the same.'

'HANSARD'

'Men are we, and must mourn when e'en the shade of that which once was
great has passed away.' This quotation--which, in obedience to the
prevailing taste, I print as prose--was forced upon me by reading in
the papers an account of some proceedings in a sale-room in Chancery
Lane last Tuesday,[A] when the entire stock and copyright of
_Hansard's Parliamentary History and Debates_ were exposed for sale,
and, it must be added, to ridicule. Yet 'Hansard' was once a name to
conjure with. To be in it was an ambition--costly, troublesome, but
animating; to know it was, if not a liberal education, at all events
almost certain promotion; whilst to possess it for your very own was
the outward and visible sign of serious statesmanship. No wonder that
unimaginative men still believed that _Hansard_ was a property with
money in it. Is it not the counterpart of Parliament, its dark and
majestic shadow thrown across the page of history? As the pious
Catholic studies his _Acta Sanctorum_, so should the constitutionalist
love to pore over the _ipsissima verba_ of Parliamentary gladiators,
and read their resolutions and their motions. Where else save in the
pages of _Hansard_ can we make ourselves fully acquainted with the
history of the Mother of Free Institutions? It is, no doubt, dull, but
with the soberminded a large and spacious dulness like that of
_Hansard's Debates_ is better than the incongruous chirpings of the
new 'humourists.' Besides, its dulness is exaggerated. If a reader
cannot extract amusement from it the fault is his, not _Hansard's_.
But, indeed, this perpetual talk of dulness and amusement ought not to
pass unchallenged. Since when has it become a crime to be dull? Our
fathers were not ashamed to be dull in a good cause. We are ashamed,
but without ceasing to be dull.

[Footnote A: March 8, 1902.]

But it is idle to argue with the higgle of the market. 'Things are
what they are,' said Bishop Butler in a passage which has lost its
freshness; that is to say, they are worth what they will fetch. 'Why,
then, should we desire to be deceived?' The test of truth remains
undiscovered, but the test of present value is the auction mart. Tried
by this test, it is plain that _Hansard_ has fallen upon evil days.
The bottled dreariness of Parliament is falling, falling, falling. An
Elizabethan song-book, the original edition of Gray's _Elegy_, or
_Peregrine Pickle_, is worth more than, or nea