A NEW YEAR'S CARD.
Library, House of Commons,
Honoured Sir, New Year's Eve.
I find in the Letter Bag a communication from that eminent statesman Grandolph. But I think it will keep for a week, and on this New Year's Eve I will put in the Bag a letter of my own, addressed to him who, take him for all in all, (as Bacon wrote) is the most Eminent Man of the century. No one, a cynic has said, is a hero to his own valet—meaning, I suppose, that the closer a man is looked into the less profound his valley appears. It has been my lot to sit at your feet for close upon half-a-century, perched upon the pile of volumes which, oddly enough, never grows an eighth-of-an-inch higher through the revolving years. You have honoured me with your closest confidence. I have known your inmost thoughts. I have often seen you, as you are weekly presented to an admiring public, chuckling with finger to nose and brightened eye over the inception of a joke, and I have observed you afterwards a little depressed on reading it in the proof, struck with the conviction that it was not quite so good as you thought. I am not your valet. But you are truly my Hero.
It may be said that I am prejudiced by receipt of personal favours. You took me literally out of the streets to be your daily companion, and, at friendly though still humble distance, to consort with the Beauty and Brilliance that throngs your court. But for you I might years ago have followed the historic precedent, gone mad to serve my private ends, bit some unwholesome person and died. But you took me by the paw, lifted me into your company, placed me on the pedestal of your ever-increasing but never-swelling bulk of volumes, whence it was an easy matter to step on to the lower level of the floor of the House of Commons. The prestige of your name was sufficient to secure for me the suffrages of one of the most important and one of the most enlightened county constituencies of this still undivided Empire.
As I sit here alone in this dimly-lighted chamber there glide along with silent footfall an interminable procession of familiar faces and figures that have passed through this room since I first took the oath and my seat for Barkshire. Dizzy walks past, looking neither to the right nor to the left, but conveying to the mind of the onlooker a curious impression that he sees all round; and here comes kindly Stafford Northcote and burly Beresford-Hope, and Tom Collins, with the faded umbrella he used to bring down through all the summer nights and solemnly commit to the personal charge of the doorkeeper. And there goes dear Isaac Butt, wringing his hands because of Major O'Gorman's revolt, and W. P. Adam, disappointed after his long fight which ended with victory for his Party and something like a snub for himself. Here is Newdegate frowning at the scarlet drapery of a reading lamp; and behind him, Whalley, wondering whether he was really in earnest when he denounced him before the House of Commons as "a Jesuit in disguise." Here, too, poor Lord Henry Lennox with his trousers turned up, and Sir Thomas May with a Peerage looming within hand's reach, and Captain Gosset steering his shapely legs towards his room to drink Apollinaris and read up Hansard. All, all are gone, the old familiar faces, and the New Year, which the bell-ringers are waiting to welcome in, is nothing to them. Over there in the corner are the two chairs on which the form of Joseph Gillis reclined on the first all-night sitting that ever was, when, the thing being fresh to Members, they were eager to stop up all night, to walk round the recumbent form, dropping pokers and heavy volumes with innocent attempt to disturb the slumberer. But Joseph Gillis slept, or seemed to sleep. He was giving the Saxon trouble, and was not greatly inconvenienced himself.
I have taken down from the shelves two volumes among the most recent and most prized addition to our Library, and, turning over the leaves, come upon fresh testimony to my Honoured Sir's prescience. Turning over John Leech's Pictures of Life and Character, garnered from the Collection of Mr. Punch, I find under date twenty-five years back, women of all degrees presented under cover of monstrous hoops. Everybody wore crinoline in those days. It was the thing, the only possible thing, and the average human mind could not grasp the idea of there being any other way of arraying the female form. But the prophetic eye of one of the most brilliant of Mr. Punch's Young Men peered into the future and beheld what was to come.[1] In the very midst of delineations of these everyday monstrosities, fearful in the drawing-room, grotesquely exaggerated in the kitchen, John Leech flashed forth a view of the future. There are three sketches of girls, two in the eelskin dress that marked the rebound from the hideous tyranny of crinoline, and the third showing a style of dress that might have been sketched to-day in Bond Street, not forgetting the upper rearward segment of the crinoline which survives at this day to hint what has been. Ex pede Herculem. It seemed at the date a monstrous idea, a nightmare fancy, peradventure a joke. But Mr. Punch's calm eye pierced the veil of the future, and saw then, as he has always seen, what was to be.
This, Sir, is only a solitary instance of your prescience cited in accidentally turning over the collected pages that seem so familiar and are still so fresh. I could quote indefinitely as I turn over the leaves. But time is shorter than usual this evening. There is less than an hour left of 1877. The procession I spoke of just now has passed out and closed the doors. Under brighter and more inspiriting auspices comes another group. May I present them to my honoured Master? Eighteen Eighty-Eight this is Mr. Punch of whom you may have heard. Mr. Punch, this is Eighteen Eigthy-Eight of whom I expect you will hear a good deal. And here, happier in his possessions than King Lear, are his four daughters—Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter. They come to wish you a Happy New Year in which no one joins so heartily as your humble friend and servitor, Toby, M.P.
[1] There is a later example of this gift in the date of another Young Man's letter.—Ed.
