ge to the assembly as though he had never belonged to it.
But this Session he is constantly getting up in his seat, and he rushes
through the lobbies with the cyclonic movement of a youth bearing on
juvenile shoulders a weight too heavy to bear. Mr. Bartley is about as
dull a fellow as ever bored a House of Commons, and in the last
Parliament even his own friends found him a trial and a nuisance. He has
suddenly taken to making the House of Commons familiar with his voice at
every sitting. Lord Cranborne has been remarkable for the boorishness
and impertinence of his manners--or, perhaps, to be more accurate, want
of manners. I have seen him interrupting Mr. Gladstone in the most
impudent way with a face you would like to slap, and his hands deep down
in the depths of his pockets. Lord Cranborne is now nightly in evidence,
and leads the chorus of jeers and cheers by which the more brutal of the
Tory youth signalize the opening of the new style of Parliamentary
warfare.

[Sidenote: Jimmy.]

But of all the things which indicate the new state of affairs which has
arisen, nothing is so significant as the change in the position of Jimmy
Lowther. People think that I have attached too much importance to this
extraordinary individual, and that he should be taken simply as the
frank horse-jockey he looks and seems. I have given my reasons for
believing that in a crisis Jimmy would develop a very different side of
his character, and that he has in him--latent and disguised for the
moment--all the terrible passions and possibilities of the aristocrat at
bay. However, let that question rest with history and its future
developments; his position at the present moment is very peculiar. There
is a report that the desire of his heart is to sit on the first seat on
the front bench below the gangway, which for seven years was occupied by
Mr. Labouchere, and which for the five years of Mr. Gladstone's Ministry
of 1880 to 1885 was occupied by Lord Randolph Churchill when he was the
chief of the dead and buried Fourth Party. That seat is the natural
point for a sharpshooter and guerilla warrior. Indeed, the first seat
below the gangway seems just as marked out by fate for such a man as
Jimmy Lowther, as one of the high fortresses on the Rhine for the work
of the bold freebooter of the Middle Ages. But for some reason or other,
Jimmy did not attain his heart's desire, and he is compelled to sit on
the front Opposition bench. This would not