ot's military experience
(chiefly gained in discharge of his duties as Lieutenant-Colonel of the
Second Battalion Sussex Rifle Volunteers) was lavishly placed at the
disposal of the House and the country.

When Disraeli was going out of office he made the Colonel a baronet, a
distinction the more honourable to both since Colonel Barttelot, though
a loyal Conservative, was never a party hack.

Sir Michael Beach sat for East Gloucestershire in 1873, and had not
climbed higher up the Ministerial ladder than the Under Secretaryship of
the Home Department. Another Beach, then as now in the House, was the
member for North Hants. William Wither Bramston Beach is his full style.
Mr. Beach has been in Parliament thirty-six years, having through that
period uninterruptedly represented his native county, Hampshire. That is
a distinction he shares with few members to-day, and to it is added the
privilege of being personally the obscurest man in the Commons. I do not
suppose there are a hundred men in the House to-day who at a full muster
could point out the member for Andover. A close attendance upon
Parliament through twenty years necessarily gives me a pretty intimate
knowledge of members. But I not only do not know Mr. Beach by sight, but
never heard of his existence till, attracted by the study of relics of
the Parliament elected in 1868, I went through the list.

[Illustration: MR. W. W. B. BEACH.]

Another old member still with us is Mr. Michael Biddulph, a partner in
that highly-respectable firm, Cocks, Biddulph, and Co. Twenty years ago
Mr. Biddulph sat as member for his native county of Hereford, ranked as
a Liberal and a reformer, and voted for the Disestablishment of the
Irish Church and other measures forming part of Mr. Gladstone's policy.
But political events with him, as with some others, have moved too
rapidly, and now he, sitting as member for the Ross Division of the
county, votes with the Conservatives.

[Illustration: MR. A. H. BROWN.]

[Illustration: MR. CAMPBELL-BANNERMAN.]

Mr. Jacob Bright is still left to us, representing a division of the
city for which he was first elected in November, 1867. Mr. A. H. Brown
represents to-day a Shropshire borough, as he did twenty years ago. I do
not think he looks a day older than when he sat for Wenlock in 1873. But
though then only twenty-nine, as the almanack reckons, he was a
middle-aged young man with whom it was always difficult to connect
associations of a