tep to something beyond? While the usual
preliminary work was being done, he looked round the House, and saw
Lord Cantrip in the Peers' gallery. Alas! of what avail was that? He
had always been able to bind to him individuals with whom he had been
brought into close contact; but more than that was wanted in this
most precarious of professions, in which now, for a second time, he
was attempting to earn his bread.

At half-past four he was on his legs in the midst of a crowded House.
The chance,--perhaps the hope,--of some such encounter as that of the
former day, brought members into their seats, and filled the gallery
with strangers. We may say, perhaps, that the highest duty imposed
upon us as a nation is the management of India; and we may also
say that in a great national assembly personal squabbling among
its members is the least dignified work in which it can employ
itself. But the prospect of an explanation,--or otherwise of a
fight,--between two leading politicians will fill the House; and any
allusion to our Eastern Empire will certainly empty it. An aptitude
for such encounters is almost a necessary qualification for a popular
leader in Parliament, as is a capacity for speaking for three
hours to the reporters, and to the reporters only,--a necessary
qualification for an Under-Secretary of State for India.

Phineas had the advantage of the temper of the moment in a House
thoroughly crowded, and he enjoyed it. Let a man doubt ever so much
his own capacity for some public exhibition which he has undertaken;
yet he will always prefer to fail,--if fail he must,--before a large
audience. But on this occasion there was no failure. That sense of
awe from the surrounding circumstances of the moment, which had once
been heavy on him, and which he still well remembered, had been
overcome, and had never returned to him. He felt now that he should
not lack words to pour out his own individual grievances were it not
that he was prevented by a sense of the indiscretion of doing so. As
it was, he did succeed in alluding to his own condition in a manner
that brought upon him no reproach. He began by saying that he should
not have added to the difficulty of the debate,--which was one simply
of length,--were it not that he had been accused in advance of voting
against a measure as to which he had pledged himself at the hustings
to do all that he could to further it. No man was more anxious than
he, an Irish Roman Catholic, to