The House has commenced. The peers’ gallery, ambassadors’ seats, strangers’, Speaker’s gallery, all full of attentive listeners. “Distinguished foreigners” are present. The Emperor of Brobdignag’s ex-Minister for Foreign Affairs has come down from the Travellers’, where he has been playing whist with the Hospodar of Wallachia’s Chargé d’Affaires, and lurks in ambush behind the Speaker. The sparkling eyes of ladies, seeing but unseen, look down, as at Evans’s, upon the hall. The members’ benches—oaken covered with green leather, carved ends—are full. The members’ gallery (stretching along both sides of the House) is, to tell the truth, not full, but it is possibly occupied by honourable members who have retired thither to—listen to the debate, of course. Oddly enough, they find that the assumption of a horizontal position is the very best for hearing that which is going on below; or, perhaps, they only imitate in this Fortunio’s gifted servant. To turn the face to the wall, also, seems a favourite method of stimulating the auditory nerve; and some honourable gentlemen are so engrossed in the exciting debate proceeding in the House, that, at two o’clock in the morning, they sometimes give vent to their overworked-up feelings in a deep stertorous nasal sound resembling a snore.
Up in the reporters’ gallery there, the gentlemen who submit to “work on an intellectual treadmill for three hundred pounds a year,” are having hard times of it. The “turns” of stenography are getting shorter and shorter; but, alas! they have been terribly frequent during the debate. How unmerciful have been the maledictions bestowed on Gulliver and his indemnity since five p.m. when the Speaker was at prayers! Gulliver would be a bold man to venture into the cushion-benched chamber behind the gallery where the gentlemen of the Press retire to transcribe their notes. O’Dobbin of the “Flail” has been dying to hear Tamberlik in “Otello” these six weeks past. His chief gave him a stall this morning. Gulliver sits in it like a ghoule on a grave. Dollfus, of Garden Court, Temple, was invited to Jack Tritail, the newly-made barrister’s, “call” carouse in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Gulliver is sitting at the hospitable board, gulping down the claret like Garagantua. Little Spitters, who was always a ladies’ man, was to have been a “welcome guest” at a neat villa not far from Hammersmith Broadway. The fiend Gulliver is at this moment being called a “droll creature,” and is flirting with the eldest Miss Cockletop.
TWO O’CLOCK A.M.: A LATE DEBATE IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS.
The great chief of the Opposition has spoken. Gloomy, saturnine, isolated, yet triumphant, sits the eloquent and sarcastic Caucasian. Those once brilliant black corkscrew ringlets are growing slightly gray and wiry now, the chin tuft has disappeared, and time and thought have drawn deep lines in the sallow visage of Benjamin Disraeli, ruler of the Opposition. His attire, too, is sober compared with the myriad-hued garb, the flashing jewellery, and vests of many colours, with which Benjamin was wont to dazzle our eyes in the days before he slew Robert Peel, and hired himself to the Protectionists—all in a parliamentary sense. People say, when he wrote “Venetia” and the “Revolutionary Epic,” he used to wear laced ruffles at his wrists and black velvet inexpressibles. He is wiser now. He has turned the half century, and only wears a vest of many colours when he dons his gold robe as Chancellor of the Exchequer. He has worn it once, and would very much like to wear it again. He has made a very long, telling, brilliant speech, in which he has said a multitude of damaging things against Gulliver, his indemnity, and especially against the noble Viscount at the head of the Government. He has never been abusive, insulting, coarse, virulent—oh, never! he has not once lost his temper. He has treated the noble Viscount with marked courtesy, and has called him his right honourable and noble friend scores of times; yet, hearing him, it has been impossible to avoid the impression that if any man was ever actuated by the conviction that his right honourable and noble friend was an impostor and a humbug, with a considerable dash of the traitor; and that—without hinting anything in the slightest degree libellous—his right honourable and noble friend had been once or twice convicted of larceny, and had failed in clearing himself from the suspicion of having murdered his grandmother, that man was Benjamin Disraeli, M.P. for the county of Bucks. He did not begin brilliantly. He was not in the slightest degree like Cicero or Demosthenes, Burke or Grattan, or like thee, my Eglintoun Beaverup, when thou descantest upon the “glorious old cocks,” the “real tap, sir,” of antiquity. He was, on the contrary, slow, laboured, downcast, and somewhat ponderous; nor even at the conclusion of his magnificent harangue, did he throw his arms about, smite his breast, stamp his foot, or cast his eyes up to heaven—and the ceiling. The days of weeping and gesticulation, of crumpling up sheets of paper, cracking slave-whips, flinging down daggers, and smashing the works of watches, seem to have departed from the House of Commons. Yet the eminent Caucasian contrived to create a very appreciable sensation, and certainly shot those barbed arrows of his—arrows tipped with judicious sarcasm and polite malevolence—with amazing dexterity and with murderous success. He has made his noble friend wince more than once, I will be bound. But you cannot see the workings of that stateman’s face, for (save while addressing the House) he wears his hat; and the light coming from above causes the friendly brim to cast the vice-comital countenance into shadow.
A noticeable man this Hebrew Caucasian, Benjamin Disraeli, with his byegone literary nonsenses, and black-velvet-trousered frivolities. Not at all an English Man, trustworthy, loveable, nor indeed admirable, according to our sturdy English prejudices. Such statesmen as Shaftesbury, Ximenes, De Retz, any minister with a penchant for “dark and crooked ways,” would have delighted in him; but to upright, albeit bigoted, William Pitt, he would have had anything but a sweet savour. Even Tory Castlereagh and Tory Sidmouth would but ill have relished this slippery, spangled, spotted, insincere Will-o’-the-wisp patriot. I should like very much to have known what manner of opinion the late Duke of Wellington entertained of Benjamin Disraeli. It is, of course, but matter of speculation; but I can’t help thinking, too, that if Arthur Wellesley had had Benjamin in the Peninsula, he would have hanged him to a certainty.
Hush! pray hush! Silence, ye cackling juniors on the back benches; wake up, ye sluggards—only they don’t wake up—the noble Viscount at the head of the Government is speaking. He begins confidently enough, but somewhat wearily, as though he were thoroughly tired of the whole business. But he warms gradually, and he, in his turn, too, can say damaging things about his right honourable friend, head of the Opposition. But he never says anything spiteful—is at most petulant (loses his temper altogether sometimes, they say), and flings about some bon mots that, were they published in this week’s “Punch,” would cause a well-grounded complaint of the growing dulness of that periodical. He speaks long, and to the purpose, and you can see at once in what stead have stood to him his long official career, his immense parliamentary experience. Recollect that John Henry Temple, Viscount Palmerston, has sat in Parliament for half a century, was Secretary-at-War while Wellington was yet wrestling with Napoleon’s marshals in Spain, was one of the authors of the “New Whig Guide,” has formed part of scores of administrations; and—one of the hardest-worked men of his time—has yet found leasure to be a beau and lion of fashion in Grosvenorian circles, and to be called “Cupid”—Grosvenorian circles rather chap-fallen, crow’s-footed, rheumy about the eyes by this time, rather fallen into the sere and yellow leaf, now hessians and short waists have gone out, hoops and pegtops come in. Drollest of all, to think that this smug elderly gentleman, voluble in spite of tongue-clogging seventy, and jaunty in spite of evident gout, but quite a decorous, father-of-family, select vestryman-looking ancient, should be the “terrible Palmerston” the firebrand of the Continent, the bugbear of foreign oligarchs, the grim “Caballero Balmerson” naming whom Spanish contrabandistas cross themselves, the abhorred “Palmerstoni” whom papal gensd’arme imagine to be an emerited brigand who has long defied the pontifical authority from an inaccessible fastness in the Apennines. I need not tell you anything more about his speech. You will find it all in Hansard; and the newspapers of the day gave an accurate summary of the cheers, the counter-cheers, the ironical cheers, the “Hear, hears,” and the “Oh, oh’s” which accompanied the harangue, together with the “loud and continuous cheering” (from his own side of the House) which greeted its conclusion.
The longest lane, however, must have a turning; and this desperately long drawn-out parliamentary avenue has its turning at last. There have been frenzied shrieks of “Divide—divide!’ numerous bores who have essayed to speak have been summarily shut up and coughed down; and at length strangers are ordered to withdraw, and the division bell rings.