A distinctive feature of the twentieth century House of Commons is the disappearance of the orator. Time was, at and since the period of Pitt and Fox, when the House of Commons was a stage from which eminent men delivered elaborate discourses. Within my comparatively brief experience a great change has been wrought in this respect. There are many able men in the present Parliament; there is not a single one who poses as an orator. New times, above all new Rules of. Procedure, make new manners. There really isn't time now for a Member to lay himself out for a two hours' speech, as was a common custom even so recently as a quarter of a century ago. With the House meeting at the prosaic hour of a quarter to three o'clock and abruptly closing debate at eleven, there is no opening for such elaborate performance.

Moreover, habit in respect of debate is changed. In the good old days 660 Members were content to form an audience enraptured by the eloquence of eight or ten. Now, with special wires feeding local papers, every one feels called upon to deliver a certain quantum of remarks on important Bills or resolutions brought before the House. The average Member has more satisfaction in talking than in listening. This, combined with disposition to regard progress of legislative business as of more importance than flowers of oratory, has completed the change of fashion. In these prosaic days a Member, however eminent, rising with evident intent of delivering a set oration, would first be stared at, then left to discourse to himself, the Speaker, and an admiring family circle in the Ladies' Gallery.

I remember in days that are no more a quite different state of things. In the Seventies, even in the Eighties, there were giants of oratory. Gladstone was the last survival. Even he towards the end of his career was influenced by the newer turn of thought which dominated Parliamentary debate. He could not help being eloquent when deeply moved; but he was more direct in his methods, less voluminous in his speech.

His manner in speech-making was more strongly marked by action than was that of his only rival, John Bright. He emphasized points by smiting the open palm of his left hand with sledgehammer fist. Sometimes he, with gleaming eyes, pointed his forefinger straight at his adversary. In hottest moments he beat the brass-bound Box with clamorous hand that sometimes drowned the point he strove to make. Again, with both hands raised above his head; often with left elbow leaning on the Box, right hand with closed fist shaken at the head of an unoffending country gentleman on the back bench opposite; anon, standing half a step back from the Table, left hand hanging at his side, right uplifted, 80 that he might with thumb-nail lightly touch the shining crown of his head, he trampled his way through the argument he assailed as an elephant in an hour of aggravation rages through a jungle.

It is no new thing for great orators to indulge in extravagant gestures. Peel had none; Pitt but few, these monotonous and mechanical. But Pitt's father, the great Chatham, knew how to flash his eagle eye, to flaunt his flannels and strike home with his crutch. Brougham once dropped on his

knees in the House of Lords, and with outstretched hands implored the Peers not to reject the Reform Bill. Fox was sometimes moved to tears by his own eloquence. Burke on a historic occasion brought a dagger into debate, and at the proper cue flung it on the floor of the House of Commons. Sheridan, when nothing more effective was to be done, knew how to faint. Grattan used to scrape the ground with his knuckles as he bent his body and thanked God he had no peculiarities of gesture. In respect of originality, multiplicity and vehemence of gesture, Gladstone, as in some other things, beat the record of human achievement. Disraeli lacked two qualities, failing which true eloquence is impossible. He was never quite in earnest, and was not troubled by dominating conviction. Only on the rarest occasions did he affect to be roused to righteous indignation, and then he was rather amusing than impressive. He was endowed with a lively fancy and cultivated the art of coining phrases, generally personal in their bearing. When these were flashed forth he delighted the House. For the rest, at the period I knew him, when he had grown respectable and was weighted with responsibility, he was often dull. There were, indeed, in the course of a session, few things more dreary than a long speech from Dizzy. At short, sharp replies to questions designed to be embarrassing he was effective. When it came to a long speech the lack of stamina was disclosed, and the House listened to something which, if not occasionally incomprehensible, was frequently involved.

When he rose to speak he rested his hand for a moment on the Box, only for a moment, for he invariably endeavored to gain the ear of his audience by making a brilliant point in an opening sentence. The attitude he found most conducive to happy delivery was

to stand balancing himself on heel and toe with hands in his coat-tail pocket. In this pose, with head hung down as if he were mentally debating how best to express a thought just born to him, he slowly uttered the polished and poisoned sentences over which he had spent laborious hours in his study.

Those familiar with his manner knew a full moment beforehand when he was approaching what he regarded as the most effective place for dropping the gem of phrase he made-believe to have just dug up from an unvisited corner of his mind. They saw him lead up to it. They noted the disappearance of the hand in the direction of the coat-tail pocket, sometimes in search of a pocket-handkerchief brought out and shaken with careless air, most often to extend the coat-tails whilst, with body gently rocked to and fro and an affected hesitancy of speech, the bon mot was flashed forth. Not being a born orator, but a keen observer recognizing the necessity noted by Hamlet in his advice to the players of accompanying voice by action, he performed a series of bodily jerks as remote from the natural gestures of the true orator as the waddling of a duck across a stubble field is from the progress of a swan over the bosom of a lake.

John Bright, perhaps the finest orator known to the House of Commons in the last half of the nineteenth century, was morally and politically the antithesis of Disraeli. Before, in the closing years of a long life, he reached the unexpected haven of community with the Conservative Party on the question of Home Rule, political animosity passed by no ditch through the mire of which it might drag him. But it never accused him of speaking with uncertain sound, of denouncing to-day what yesterday he upheld.

To an orator this atmosphere of acknowledged sincerity and honest conviction is a mighty adjunct of power.

To it Bright added airy graces of oratory. He kept himself well in hand throughout his speech, never losing his hold upon his audience. His gestures

were of the fewest. Unlike Disraeli's, they were appropriate because natural. A simple wave of the right hand and the point of his sentence was emphasized. Nature gifted him with a fine presence and a voice the like of which has rarely rung through the classic chamber. "Like a bell" was the illustration commonly employed in endeavor to convey an impression of its music. I should say like a peal of bells, for a The Albany Review.

single one could not produce the varied tones in which Bright suited his voice to his theme.

On the whole, the dominant note was one of pathos. Probably because all his great speeches pleaded for the cause of the oppressed or denounced an accomplished wrong, a tone of melancholy ran through all. For the expression of pathos there were marvellously touching vibrations in his voice, carrying to the listener's heart the tender thoughts that came glowing from the speaker's, clad in simple words as they passed his tongue.

Henry W. Lucy.

London, which the late Grant Allen described in a warm moment as "a squalid village," has never yielded any delight to the admirers of the classic in cities. It has sprawled about the banks of the Thames in formless fashion ever since the first bridge thrown across determined the site of our capital. Its appeal has always been to the humanity in us. As a city, as an arrangement of buildings, it cannot even enter into competition, they tell us, with Vienna or with Paris. It is, they declare, put to shame by Brussels, Antwerp, Turin, Milan, Venice, Munich, and Boston (Mass.). Bath and Edinburgh can look down upon it. In modern times the desire to produce a beautiful city did not touch us while it was stirring other communities. As for the splendid remains of mediæval building that we might have boasted, as Brussels or Nürnberg boast them now, there was the Great Fire, which, what with burnings down and blowings up, swept most of Gothic London off the map. That calamity may have had the compensating advantage of cleansing the soil of the town of the bacteria of ages, and giving London a fresh sanitary

start, as Sir Walter Besant believed; but it certainly did not help the cause of beauty. The twentieth century however, which seems destined to see the first awakening of our nation to so many things, is already determined to hand on to the twenty-first a London that our fathers would not recognize, a London poor in the quaint, the gloomy, the mysterious, having none of those dark arches leading to unsuspected courts or riverside spaces that moved the young imagination of David Copperfield, none of those ancient, narrow, and grimy thoroughfares of which the departed Booksellers' Row was the type, none of the old homely squalor; a London rich in broad streets and tall buildings, with cleaner air and many trees and no "associations" to speak of. What will happen when the time comes for the posthumous honoring of the twentieth-century great? It is impossible to believe that the pleasant and inexpensive flats in Battersea, overlooking the Park, where A is writing his immortal songs at this moment and B creating the novel of our era, will ever gain any grace from antiquity. It is a fine, lofty block of building, quite

worthy to contribute to the general effect of a modern capital, but it is hard to see how it can ever become anything more than a detail in a street-plan, or contain for the pious tourist of the future any of that quaintness and dear absurdity that makes the homes and haunts of the great men of the past worth the trouble of hunting them out. London is to become like Paris, where you have to seek scientifically at the backs of great white buildings for the little that is left of the old town. The County Council knows what it wants, and has given us in the noble thorough fares out of the Strand an earnest of the things to come. What is wanted, it is true, is not always the same as what is obtained. A siege, for instance, under modern conditions of bombardment, would affect the architectural character of a new London in a very marked manner.

A proper and natural accompaniment of the recent changes has been a flood of London books from the press. It is a time for haste if any record is to remain of the old London, and the pity is that the work is done in so scattered, unequal, and haphazard a way by so many individual hands, according to no plan. Sir Walter Besant's Survey was left incomplete, and cannot be taken seriously in the form in which it has come into the hands of the public. The older works of comprehensive character are out of date in the matters of history, of antiquarian knowledge, and especially in the all-important matter of illustration. The old London that is vanishing ought to be the subject of as fine a series of photographic pictures as the art of the camera can produce. But in default of any such organized effort to preserve the memories enshrined in that brick and stone, we must welcome the small books and wish posterity joy of the task of collecting and digesting them.

The latest of these to appear is Mr.

Austin Brereton's Literary History of the Adelphi and Its Neighborhood.1 There is no quarter of London that is richer in the records of the heroes of London, no part that has arrested and kept more of the memory of that great tide of opulent human nature that has flowed through the English capital generation after generation. To name but a few of those who have honored the Adelphi is to call up a pageant of various splendors. In Durham House, which stood where now the buildings of the Adam brothers stand, dwelt Cranmer for a little. Anne Boleyn's father held it of the King after it had become part of the spoil of the Roman Church in England, and Elizabeth lived there in early days. A part of Philip Sidney's boyhood was passed there, and it was Walter Raleigh's London house for the twenty years preceding his melancholy fall. In those precincts the figures of Pepys and Johnson and Voltaire were well known in their days-the Frenchman lodged but a few yards from the Adelphi during his three years in England. At the end of that great century the Adam brothers replaced the tottering remains of Durham House by the well-planned streets, the fine terrace above the river, and the house for the Society of Arts that still remind us in the name of "Adelphi" of their fraternal labors. Garrick lived in a house on the Terrace, and died there-nor is that all the connection of the Adelphi with our theatre, for Othello was first published on its site, "at the Eagle and Childe in Brittan's Bursse" in 1622; and nowadays (let us remind our author) Mr. Bernard Shaw lives a few doors from Garrick's house. In that same Terrace the famous charlatan Dr. Graham set up his Temple of Health, to which all the quality came; and there Emma Lyon, with whose name the country was afterwards to ring so long as it rang with Nelson's, imper1 London: Treherne 10s. 6d. net.

sonated in Graham's service "Vestina, the Rosy Goddess of Health." In the Adelphi "Coutts'" stood for a hundred and sixty years, and there the greatest of British bankers, Thomas Coutts, made himself "the richest man in London." There, too, was founded the Savage Club; and there the "Savages" meet to-day-Laman Blanchard, who performed the superhuman feat of writing the Drury Lane pantomime for thirty-seven consecutive years, had to turn out of his house to make room for them. Thomas Hardy, then busy with architecture, lived on the Terrace The Outlook.

in the sixties, and drew caricatures in pencil on the marble of the fine Adam's mantelpiece in his room. These are but few of the glories that Mr. Brereton's book has brought together. It is a useful contribution to the vast and scattered literature of our capital, and it will live in the libraries beyond the period of the favor that it will find with the public to-day; for the worthy work of the Scottish brothers must also go in time, and the little casket that they prepared for the housing of so much treasure of the spirit will be a memory like the rest.

Mrs. Roger A. Pryor's "The Birth of the Nation-Jamestown, 1607" (The Macmillan Co.) is written, of course, apropos of the Jamestown Exposition. Probably it would not have been written and published at this time, except for the observance of the tercentenary. But it is as far as possible from being a mere hack work, produced for an occasion. It is written in a charming style, after a sufficiency of research but without superfluous detail, and would have been an accept able contribution to American history at any time. When history is told in this fashion, it becomes as engaging as fiction to readers young or old, and far more profitable.

Mr. Arthur Symons serves Browning and all Browning readers not already possessors of the book by republishing his "An Introduction to the Study of Browning." Long out of print, its place has been usurped by a flock of quite unnecessary "studies," and "appréciations," each one more "precious" than the last, and nearly all entirely unaware of that solid common sense,

that perfect acceptance of things as they are by which Browning made himself master of the Italian character, and also made himself dear to Italians, and a mystery to those desirous of finding something in his work which is not there; viz., their own mysticism. Now that this book reappears it may be hoped that the writers of "papers" and of "notes" will be content with silence for a time. An opening paper on "General Characteristics," a summary of each poem, long or short, a Bibliography of English editions, and an index of poems compose the volume. E. P. Dutton & Co.

The Dickensian observes that lovers of the works of Charles Dickens are continually finding opinions in them which are most applicable to presentday circumstances; and it cites this instance:

In "Bleak House," readers learn that Mrs. Jellyby neglected her husband, her children, and household duties, in order to attend to the subject of Africa, "with a view to the general