ESSENCE OF PARLIAMENT.
EXTRACTED FROM THE DIARY OF TOBY, M.P.
Tuesday, February 5.—House filled once more with bustle of new Session. Lobby crowded. Corridors, long silent, burst into bustling life. "Seems to me," says Jemmy Lowther, looking on with his juvenile-veteran air, "that the happiest day in a member's life is the first of a Session, if indeed the cup of his joy isn't fuller on the day of prorogation."
For some the jubilation of the hour is toned down by saddened thought. There is one step that will never more be heard in the lobby, one familiar face seen here no more, one voice, wont to sway the passions of the House, that now is still. Lycidas is dead, not quite ere his prime, but in what, had fate been kinder, should have been the fulness of his rich gifts.
The House knew Grandolph, as he presented himself to its notice from various points of view. First, an unknown new Member, rising from bench immediately behind Ministers, a situation which, deliberately chosen, seemed to observant Whips to indicate pleasurable prospect of docility. Next, whilst his Party was still in office, he popped up from front bench below gangway, and pricked at ponderous hide of Sclater-Booth, pink of respectability, sublimation of county-gentry-Toryism. Then, with sudden brilliancy and sustained force, he rose on the firmament below the gangway in Opposition, tilting almost single-handed at the panoplied host, a majority over a hundred strong, that seemed to make Mr. G.'s second Administration invulnerable. For a moment in a famous night in June he was seen standing jubilant on his seat at the corner of the bench, waving his hat, shouting himself hoarse with cries of victory. From this elevation he sprang lightly on to the Treasury Bench, and astonished Members who, with him, had heard the chimes at midnight and after, by the quiet dignity of his manner, his unerring tact, his unfailing skill of management. Never since the time Prince Hal, boon companion of Falstaff, became King Henry the Fifth, has there been seen such transformation.
Never was such a sudden scholar made;
Never came reformation in a flood,
With such a heady currance, scouring faults;
Nor never Hydra-headed wilfulness
So soon did lose his seat, and all at once,
As in this king.
The succeeding Session had a fresh surprise. It found our Grandolph, self-reduced to the ranks, caressing his moustache on the corner seat behind the Treasury Bench. After a while he wearied of the invidious position, and went off to the races, to Norway a-fishing, to South Africa to observe the ways of lions from precarious proximity. But his heart was, after all, at Westminster. He came back broken in health, undaunted in spirit. Nothing pluckier, nothing more pathetic seen in the House than his long stubborn fight against the paralysis that crept over him even as he stood at the table and tried to weave again the magic spell by which he once held the House.
He died as he lived, fighting, keeping Death at arm's length for a full month after the highest authorities had said it was a mistake to be such an unconscionably long time in dying.
The House of Commons will know Grandolph no more. But it will never forget one who will through all time rank among the most brilliant of its sons.
Something decidedly hysterical about jubilation of the hour. Prevalent hilarity suggests case of crowded passenger ship, having been in imminent danger of shipwreck, suddenly steams into comparatively placid seas.
