view of the personality of the Leadership. It is impossible that a House led by Mr. W. H. Smith can be as prone to merriment as was one which found its head in Mr. Disraeli. When, in the Parliament of 1868, Mr. Gladstone was Premier and Mr. Disraeli Leader of the Oppositon, or in the succeeding Parliament, when these positions were reversed, the House of Commons enjoyed a unique incentive to conditions of humour. Mr. Gladstone, with his gravity of mien, his sonorous sustained eloquence, and his seriousness about trifles, was a superb foil for the gay, but always mordant humour of Mr. Disraeli.
"Eloquence."
From the outset of his career that great Parliamentarian enjoyed extraordinary advantage by reason of the accident of the personality against which, first and last, he was pitted. Having had Sir Robert Peel to gird against through the space of a dozen years, it was too much to hope that for fully a quarter of a century he should have enjoyed the crowning mercy of being opposed to and contrasted with Mr. Gladstone. Yet such was his good fortune. How little he did with Lord Hartington in the interregnum of 1874-7, and how little mark he made against Lord Granville when he met him in the Lords, brings into strong light the advantage fortune had secured for him through the longer period of his life.
"Haunted."
Whilst the tone and habit of the House of Commons in matters of humour are to a considerable extent conformable with the idosyncrasy of its leaders, it will sometimes, in despair of prevailing dulness, assume a joke if it has it not. There is nothing more delightful in the happiest efforts of Mr. Disraeli than the peculiar relations which subsist between the present House of Commons and Mr. W. H. Smith. On one side we have a good, amiable, somewhat pedagogic gentleman, unexpectedly thrust into the seat haunted by the shades of Palmerston and Disraeli. On the other side is the House of Commons, a little doubtful of the result, but personally liking the new Leader, and constitutionally prone to recognise authority.
At first Mr. Smith was voted unbearably dull. His hesitating manner, his painful self-consciousness, his moral reflections, and his all-pervading sense of "duty to his Queen and country" bored the House. In the first few months of his succession to Lord Randolph Churchill, there was seen the unwonted spectacle of members getting up and leaving the House when the Leader presented himself at the table. But Mr. Smith plodded on, patiently, pathetically, trolling out his moral reflections, and tremulously preserving what with full consciousness of the contradiction of words may be described as an air of submissive authority. Members began to perceive, or perhaps to invent, the fun of the thing. Mr. Smith realised their boyhood's idea of Mr. Barlow conversing with his pupils; only he was always benevolent, and though he frequently shook his ferule with threatening gesture, Sandford and Merton felt that the palms of their hands were safe.
Mr. Smith is, however, peculiarly a House of Commons' possession. No one out of the House can quite understand how precious he is, how inimitable, how indescribable. To the outsider he makes poor amends for the Irish Members of the Parliament of 1874, or the Fourth Party that played so prominent a rôle in the House that met in 1880. The Fourth Party, like the Major, Mr. Biggar, Mr. Delahunty, Mr. McCarthy Downing, and the famous Lord Mayor of
