arliament, the Chief Clerk of the
House of Commons was Sir Thomas Erskine May, afterwards Lord
Farnborough--an hereditary friend. He gave me many useful hints, and
this among the rest--"Always go across to the House of Lords when they
are sitting, even if you only stop five minutes. You may often happen on
something worth hearing; and on no account ever miss one of their
full-dress debates." I acted on the advice, and soon became familiar
with the oratory of "the Gilded Chamber," as Pennialinus calls it. I
have spoken in a former chapter of the effect produced on me as a boy by
the predominance of Disraeli during the debates on the Reform Bill of
1867. He had left the House of Commons before I entered it, but that
same mysterious attribute of predominance followed him to the House of
Lords, and indeed increased with his increasing years. His strange
appearance--un-English features, corpse-like pallor, blackened locks,
and piercing eyes--marked him out as someone quite aloof from the common
population of the House of Lords. When he sat, silent and immovable, on
his crimson bench, everyone kept watching him as though they were
fascinated. When he rose to speak, there was strained and awe-stricken
attention. His voice was deep, his utterance slow, his pronunciation
rather affected. He had said in early life that there were two models of
style for the two Houses of Parliament--for the Commons, _Don Juan_: for
the Lords, _Paradise Lost_. As the youthful Disraeli, he had out-Juaned
Juan; when, as the aged Beaconsfield, he talked of "stamping a
deleterious doctrine with the reprobation of the Peers of England," he
approached the dignity of the Miltonic Satan. It was more obviously true
of him than of most speakers that he "listened to himself while he
spoke"; and his complete mastery of all the tricks of speech
countervailed the decay of his physical powers. He had always known the
value of an artificial pause, an effective hesitation, in heralding the
apt word or the memorable phrase; and just at the close of his life he
used the method with a striking though unrehearsed effect. On the 4th of
March, 1881, he was speaking in support of Lord Lytton's motion
condemning the evacuation of Kandahar. "My Lords," he said, "the Key of
India is not Merv, or Herat, or,"--here came a long pause, and rather
painful anxiety in the audience; and then the quiet resumption of the
thread--"It is not the place of which I cannot recall the name--t