type of the sleuth-hound whose pursuit of the enemy of a Foreign Government makes the dock the antechamber to the prison or the gallows.  Sir Edward Grey, with his thin face, prominent Roman nose, extraordinarily calm expression, and pleasant, almost beautiful, voice, shows that the blood of legislators flows in his veins; he might stand for the highest type of the young English official.  He has not spoken often in the House of Commons—­not often enough; but he is known on the platform and at the Eighty Club.  He has the perfect Parliamentary style, with its virtues and defects, just as another young member of the House—­Mr. E.J.C.  Morton—­has the perfect platform manner, also with its virtues and defects.  Sir Edward Grey speaks with grace, ease, with that tendency to modest understatement, to the icy coldness of genteel conversation, which everybody will recognize as the House of Commons style.  This means perfect correctness, especially in an official position; but, on the other hand, it lacks warmth.  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.  Mr. Chaplin is always to the front on such occasions; pompous, prolix, and ineffably dull.  Mr. Herbert Gardner made his debut as the Minister for Agriculture, and did it excellently.

[Sidenote:  Keir-Hardie.]

Mr. Keir-Hardie is certainly one of the most curious forms which have yet appeared on the Parliamentary horizon.  He wears a small cap—­such as you see on men when they are travelling; a short sack coat; a pair of trousers of a somewhat wild and pronounced whiteish hue; and his beard is unkempt and almost conceals his entire face.  The eyes are deep-set, restless, grey—­with strange lights as of fanaticism, or dreams.  He rather pleasantly surprised the House by his style of speech.  Something wild in a harsh shriek was what was looked