g himself unable to rearrange
them, he sat down discomfited, and he appears to have accepted that one
disaster as final.

In the Commons he had been a brilliant figure. I have good personal
reason to remember his most striking effort. His speech had relation to
an Army Reform Bill, and it was a mosaic of the aptest and most wittily
applied literary quotations. It was of so fine a literary quality that
I very much doubt if there were a score of people among his hearers who
were able fully to appreciate its excellence.

Those who could follow his allusions were delighted beyond measure, and
the House took its cue from them and laughed and cheered uproariously
at many things it did not understand. Mr Gladstone acted as a sort of
fugleman, and his rejoicing chuckle at some happy ironic application of
a Virgilian or Homeric phrase was a cue which was instantly seized upon.
Lowe was always a terror to the reporters, for he spoke at a pace which
no stenographer's or phonographer's pen could follow, but it was not
merely the speed of his utterance which made him so impossible. He would
boggle at the beginning of a sentence, and would stammer over it until
the reporter was half wild with expectancy, and then he would be away
at racing pace, gabbling at the rate of three or four hundred words a
minute. I was in the reporter's box when Mr Lowe caught the Speaker's
eye on this particular evening, and the chief of the staff, who sat next
to me, gave me an urgent whisper, "We want the fullest possible note of
this." I suffered a twenty minutes' agony. I believe that for many years
after I had left the national talking-shop, I was credited with having
been one of the lamest shorthand writers who ever sat there, and in my
anxiety and with the certainty of failure before my eyes, I fell into
such a state of agitation that my hand perspired so that my pencil would
not mark a line upon the paper. I threw it down in despair and stared
upward at the painted ceiling, listening for all I was worth, and
determined to rely upon what was then a really phenomenal memory.

"What are you doing?" my chief whispered to me. "For God's sake leave
me alone!" I answered. He gave a moan and went to work feverishly at a
supplementary note. The orator sat down amidst a great burst of cheers,
just as my relief tapped me on the shoulder, and I walked away to
committee room No. 18, which was then used by the gallery reporters as
a transcribing room, feeling