this paper once obligingly called me, torture unparalleled by anything
short of acid wine or the Chinese atrocities, though truly he who heads
our Lower House with his vernal heart and his matchless brain were
enough to make any man, coxcomb or hero, oppositionist or
ministerialist, proud to sit in the same chamber with him. But there are
nights now and then, of course, when I like to go to both Houses, to
hear Lord Derby's rich, intricate oratory, or Gladstone's rhetoric,
(which has so potent a spell even for his foes, and is yet charged so
strangely against him as half a crime; possibly by the same spirit with
which plain women reproach a pretty one for her beauty: what business
has he to be more attractive than his compeers? of course it's a peche
mortel in their eyes!) and when Mrs. Breloques, who is a charming little
woman, to whom no man short of a Goth could possibly say "No" to any
petition, gave me a little blow with her fan, and told me, as I valued
her friendship, to get an order and take her and Gwen to hear the Lords'
debate on Tuesday, when my cousin Viscount Earlscourt, one of the best
orators in the Upper House, was certain to speak, of course I obliged
her. Her sister Gwen, who was a girl of seventeen, barely out, and whom
I wished at Jerico, (three is so odious a number, one of the triad must
ever be _de trop_,) was wrathful with the Upper House; it in no wise
realized her expectations; the peers should have worn their robes, she
thought, (as if the horrors of a chamber filled with Thames odors in
June wasn't enough without being bored with velvet and ermine) she would
have been further impressed by coronets also; they had no business to
lounge on their benches as if they were in a smoking-room; they should
have declaimed like Kean, not spoken colloquially; and--in fact, they
shouldn't have been ordinary men at all. I think a fine collection from
Madame Tussaud's, with a touch of the Roman antique, would have been
much more to Gwen's ideal, and she wasn't at all content till Earlscourt
rose; _he_ reconciled her a little, for he had a grand-seigneur air, she
said, that made up for the incongruities of his dress. It was a measure
that he had much at heart; he had exerted for it all his influence in
the cabinet, and he was determined that the bill should pass the Lords,
though the majority inclined to throw it out. As he stood now against
the table, with his calm dignity of gesture, his unstrained flow of
w