ituation by smiling. Must have told the
joke wrong; look up Parliamentary Reports. No, there it is, the
very words; also his retort to TIM HEALY; his turning the flank of
HARCOURT; his triumphant knocking over of TIM, when, after brief
pause, he came up again.

"Such badinage!" said CHARLES WILSON, "such persiflage!"

So it seemed at time. Everyone roared with delight.

"Quite in DIZZY'S style," said the admiring STANHOPE.

"Only better," added the ecstatic GEORGY HAMILTON.

Thought so too at the time; but when I come to write down the jokes,
the fun has gone, the flavour escaped, the bloom shed. Wonder what it
was we all laughed at?

[Illustration: "Such badinage! such persiflage!"]

"You do your best," said the Member for Sark, always ready with kindly
remark, "but you can't bring OLD MORALITY and all he is to us on
your written page. His voice, his looks, his way of getting up and
of sitting down, his throwing back his head and thrusting forward his
chin as he mouths his apophthegm, his nervous glance round the House,
his assumption of a stern official aspect, breaking presently into a
smile when the House laughs; his apologetic way of sitting on the
edge of the seat when he has snubbed HARCOURT; all his goodness,
his littleness, his honest intention, and his occasional lapses
into crooked paths; his 'Certainly, Sir,' when the thing is quite
otherwise, his blush when he discovers himself dealing with facts in
a Pickwickian sense, his constitutional modesty, and his spasmodic
aggressiveness, the look in his eye as of a wounded hare when COURTNEY
refuses to put the Closure he has moved,--all these are things, little
in themselves, momentary in their passage, which you, dear TOBY, can
no more transfer to your folios than you can illuminate them with the
glow of sunset, or perfume them with the scent of country lanes in
this sweet spring-time. OLD MORALITY belongs to us. He is a peculiar
growth of the House of Commons, unique, unprecedented, unapproachable,
never fully to be understanded of, or appreciated by, the people."

_Business done._--Battling round Budget Bill; sat all night, and far
into morning.

_Tuesday._--CADOGAN in good time at House of Lords to-day. DENMAN
got first place with Motion for Second Reading of his Bill extending
Municipal Franchise in Ireland. CADOGAN to move rejection of Measure
in name of Government.

"I must be firm," he said, as he turned up his trousers over his white
spats. "