The most wonderful instance of his magnetic influence and power that I ever witnessed was when he dined with the Eighty Club on April 28, 1885. It was an open secret that the majority of the club did not want him to be invited, but a Cabinet Minister could not be passed over. The audience was apathetic. They laughed awkwardly when he introduced himself as one “who certainly has never worshipped with Whigs in the Temple of Brooks’s.” He seemed to get no echo from his audience and became uneasy. He was speaking from notes piled up on a heap of oranges in a high dessert dish. Suddenly I saw him drop a page back on to the
heap—he left his notes and his voice rang out amongst us in a graphic picture of a Birmingham slum and the children crying for milk, and the shameful contrast of the well-fed, sleek mob in front of him. Melodrama, perhaps, but rattling good melodrama. It made Radicals for the moment of every Whig in the room, and when he returned to his notes and quoted from the “Corn Law Rhymer,” in tones of triumphant fervour:—
They taxed your corn, they fettered trade;
The clouds to blood, the sun to shade;
And every good that God had made
They turned to bane and mockery—
cheers echoed and re-echoed, and there was not an ounce of Whig left in his audience.
Alas! the whirligig of Time brings in his revenges. In a few years Chamberlain had an entirely new set of politics, and I had none whatever.
Eighty-six dawned, but the sun did not shine very brightly in Middle Temple Lane. I had one or two briefs, certainly, but there seemed no outlook. The South-Eastern Circuit was a far too expensive amusement for my pocket, and, now that the election was over, there seemed nothing to do but to write stories that ungrateful editors did not want and to sit in chambers waiting for unintelligent solicitors who never came.
It was one winter afternoon. My boy was out at lunch. I was sitting in that upper chamber in Middle Temple Lane wondering if there would be