a good young man who took himself very seriously. On a Sunday afternoon the vicar and his pupil were taking a stroll, when they were attracted by a scene of excitement in a neighbouring field where some rustics had gathered. They went there, and saw that a cow had got into a ditch and could not get out, and that Mr. W. H. Smith had taken off his coat and vest and was assisting in the effort to get the cow out of the ditch. “Well,” said the vicar to Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, “this is the first time I have ever seen an ox and an ass fallen into a ditch on the Sabbath day.”

Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s more solid qualities have thrown into the background his pleasant wit, of which there were many manifestations on every day of his life. It is easy to give an illustration or two of this. The Kaiser had presented to Great Britain a statue of William III. Sir James Craig, with portentous solemnity, urged by way of question to Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, as Prime Minister, that Belfast or Portadown, as Orange citadels, would be the appropriate site for LORD BERESFORD the Kaiser’s thoughtful gift. Sir Henry, who had been pressed by many questions on the subject, terminated Sir James Craig’s importunity by telling him that Kensington Palace had been chosen for the site of the statue of “The Deliverer,” but that Sir James Craig would be consoled at hearing that it would be placed in close proximity to the Orangery.

The late Lord Beresford, better known as Lord Charles Beresford, concealed, beneath a breezy, hail-fellow-well-met manner, intense personal ambition and desire to live in the mouths of men. His doings were recorded under attractive headings in the Press. He was on one occasion the subject of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s criticism. Sir Henry spoke from notes at which he looked carefully and solemnly as he said: “The noble lord has the misfortune, to his regret as we all know, to be the subject of frequent mention in the Press,” and looked surprised at the roar of boisterous laughter produced by the remark.

Sir Henry was the coiner of happy and taking terms such as “Ulsteria,” “methods of barbarism,” and many others. He was, moreover, a man of resolute purpose, and of infinite courage in facing intrigues for personal purposes to oust him from party leadership. His prompt action in calling a meeting of the Liberal Party in July, 1901, discomfited and defeated the plotters’ game. He showed, too, great restraint and self-control, when in December, 1905, on Mr. Balfour’s resignation of the Prime Ministership without dissolution, he consented to form a Government before the opinion of the country had been definitely ascertained by a General Election, and thus saved it from a régime which would have been as traitorous to the progress of popular rights and liberties as the disastrous premiership of Lord Rosebery from 1894 till 1895.

I wish to place on record my gratitude to Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman for giving me the powerful imprimatur of his support, from the very first, in the movement which I commenced in 1899 against the union of the office of Minister of the Crown and director of a public company. On becoming Prime Minister in 1905 Sir Henry established a rule that prevented this abuse, and since that date the rule has inflexibly been maintained, so that the Treasury Bench of the House of Commons is no longer a sty for guinea-pigs.

I have already referred ^[5] to the cession of Heligoland to Germany.^[6] It was one of the most stupendous blunders in the history of the world. But for it humanity could not have been scourged by the Great War. How such a thing came to be accomplished is, even now, difficult to state; but it is clear that public opinion never realised the importance of the little island, and that even the HELIGOLAND leaders went into the matter without due consideration of such a vital project. On June 2nd, 1890, the late Lord Pirbright, who was then Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, was repudiating with indignation, from the Treasury Bench in the House of Commons, the suggestion that there could be any idea in the minds of the Government of such a surrender. He said the cession of Heligoland was as little within the contemplation of the Government as the surrender of the Channel Islands. Yet no more than a fortnight later, Lord Salisbury, Prime Minister and Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, announced his plan for the cession. And the cession, it then appeared, was to be effected by statute, a method of procedure wholly unnecessary—unless the statesmen responsible desired to be able to say, if their conduct was ever impugned, that they had acted with the wishes of Parliament and under parliamentary sanction. In other words, these statesmen did not consider the matter enough to realise the folly of their action, but only enough to realise that the responsibility had better be placed on other shoulders. But if the Government knew little of what it was doing, the House of Commons certainly knew less. The members were utterly ignorant of the island’s extreme strategic value. The small minority—in which I am proud to say I was included, as were also Lord Channing de Wellingborough and Mr. F. S. Stevenson, who are still with us—that opposed the statute met with ridicule and gibes. Yet Lord Salisbury (who died in August, 1903, eleven years before the beginning of the Great War), is stated to have admitted towards the close of his life that the cession was a grave mistake in policy. And its fruits are clear and filled with sadness.

On March 11th, 1892, I moved that the votes of three members, Sir L. Pelly, Mr. Burdett-Coutts and Sir John Puleston, be disallowed. These votes were given in favour of a grant to the British East Africa Company in aid of a preliminary survey for a railway from the coast to Lake Victoria Nyanza, which had been undertaken on behalf of the Government by the British East Africa Company. Two of the members whose votes were challenged were directors and shareholders, while the third was a shareholder of the Company. Mr. Balfour opposed the motion, and was supported by Mr. Goschen as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Mr. Gladstone in a masterly speech supported the disallowance of the votes. The Government, who thought their majority would be small, refrained from putting on Government tellers. I had not the very slightest hope of carrying the motion. I “told” in the “No” Lobby, and on coming into the House I passed by the Front Opposition Bench. Mr. Gladstone, who was sitting on that Bench, asked me in a tone of excitement the number in the “No” Lobby. “149, sir,” I replied. “Then,” said Mr. Gladstone, “the ‘Ayes’ are 154, and you, Mr. MacNeill, have won.” I took the paper given me by the clerk and announced the numbers SIR LEWIS PELLY to the Chair—an announcement which was received with great enthusiasm.^[7]

The great importance of the principle for the maintenance of which this motion was instituted, and the serious tone of the proceedings, were not diminished by an incident which savours of the ludicrous and presents yet another illustration of the strange interpolation of the comic element, no matter how grave the question at issue, which is so marked a characteristic of all the proceedings of the House of Commons. No reflection was made on the members whose votes were impugned. The grant for which these gentlemen had voted would, if divided among the shareholders of the company, have given each shareholder a sum of about fifteen shillings, if so much. On the moving of the motion, each of the three members was heard in explanation of his position, and then the Chairman, in accordance with practice, asked them to withdraw from the Chamber of the House during the discussion. This direction produced good-humoured laughter. One gentleman, however, Sir Lewis Pelly, under the impression that his honour was affected, was only prevailed on to comply with the direction of the Chairman by the persuasion of friends experienced in parliamentary practice, who assured him that in no respect whatever had his honour or personal conduct been impugned. The three members were heartily cheered in every quarter as they retired from the Chamber.

Another matter on which I persistently worked in the House of Commons was to secure the abolition of the practice of flogging boys in the Navy for petty offences. Lord Fisher has recorded that he witnessed this practice in operation, and that as a little boy he swooned at the sight. For years I was unsuccessful in this crusade (which was stimulated by a powerful letter from Mr. Charles Doran, the Shakespearean actor); but here again Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman championed my cause, and on becoming Prime Minister one of his first acts was the abolition of flogging in the Navy. He was good enough to mark the occasion with a very generous appreciation of my efforts and warm congratulation on their success.

I have a still more moving recollection of this kindly-hearted gentleman. I had been saved from the jaws of death by the late Sir Christopher Nixon, a Dublin physician of great eminence and to me a valued friend. Stating the circumstances, I asked Sir Henry to recommend him for a baronetcy. He complied with my request, and intimated to me that if I so desired it there was nothing in his gift that he would not confer on me.

I once applied to Sir Henry, on the strength of a requisition signed by a majority of the members of the House of Commons, for an opportunity for the discussion of a case of grave judicial misconduct. My application was granted. Sir Henry strongly SIR HENRY CAMPBELL-BANNERMAN reprobated the judge’s conduct in debate, but suggested that as the case was scarcely one for dismissal it would be well that I should be content with the trend of the debate and withdraw the motion; advice on which I, of course, acted. Five years afterwards the learned judge to whose conduct I had directed attention revived the memory of the incident in a charge to a grand jury in which he vehemently attacked me. I took no notice of the attack, but it was brought (through the medium of a question of which I knew nothing to Mr. Asquith, who was then Prime Minister) to the notice of the House of Commons, and was visited by the severest rebuke ever administered to an English judge by a Minister of the Crown.

Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman had the inestimable solace in an hour of terrible bereavement of the extension to him of the heartfelt sympathy of the House of Commons, which is, as a whole, a very human, tender-hearted body. Sir Henry’s absence from the House was mentioned in the Chamber by someone who did not know the reason of it, namely the illness, which eventually proved fatal, of Lady Campbell-Bannerman. He was thus compelled on his return to refer to his absence. Speaking with an emotion which he made no effort to suppress, he said: “For being away on that day I can never make any apology to anyone.” I can never forget the sympathetic cheers which immediately filled the Chamber.

I have mentioned these memories of a great and good man because they illustrate the strength and the depth of personal affection so frequently and prominently found, in spite of party or political influence, in parliamentary life.

I had the privilege of serving in Parliament for seven years, from February, 1887, till March, 1894, with Mr. Gladstone. It is hard to realise the extent of his influence, both in office and in opposition, in the House of Commons. His was indeed a mighty power. Whatever he handled, whether the infinitely great or the infinitely small, on it he concentrated for the time his unparalleled energies and comprehensive genius.^[1] Relics of his fervour in the House of Commons have left their physical traces in the very Chamber itself. At the end of the table of the House of Commons, opposite to each other, are two large boxes, which are kept closed and are only opened when their contents, New Testaments, are required for the taking of the parliamentary oath. The covers of these boxes are deeply indented. The indentations are due to Mr. Gladstone’s habit, when speaking, of bring down the back of his hand with great force on the boxes, the impressions being thus caused by the rings on his fingers. It has been observed that these impressions are deeper on the cover of the box at the Opposition side than on that of the box at the Government side of the House, thus evidencing that Mr. Gladstone was more strongly moved in the making than in the repelling of attack.

I have mentioned that I first saw Mr. Gladstone in 1877 in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, an edifice in itself replete with the memories of a great asserter of freedom. It was in a letter written to me by him that I first saw the letters M.P. after my name. My return for South Donegal was delayed by the factious opposition of an eccentric gentleman named Munster, an Englishman and a Roman Catholic, who never even appeared in the constituency but got himself nominated and incurred the expense of a contested election in gratification of an insane whim. Mr. Gladstone, knowing my return to be a certainty, placed M.P. after my name in anticipation. I may perhaps mention that one of the spoiled voting papers at that election bore against Mr. Munster’s name the words “No Popery,” and against mine the words “No Home Rule”: a very clear indication of the voter’s sentiments.

Mr. Gladstone belonged to a different generation from the majority of the members of the House of Commons, to which he had been first elected fifty-five years before I become a member of that assembly. His was an absolutely unique personality. His gestures, his astonishing dexterity in debate, his power of stirring the deepest emotions, the impression he conveyed of single-mindedness, of MR. GLADSTONE desire to do the right thing and to preserve a good conscience before God, to Whose direction he essayed to submit himself, all worked together to render him a great moral and intellectual influence in the House of Commons—a fact of which every member, irrespective of creed or party, was justly proud. I was then—and I am now—no worshipper of men, but the expression “great man,” so often applied to persons of very modest rank in conduct and in abilities, is, in my judgment, pre-eminently applicable to Mr. Gladstone, whose claim to that title, while he was still with us, was acknowledged as unreservedly by his political opponents as by his supporters.

Mr. Gladstone’s self-restraint and self-command were incomparable. In a great debate, before he rose to reply, he exhibited all the signs of an excitement which he made no effort to conceal or to control. He moved uneasily on the Treasury or Front Opposition Bench, as the case might be, he twisted his cravat, he whispered eagerly to the men at either side. He seized a pen and made a note. His eyes blazed. And then, when he rose in debate, the words of the Speaker as he called “Mr. Gladstone” seemed to have a miraculous effect. Excitement was banished. Strict moderation in expression and closely-reasoned argument prevailed. Mr. Gladstone’s notes, rarely referred to, were not, as they seemed in their formation, a few hurried words written on various scraps of paper, but careful headings of his speech under which the arguments were tabulated. The manner in debate of the great parliamentary orators of bygone days was reproduced, in happy unison with lines of argument appropriate to the wants and wishes of modern times. The House was led on by easy stages from a restrained opening to flights of the very highest eloquence, by which friends and foes were alike entranced, and in which the deadliest blows were inflicted on the arguments of opponents, who were treated not with any formal or studied courtesy, but with the deference that was natural from a high-minded gentleman of richly-stored mind and innate susceptibility to the feelings of others, however wide might be their differences from himself.

Mr. Gladstone was a hard hitter. He has compared Mr. Chamberlain with “the Devil’s Advocate,” whose province it was to find objections to everything and faults in everything, but in that very speech he bore generous tribute to Mr. Chamberlain’s great abilities. Mr. Gladstone’s care not to hurt the feelings of anyone great or small savoured of the punctilious. When he left the House during the speech of a member he carefully conveyed the impression that he would return in a minute. He rose abruptly, as if he had forgotten something or wished hurriedly to consult someone or some book and would return immediately. Albeit unconsciously, he inspired men by no means inclined to be respectful with a feeling of awe in his presence. I remember that on one occasion, during a division in a crowded lobby on a frivolous amendment in MR. GLADSTONE committee to the Home Rule Bill of 1893, Mr. Gladstone sat down to write a hurried note at a table at which several persons, including myself, were writing. He said: “This kind of thing would have broken Daniel O’Connell’s heart.” The observation was addressed to no one in particular, and no one ventured to reply. Then Mr. Gladstone repeated the remark to me, addressing me by name. “No, sir,” I replied, “O’Connell would have been a proud and happy man if he were here with you and the Liberal Party working for the restoration of the Irish Parliament.”

Mr. Gladstone’s power of concentrating his whole faculties on one thing for the moment and his scrupulous economy of time were manifested in the division lobbies, in which, during a division, he wrote numerous letters with astonishing rapidity. On one occasion, when he was thus engaged, Mr. Causton (Lord Southwark), one of the Liberal Whips, came up to him and said: “The Government, sir, will have a bad division this time. I am afraid we shall not have a majority of more than three or four.” He was apparently unmoved by this disconcerting intelligence, and calmly went on with his correspondence.

Mr. Gladstone’s memory was unfailing, and in many domains of political and constitutional history he may be said to have been omniscient. He had stated, in an out-of-doors speech, that Edmund Burke had been opposed to the Irish Union. I ventured to approach him and to ask him how this was, since Edmund Burke died in 1797 and the proposal of a union had not been even broached as a Government measure till the autumn of 1798. “Oh,” said Mr. Gladstone, “do you not remember what Dr. Laurence said?” Mr. Gladstone asked me to accompany him into the library of the House of Commons, and, mounting a library ladder, without reference to a catalogue he brought down a volume of the parliamentary reports, with a debate on the union proposals on January 30th, 1799. He instantly laid his hand on a speech of Dr. Laurence, Burke’s most confidential friend, in which Laurence said that Edmund Burke, in his last illness, had stated to him that a union would be injurious alike to Great Britain and Ireland. Many years afterwards Mr. Gladstone’s grandson, Mr. W. E. G. Gladstone, a young man of genius who would have cast fresh lustre on the name of Gladstone had he survived the Great War, in which he so nobly fell, came up to me shortly after his election to the House of Commons. I had not been introduced to him. I was sitting at a small table in the Members’ Dining-room by myself. He asked whether he might sit with me, said that he had heard that I had a great admiration for his grandfather, and pressed me to give him my impressions. I had what was, to me at least, a very delightful half hour’s converse with him, and afterwards brought him to the library to show him the identical volume of the reports on which his grandfather had immediately laid his hand when showing me the speech of Dr. Laurence.

I only once remember to have been seized with MR. GLADSTONEHouse of Commons fright. I had visited West Donegal and witnessed there scenes of poverty, misery and despair that I can never forget, intensified by the impending eviction of the people from their famine-stricken homes by the armed forces of the Crown, aided by a battering-ram to level the houses to the ground. Mr. Parnell asked me to move the adjournment of the House to call attention to the destitute condition of the poverty-stricken tenants in West Donegal, and the conduct of the Government in employing the forces of the Crown to drive them out of their dwellings. The occasion was, I thought, one for a plain, simple statement of the destitute condition of these people and their sufferings of which I had been an eye-witness. What I had seen had made a very deep and abiding impression on me, and I began to describe my experiences with sincerity and truth. I had uttered only a very few sentences, speaking from below the gangway and addressing myself to the Speaker, when I became conscious of some strange impression from without which I could not understand. I paused, glanced at the Front Opposition Bench, and there saw Mr. Gladstone, sitting at the extreme end of that Bench with his hand to his ear and gazing intently at me with his wondrous eyes. I was taken aback, and for some seconds, which seemed to me an eternity, I was unable to proceed. I looked again towards Mr. Gladstone and then perceived in his expression such a superabounding sympathy that confidence took the place of nervousness and embarrassment, and I felt myself inspired by one who was great not only in intellect but in goodness.

On the day of Mr. Gladstone’s death, when everyone knew that he was passing away, I walked home with the late Sir Richard Jebb, the distinguished scholar who represented Cambridge University and was a great favourite in the House of Commons. Just as we reached Sir Richard Jebb’s house the clocks were striking twelve. He said to me: “What a solemn moment this is when a man who has influenced so powerfully the tide of human affairs is leaving this world.”

Mr. Balfour’s deference to Mr. Gladstone, to whom he was politically opposed, and his admiration for him, were consistent with the endearing qualities which have made him one of the best-loved men of his time.

Mr. Gladstone’s estimate of Mr. Balfour’s genius for statesmanship was formed when Mr. Balfour was little known to the public at large. It may be proved by one incident now all but forgotten. So far back as December, 1885, Mr. Gladstone began an informal conversation with Mr. Balfour on the condition of Ireland, with a view to a system of self-government. He followed up the conversation by a letter urging how great a calamity it would be if so momentous a question should fall within the lines of party conflict, and expressing his desire to see it taken up by Lord Salisbury’s Government, and his willingness to MR. BALFOUR co-operate with Lord Salisbury on non-party grounds.

Mr. Gladstone’s admiration for Mr. Balfour was more than reciprocated. In the Home Rule session of 1893 some young men of the Tory Party, on benches behind the Speaker’s Chair, where the Speaker’s eye could not reach them, rudely interrupted Mr. Gladstone in his speeches. Mr. Gladstone at first took no notice of these interruptions, but at last said that he was grieved to be constrained to say that, for some time past, he had been the victim of unseemly interruptions in debate proceeding from a certain number of young and inexperienced members seated in a certain portion of the House. The next day Mr. Balfour, who was not in the House when Mr. Gladstone spoke, rose after question time by way of personal explanation. He had, he said, read Mr. Gladstone’s remarks. He hoped and trusted that Mr. Gladstone had been mistaken in thinking that any lack of respect had been shown by any members of the party he was leading, since everyone recognised in Mr. Gladstone one of the very greatest figures that had ever appeared in the whole history of Parliament. These words were received with loud cheers. Mr. Gladstone, I observed, did not deprecate the almost lavish character of Mr. Balfour’s tribute to his genius, of which he was conscious, holding his intellect as a talent committed to his charge. He rose and, with a profound bow, conveyed in silence his grateful acknowledgments. This incident is in consonance with Mr. Balfour’s touching manifestation of respect and affection when, at Mr. Gladstone’s funeral, he bent down and kissed the hand of his widow as she stood in desolation at his grave.

From Mr. Gladstone one’s thoughts turn by an easy transition to Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, whose political severance from his old chief on personal rather than on public grounds so vitally changed the political history of these countries. When we consider his meagre intellectual resources, the magnitude of his influence on public affairs appears extraordinary and almost amazing. With the modicum of education of a city clerk, Mr. Chamberlain not only held his own in an opposition that wrecked Mr. Gladstone’s Irish policy, with results of fathomless suffering to Ireland and discredit to Great Britain, but, in a fierce struggle of intellects, he vanquished men with the most highly-trained intelligence of their generation. By his speeches, admirable in their clearness of statement, in their succinctness, in the extraordinary skill with which they tersely enunciated the governing features of any situation, however complicated, in their happy aptness in interpreting the feelings of his own party and in giving the impression to his opponents that such feelings were reasonable, he was constituted one of the most influential members of the House of Commons of any time.

Yet this undeniably great man had, with his greatness, weaknesses of character which bordered on the childish. He was morbidly sensitive, and suffered from the merest parliamentary pin-prick. I remember when, in the very height of his parliamentary career, he was so wounded by a harmless witticism of mine that for nearly two years he never spoke to me. This was in 1893. When Mr. Gladstone’s Home Rule Bill was in committee Mr. Chamberlain gave notice of motion of censure on the Government. He took the unusual but strictly orderly course of reading the resolution aloud to the House from a sheet of ordinary notepaper. He was interrupted, as no doubt he had anticipated, by cheers, counter-cheers, uncomplimentary remarks, derisive laughter and general disorder; but he held on his way apparently unperturbed. At the end of the first page from which he was reading came the words: “to advise Her Majesty.” As he paused in turning over the page, I cried out the interpolation: “to send for Joe.” Amid a roar of laughter Mr. Chamberlain gave me a look which would have been worthy of “Medusa’s head.” As a consequence of this remark, as I have said, our relations were strained and even suspended for two years. A reconciliation was made by my asking Mr. Jesse Collings, his devoted friend, to get him to autograph his photograph for MR. JOSEPH CHAMBERLAIN me—an act which I suppose showed that I was among his admirers.

On another occasion I again said something to offend him, and the result was the same: a suspension of relations followed by a reconciliation. In this case the reconciliation came about through an action of mine which appealed to his sense of humour. He entertained no great admiration for Mr. Winston Churchill, and once when that statesman was walking down the floor of the House Mr. Chamberlain began with his hands to imitate his wobbling, duck-like gait. As he did so, he looked up and saw me, on the opposite side of the House, indulging in an even more exaggerated parody of “the Winston waddle.” He burst into laughter, and the coldness between us came, for a time at least, to an end.

Mr. Chamberlain, for a careful speaker, was betrayed into deplorable errors of judgment, or rather into inconceivable thoughtlessness. Commenting on Mr. Gladstone’s absence and the manifest perplexities and differences among themselves of the members of his cabinet, Mr. Chamberlain said: “When the cat’s away the mice will play,” thus eliciting from Mr. Healy the obvious retort: “What about the rats?” And a very few days after the exposure of Pigott as the writer of the notorious forged Parnell letter, Mr. Chamberlain congratulated the Salisbury Government, of which he was then a strong ally, on “successfully forging their way.”

Mr. Chamberlain was himself an adept in the gentle art of parliamentary repartee. Mr. Healy was complaining of the infrequency of the visits of the late Duke of Devonshire to Ireland. “When,” he asked, “was His Grace last at his lovely residence of Lismore Castle?” Mr. Chamberlain retorted with rasping severity: “Not since his brother (Lord Frederick Cavendish) was murdered.” This interruption would have been sufficient to crush the ordinary man, but Mr. Healy was equal to the situation. “Might I ask,” he said, “when was the Duke of Devonshire last at Lismore before his brother was murdered?”

Mr. Chamberlain was, as I have said, a ready debater. He had the rare gift of saying what he meant in language that was plain, direct and incapable of being misunderstood. He spoke, moreover, with the greatest ease and freedom from embarrassment in words which occurred to him on the spur of the moment. The only occasions on which he seemed to be cautious and guarded, in delivering a speech, were those in which he referred to political and parliamentary history. When he mentioned what Mr. Pitt said or did, when he referred to the policy of Mr. Fox or the opinions of Mr. Burke, caution took the place of his wonted freedom of expression, and he seemed to be repeating with scrupulous accuracy something that he had learned by rote, and which he feared to vary by the addition or omission of a single word. In Mr. Chamberlain’s historical references the voice indeed was the voice of Joseph, but the words were the words of a careful private secretary.

Mr. Chamberlain had a highly-strung, nervous MR. CECIL RHODEStemperament. A long corridor which runs parallel with the library of the House of Commons is not much frequented.^[1] On one occasion when I was at one end of that corridor, which was then empty, Mr. Chamberlain entered at the other end, which was in close proximity to the rooms of the Ministers. Thinking that he was entirely by himself, he raised both his hands with the gesture of a man who has discovered that he has made some fatal mistake, or has omitted to take some vital matter into consideration: his gesture, which I can never forget, was one of despair. He turned abruptly, left the corridor, and retraced his steps in the direction of the Ministers’ rooms. I cannot remember the time I witnessed that scene, but I have often thought that it must have been in connection with the episode of the Jameson Raid, and the proceedings arising out of that event.

Mr. Cecil Rhodes disliked Mr. Chamberlain, and spoke very freely of his knowledge of the imminence of the Jameson Raid and of his complicity in that affair. When the report of the Committee of Inquiry into the raid and its attendant circumstances was submitted to the House of Commons, with its condemnation of the raid, Mr. Chamberlain, with the very cautious, restrained manner and the scrupulous selection of every word which characterised his historical references, proceeded to pay a high tribute to Rhodes as a man of honour, and to say that he had done nothing in any respect inconsistent with the character of an honourable man. I heard that speech. On the bench below me in the House of Commons sat the late Mr. Thomas, Q.C., an eminent lawyer sitting on the Liberal side. It subsequently transpired that if Mr. Chamberlain had not fulfilled the conditions required by Rhodes, at a signal from a confidential friend of Rhodes who was sitting under the clock, Mr. Thomas was to disclose correspondence which would make Mr. Chamberlain’s complicity in the Jameson Raid incontrovertible. I afterwards humorously asked Mr. Thomas what was the gist of the correspondence. He said there was nothing in the correspondence which could not have been apparent to any reasonable man who had studied the circumstances of the Raid, that the correspondence would, if published, only make conclusive the generally accepted theory of the enterprise. I told Mr. Thomas that, if it had been known that he was in possession of such correspondence there were men in the House who, whatever the consequences to themselves might have been, would have wrested that correspondence from him and had it published to the world. It is perfectly certain that, if that correspondence had been published, it would have most seriously affected Mr. Chamberlain’s career for the remainder of his life; but it is equally certain that there never would have been the Boer War.

I have referred in the previous chapter and also in an earlier chapter to Mr. Cecil Rhodes. It was in 1887 that I first became acquainted with him. In that year, owing to the abruptness of the change from my tranquil life in Dublin to the strenuousness of party warfare in the House of Commons, my health gave way. The late hours of the House, the fatigue of attending meetings in the country, and, above all, the abuse with which I was assailed by a section of the Press, brought me into imminent danger of nervous prostration and rendered complete rest and change of scene and surroundings imperative. I accordingly determined to take a voyage to the Cape, hoping that the journey to and fro and the life on board ship, which I have always loved, would restore me to health. I embarked on the R.M.S. Garth Castle at London. At Dartmouth the ship took on board the mails, and also a number of passengers. Amongst the new arrivals was Mr. Rhodes, whom I did not then know, and of whom, in fact, I had not even heard.

I very soon came not merely into contact, but into physical contact with him. He was trying to get his sea legs by endeavouring, while the ship lurched, to walk along a single plank in the deck. I was engaged in a similar recreation, and as we were going in opposite directions on the same plank we met—with some force. At dinner we found ourselves again opposite to one another, and naturally we soon became acquainted.

We discovered that we had many friends in common. We talked of Oxford and Oxford days, and Mr. Rhodes delighted me by saying that he always had some memento of Oxford with him, as he had never given up his Oxford tailor, who still made all his clothes. He told me that he was much interested in politics, was a member of the Cape Legislative Assembly, and had been Treasurer-General in the Cape Government.

The Irish Question, he said, greatly interested him. He thought that the settlement, on an equitable basis, of the relations between Great Britain and Ireland would be the first step towards an Imperial Federation which, in his opinion, should be formed by the establishment of a Parliament of the elected representatives of Great Britain and her colonies and dependencies. He told me that his objection to Mr. Gladstone’s Home Rule Bill of 1886 was that no provision was made in it for Irish representation in the Imperial Parliament.

Mr. Rhodes’s cabin contained a goodly number of books. At the time he was absorbed in Mr. A. M. MR. CECIL RHODES Sullivan’s New Ireland, which had been published ten years previously, but with which he had only recently become acquainted. He was interested when I told him that I had known its author. He was also greatly attracted by another book, Olive Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm, which Mr. Lecky regarded as one of the greatest novels in the English language. He used to express his astonishment that such a book could have been written by a young girl, brought up on the veldt, who had never been farther from her home than Cape Town. Mr. Rhodes spent much of his time reading in his cabin. He took part, however, occasionally in the usual games and amusements on board ship, but told me humorously that of late he had rather kept aloof from more intimate acquaintanceship with his fellow-passengers. “You see,” he said, “this voyage, taking fourteen or fifteen days to reach Cape Town, is much too long. It takes four or five days to form acquaintanceship, then four or five days more for friendship; and then the voyage is too long, for in a few days more the acquaintanceship and friendship stop, and then there comes the row—I have seen several rows and I want to keep clear of them.”

“Spelling bees” were then much in vogue. Mr. Rhodes instituted one, and offered as a prize an English dictionary, which he said he had bought many years ago for one shilling and sixpence. Its binding was worn out and ragged and several of the leaves were torn, but he valued the little book and therefore he made a condition that the prize should not be awarded in the event of the absence of due merit, of which he alone should be the judge. The game began. Mr. Rhodes ruled out all the competitors on various frivolous pretexts and the dictionary remained in his possession. In after years, when Mr. Rhodes was in tight corners, I have often thought of this incident as evidence of his resource and ingenuity in extricating himself from difficulties and embarrassments.

Mr. Rhodes spoke very freely to me of public affairs, and told me that Gordon of Khartoum, whom he had met at the Cape, had taken a great fancy to him, and asked him to accompany him to Khartoum. Mr. Rhodes replied that he had been just appointed Treasurer-General at the Cape, that he could not resign a post almost immediately after its acceptance, but that if Gordon wished to have him some six months hence he would join him. Communications with Khartoum, as everyone knows, were soon cut off. The place fell and Gordon perished. I remember Rhodes saying to me as we walked on deck late at night: “I wish I had gone with Gordon; I believe I would have saved him, and if not I would willingly have died with him.” I have no doubt of the sincerity of this utterance. Gordon, who liked Rhodes, spoke very plainly to him: “You,” he said to Rhodes, “never believe in any project unless you start it yourself.” Gordon, Rhodes told me, had strange beliefs in spiritual influences which were in some cases malevolent. He thought, for instance, that the powers of evil were much more potent MR. CECIL RHODES on sea than on land, and on mountains than on lowlands.

When we were nearing Cape Town, Rhodes asked me what were my plans on my visit to South Africa. I told him I had come out simply for the benefit of the voyage there and back, that I would not go into the interior, and would return to England in a few weeks. “Oh,” said Rhodes, “the Irish, now that you are here, will insist on Home Rule meetings. You must come up with me to Kimberley, where there will be, of course, a great Home Rule meeting which I will ‘Chairman’ [that was his expression] myself.”

I was most reluctant to take this course. I had only been a few months in Parliament, and I had gone to South Africa, not on a political mission nor as an accredited representative of Irish interests, but merely as a private individual needing some little rest. But Mr. Rhodes was insistent, saying: “The ship will not have anchored for ten minutes in Table Bay before you will be surrounded by Irishmen clamouring for speeches.” His forecast was correct.

I eventually consented to go with him to Kimberley and to speak there, in Port Elizabeth and in Cape Town. In the train to Kimberley—the journey between Cape Town and Kimberley by train was then a matter of several days—Rhodes returned to the subject of the retention of an Irish representation at Westminster. He told me that he was very well off—a circumstance of which I had not been previously aware—that he could afford the gratification of his fancies, and that, if I could give him a promise that if in the next Home Rule Bill there was a provision for the retention of an Irish representation at Westminster the Irish Party would not oppose it, he would give me £10,000 for the funds of the Irish Party. I, of course, said that I was not in a position to give any pledge of the kind, but that I would, on my return home, communicate to Mr. Parnell the very generous proposal, and I suggested that Mr. Rhodes himself should write to me a letter in relation to that proposal which I would show to Mr. Parnell.

Mr. Rhodes insisted that at Kimberley I should be his guest. When I said how delighted I should be to accept his hospitality he hastened to explain that he and Dr. Jameson lived together in three rooms, and that his intention had been that I should put up at the hotel at his expense and dine with him each evening at his club. I accepted as far as the club dinners were concerned, but I did not allow him to pay my hotel bill. I only mention this incident for the purpose of recording that Rhodes and Jameson, although millionaires, were then rigid observers of the rules of simple living.

Dr. Jameson, whom I met in due course, in that unpretentious sitting-room which he and Rhodes shared at Kimberley, a room like that of an undergraduate at college, was a quiet gentleman of a retiring disposition, and appeared to be the very last man in the world likely to be identified with a MR. RHODES AND MR. PARNELL transaction of the character of the Raid associated with his name. “Jameson,” said Mr. Rhodes, “is a queer chap but a very good one. He will sit up night after night with the poorest Kafir, endeavouring to relieve his sufferings and to cure him; but when he gets a rich patient he pays himself for his charity to the Kafir.”

The meeting at Kimberley which Rhodes “chairmanned” was a great success, and was followed, as we had arranged, by other meetings in Port Elizabeth and Cape Town. Mr. Rhodes gave me the letter for which I had asked, confirming his proposal to the Irish Party, and on my return to Ireland late in October I got into touch with Mr. Parnell at “Avondale,” his residence in Wicklow, and eventually spent a couple of days there for the purpose of discussing the project with him. Over my own signature, but at Mr. Parnell’s dictation, I wrote to Mr. Rhodes expressing grateful acknowledgments for the offer, which Mr. Parnell was prepared to accept on behalf of the Irish Parliamentary Party.

The letter was duly posted, but no reply nor even an acknowledgment came from Rhodes. Mr. Parnell used sometimes to ask me with a twinkle in his eye: “What about that £10,000?” I invariably replied: “Wait a little. I know Rhodes is quite sincere in his offer.” At last, in June, 1888, I learnt that Mr. Rhodes was in London. I told Mr. Parnell that the £10,000 was safe, and went almost at once to see Mr. Rhodes at Winchester House. He told me that he had refrained from replying to my letter as, on its receipt, he knew that he would shortly be coming to England. He expressed a wish to meet Mr. Parnell, and I arranged that they should both dine with me at the House of Commons. They entered almost immediately into the subject of the retention of the Irish members, and then proceeded to draft the formal letters to be exchanged between them. The negotiations, at which I was present, required two or three meetings, but they were concluded at last and the £10,000 was paid to Mr. Parnell.^[1] As he rose from signing the first of the two cheques that covered the amount, Mr. Parnell handed me the original draft of the letters, with the remark: “Keep this. It will be perhaps of value some day.” I still have it in my possession.

I have entered into this incident at length owing to the interest which attaches to both Rhodes and Parnell by reason of the tragedy of their careers. And in this connection a remark made to me by Mr. Parnell at this time deserves, considering his usual astuteness, to be numbered among the many instances of the fallibility of political predictions. “What a pity,” he observed, “that Rhodes is not in the Imperial Parliament. As it is, he will not live in history.”

On a second visit to South Africa, in 1891, I was MISS OLIVE SCHREINERreceived everywhere with great kindness; but then the element of interest in the Irish situation, which was so predominant in 1887, had vanished, for the Parnell split had intervened and the Irish cause was suffering from a disastrous set-back. That visit was perhaps the pleasanter because I was received as a private individual. I did not indeed desire to enter into public affairs, since I was suffering from a terrible bereavement—the death of a beloved father.

Then it was that for the first time I met the late Olive Schreiner, of whose great abilities Rhodes had spoken so enthusiastically. Miss Schreiner was a member of a family on whom great intellectual gifts had been bestowed. Her brother, the Hon. William Schreiner, who had been Senior in the Law Tripos at Cambridge and a Fellow of his College, returned to Cape Town to practise at the Bar. He became Attorney-General and Prime Minister, and held a foremost place in the legal and political world of his time. Miss Schreiner’s father, long dead, had devoted himself to missionary work in South Africa. Her mother was one of the most fascinating ladies whom it has ever been my privilege to meet. Mrs. Schreiner late in life had become a Roman Catholic and lived in a convent in Grahamstown. An introduction to her was greatly prized and sought after, and I had the privilege of the enjoyment of her friendship and the delight imparted by her almost unparalleled brilliancy in conversation.

Miss Schreiner herself was of a very delightful disposition, and full of zeal in every matter to which she applied her mind. She was quite unrestrained in expressing her appreciation, favourable or otherwise, of men and things, and would admit everyone she liked readily into her confidence. On one subject, however, she would never speak. She actually winced at any reference to her own writings.

When I first met her she regarded Rhodes as a hero, and a person with a mission for the achievement of great things for the world. I do not know the circumstances under which her enthusiastic admiration and belief in his political genius turned to the abhorrence of his policy and public work which she expressed in her book, Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland—a book which may take its rank as one of the most scathing denunciations of an individual in English literature—but I am in a position to relate an incident that seems to indicate the beginning of her change of feeling.

I was staying for a few days at Matchesfontein, now, I hear, a flourishing town, but then a hamlet in the veldt.^[2] Miss Schreiner happened to be at Matchesfontein. The trains between Cape Town and Kimberley generally broke the long journey by stopping there for about two hours, and it was usual for visitors at the hamlet to go to the station to meet incoming trains and receive the latest news from the MISS OLIVE SCHREINER passengers. On one of these trains I found Mr. Rhodes. Miss Schreiner and I lunched with him at the railway restaurant, and afterwards Miss Schreiner and Rhodes took a stroll on the veldt. That evening, after Rhodes had proceeded on his way to Kimberley, Miss Schreiner suddenly came to me in the restaurant where people usually dined in that primitive place, and abruptly said: “A thought has just struck me. Have you written anything to England about Mr. Rhodes and myself?” I answered that I had just posted a description of their meeting, together with a few words of the admiration which I genuinely felt for them both. She then said that nothing would give her greater distress than that her name should be in any way associated with his. Fortunately, I was able to recover my letter, and I tore it up in her presence.

I have referred very frequently in these pages to Sir William Harcourt, who was unrivalled, not merely as a great parliamentary debater, but as a man of profound knowledge of political and constitutional history, which he turned to happy account for illustration in his speeches. He invested occurrences of the past with a striking application to the present in a way which was marvellously impressive. He had the habit of reading his speeches. The reading of a speech is prohibited by a fundamental rule of parliamentary debate, but the using of notes to refresh one’s memory is permissible, and copious notes enable a member to deliver a speech practically written. Sir William Harcourt’s skill in the delivery of these written speeches made them as effective and as interesting as if they were the products of an active brain on the spur of the moment. He was likewise a ready and powerful extempore speaker, and his replies in debate, without SIR WILLIAM HARCOURT preparation and with no notes except a few jottings from the speeches on the other side, yielded to none of his prepared speeches in brilliancy and argumentative weight. He felt strongly and spoke strongly both in public and in private. He was a hater of pretentious solemnity and of affected mental and ethical superiority, and expressed his estimate in the Cabinet of self-sufficient dullards and sciolists in language that was never forgiven nor forgotten. His plain speaking lost him the Premiership.

I have often thought he felt irritated at the interventions in the regulation of debate of Mr. Speaker Peel, whose chief he had been as Home Secretary when Mr. Peel was Under-Secretary for the Home Department. Mr. Peel had, as I have said, a high sense, not of his own importance, but of the dignity of the Chair, and was once reminded by Sir William that he was the servant and not the leader or master of the House. “You, sir,” said Sir William, “are called Speaker. Why? Because you are the mouthpiece of the House of Commons, and you speak strictly as their servant.” Mr. Peel, of course, could not take exception to this plain exposition of his rigidly representative official relation to the House, but I thought he was not particularly grateful to Sir William Harcourt for so plainly defining his position.

A delightful story, probably founded on fact, was current in the House of Commons that on the day before the division was taken on the vote on which Lord Rosebery’s Government was defeated in June, 1895, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman came down to tea on the terrace, and said humorously that everything was going on quite well in the Cabinet. “We are a happy family,” he is reported to have said. “Why he [Harcourt] only three times this day called me a ‘d——d fool.’ ”

The feeling of personal dislike to Harcourt was very great with some of his colleagues. When he lost his seat for Derby at the General Election of 1895 Mr. Warmington, Q.C., an eminent barrister who had been for some years member for West Monmouth but took little active part in the proceedings, resigned his seat in favour of Harcourt. Some little time afterwards, as Mr. Warmington told me, he happened to meet a prominent member of the late Rosebery Cabinet. They talked generally on the political situation, but the West Monmouth seat was not referred to by the Rosebery Cabinet Minister. At last Mr. Warmington, feeling rather piqued at a matter so personal to himself having been ignored or forgotten by his eminent friend, said: “Well, you know about my seat for West Monmouth.” The Rosebery statesman laid his hand on Mr. Warmington’s shoulder and said reproachfully: “Ah, you have spoiled our little game, which was to keep him [Harcourt] out altogether.”

The succession of Lord Rosebery to the Premiership was believed to have been made on the advice of Mr. Gladstone. We now know that Mr. Gladstone was not asked to advise as to his successor, and that had his advice been asked he would have selected MR. “LULU” HARCOURT Earl Spencer. The statement, openly made, that Lord Rosebery was Mr. Gladstone’s choice remained uncontradicted, and was believed by the Irish Party, who were then the masters of the situation, and who, if they had known the true state of things, would not have suffered Lord Rosebery to retain the Premiership for an hour.

The House of Commons, as I have more than once said, is very human; and the love between Sir William Harcourt (whose plain speaking and nervous irritability were the drawbacks of a very noble character) and his son Mr. Lewis (the late Viscount Harcourt, universally known as “Lulu”) is to me a delightful reminiscence. “Lulu” was absolutely devoted to his father, of whose confidence he was wholly possessed. He was his father’s private secretary when he was Home Secretary and when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer. He did not accept a seat in the House of Commons, which was open to him, because he wished to devote himself exclusively to helping his father and lightening his burden. He used to sit under the gallery of the House of Commons watching with eagerness every word, every gesture, of his father, of whose prepared speeches he was cognisant before their delivery. I recollect once going into the House while Sir William was speaking. As I went to my seat I passed in front of “Lulu,” and I received the impression that he was so intent on observing his father that he literally failed to realise that I was temporarily obstructing his view: I felt that he actually saw through me. I told this afterward to Sir William, and was struck with his reply:

When at length Mr. “Lulu” Harcourt did enter the House of Commons he was introduced by his father, for whom it must have been a proud moment. It was on St. Patrick’s Day, 1904, and I rejoiced to see that both father and son were wearing the shamrocks that I had given them.

I have spoken of the pleasantness, the sympathy and the chivalry of Parliament as I knew it. In the late eighties of the last century a debate took place on the hardship of evictions in Donegal, and a very deep impression was made on the House by a Nationalist member, who appeared with his head bandaged as the result of a blow from a policeman’s baton when he was endeavouring to prevent famine-stricken people from being driven from their homes. After the division, which, of course, went against the Irish members, Sir Henry Seymour King, K.C.I.E., a most pronounced and convinced Tory, came to me and said: “I cannot endure the thought of the sufferings of these poor people. I am against you in politics, but I sympathise with the victims of distress that results from no fault of their own. Will you take a trifling gift to them?” The “trifling gift” was £100. I immediately forwarded it to Donegal for distribution, but party feeling was then so strong that I refrained from mentioning the name of the benefactor lest MR. WALTER LONG he might be politically prejudiced by his superabounding goodness and kindness of heart.

Sir Henry Seymour King, who is still with us, was one of several men who went about doing good and were invariably beloved in the House of Commons. Another was the late Mr. Walter Long (Viscount Long of Wraxall). His abilities were respectable, but not dazzling: he obtained his great position in the House and the country not by brilliancy of intellect but by force of character, by kindliness, by transparent sincerity in word and deed, and by the confidence which his truthfulness, fair dealing and high personal and political honour never failed to inspire.

Mr. Long, whom I had known slightly at Oxford, had Irish connections. One of his great-grandfathers, Mr. Hume, of Hume Wood, County Wicklow, a member of the Irish House of Commons, had been killed in the insurrection of 1798. Another great-grandfather, an Irish gentleman of great estate, had, despite the difference of social position, been on intimate terms with a jeweller in Grafton Street, Dublin, who eventually left him the greater part of his small property. This jeweller was an uncle of Disraeli’s, and Disraeli used often jocosely to refer to the incident, saying to Mr. Long’s grandfather: “When are you going to give me back that family estate of mine in Ireland?”

I used often to speak to Walter Long of his family antecedents, and I remember his once asking me to write for him a memorandum in relation to his family history in Ireland. I promised to do so, but as the matter was not pressing I deferred the fulfilment of my promise. When Long became Irish Secretary I immediately wrote the delayed memorandum as carefully as I could. I told Long, in sending it to him, that I could not now delay in the keeping of my promise—I had been in collision with every Irish Secretary since I entered Parliament, and (although I am glad to be able to say now that Long and I remained friends to the last) it seemed advisable to give him the memorandum before our relations were interrupted.

Mr. Augustine Birrell’s speeches always greatly impressed their hearers. Coming into the House with a great literary reputation,^[1] he acquired at least equal fame in oratory. He spoke exactly as he wrote. Mr. Lecky also spoke as he wrote; but in his case the effect was spoilt by the manner of his delivery. Mr. Birrell, on the other hand, delivered his speeches in a perfectly natural manner which never failed to create an impression. His speeches MR. AUGUSTINE BIRRELL did not seem to be the outcome of studied consideration of style, but simply to be the outpourings of a highly-gifted and richly-stored mind. In casual conversation and in unprepared replies in debate I have heard Mr. Birrell make epigrams just as good and remarks just as attractive as any epigram or remark in his writings. The effect which he produced was enormously enhanced by the solemnity of his manner and by the avoidance of even the suspicion of a smile. I remember that on one occasion, when Mr. Speaker Gully had called him to order for glaring irrelevance, this incomparable humorist said: “I am sorry, sir, that you did not call me to order before. I have now said all the disorderly things that I wished to say.”

Mr. Birrell was at his best in replying to embarrassing questions. Once a question of which notice had been given contained inquiries in reference to the qualifications of a gentleman who had been appointed to an important and lucrative position in Ireland. Mr. Birrell’s reply led to supplemental questions which at first were adroitly evaded. At last came the question to which, as Mr. Birrell very well knew, all the others had led: “Is it the fact that this gentleman thus pitchforked into this great position without previous experience is the son of the Irish Lord Chancellor?” Immediately Mr. Birrell solemnly replied: “I have always heard that he is the son of the Lord Chancellor, and I have no reason to doubt it.”

The House of Commons is, in my judgment, the most democratic assembly in the world. There, persons of the highest social position and persons of the very humblest antecedents, the richest and the poorest, meet on equal terms. The House of Commons forms its estimate of a man on merit alone, regardless of adventitious circumstances; and the favour of its attention and sympathy is accorded to any man, even although he may have been born in a workhouse, if he is entitled to respect for his character and abilities, while that favour is denied to a millionaire who does not deserve it. In the House all social distinctions are ignored, and all men are equal in the most levelling sense of the term.

At the same time, any member of the House of Commons, although he may never hold office, is for the time being a factor in the government of the country, which is vested, nominally, in the Sovereign, the Lords, and the Commons. It is this fact, I imagine, that causes some members of SIR HENRY FOWLER the House of Commons to acquire an air of self-importance directly they enter the House.

The late Sir Henry Fowler, who eventually became Viscount Wolverhampton, was one of those who suffered from this complaint. He was a gentleman of marked ability and a very great power in the House by reason of his skill in debate, his knowledge of procedure, and his wide experience of the world; but he “fancied himself,” and was more self-important than almost any other man I have ever known. When he became a Cabinet Minister he was very indignant at what he considered the slight put upon him inasmuch as that he was not immediately nominated as the Minister-in-attendance on Queen Victoria. When at length his turn for this distinction arrived Sir Frank Lockwood (who was Solicitor-General in the Rosebery Administration) asked him on his return for his impressions of his visit, and whether he had liked the Queen. Sir Henry assumed an air of consideration, and then said sententiously: “Well, on the whole, I am pleased. The Queen is a most interesting person: in fact, she is well worth knowing.”

The relations of the Irish Party with the Sovereign at times were necessarily somewhat strained, and on one occasion it was considered impossible to accept an invitation, sent to all members of the House, to attend a garden party at Windsor Castle. There was, however, one personal acceptance by an Irish member—Mr. Samuel Young. When the Queen learnt that Mr. Young alone was present she expressed her regret at the absence of the rest of the Irish Party and then desired that Mr. Young should be presented to her. A gentleman-in-waiting went in search of him, and eventually discovered him in one of the halls of the Castle very intently examining some old armour. When told of the Queen’s gracious command he seemed much perplexed. After a moment or two of deep thought, he replied: “I have already sufficiently compromised the political situation by my presence here. No! It is better for Her Majesty and better for me that we should not meet.”

At this garden party the Queen drove about the grounds of the Castle in a little pony carriage. Sir Frank Lockwood was presented to her, and stood for a few moments at the side of the carriage conversing with her. Afterwards his daughter, in much excitement at the incident, said to him: “Now you must tell me every word the Queen said to you. Now mind, every word.” “Certainly, my dear,” said Sir Frank, “and you will be relieved to hear that Her Majesty said nothing of which your dear mother would have any cause to be jealous.”

Once, in the early afternoon of an extremely cold winter’s day, I was sitting in an arm-chair by the fire in the Members’ Smoking-room of the House of Commons, when a gentleman came in and approached the fire. As he seemed almost perishing with cold, I left my chair and, despite his unwillingness to disturb me, literally pushed him into it. We fell into conversation, and I noticed THE DUKE OF ARGYLL that he spoke with a pronounced Scottish accent. He asked me how long my family had been in Ireland, and I gave him an account of those who had gone before me from the time when an ancestor of mine, a younger son of the Laird of Barra of the day, had left “wild Barra” to seek his fortune and had made his home in Ireland. I then said that I, of course, knew him by appearance but did not know his name. I thought he said in reply: “I am Long.” “Really,” I said, “I did not know that any Scottish member had a name as English as that of Long.” “Oh no,” he answered, “not Long, but Lorne.” “Lorne!” I exclaimed. “Then I have been presuming to relate my ancestry to the descendant of MacCailean Mhor ^[1] himself!”

This informal acquaintanceship with the Marquis of Lorne, subsequently the Duke of Argyll, continued. We had many talks together. Lord Lorne, owing to his connection with royalty, felt himself in a delicate position and precluded from active participation in the party warfare of the House of Commons, with the result that his splendid political talents were largely wasted.^[2]

At a reception given by Mrs. Lowther (Viscountess Ullswater) during her husband’s Speakership, Mr. Lowther told me that H.R.H. Prince Louis of Battenburg desired me to be introduced to him. The Prince in the very few moments of conversation with me created the impression of being blessed with the gifts of personal charm, sympathy, wide knowledge of public affairs, and discernment of character in as high a degree as anyone with whom it has been my privilege to come in contact.

I was once brought very unexpectedly into association with one of the romances of the peerage. In the nineties of the last century the late Archdeacon Wilberforce (who was then Chaplain to the Speaker of the House of Commons) and I were showing some ladies over the House of Lords, which was then sitting. A gentleman almost in the prime of life was addressing the House with evident feeling on some philanthropic subject; we asked his name, and were informed that he was the Earl of Stamford.

Soon afterwards, the House having risen, I was explaining to my friends the subjects of the frescoes in the corridor which leads from the House of Lords to the Central Lobby, when the gentleman whom we had just heard speaking came up to me, greeted me with great affection by my Christian name, and asked me almost reproachfully whether I did not remember Grey, of Exeter College, Oxford. I then recollected him as the son of a poor LORD STAMFORD clergyman who on taking his degree had gone out to Barbados as an assistant master of Codrington College.

I subsequently heard the story of his succession to the Earldom of Stamford with a princely income. The peerage came to him by descent as the great-grandson of the fourth Earl, who died in 1801. His father had been the third son of the third son of that Earl, and the death of several persons nearer than he in the line of succession had brought Grey to the peerage.

Curiously enough, while returning from South Africa in 1891, I had met a gentleman who told me that he was the Earl of Stamford’s secretary, and that he had been to Cape Town to ascertain without doubt that the Earl’s title of succession was true, a parallel branch of the family having lived in Africa many years before; but I little knew then that the Lord Stamford of whom we were talking on board the ship was the old friend whom I had known in undergraduate days at Oxford.

I do not desire to enter into political matters in these pages, but there is in this connection one matter to which I may refer as personal to myself, since my action in it has been misconstrued. Very soon after the outbreak of the Great War I attacked the retention of the highest honours conferred by the Crown by the princes of countries actually in arms against the British Empire. Considering this an intolerable anomaly, I addressed question after question on the subject to Mr. Asquith, who was then Prime Minister.

At first I received little if any sympathy, and discouraging and evasive replies. I, however, still persevered. I thought that it was in the interests of the Crown itself, and in justice to the men who were dying for the salvation of their countries, that the highest honours and places in the whole Empire—Knighthoods of the Garter, Dukedoms, and the position of Field-Marshal in the British Army—should not be retained by the declared enemies of the Empire. At last, after many months, I began to make an impression, and I heard semi-officially that the Prime Minister was no longer opposed to my proposal.^[3] It had been suggested that my action implied either personal or political hostility to the Crown; whereas, on the contrary, I acted from a conviction that to deprive the princes of hostile countries of British honours would be in the interests of the Crown, since it would increase and strengthen the affection of the people of the Empire for the Royal Family. The subsequent assumption by the Royal Family of the British name THE ROYAL FAMILY of Windsor evoked a popular enthusiasm which proved that I had been right. And the passing in 1917 of the Enemy Princes Deprivation Act was the justification of my action.

I have witnessed several tragedies in the Chamber of the House of Commons. Among the most painful, I have always regarded the scene when, on April 20th, 1894, Lord Randolph Churchill, obviously afflicted with mental weakness, delivered from the Front Opposition Bench a speech that was puerile, inconsequential and in utter bad taste, but enunciated with the evident impression that he was, as the Americans would say, “whipping creation.”

An actual tragedy that I witnessed occurred in June, 1899, when a grant to Lord Kitchener in recognition of his success in the Omdurman Expedition was the subject of debate. The grant was fiercely opposed, Lord Kitchener’s personal conduct being the subject of severe stricture on the ground of alleged cruelty and also on the charge of his having permitted an outrage—the bringing to England of the Mahdi’s head preserved in spirits of wine—an act revolting to the instincts of humanity. LORD KITCHENER Lord Kitchener sat in the Peers’ Gallery throughout the whole debate, silent and apparently unmoved. Mr. Wallace,^[1] who was famous for the vehemence and vituperative character of his speeches, which were carefully prepared and abounded in epigrams and antithesis, spoke in opposition to the grant. On his rising to speak, the House listened attentively, convinced that on such a subject he would be at his best. He uttered some half-dozen preliminary sentences, each ending with the words: “It was a famous victory.” Then suddenly he paused, the notes fell from his hand, and he staggered back on to the bench behind him. A glass of water was put to his lips without result, and at last he was carried out of the Chamber. A few hours afterwards, in Westminster Hospital, he expired.

While this tragedy was being enacted Lord Kitchener retained the impassivity which he had shown during the debate. On the seventeenth anniversary of that day, exactly, Kitchener himself perished on board the Hampshire.

But while the House of Commons has occasionally been the scene of tragedy, it has also, and not infrequently, been the scene of comedy, if not of farce, the actors being sometimes unconscious and sometimes conscious contributors to the gaiety of nations.

Dr. Tanner, now only remembered as a prominent figure in “scenes” in the House of Commons, had a great sense of humour and a knack of turning things meant to be serious into ridicule. He was particularly fond of jokes at the expense of Mr. Speaker Peel, who, as I have already intimated, aimed at dignity and solemnity in all the proceedings.

At the time of the Jubilee celebration of 1887 Mr. Peel, in response to questions, gave from the Chair a description of the intended procession of the Speaker and members from the House to Westminster Abbey. “Sir,” interrupted Dr. Tanner, “if unfortunately the day be wet, will honourable members be accommodated with omnibuses?”

A German Jew, recently naturalised, was walking up the floor of the House on the occasion of his introduction and the taking of the parliamentary oath, when, amid the cheers of the Tory Party, was heard Dr. Tanner’s voice greeting the new member in the German tongue with repeated cries of “Hoch! Hoch!”

Dr. Tanner was fond of tormenting Mr. Balfour, who, although quite imperturbable when seriously attacked and able to listen calmly to unfavourable comparisons between himself and all the most hateful characters in history, had one weak point on which he was really sensitive—ridicule of his well-known elegance of deportment. Dr. Tanner was well aware of this, and on one occasion went out of his DR. TANNER way to complain that Mr. Balfour had treated him “in a most unladylike manner.” Mr. Balfour, however, subsequently contrived a most excellent score off Dr. Tanner in return. Some small boys had been imprisoned for selling copies of a suppressed newspaper in the streets of Cork. Dr. Tanner immediately took to selling copies of the same paper, but was not interfered with by the police. When questions were asked in the House about the prosecution of the newsboys, Dr. Tanner asked whether Mr. Balfour was aware that although he also had sold the suppressed newspapers he had not been prosecuted. “Yes, sir,” answered Mr. Balfour, “I was aware of the hon. gentleman’s activities, but the police were directed only to arrest persons of political importance.”

Practical joking in the House of Commons is an unacknowledged parliamentary practice. During Committee stages of business the Speaker’s Chair is unoccupied, and the Chairman of Committees sits at the table of the House, directly in front of the Chair, to which his back is turned. The Chair itself then becomes available for any member like any other seat in the House. Dr. Tanner once created great amusement by sitting in the Speaker’s Chair while the House was in Committee with Mr. (Lord) Courtney in the Chair at the table. Dr. Tanner, who was an admirable actor and a perfect mimic, had furnished himself with the paper containing the orders of the day. He assumed the favourite attitude of Mr. Peel, who was then the Speaker. He listened courteously and even attentively to the speeches, his head reclining on one hand; he then perused the order paper; he then moved restlessly as if about to call a member to order. In dumb show he rose from the Chair with much impressiveness to maintain the dignities of the House. These antics, which produced much laughter and cries of “Order! Order!” and cheers, were, of course, not perceived by Mr. Courtney, since they were enacted immediately behind his back. He rose repeatedly to ask members to observe the decorum of debate, saying that he was entirely unable to understand the outbursts of immoderate laughter, for which there was no cause. At length Dr. Tanner made a dignified exit from the Chair, assuming an expression of sorrow at the disorder which seemed to have taken possession of the House.

A very audacious practical joke was played on Mr. Speaker Peel himself, to whom familiarities would by reason of his temperament be most distasteful, and to whose credit, therefore, it must be stated that on this occasion he allowed himself to be persuaded by his friends to refrain from bringing the matter publicly before the House with a view to discovering and punishing the perpetrators of the audacity.^[2] A man of very limited education, who had acquired an immense fortune in trade, secured a seat at a General Election in the Conservative interest. He had heard that a member who has MR. SPEAKER PEEL not previously spoken in the House is generally called upon, as a matter of courtesy, in preference to other members rising at the same time; but he had not realised that on the assembling of a new Parliament, when a large percentage of the members would be there for the first time, a strict observance of the rule is sometimes impossible. This member desired to speak in an important debate which threatened the existence of the Government of the day. On the first evening of the debate he rose repeatedly, but failed to catch the Speaker’s eye. On the succeeding evening he had a similar experience. Having been long accustomed to enjoy the deference accorded to wealth by those who have no share therein, he showed and voiced his indignation at this failure to recognise his importance. On the morning of the third day he received a letter stamped with the Speaker’s official address and purporting to be written by the Speaker himself. In the letter the Speaker apologised for his not having immediately called upon this gentleman to speak, and stated he was looking forward with interest and pleasure to hearing him, so that if he would rise that evening immediately after the Leader of the Opposition the Speaker would have much gratification in calling on him. In due course the Leader of the Opposition concluded his speech and sat down. The new member rose immediately; but to his great surprise he still was not called on. Twice subsequently he rose, but each time he failed to catch the Speaker’s eye. He grew more and more indignant. At last he lost all self-control. Going down to the side of the Speaker’s Chair, he exclaimed: “Mr. Speaker! H’am I h’excommunicated or h’am I boycotted?”

The late Lord Charles Beresford, who is reported to have been the leader of some adventurous escapades as a midshipman, did not lose his buccaneering propensities by becoming a Member of Parliament. On one occasion he observed that an old gentleman who was addicted to gout was in the habit of sitting on one of the benches behind the Speaker’s Chair, taking off his boots, and indulging in a doze until he was awakened by the noise and bustle of an approaching division. He would then put on his boots and go with his party into the division lobby. Lord Charles watched his opportunity, and when the old gentleman was asleep he managed to secure his boots and conceal them. The division awakened the sleeper, but he looked in vain for his boots, and at last went in his stockinged feet into the lobby, where he was received with loud laughter and cheers.

Divisions taken at wholly unexpected times have produced some laughable incidents. A division once came about while some gentlemen, including the late Sir Tatton Sykes and the late Sir Robert Penrose Fitzgerald, were actually in their baths. In the limited time available for reaching the Chamber to take part in the division it was impossible for them fully to dress, and accordingly they hurriedly put on dressing-gowns. Thus arrayed they entered CAPTAIN WEDGWOOD BENN the lobby, where their unusual attire and much disarranged hair—the two whom I have named were both noted for the normal exactitude of their dress—produced roars of laughter, in which the objects of the amusement good-humouredly participated.

The bathrooms of the House of Commons have been at times utilised in attempts to “shake the Government” by unexpected—or, as they are generally designated, “snap”—divisions. On one occasion, when such a division had been planned, certain members entered the Palace of Westminster by unusual routes so as to escape the notice of the Whips of the opposite side, and secreted themselves in the bathrooms—one bathroom being filled by no fewer than twelve members. The Whips of the Party to which the ambuscaders belonged were aware of the manœuvre, and a division was called for in every confidence of the Government sustaining a heavy defeat. At the last minute the bathroom doors opened and the hidden members appeared in the division lobby and all but succeeded in placing the Government in a minority.

I subsequently addressed a question to my friend Captain Wedgwood Benn, who was then Commissioner of Public Works and responsible for the upkeep of Westminster Palace. I asked him whether his attention had been directed to the want of sufficient bathroom accommodation; whether it was the case that on a recent occasion one bathroom had been occupied at one time by no fewer then twelve members all eager to have a bath; and whether steps would be taken to rectify this very serious inconvenience. I told Captain Wedgwood Benn that when my question was answered I would ask a supplementary question: whether the Commissioner of Public Works was aware of any instance of a bath being so overcrowded since the time of the Pool of Siloam. I expected a witty answer, and I was not disappointed. “No, sir,” was the reply, “I know of no more recent precedent, but it must be remembered that in this case, unlike that of the Pool of Siloam, there was no miracle.”

I have rarely seen the plan of making an individual member of the House of Commons a laughing-stock and of holding him up to contempt and ridicule more implacably pursued than in the case of the organised “set” by the younger members of the Tory Party against Sir John Rigby, Q.C. He was a man of unusual distinction and abilities who had originally entered Parliament in 1885; but owing to his adherence to Mr. Gladstone’s Irish policy he had lost his seat in the following year, and then had been exiled from the House for six years. When he returned to the House of Commons in 1892 he was unknown to the younger members, although by that time he had attained to the office of Solicitor-General after a very prominent career at the Bar. His appearance was peculiar. He was a man of robust frame, with rugged, homely features that bordered on plainness; he had a straggling beard and unkempt hair, and he wore large spectacles akin to goggles. He was usually attired in a blue SIR JOHN RIGBY pilot jacket. His general appearance, in fact, drew attention towards him, and this, combined with the fact that for some time after re-entering the House he took no part in the debates, created a desire in some of the younger Tory members to subject him to chaff. These young men made up their minds that his abstention from speaking must not continue. Therefore, whenever a speaker on the Government benches rose to address the House, there were immediate cries of “Rigby! Rigby! Rigby’s speech!” This continued, with increasing vehemence, for some days. At last the desire was gratified—and in a manner which won for Sir John Rigby admiration even from those who had tried to torment him.

A Tory member, with a great display of learning and apparently no small confidence in his own abilities, was giving the House a description of the different legislative systems that had been tried and had failed in Ireland. As he spoke he seemed to be calling on the House to admire the great intellectual efforts with which he had achieved the knowledge which his speech displayed. Finally, having predicted in a florid peroration that the system portrayed in Mr. Gladstone’s Home Rule Bill would be the worst failure of all, he sat down, receiving the cheers which he had sought. Suddenly Sir John Rigby rose to his feet. Taking no notice of the derisive cheers which greeted him from one quarter of the House, he began, in a quiet, conversational style, to express his admiration for the speech to which they had just listened. If, however, he might presume to criticise so excellent a speech, he said, he would venture to say what the speaker—no doubt in the hurry of the moment, or in the excitement of debate—had omitted to mention: namely that he had adopted and repeated word for word the arguments written by that learned author, Dr. Ball, in his well-known book, Irish Parliamentary Systems.

The remark was followed by a momentary silence. The House waited for the previous speaker to deny the delicately-worded charge of plagiarism; but no such denial came. Sir John was then greeted with loud and prolonged cheers, and the remainder of his powerful speech was heard with respect and attention.

Of unconscious parliamentary humorists whom I have known I think the late Sir Trout Bartley may be placed in the very first rank. He was totally devoid of any sense of humour, and was intensely in earnest, a man of portentous solemnity of demeanour and of very great industry in parliamentary matters. On one occasion he told the House that he “represented a dense constituency,” meaning a densely populated constituency, and did not seem to understand the laughter created by my remark that it was, of course, a case of natural selection.

He was a member of the Conservative Party, and his services had not, he thought, been sufficiently acknowledged. When the Unionists came into office SIR TROUT BARTLEY in 1895 he thought himself slighted by not being appointed to a place in the Ministry, and coming to me, from whom he could scarcely have expected sympathy, he said: “Think of it: Austen Chamberlain, who is younger than my eldest son, is in the Government, and I am left out.” Later, he wrote to The Times of the neglect by the Government of its friends, saying that he “had in fact never been invited to a State concert or even to a garden-party.” At length he received an honour that no one who had enjoyed the amusement which he unconsciously afforded could grudge him. He was made a K.C.B., and was happy for ever afterwards.

Before embarking on this chapter I must repeat what I have already intimated in a Foreword: that I am here neither discussing political questions, nor relating history except in so far as it concerns the men who made it—and not often then. The words of the play on the stage are not my affair at the moment; I write merely of the actors and of their asides which were not heard by the audience.

The details of what is known as “the Parnell split” can be read, with the arguments on both sides, in books of history. I have here only to give fragments of “what I have seen and heard” at that time.

In my days, for the last three years before the incident which was fraught with such fatal consequences for the late Irish Parliamentary Party, Mr. Parnell did not exercise any very active party leadership. He would come suddenly into the House of Commons, and as suddenly leave. In the opposition to the Irish Coercion Act of 1887, and MR. PARNELL to the framing of the new standing orders in the same year for the purpose of meeting parliamentary obstruction, he took an active part, but on the whole his attitude was one of aloofness and detachment from the routine of parliamentary work. Even on the day of the appearance of the Pigott forged letter he did not enter the House till near midnight, when the debate on the second reading of the Irish Coercion Bill was drawing to a close. No one had seen him on that day, and there had been no communication with him. Mr. Sexton, indeed, denounced the Pigott letter as a manifest forgery, without having had any communication on the subject from Mr. Parnell.

Mr. Parnell would sometimes be absent from the House for weeks at a time. I recollect Mr. Sexton saying to me towards the end of a session: “It is almost time for Parnell to appear. He will come in here in a day or so and say: ‘Well, gentlemen, I never knew the estimates to have been better fought than in this session.’ ” Strange to say, Parnell did appear in the House on that very day, and did make that very observation.

Still, Parnell was the bond of cohesion of the Irish Party, and that bond was broken by the exposure of December, 1890.

The debates and discussion in Committee Room No. 15, ending in the division of the party, with incalculable injury to Ireland and to the British Empire, can never be forgotten by anyone who was present. Those grim and tragic days were, however, brightened by occasional gleams of humour, conscious and unconscious.

Mr. J. F. X. O’Brien, who had been a Fenian leader and was the last survivor of the men on whom sentence of death by hanging with the addition of drawing and quartering had been pronounced, said, in a speech which was an indictment of Parnell: “Eugene O’Kelly (a rich Irish-American) has stated that no more money for the Irish Party will come from America.” “Eugene O’Kelly,” Parnell interrupted, “said nothing of the kind.” “Well, Mr. Parnell,” was the reply, “if Eugene O’Kelly did not say it, still it would be a very right and proper thing for him to say.”

Mr. O’Hanlon, a very eccentric person, urged mitigating circumstances. Not in a spirit of animosity or of heartless levity, but in absolute seriousness, he maintained that if there had been an Irish Parliament sitting in Dublin Mr. Parnell would not have fallen into deplorable aberrations—aberrations, he declared, not unusual in England, but practically unknown in Ireland. “You were not,” he said, “in your own virtuous country, Mr. Parnell, but here in this Babylon of London; and you yielded to temptation.” This unique deliverance was received with an outburst of laughter, and was heard by Mr. Parnell with a sickly smile.

Mr. William Redmond, in a very fervent speech, attributed the policy of deposing Parnell to the wiles of English politicians, who, he declared, seized on the scandal as an excuse for getting rid of an MR. PARNELL Irish statesman whom they feared and hated. The opposition to the retention of Parnell in the Chair of the Irish Parliamentary Party, he insisted, was due to the interference and dictation of Mr. Gladstone, who was assuming control over the Irish Party. “Who,” he asked dramatically, “who is the master of the Irish Party?” Immediately Mr. T. M. Healy quietly asked: “And who is the mistress of the Irish Party?”

I cannot exclude from these reminiscences my impressions of three remarkable men whose memory is fast sinking into forgetfulness.

Mr. Labouchere held a unique position in the House of Commons. In parliamentary debates he was more a clever speaker than an effective one. He purposely and successfully conveyed the impression that he viewed everything with an enlightened but heartless cynicism; whereas in reality he was a kindly, tender-hearted man, with a profound knowledge of human nature. In exposing and denouncing abuses and in bringing the force of public opinion to bear against jobbery and corruption, he was a man of high purpose waging war in the interests of freedom; while he posed as an imp of mischief delighting in the creation of sensations simply for the fun of the thing. His speeches were always entertaining, and were invariably invested with interest for the novelty with which he treated any matter, however trite. He had considerable knowledge of parliamentary MR. LABOUCHERE procedure, an amazing memory, and surprising methods of acquiring accurate information of the personal history and antecedents of everyone with whom he came in contact, and at the same time he had an easy but dexterous, conversational style and an ingenuity in the conveyance of imputations in language to which no exception could be taken. He was, moreover, the soul of hospitality, and the gatherings at his beautiful historic residence, Pope’s Villa, at Twickenham, were to his guests among the most delightful incidents of parliamentary life.

Mr. Labouchere, however, was at his best, not on the floor of the House of Commons producing embarrassed looks on the Treasury Bench, nor in the columns of Truth, nor on the platforms, but in an arm-chair of the Smoking-room of the House of Commons, where he was unrivalled. There, consuming innumerable cigarettes, dipping rusks into a cup of coffee, and not so much conversing as thinking aloud, he would tell stories which were quite incomparable, so brilliant was the manner of their telling. I have often been in the crowd of his admirers when he was in the mood of a raconteur. Here are one or two of his anecdotes.

A gentleman in high social position came to him in great trouble: his wife had been convicted of theft and sentenced to several months’ imprisonment, and a baby was expected. The future father deplored the fact that if the child were a boy he might in later years require official verification of his age and place of birth, and then it must be revealed that he was born in prison. “Oh,” said Labouchere, “if any inquiry was made he could say that his father was governor of the prison and residing there.”

It was not unusual in those days for social climbers, seeking to give éclat to their entertainments, to offer hospitality to impecunious noblemen, who would accept the invitations “for a consideration.” One such host happened to be a Member of the House of Commons, and in the lobby Labouchere, as he used to relate, witnessed a meeting between this gentleman and a foreign nobleman who appeared to have spent a good deal of the honorarium which he had received as a diner-out on refreshment. His late host came up to him. He was coldly received, but failed to realise the fact that his attentions were not relished. At last the nobleman exclaimed: “I went to your d——d dinner and got your d——d money for it. That was a matter of business, and the business is now at an end. How dare you presume to pester me, you cad!”

Mr. Labouchere was much sought after as a speaker at political meetings and election campaigns. At one election he went to a certain town in a county borough to support a candidate who was a wretchedly bad speaker. It was the candidate’s inaugural meeting in that place, and a good first impression was, of course, of the utmost importance. But the candidate stumbled over his words and eventually broke down altogether. Mr. Labouchere immediately got to his feet to state his conviction that the electors would all share his own regret that their future MR. LABOUCHERE member, owing to the extreme fatigue and strain of the contest, was not at his best that evening (cheers). But he (Mr. Labouchere) had known him since his birth—in fact, the candidate was his godson—and he had often listened with the utmost delight to those powerful speeches for which he was so well known. Their future member, in spite of considerable physical suffering, had come to present himself to the electors to-night, and they would doubtless show their sympathy by allowing him to rest while he (Mr. Labouchere) repeated to them some extracts from the candidate’s speeches. Mr. Labouchere then recited the main points of the party programmes in forcible language and eventually sat down amid a hurricane of cheers. “Oh, Mr. Labouchere,” said the candidate afterwards, “I am so much delighted at your liking my speeches. I did not know that you had heard me speak. I did not even know that you were my godfather.” “Sir,” said Labouchere, “I neither saw nor heard you till this evening.”

Labouchere, as one who had set himself resolutely to the task of attacking wickedness in high places, made many enemies; and many attempts were made to assail him with petty annoyances. He was constantly the subject of practical jokes, committed out of pure venom. Once in Dublin I received a very cordial invitation from a lady who stated that she was Mr. Labouchere’s niece, and asked me, at her uncle’s request, to spend Christmas with him at Pope’s Villa. I replied gratefully to Labouchere, regretting that I was unable to accept his hospitality, as during my mother’s lifetime I always spent Christmas with her. Labouchere wrote me a characteristic letter saying that I should always be welcome as a guest at his home, but that the amiable lady who had sent the invitation, and who for months past had been issuing invitations in his name, was certainly not his niece, and was not even a friend of his.

It is a matter of general regret that, by his peremptory directions that on his death his papers should immediately be destroyed, Mr. Labouchere deprived the historian of the richest possible treasure house of facts and stories concerning the more intimate history of Parliament and of public life in general.

Mr. Michael Davitt, the originator of the Irish Land League, entered the House of Commons for the first time in 1892. By that time he had endured no less than nine and a half years’ imprisonment as a political offender. He was, in fact, undergoing a term of penal servitude when he was first returned to Parliament in 1881. Frequently he had declined to sit in the English House of Commons. When, finally, he did take his seat, he did not speak until 1893, and then his first parliamentary speech was notable, apart from its obvious ability and the impression made by it, for an unpleasant incident. This was the use towards him by Viscount Cranborne, the present Marquis of Salisbury, of the epithet MR. DAVITT “Murderer.” The interjection was followed by a scene of great indignation and excitement. Lord Cranborne was asked to withdraw the expression, and he dexterously evaded a direct apology to Davitt by saying that he apologised to the House for having used the expression.^[1]

In that speech Mr. Davitt ventured on one of the few political predictions which has ever been completely verified. It may be placed in juxtaposition with Mr. Parnell’s prediction that Mr. Cecil Rhodes would not live in history. “The hon. and learned member for Mid-Armagh,” said Mr. Davitt, “came here the other night and told an affrighted House that Ulster will not obey the law of the land if this (Home Rule) Bill is passed, that he had enrolled himself in some organisation, and that he looked forward to the possibility of having to spend long years of his life in penal servitude. . . . The hon. and learned member will become in all probability an Irish judge. He will never reach the Bench by way of the dock.” Mr. Davitt was right. Mr. Dunbar Plunket Barton, to whom he referred, became in succession an Irish law officer, an Irish judge, and a baronet.

One of the most amusing incidents I have ever witnessed was an enforced tête-à-tête at dinner between Mr. Davitt and Mr. Lecky. Lecky detested the views of Davitt, to whom he referred in some of his writings as “the man Davitt.” Once when there was a very crowded attendance in the House nearly every seat in the dining-room was occupied. Mr. Lecky came into the room, looked about, saw a small table for two, with one seat unoccupied, and sat down. Owing to his short sight he did not at first realise that the occupant of the other seat at his table was Mr. Davitt. When at last realisation came to him and also to Mr. Davitt, they treated each other, to the amusement of the members at neighbouring tables, with every possible formality, carefully passing the salt to one another and so on, and displaying all the courtesies common between strangers.

To Mr. Lecky, who entered the House when in the fifties, parliamentary life was uncongenial. He seldom addressed the House, but when he did his speeches were not conversational but didactic and essay-like; his method of speaking, moreover, was awkward and his hearers listened to sentences of well-considered form and character pronounced in a thin, shrill voice that reminded one of the recital of the Litany by a very young and very nervous clergyman. How different from the method of that other great man of literature whom I have described, Mr. Birrell! Mr. Lecky, on the few occasions when he intervened in debate during his eight years of parliamentary life, was always heard with respect and attention, but his speeches could not be regarded as effective.

Mr. Lecky’s writings proved, not infrequently, MR. LECKY an armoury for his opponents. I remember Mr. T. M. Healy quoting from one of Mr. Lecky’s books a very serious indictment against English Government in Ireland—a parallel incident to my own assault on Mr. Froude. Mr. Lecky, while Mr. Healy spoke, was sitting opposite to him with that expression of weariness and dislike of the whole proceedings which is faithfully reproduced in his statue in Trinity College, Dublin, an embodiment of the words in Newman’s hymn, “with mild austereness sad.” Healy looked at the cover of the book from which he was quoting and informed the House that its author was “W. H. Lecky.” “I often wonder,” said Healy, “what has become of him.”

Mr. Lecky took badinage to heart. He seemed to consider that the House of Commons and its surroundings lacked the serious character proper and becoming to a great legislative assembly. I had written a little book with the genial name, Titled Corruption, in which I had shown, largely by quotation from Lecky’s writings, the very discreditable origin, with few exceptions, of the Irish peerage; and on the title-page I had placed Mr. Lecky’s words, “The majority of Irish peerages are historically connected with memories not of honour but of shame.” Yielding to the suggestion of a waggish friend, I sent Mr. Lecky a copy of this little book, stating my obligations to him for the material which his researches had put ready to my hand. In reply he wrote me a serious letter, thanking me for the book, and reminding me, somewhat sententiously, of the duty of judging men according to the average standard of morality of their day and generation, rather than in accordance with the more enlightened standards of our own time!

Mr. Lecky had married the daughter of a Dutch nobleman. At the time when her husband came into Parliament—the time of the Committee of Inquiry into the Jameson Raid, and of the Boer War—her sympathies were presumably with the Boers. It was thus an unhappy time for Mr. Lecky. One cannot tell to what extent this affected his life, but in one incident, it seems to me, it was apparent. Mr. Labouchere, relying on something that I had told him, stated in the House of Commons that Mr. Lecky had expressed great indignation at the outrages perpetrated by empire extenders on the natives of South Africa. Mr. Lecky immediately rose and contradicted the statement with considerable emphasis. I assured Mr. Labouchere that I had spoken to him with proper authority, for Mr. Lecky had used the words quoted before the Historical Society of Trinity College, Dublin; but before I could obtain from Ireland an official report of the speech Mr. Lecky himself anticipated me by writing on the following day to The Times, apologising both to the House of Commons and to Mr. Labouchere, and stating that the speech at Dublin had entirely escaped his memory. I have always thought that Mr. Lecky must have made that speech under his MR. LECKY wife’s influence and that the sentiments were hers rather than his, and were accordingly the more easily forgotten by him. In any case, Mr. Lecky, by his very prompt admission and apology, showed that he was a man of the very highest sense of honour.

The time comes when I must lay down my pen. I am conscious of the incompleteness of this selection of my recollections. The reader will doubtless study the index for many names of persons of note and of interest with whom I have been acquainted, and will search in vain. My apology for the many omissions both of persons and of incidents must be that to compress reminiscences within the compass of one volume is more difficult than the writing of several volumes; and that I enter into the spirit by which the Apostle was moved when he justified the compression of his narrative on the ground that, if he attempted a comprehensive record, he supposed that the world itself would not contain the books that would be written.

Aberdeen, Lady, 210

Alexander, Primate, 78

Allen, Grant, 91

Arbuthnot, Robert George, 276

Ardilaun, Lord, 35, 42

Argyll, Duke of, 281

Armstrong, Anne, 29

Armstrong, Richard, 173-177

Arnold, Matthew, 100

Ashbourne, Lord, 129-131, 172, 173, 196, 211

Ashmead Bartlett, Sir Ellis, 87

Asquith, Herbert H., see Oxford and Asquith, Earl of

Avebury, Lord, 231

Balfour, Lord, 216, 221, 225, 235, 238, 250-252, 288, 289;

Illus. p. 288

Balfour, Gerald, 228

Ball, Lord Chancellor, 49-51, 128, 162, 296

Barrett, John, 26, 27

Barrington, Sir Jonah, 26, 27

Barry, Lord Justice, 158

Bartley, Sir Trout, 294-296

Barton, Sir Dunbar Plunket, 210, 307

Battenberg, H.R.H. Prince Louis of, 282

Benn, Captain Wedgwood, 293, 294

Beresford, Lord, 235, 292

Bernal Osborne, Ralph, 161

Bernard, Montague, 73, 74

Bethell, Richard, see Westbury, Lord

Biggar, Joseph Gillis, 135, 136, 215

Birrell, Augustine, 276, 277, 308

Blackburne, Lord Chancellor, 151

Blake, Hon. Edward, 220

Blennerhassett, Rowland Ponsonby, 58, 59

Bottomley, Horatio, 229

Bradshaw, Rev. MacNevin, 204

Brampton, Lord, 107

Brewster, Lord Chancellor, 151

Bright, John, 203-205

Brodrick, St. John, see Midleton, Earl of

Browne, Colonel, 33

Browne, Daniel, 34

Bryce, Viscount, 76

Buller, Sir Redvers, 230

Bunton, Timothy, 180

Buonaparte, Napoleon, 180

Burdett-Coutts, Mr., 87

Burke, Sir Bernard, 65

Burke, Edmund, 131, 139, 247

Burke, Rev. J. Lardner, 32

Burke, Thomas Henry, 20

Burrowes, Dean, 26

Burton, Mr. Justice, 132

Butler, Dr., 100

Butler, Gordon, 100

Butler, Lady, 31

Butt, Isaac, 111, 118-124, 131, 144, 145, 156;

Illus. p. 118

Butt, Mrs. Isaac, 123

Cadogan, Earl, 193

Cairns, Lord Chancellor, 127-131, 151

Campbell of Lochow, Sir Colin, 281

Campbell, Lady, 34

Campbell-Bannerman, Sir Henry, 234-236, 240, 241, 272

Campbell-Bannerman, Lady, 241

Cardwell, Viscount, 96, 97

“Carroll, Lewis,” see Dodgson, Rev. C. L.

Carson, Lord, 194, 195, 214

Caulfield, Edward Houston, 39-44

Caulfield, Miss, 43, 44

Causton, Mr., see Southwark, Lord

Cavendish, Lord Frederick, 20, 256

Cecil, Lord Hugh, 104, 307

Chadwick, Bishop, 33

Chamberlain, Austen, 297

Chamberlain, Joseph, 205, 219-221, 246, 253-258;

Illus. p. 288

Charlemont, Earl of, 39

Channing de Wellingborough, Lord, 237

Charnwood, Lord, 103

Chatterton, Vice-Chancellor, 184, 185

Christian, Lord Justice, 164

Churchill, Lord Randolph, 134, 224, 286

Churchill, Winston, 255

Coffey, Dr., 64

Colborne, Sir John, see Seaton, Lord

Coleridge, Lord Chief Justice, 100, 101

Coleridge, Mr. Justice (Lord), 87

Copleston, Bishop, 94

Courtney, Lord, 216, 289, 290

Craig, Sir James, 234, 235

Creighton, Bishop, 94

Curran, John Philpot, 18

Curzon, Marquess, 92

Daunt, W. J. O’Neill, 137-141;

Illus. p. 138

Davenport, Bromley, 232

Davitt, Michael, 198, 306-308

Deane, Admiral, 24

Deane, Dr., 97

Dease, Mr., 59

Delahunty, Mary, 29, 30

Delahunty, Thomas, 29

Delaney, Patrick, 170

De Moleyns, Thomas, 180, 181

Derby, Fifteenth Earl of, 150

Devonshire, Eighth Duke of, 256

Dill, Sir Samuel, 84

Dillon, John, 32, 33, 219, 220

Disraeli, Benjamin, 71, 72, 116, 275

Dodgson, Rev. C. L., 66

Doran, Charles, 240

Dowse, Mr. (Baron) Richard, 50, 51, 134, 176, 183, 184

Egan, John, 20

Eglinton and Winton, Earl of, 32

Ellis, Mr., 28, 29

Emmet, Robert, 20, 35

Finn, Mr., 116

Fisher, Lord, 17, 75, 240

Fisher, Herbert, 90

Fitzgerald, Lord, 142, 153, 158, 196

FitzGerald, Lord Edward, 34

Fitzgerald, Francis (Baron), 154, 155

FitzGerald, James (Prime Serjeant), 30

Fitzgerald, Sir Robert Penrose, 292

FitzGibbon Gerald, junior (Lord Justice), 33, 128-130, 133, 136

FitzGibbon, Gerald, senior (Master in Chancery), 132, 133

FitzMaurice, Lord (Edmund), 282

Fowler, Sir Henry, see Wolverhampton, Viscount

Fowler, Rev. Thomas, 78

Fox, Charles James, 203

Freeman, Edward Augustus, 72

Froude, James Anthony, 65, 66, 71-73, 309

Galbraith, Rev. Professor, 118, 125, 126

Geale, Piers, 40

Geale, Miss, 40

Gibson, Edward, see Ashbourne, Lord

Gladstone, William Ewart, 37, 38, 64, 135, 178, 198, 203, 204, 209, 211, 212, 216, 238, 243-255, 272, 273, 301;

Illus. p. 246

Glass, Mr., 174

Grattan, Henry, 18

Gray, Edmund Dwyer, 169, 170

Gray, Rev. Thomas, 59, 60

Green, John Richard, 98

Gordon, General, 262

Goschen, Viscount, 224-226, 238

Guinness, Sir Arthur, see Ardilaun, Lord

Guinness, Arthur, 36

Guinness, Sir Benjamin, 35-37

Gulland, Mr., 284

Gully, Mr. Speaker, 212, 216-221, 223, 277

Gully, Mrs., 221

Hamilton, Lord Claud, 134

Hamilton, Bishop, 67

Harcourt, Sir William, 96, 97, 218, 270-274;

Illus. p. 246

Harcourt, Viscount (“Lulu”), 273, 274

Harrison, Edwin, 95

Haughton, Rev. Samuel, 126-128, 130

Hawkins, Sir Henry, see Brampton, Lord

Healy, T. M., 197-201, 214, 215, 255, 301, 309;

Illus. pp. 288, 300

Hemphill, Lord, 185, 186

Henry VIII., 71

Henry, Mitchell, 176, 177

Heron, Denis Caulfield, 158-162

Hicks-Beach, Sir Michael, 123

Hopkinson, Sir Alfred, 87

Hume, Mr., 275

Ingram, John Kells, 55, 56

Irving, Lawrence, 90

Iveagh, Lord, 35

Jameson, Dr., 264, 265

Jebb, Sir Richard, 250

Jellett, Mr., 202

Johnson, Sir William, 193, 198, 199

Jones, Ernest, 88

Jones, Judge Atherley, 88

Jowett, Dr., 64, 76

Karslake, Sir John B., 107, 108

Kelly, Charles, 165-168

Kennaway, Sir John, 230

Kenny, Professor Courtney, 99

Keogh, Mr. Justice, 42-44, 110, 111-117

King, Sir Henry Seymour, 274, 275

Kinglake, Alexander William, 231

Kitchen, Dean, 69, 70

Kitchen, Mrs., 70

Kitchener, Lord, 286, 287

Labouchere, Henry, 216, 226, 302-306, 310;

Illus. p. 288

La Touche, John, 79

La Touche, Rose Lucy, 79-83;

Illus. p. 80

La Touche, Mrs., 80

Laurence, Dr., 231, 248

Laurie, Lieut.-General, 229

Law, Lord Chancellor, 198

Lawrence, Sir Perceval, 99

Lawson, Mr. Justice, 27, 114, 169-172, 202

Lawson, Mrs., 171

Lecky, W. E. H., 65, 66, 79, 140, 141, 276, 307-311

Lecky, Mrs. W. E. H., 310

Lefroy, Lord Chief Justice, 27, 28, 49

Lefroy, Anthony, 28, 49

Lennox, Colonel, see Richmond, Duke of

Leopold, H.R.H. Prince, 85

“Lewis Carroll,” see Dodgson, Rev. C. L.

Lewis, Sir Charles, 135

Liddell, Dean, 63-65, 68, 84, 171, 172

Liddell, Mrs., 65, 66

Liddon, Canon, 67, 68

Litton, Edward (Master in Chancery), 44-49

Litton, Rev. Edward Arthur, 46

Lockwood, Sir Frank, 279, 280;

Illus. p. 288

Logan, J. W., 214

Londonderry, Marquess of, 66

Long, Viscount (Walter), 275-277

Lorne, Marquess of, see Argyll, Duke of

Lowther, Mr. Speaker, see Ullswater, Viscount

Lubbock, Sir John, see Avebury, Lord

Lucy, Sir Henry, 220

May, Lord Chief Justice, 155-157

McCarthy, Justin, 205;

Illus. p. 288

Macaulay, Lord, 138

Macdonagh, Francis, 173-175, 177

MacManus, Terence Bellew, 35

MacNeill, Gordon, 18

MacNeill, John, 18

MacNeill, Rev. John Gordon Swift, 18, 19, 34, 39, 44, 46, 49, 80

MacNeill, Susan Colpoys, 17, 19, 21, 22, 31, 32, 36, 44, 47

Mahaffy, John Pentland, 55-58

Magee, Archbishop, 104

Magee, Arthur, 104

Mahon, The O’Gorman, 141-143, 157

Manning, Cardinal, 101, 102

Mansfield, Lord, 150

Martin, John, 143-145

Matheson, Mr., 131

Mayo, Earl of, 43

Midleton, Earl of, 230

Miller, Alexander, 128-131

“Monster, The,” see Williams, Renwick

Montgomery, District Inspector, 174

Moore, Sir John, 19

Moore, Thomas, 34

Monroe, Mr. Justice, 199

Moriarty, Lord Justice, 192-194

Morris and Killanin, Lord, 27, 135, 196

Moulton, Lord, 229

Mowbray, Sir John, 102, 180

Mowbray, Sir Robert, 102

Muir, Sir William, 243

Munster, Mr., 244

Murphy, Mr. Justice, 202

Naish, Lord Chancellor, 193

Napier, Lord Chancellor, 47-49, 110, 152, 153

Neate, Charles, 74-76

Nixon, Sir Christopher, 240

O’Brien, Lord Chief Justice, 143, 194-197

O’Brien, Mr. Justice James, 153, 195

O’Brien, J. F. X., 300

O’Brien, Sir Lucius, 30

O’Brien, Smith, 150, 154

O’Brien, Mr. Justice William, 182, 183, 202

O’Connell, Daniel, 36, 44, 45, 56, 109, 119, 133, 134, 138-140, 149, 247

O’Connor, Feargus, 137

O’Hagan, Lord Chancellor, 135, 165, 168

O’Hagan, Mr. Justice John, 165

O’Hagan, Thomas, see O’Hagan, Lord Chancellor

O’Hanlon, Mr., 300

O’Kelly, Eugene, 300

O’Loghlen, Sir Colman, 178-180

O’Loghlen, Sir Michael, 178

O’Mahony, The, 87

O’Shaughnessy, Mr. Justice, 167

O’Shea, Captain, 143

Ovenden, Very Rev. C. T., 189

Oxford and Asquith, Earl of, 77, 86, 87, 241, 284

Owen, Sidney James, 69, 85

Palles, Lord Chief Baron, 134-136

Parnell, Charles Stewart, 20, 116, 122, 142, 143, 145-148, 156, 157, 209, 213, 232, 249, 255, 257, 265-267, 298-301, 307;

Illus. pp. 146

Parnell, Sir John, 30, 32

Parnell, Thomas, 30

Parnell, Mrs., 147

Peel, Sir Robert, 45, 212, 213

Peel, Mr. Speaker, 212-216, 271, 288-291;

Illus. p. 212

Pelly, Sir Lewis, 238, 239

Pigott, Richard, 255

Plunket, David, see Rathmore, Lord

Powell, Frederick York, 88-90

Puleston, Sir John, 238

Pusey, Dr., 67

Rasch, Sir Carne, 227, 228

Rasch, Lady, 227

Rathmore, Lord, 42, 131, 134, 165, 210

Redmond, John, 197, 200, 201, 210;

Illus. p. 288

Redmond, William, 197, 201, 300

Redington, Christopher, 94

Rhodes, Cecil, 39, 257, 259-269, 307

Richards, Herbert, 99

Richmond, Duke of, 24, 25

Rigby, Lord Justice, 294-296

Robertson, Herbert, 228

Robertson, Mrs. Herbert, 229

Robinson, John, 189, 190

Rosebery, Earl of, 85, 272

Ruskin, John, 80-82

Ryle, Bishop J. C., 95, 96

Salisbury, Third Marquess of, 89, 100, 217, 237, 238, 250

Schreiner, Olive, 261, 267-269

Schreiner, Mrs., 267

Schreiner, Hon. William, 267

Seaton, Lord, 19

Seaton, Lady, 20, 21

Selborne, Earl of, 100

Sexton, Thomas, 216, 299;

Illus. pp. 288, 300

Shaw, Sir Frederick, 108-111

Sherbrooke, Neville, 127

Sinclair, Archdeacon, 98, 99

Smith, Goldwin, 71, 72

Smith, Thomas Berry Cusac, 133

Smith, Sir William Cusac, 109

Smith, W. H., 202, 232-234

Southwark, Lord, 247

Stack, Rev. Thomas, 61, 62

Stamford, Earl of, 282, 283

Stamfordham, Lord, 284

Stanhope, Earl, 100

Stevenson, F. S., 237

Stubbs, Bishop, 71, 72

Sullivan, Alexander Martin, 111, 112, 125, 145, 156, 176

Sullivan, Sir Edward, 182, 183

Sullivan, Serjeant, 111

Swift, Anna Maria, 23

Swift, Dean, 23, 115, 140, 227

Swift, Deane, 23-26

Swift, Godwin, 23, 24

Swift, Theophilus, 24-26

Sykes, Sir Tatton, 292

Talbot, Bishop Edward Stuart, 71, 100

Talbot, Gilbert, 99, 100

Tanner, Dr., 288-290

Taylor, Colonel, 145

Thomas, Mr., 258

Thomson, Archbishop, 92, 93

Tweedy, Rev. Henry, 21

Ullswater, Viscount, 212, 222, 223, 282

Ullswater, Viscountess, 223, 282

Verrall, Professor A. W., 99

Victoria, Queen, 279, 280

Wainwright, 156

Walker, Sir Samuel, 186, 187

Wallace, R., 287

Walsh, Bishop Pakenham, 147, 148

Warmington, Cornelius, 272

Wauchope, General, 268

Webb, Thomas, Ebenezer, 50, 162-164

Wellington, Duke of, 34

Wesley, John, 18

West, Rev. George Washbourne, 77

Westbury, Lord, 75

Whately, Archbishop, 92

Whiteside, Lord Chief Justice, 49, 133, 149, 151, 153, 155, 156;

Illus. p. 150

Wilberforce, Bishop, 18, 68, 101, 231, 282

Williams, Renwick, 25

Wilson, Rev. Thomas, 139

Wolverhampton, Viscount, 279

York, Duke of, 24

Yorke, Philip, 192

Young, Samuel, 282

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Contents


		PAGE
	Foreword	13

PART I: DUBLIN

	Chapter I. Of My Earliest Years	17

Lord Fisher. My father. Lord Seaton. Lady Seaton. Mr. John Egan. My mother.

	Chapter II. Of Links with the Eighteenth Century	23

Dean Swift. Mr. Deane Swift. Theophilus Swift. Sir Jonah Barrington. Lord Chief Justice Lefroy. Mr. Justice Lawson. Mr. Ellis. My grandparents. Mr. Thomas Parnell.

	Chapter III. Of the Days of My Childhood	31

Lord Justice FitzGibbon. Lord Edward FitzGerald. Thomas Moore. Terence Bellew MacManus. Sir Benjamin Guinness. Mr. Arthur Guinness. Mr. Gladstone. Mr. Cecil Rhodes. Mr. Edward Houston Caulfield. Mr. Justice Keogh. Rt. Hon. Edward Litton. Mr. O’Connell. Lord Chancellor Napier. Mr. Anthony Lefroy. Dr. Ball. Dr. Webb. Mr. (Baron) Dowse.


PART II: DUBLIN AND OXFORD

	Chapter I. Of Trinity College	55

Dr. Ingram. Dr. Mahaffy. Mr. Blennerhassett. Rev. Thomas Gray. Rev. Thomas Stack.

	Chapter II. Of a Dean and Some Oxford Professors	63

Dr. Liddell. Mr. Lecky. “Lewis Carroll.” Dr. Pusey. Canon Heurtley. Canon Liddon. Bishop Samuel Wilberforce. Mr. Sidney James Owen. Dean Kitchen. Bishop Edward Stuart Talbot. Bishop Stubbs. Mr. Goldwin Smith. Professor Freeman. Mr. J. A. Froude. Right Hon. Montague Bernard. Mr. Charles Neate. Viscount Bryce. Dr. Jowett. Rev. George Washbourne West. Rev. Thomas Fowler. Primate Alexander.

	Chapter III. Of Mr. Ruskin and Miss La Touche	79

	Chapter IV. Of Some Undergraduates	84

Lord Rosebery. H.R.H. Prince Leopold. Mr. Asquith. Judge Atherley Jones. Sir Alfred Hopkinson. Mr. Burdett-Coutts. The O’Mahony. Lord Coleridge. Sir Ellis Ashmead Bartlett. Mr. Frederick York Powell. Mr. Lawrence Irving. Mr. Fisher. Mr. Grant Allen. Cardinal Manning. Archbishop Whately. Lord Curzon. Archbishop Thomson.

	Chapter V. Of the Oxford Union	94

Bishop Creighton. Bishop Copleston. Mr. Christopher Redington. Mr. Edwin Harrison. Bishop J. C. Ryle. Sir William Harcourt. Mr. J. R. Green. Archdeacon Sinclair. Mr. Herbert Richards. Professor A. W. Verrall. Sir Perceval Lawrence. Professor Courtney Kenny. Mr. Gilbert Talbot. Mr. Gordon Butler. Cardinal Manning. Earl Stanhope. Lord Chief Justice Coleridge. Bishop Wilberforce. Sir Robert Mowbray. Sir John Mowbray. Lord Charnwood. Mr. Arthur Magee. Lord Hugh Cecil.


PART III: DUBLIN AND WESTMINSTER

	Chapter I. Of the Tragic Ending of Great Careers	107

Sir John B. Karslake. Right Hon. Frederick Shaw. Mr. Justice Keogh. Mr. A. M. Sullivan. Mr. Disraeli.

	Chapter II. Of the Founder of the Home Government Association	118

	Chapter III. Of Nepotism and its Consequences	125

Rev. J. A. Galbraith. Rev. Samuel Haughton. Lord Chancellor Cairns. Mr. Gerald FitzGibbon. Mr. Alexander Miller. Mr. Edward Gibson (Lord Ashbourne). Mr. David Plunket (Lord Rathmore). Mr. Gerald FitzGibbon. Mr. Justice Burton. “Alphabet Smith.” Lord Randolph Churchill. Chief Baron Palles. Sir Charles Lewis. Mr. Joseph Biggar.

Chapter IV. Of the Old Irish Leaders		137

Mr. O’Neill Daunt. Rev. Thomas Wilson. Mr. O’Connell. Mr. Lecky. The O’Gorman Mahon. Mr. Parnell. Captain O’Shea. Mr. John Martin. Mrs. Parnell. Bishop Pakenham Walsh.

	Chapter V. Of Certain Famous Lawyers	149

Lord Chief Justice Whiteside. Lord Chancellor Napier. Mr. Justice James O’Brien. Lord Fitzgerald. Mr. (Baron) Fitzgerald. Lord Chief Justice May. Lord Justice Barry. Mr. Denis Caulfield Heron. Dr. Webb. Lord Justice Christian. Lord O’Hagan. Lord Ashbourne. Mr. Justice O’Hagan. Judge Charles Kelly. Mr. Justice Lawson. Mr. Edmund Dwyer Gray. Mr. Francis Macdonagh. Serjeant Armstrong. (Serjeant) Sir Colman O’Loghlen. Mr. Thomas De Moleyns. Mr. Justice William O’Brien. Mr. (Baron) Dowse. Vice-Chancellor Chatterton. Lord Hemphill. Lord Chancellor Walker.

	Chapter VI. Of my Contemporaries at the Bar	188

Lord Justice J. F. Moriarty. Lord Carson. Lord Chief Justice Peter O’Brien. Mr. T. M. Healy. Sir William Johnson. Mr. John Redmond. Mr. William Redmond. Mr. Gladstone. Mr. John Bright. Mr. Joseph Chamberlain.


PART IV: WESTMINSTER

	Chapter I. Of Speakers of the house of Commons	209

Mr. Speaker Peel. Mr. Joseph Chamberlain. Mr. T. M. Healy. Mr. Speaker Gully. Mr. Courtney. Mr. Dillon. Mrs. Gully. Mr. Speaker Lowther. Mrs. Lowther.

	Chapter II. Of Great Men and Great Causes	224

Mr. John Redmond. Viscount Goschen. Mr. Labouchere. Sir Carne Rasch. Mr. Herbert Robertson. Lieut.-General Laurie. The Earl of Midleton. Sir John Kennaway. Lord Avebury. Mr. Bromley Davenport. Mr. W. H. Smith. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. Sir James Craig. Lord Charles Beresford. Mr. Gladstone. Sir Lewis Pelly. Lady Campbell-Bannerman.

	Chapter III. Of Mr. Gladstone	243

	Chapter IV. Of Mr. Joseph Chamberlain	253

Mr. Chamberlain. Mr. Winston Churchill. Mr. T. M. Healy. The Duke of Devonshire. Mr. Cecil Rhodes. Mr. Thomas.

	Chapter V. Of Two Visits to Africa	259

Mr. Cecil Rhodes. General Gordon. Dr. Jameson. Miss Olive Schreiner. Mr. Parnell.

	Chapter VI. Of Some Cabinet Ministers	270

Sir William Harcourt. Mr. Speaker Peel. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. Mr. Warmington. Lord Rosebery. Mr. Gladstone. Mr. “Lulu” Harcourt. Sir Henry Seymour King. Mr. Walter Long. Mr. Augustine Birrell. Mr. Robert George Arbuthnot.

	Chapter VII. Of People in High Places	278

Sir Henry Fowler. Sir Frank Lockwood. Queen Victoria. Mr. Samuel Young. The Duke of Argyle. Bishop Wilberforce. The Earl of Stamford. Mr. Asquith. Mr. Gulland. Lord Stamfordham.

	Chapter VIII. Of Tragedy and Comedy	286

Lord Randolph Churchill. Lord Kitchener. Mr. Wallace. Dr. Tanner. Mr. Speaker Peel. Mr. Balfour. Lord Courtney. Lord Charles Beresford. Captain Wedgwood Benn. Sir John Rigby. Sir Trout Bartley.

	Chapter IX. Of the Fate of Mr. Parnell	298

Mr. Parnell. Mr. Sexton. Mr. J. F. X. O’Brien. Eugene O’Kelly. Mr. O’Hanlon. Mr. William Redmond. Mr. T. M. Healy.

	Chapter X. Of Three Great Parliamentarians	302

Mr. Labouchere. Mr. Michael Davitt. Sir Dunbar Plunket Barton. Mr. W. H. Lecky. Mr. T. M. Healy. Mrs. Lecky.

	Index	313

Illustrations


	J. G. Swift MacNeill	FRONTISPIECE
Photograph by Lafayette, Dublin.
		FACING
		PAGE
	J. G. Swift MacNeill “on the war path”	18
Cartoon by “Spy.” By courtesy of the Proprietors of Vanity Fair.

	Miss Rose Lucy La Touche	80
From a photograph, hand-coloured by Miss La Touche.

	Mr. Isaac Butt	118

	Mr. W. J. O’Neill Daunt	138
By courtesy of Messrs. T. Fisher Unwin Ltd.

	Mr. Parnell	146
By courtesy of The Graphic.

	Lord Chief Justice Whiteside	150

	The Irish Foot Soldier (J. G. Swift MacNeill)	202
By courtesy of the Executors of Sir F. C. Gould and Messrs. T. Fisher Unwin Ltd.

	Mr. Speaker Peel	212
By courtesy of The Graphic.

	“The minority who opposed the Statute met with ridicule and gibes”	236
By courtesy of the Executors of Sir F. C. Gould and The London Express Newspaper Ltd.

	“On March 11th, 1892, I moved that the votes of three members be disallowed”	238
By courtesy of The Graphic.

	Mr. Gladstone welcomed by Sir William Harcourt and cheered by the Irish members	246
By courtesy of The Graphic.

	Mr. Balfour amuses the Irish members	288
By courtesy of The Graphic.

	“The bond of cohesion was broken”	300
By courtesy of The Graphic.

CHAPTER I
OF MY EARLIEST YEARS

CHAPTER II
OF LINKS WITH THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

CHAPTER III
OF THE DAYS OF MY CHILDHOOD

CHAPTER I
OF TRINITY COLLEGE

CHAPTER II
OF A DEAN AND SOME OXFORD PROFESSORS

CHAPTER III
OF MR. RUSKIN AND MISS LA TOUCHE

CHAPTER IV
OF SOME UNDERGRADUATES

CHAPTER V
OF THE OXFORD UNION

CHAPTER I
OF THE TRAGIC ENDING OF GREAT CAREERS

CHAPTER II
OF THE FOUNDER OF THE HOME GOVERNMENT ASSOCIATION

CHAPTER III
OF NEPOTISM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

CHAPTER IV
OF THE OLD IRISH LEADERS

CHAPTER V
OF CERTAIN FAMOUS LAWYERS

CHAPTER VI
OF MY CONTEMPORARIES AT THE BAR

CHAPTER I
OF SPEAKERS OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS

CHAPTER II
OF GREAT MEN AND GREAT CAUSES

CHAPTER III
OF MR. GLADSTONE

CHAPTER IV
OF MR. JOSEPH CHAMBERLAIN

CHAPTER V
OF TWO VISITS TO AFRICA

CHAPTER VI
OF SOME CABINET MINISTERS

CHAPTER VII
OF PEOPLE IN HIGH PLACES

CHAPTER VIII
OF TRAGEDY AND COMEDY

CHAPTER IX
OF THE FATE OF MR. PARNELL

CHAPTER X
OF THREE GREAT PARLIAMENTARIANS

Index

CHAPTER I OF MY EARLIEST YEARS

CHAPTER II OF LINKS WITH THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

CHAPTER III OF THE DAYS OF MY CHILDHOOD

CHAPTER I OF TRINITY COLLEGE

CHAPTER II OF A DEAN AND SOME OXFORD PROFESSORS

CHAPTER III OF MR. RUSKIN AND MISS LA TOUCHE

CHAPTER IV OF SOME UNDERGRADUATES

CHAPTER V OF THE OXFORD UNION

CHAPTER I OF THE TRAGIC ENDING OF GREAT CAREERS

CHAPTER II OF THE FOUNDER OF THE HOME GOVERNMENT ASSOCIATION

CHAPTER III OF NEPOTISM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

CHAPTER IV OF THE OLD IRISH LEADERS

CHAPTER V OF CERTAIN FAMOUS LAWYERS

CHAPTER VI OF MY CONTEMPORARIES AT THE BAR

CHAPTER I OF SPEAKERS OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS

CHAPTER II OF GREAT MEN AND GREAT CAUSES

CHAPTER III OF MR. GLADSTONE

CHAPTER IV OF MR. JOSEPH CHAMBERLAIN

CHAPTER V OF TWO VISITS TO AFRICA

CHAPTER VI OF SOME CABINET MINISTERS

CHAPTER VII OF PEOPLE IN HIGH PLACES

CHAPTER VIII OF TRAGEDY AND COMEDY

CHAPTER IX OF THE FATE OF MR. PARNELL

CHAPTER X OF THREE GREAT PARLIAMENTARIANS

Index

CHAPTER I
OF MY EARLIEST YEARS

CHAPTER II
OF LINKS WITH THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

CHAPTER III
OF THE DAYS OF MY CHILDHOOD

CHAPTER I
OF TRINITY COLLEGE

CHAPTER II
OF A DEAN AND SOME OXFORD PROFESSORS

CHAPTER III
OF MR. RUSKIN AND MISS LA TOUCHE

CHAPTER IV
OF SOME UNDERGRADUATES

CHAPTER V
OF THE OXFORD UNION

CHAPTER I
OF THE TRAGIC ENDING OF GREAT CAREERS

CHAPTER II
OF THE FOUNDER OF THE HOME GOVERNMENT ASSOCIATION

CHAPTER III
OF NEPOTISM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

CHAPTER IV
OF THE OLD IRISH LEADERS

CHAPTER V
OF CERTAIN FAMOUS LAWYERS

CHAPTER VI
OF MY CONTEMPORARIES AT THE BAR

CHAPTER I
OF SPEAKERS OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS

CHAPTER II
OF GREAT MEN AND GREAT CAUSES

CHAPTER III
OF MR. GLADSTONE

CHAPTER IV
OF MR. JOSEPH CHAMBERLAIN

CHAPTER V
OF TWO VISITS TO AFRICA

CHAPTER VI
OF SOME CABINET MINISTERS

CHAPTER VII
OF PEOPLE IN HIGH PLACES

CHAPTER VIII
OF TRAGEDY AND COMEDY

CHAPTER IX
OF THE FATE OF MR. PARNELL

CHAPTER X
OF THREE GREAT PARLIAMENTARIANS