One other figure rose out of the sea of upturned and vehement faces at this moment of stress and storm.  When the Irish Members were shouting disapproval there suddenly gleamed upon them a face from the front Opposition bench.  It was a startling—­I might almost say a menacing exhibition.  It was the face of Mr. James Lowther.  I find that few people have as keen an appreciation of this remarkable man as I have.  In his own party he passes more or less for a mere comedian—­indeed, I might say, low comedian, in the professional and not in the offensive sense.  His tenure of the Chief Secretaryship of Ireland is looked back upon, in an age that has known Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, Mr. Balfour, and Mr. John Morley, as a sublime and daring joke by Disraeli which belongs to, and could only happen in an epoch when sober England was ready to allow her Oriental juggler and master to play any kind of Midsummer’s Night’s Dream pranks even with the sternest realities of human life.  Yet sometimes the thought occurs to me that if he were a little more articulate, or, perchance, if the time came when a democracy had to be met, not with bursts of Parliamentary eloquence, but with shot and shell, and the determination to kill or be killed, the leadership of the party of the aristocracy would fall from the effeminate hands of the supersubtle and cultivated Mr. Balfour into the firm and tight grip of the rugged, uncultured country gentleman who sits remote and neglected close to him.  There are the tightness and firmness of a death-trap in the large, strong mouth, a dangerous gleam in the steady eyes, infinite powers of firmness, inflexibility, and of even cruelty in the whole expression, not in the least softened, but rather heightened and exalted by the pretty constant smile—­the smile that indicates the absence alike of the heat of passion or the touch of pity, and that speaks aloud of the unquestioning and dogged resolve of the aristocrat to fight for privilege to the death.

[Sidenote:  What a cruel face!]

“Ah, what a cruel face!” exclaimed an Irish Member by my side as Mr. Lowther turned back and shouted, “Order, order!” at the Irish benches—­the good-humoured smile absent for a few moments, and revelations given into abyssmal depths.  But Mr. Lowther soon recovered himself, smiled with his usual blandness, and once more dropped the hood over his inner nature.  But it was a moment which brought its revelations to any keen observer; especially if he could have seen the answering looks from a pair of blazing Celtic eyes—­also characteristic in their way of all the passion, rage, and secular intrepidity of the smaller and weaker race that has carried on a struggle for seven centuries—­over battlefields strewn with the conquered dead—­past gallows stained by heroic blood—­past prisons and hulks where noble hearts ate themselves wearily and slowly to death.  It was as in one glance all the contrast, the antipathies, the misunderstanding which had separated one type of Irishmen from one type of Englishmen through hundreds of years.