rived, or rather the important
messenger, who brought down, express, a report of its proceedings to
Castle Dacre.

Nothing is more singular than the various success of men in the House of
Commons. Fellows who have been the oracles of coteries from their
birth; who have gone through the regular process of gold medals,
senior wranglerships, and double firsts, who have nightly sat down
amid tumultuous cheering in debating societies, and can harangue
with unruffled foreheads and unfaltering voice, from one end of a
dinner-table to the other, who, on all occasions, have something to say,
and can speak with fluency on what they know nothing about, no sooner
rise in the House than their spells desert them. All their effrontery
vanishes. Commonplace ideas are rendered even more uninteresting by
monotonous delivery; and keenly alive as even boobies are in those
sacred walls to the ridiculous, no one appears more thoroughly aware of
his unexpected and astounding deficiencies than the orator himself. He
regains his seat hot and hard, sultry and stiff, with a burning cheek
and an icy hand, repressing his breath lest it should give evidence of
an existence of which he is ashamed, and clenching his fist, that
the pressure may secretly convince him that he has not as completely
annihilated his stupid body as his false reputation.

On the other hand, persons whom the women have long deplored, and the
men long pitied, as having 'no manner,' who blush when you speak to
them, and blunder when they speak to you, suddenly jump up in the House
with a self-confidence, which is only equalled by their consummate
ability. And so it was with Arundel Dacre. He rose the first night
that he took his seat (a great disadvantage, of which no one was more
sensible than himself), and for an hour and a half he addressed the
fullest House that had long been assembled, with the self-possession of
an habitual debater. His clenching argument, and his luminous detail,
might have been expected from one who had the reputation of having been
a student. What was more surprising was, the withering sarcasm that
blasted like the simoom, the brilliant sallies of wit that flashed like
a sabre, the gushing eddies of humour that drowned all opposition and
overwhelmed those ponderous and unwieldy arguments which the producers
announced as rocks, but which he proved to be porpoises. Never was there
such a triumphant debut; and a peroration of genuine eloquence, because
o