of personal bickerings and hideous and revolting personal animosities.  It is the vice of Sir George Trevelyan as a speaker that he over-prepares—­writing out, as a rule, nearly every word he has to utter, and often some of the very best speeches I have heard him deliver have been spoiled by giving the fatal sense of being spoken essays.  The speech was carefully prepared, and, so far as I could observe, was even written out; but its grace of diction, its fine temper, above all, its manly explanation of a change of view and its close-knit reasoning, made it really one of the very finest addresses I have heard in the course of many years’ debating.

[Sidenote:  Toryism of the gutter.]

And, then, if you wanted to appreciate Sir George Trevelyan the more, you had only to wait for a few moments to hear the man who followed him.  I am told on pretty good authority that, next to Lord Randolph Churchill, the favourite orator of the Tory provincial platform is Sir Ashmead Bartlett.  I can well believe it.  The empty shibboleths—­the loud and blatant voice—­the bumptious temper—­that make the commoner form of Tory—­all are there.  He is the dramatically complete embodiment of all the vacuous folly, empty-headed shoutings, and swaggering patriotism which make up the stock-in-trade of most provincial Tories.  Poor Mr. Balfour was caught by Sir Ashmead before he had time to escape, and in sheer decency had to remain while his servile adulator was pouring on him buckets of butter, which must have appalled and disgusted him.  Indeed, the effect of the bellowings of the man from Sheffield could be seen in the bent back, the depressed face, the general air of limpness which overcame the Tory leader—­as helpless, dejected, bent double, he looked steadily at the green bench underneath him, and concealed from the House as much as possible the tell-tale horror of his face.

[Sidenote:  A portrait of Michael Davitt.]

On an assembly which had been jaded and almost tortured by this tremendous display, it was Mr. Davitt’s fortune to come with his first speech in Parliament.  For hour after hour he had sate, very still, with deeply-lined face, but with a restless and frequent twist of the heavy dark moustache, that spoke of the intense nervous strain to which this weary waiting was subjecting him.  Davitt is a man whose face would stand out in bold relief from any crowd of men, however numerous or remarkable.  He has a narrow face, with high cheek-bones, and the thick, close black whiskers, beard and moustache, make him look almost as dark as a Spaniard.  The eyes are deep-set, brilliant, restless—­with infinite lessons of hours of agony, of loneliness, torture in all the million hours which filled up his nine years of endless and unbroken gloom in penal servitude.  The frame is slight, well-knit—­the frame of a sturdy son of the people—­kept taut and thin by the restless nervous soul within.  An empty sleeve hanging by his side tells the tale of work in the factory in childhood’s years, and of one of the accidents which too often maim the children of the poor in the manufacturing districts of England.  The voice is strong, deep, and soft; the delivery slow, deliberate, the style of the English or American platform rather than of the Irish gathering by the green hillside.