It is only Mr.
Gladstone, perhaps, among the members of the House of Commons--old or new--who has power of being at once, easy, calm, perfect in tone, and full of the inspiring glow of oratory.
[Sidenote: Pity the poor farmer.] The agriculturists are not very happy in their representatives.

A debate on agriculture produces on the House the same effect as a debate on the Army.

It is well known that the party of all the Colonels is enough to make any House empty; and a debate on agriculture is not much better.
The farmer's friends are always a dreadfully dull lot; and they usually lag some half-century behind the political knowledge of the rest of the world.

It would have been impossible for anybody but the county members to attempt a serious discussion on Protection or Bimetallism as cures for all the evils of the flesh; but that is what the agricultural members succeeded in doing on a certain Monday and Tuesday night.

Their prosings were perhaps welcome to the House; but it was a curious thing to see an assembly, as yet in its very infancy, so bored as to find refuge in every part of the building, except the hall appropriated to its deliberations.