gs on either side, and brought on to the forehead,
where it is apparently pasted together in a looped curl.

This is Mr. Disraeli, as I know without being told, though I see him
now for the first time. He is wonderfully old-looking, with sunken
cheeks and furrowed lines about the mouth and eyes. But his lofty
brow does not seem to have a wrinkle on it, and his hands, when he
draws them from under his arms and folds them before him, twiddling
his thumbs the while, are as smooth and white as Coningsby's. He is
marvellously motionless, sitting almost in the same position these
two hours. But he is as watchful as he is quiet. I can see his eyes
taking in all that goes on on the bench at the other side of the
table, where right hon. gentlemen, full of restless energy, are
constantly talking to each other, or passing notes across each other,
or even pulling each other's coat-tails and loudly whispering
promptings as in turn they rise and address the House.

I observe that Mr. Disraeli does not wear his hat in the House, and
Chiltern, to whom I mention this when he comes up again, tells me
that he and some half-dozen others never do. Since Mr Gladstone has
retired from the cares of office he is sometimes, but very rarely,
able to endure the weight of his hat on his head while sitting in
the House; but, formerly, he never wore it in the presence of the
Speaker. The rule is to wear your hat in the House, and a very odd
effect it has to see men sitting about in a well-lighted and warm
chamber with their hats on their heads.

Chiltern tells me this peculiarity of wearing hats was very nearly
the means of depriving Great Britain and Ireland of the presence in
Parliament of Mr. John Martin. That distinguished politician, it
appears, had never, before County Meath sent him to Parliament,
worn a hat of the hideous shape which fashion entails upon our
suffering male kindred. It is well known that when he was returned
he declared that he would never sit at Westminster, the reason
assigned for this eccentricity being that he recognised no
Parliament in which the member for County Meath might sit other
than one meeting of the classic ground of College Green. But
Chiltern says that was only a poetical flight, the truth lying at
the bottom of the hat.

"Never," Mr. Martin is reported to have said to a Deputation of his
constituents, "will I stoop to wear a top hat. I never had one on my
head, and the Saxon shall never make me put it th