During the first session Mike was hampered and inconvenienced by the forms of the House; in the second, he began to weary of its routine.  His wit and paradox attracted some attention; he made one almost successful speech, many that stirred and stimulated the minds of celebrated listeners; but for all that he failed.  His failure to redeem the expectations of his friends, produced in him much stress and pain of mind, the more acute because he was fully alive to the cause.  He ascribed it rightly to certain inherent flaws in his character.  “The world believes in those who believe in it.  Such belief may prove a lack of intelligence on the part of the believer, but it secures him success, and success is after all the only thing that compensates for the evil of life.”

Always impressed by new ideas, rarely holding to any impression long, finding all hollow and common very soon, he had been taken with the importance of the national assembly, but it had hardly passed into its third session when all illusion had vanished, and Mike ridiculed parliamentary ambitions in the various chambers of the barristers he frequented.

It was May-time, and never did the Temple wear a more gracious aspect.  The river was full of hay-boats, the gardens were green with summer hours.  Through the dim sky, above the conical roof of the dear church, the pigeons fled in rapid quest, and in Garden Court, beneath the plane-trees, old folk dozed, listening to the rippling tune of the fountain and the shrilling of the sparrows.  In King’s Bench Walk the waving branches were full of their little brown bodies.  Sparrows everywhere, flying from the trees to the eaves, hopping on the golden gravel, beautifully carpeted with the rich shadows of the trees—­unabashed little birds, scarcely deigning to move out of the path of the young men as they passed to and fro from their offices to the library.  “That sweet, grave place where we weave our ropes of sand,” so Mike used to speak of it.

The primness of the books, the little galleries guarded by brass railings, here and there a reading-desk, the sweet silence of the place, the young men reading at the polished oak tables, the colour of the oak and the folios, the rich Turkey carpets, lent to the library that happy air of separation from the brutalities of life which is almost sanctity.  These, the familiar aspects of the Temple, moved him with all their old enchantments; he lingered in the warm summer mornings when all the Temple was astir, gossiping with the students, or leaning upon the balustrades in pensive contemplation of the fleet river.