The same gentlemen now rushed about
with a hurried, preoccupied, and, above all, a self-conscious air that
had its disgusting but also its very amusing side. For instance, Mr.
Bromley-Davenport, during the six years of Tory Government, never spoke,
and rarely even made his appearance in the House of Commons. His voice
was as strange to the assembly as though he had never belonged to it.
But this Session he is constantly getting up in his seat, and he rushes
through the lobbies with the cyclonic movement of a youth bearing on
juvenile shoulders a weight too heavy to bear. Mr. Bartley is about as
dull a fellow as ever bored a House of Commons, and in the last
Parliament even his own friends found him a trial and a nuisance. He has
suddenly taken to making the House of Commons familiar with his voice at
every sitting. Lord Cranborne has been remarkable for the boorishness
and impertinence of his manners--or, perhaps, to be more accurate, want
of manners. I have seen him interrupting Mr. Gladstone in the most
impudent way with a face you would like to slap, and his hands deep down
in the depths of his pockets. Lord Cranborne is now nightly in evidence,
and leads the chorus of jeers and cheers by which the more brutal of the
Tory youth signalize the opening of the new style of Parliamentary
warfare.
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