Mr. Louis Jennings, though he sat on the same side of the House as Sir Walter Barttelot, and within a week or two of his neighbour's departure likewise answered to the old Lobby cry, "Who goes home?" was of a different type of Conservative, was a man of literary training, generous culture, and wide knowledge of the world, and made his fame and fortune long before he entered the House of Commons. It was the late Mr. Delane whose quick eye discovered his journalistic ability, and gave him his first commission on the Times. He visited America in the service of that journal, and being there remained to take up the editorship of the New York Times, making himself and his journal famous by his successful tilting against what, up to his appearance in the list, had been the invincible Tweed conspiracy. He edited the "Croker Papers," and wrote a "study" of Mr. Gladstone—a bitterly clever book, to which the Premier magnanimously referred in the generous tribute he took occasion to pay to the memory of the late member for Stockport.
MR. LOUIS JENNINGS.
AS CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER.
Upon these two books Mr. Jennings's literary fame in this country chiefly rests. It would stand much higher if there were wider knowledge of another couple of volumes he wrote just before he threw himself into the turmoil of Parliamentary life. One is called "Field Paths and Green Lanes"; the other "Rambles Among the Hills." Both were published by Mr. Murray, and are now, I believe, out of print. They are well worth reproducing, supplying some of the most charming writing I know, full of shrewd observation, humorous fancy, and a deep, abiding sympathy with all that is beautiful in Nature. I thought I knew Louis Jennings pretty intimately in Parliamentary and social life, but I found a new man hidden in these pages—a beautiful, sunny nature, obscured in the ordinary relations of life by a somewhat brusque manner, and in these last eighteen months soured and cramped by a cruel disease. Jennings knew and loved the country as Gilbert White knew and loved Selborne. Now
His part in all the pomp that fills
The circuit of the summer hills
Is, that his grave is green.
His Parliamentary career was checked, and, as it turned out, finally destroyed, by an untoward incident. After Lord Randolph Churchill threw up the Chancellorship of the Exchequer and assumed a position of independence on a back bench, he found an able lieutenant in his old friend Louis Jennings. At that time Lord Randolph was feared on the Treasury Bench as much as he was hated. For a Conservative member to associate himself with him was to be ostracised by the official Conservatives. A man of Mr. Jennings's position and Parliamentary ability was worth buying off, and it was brought to his knowledge that he might have a good price if he would desert Lord Randolph. He was not a man of that kind, and the fact that the young statesman stood almost alone was sufficient to attract Mr. Jennings to his side.
PRESENT DAY.