lead, which they should be proud to follow, in a speech delivered at the United Club. With eloquence he admitted that it was the Party's first duty to defend the Empire and the Constitution. But he spoke a necessary word of warning. He showed how the attack upon the Lords was an attempt to divert the country's attention from the great constructive issues which patriots cannot and will not forget. "Do not be put on the defensive," said he; "it is not your business; it is not the natural position which you should occupy. We are the great reformers." It is in this spirit of pride and courage that we should approach the coming struggle. With the hopefulness of Mr Balfour we should remember that their defence is stoutest who are the most eager in aggression, the most active in attack. The truth is that Englishmen, serious in trifles, are wont to treat the graver enterprises of life with a sort of flippanoy. Politics presents one side of the medal; Mr Oscar Browning's 'Memories of Sixty Years' Sixty Years' (London: J. Lane) presents the other. Never was a more portentously solemn book written about nothing. Its three hundred pages contain no episode that is of the slightest interest to any other than the author himself. Mr Browning, being wholly devoid of humour, exaggerates enormously the importance of what he has seen and done. He looks back upon his past through a mist of self complacency which might be pathetic if it were not wholly ludicrous. Unfortunately, Mr Browning does not stand alone in indiscretion. He belongs to an increasing class which believes that to run up and down in railway trains, and to gaze upon the features of widely advertised men and women, is a lofty enterprise; and if we consider his book at all, it is because we sadly recognise that its author is what Emerson called " a representative man. The one and only purpose of Mr Browning's life seems to have been the collection of celebrities. He has pursued them with the zeal and tirelessness of an entomologist. For sixty years they have been his Lepidoptera, and now at the end of his career he has them all nicely mounted and displayed for the benefit of the world, with a pin delicately placed in the back of each. And, as he exhibits them, they are all dead, like butterflies in a collection. Happily, many of them are yet unburied. But even those who still live in the upper air seem miserably deprived of life in Mr Browning's presentation of them. For, though this most assiduous collector has come upon many a fine specimen in the course of his arduous researches, he has not known what to do with them when he has found them, As far as we know they said nothing to him, and he seems to have imparted little enough to them. They met, their names were intrusted triumphantly to a greedy note-book, and there was an end of the matter. However, as any one may see, Mr Browning was born to greatness. When he was a mere boy he accompanied the King of the Belgians on a formal visit paid to the King of France. From that moment Kings and Princes were among his dearest friends. There was only one Court which he avoided, and he avoided that because it was not worthy of him. General Fox, he writes, and we would not omit a word of this priceless passage, "did not care much for the Emperor, whom he regarded as a parvenu, hardly, indeed, a gentleman, and he would never allow me to enter into any relation with the Tuileries, or to know any of the Emperor's Court." Poor Emperor, thus to be deprived of Mr Browning's brilliant company! Thrice-fortunate Mr Browning, to be saved thus by the most prudent of guides from the contamination of an Emperor, who was hardly a gentleman! If the light which beats upon a throne be fierce, fierce also is the illumination which surrounds the friend of kings, and Mr Browning has suffered more bitterly than most from his inevitable distinction. Once upon a time he was preparing to leave Berlin, when the Crown Princess begged him to delay his departure until she had seen him. He delayed his departure, and she did him the honour to ask him his advice concerning the education of her two sons, William and Henry. "I gave it to the best of my ability," says Mr Browning with simple gravity; "but much as I admire the splendid qualities of the Emperor William, and appreciate the enormous services which he has rendered to his country, I wish to disclaim all responsibility for the effect of any suggestion I may have made." A disclaimer of this sort was obviously necessary. It is easy to see how the great man's amiability might be misconstrued, and we are glad to have it on his own word that he is entirely guiltless of the energy and intelligence which have long been the wonder of Europe. As we descend from the splendour of Courts to the plain the plain society of peers and statesmen, we find Mr Browning still intimately at home. He is of those who disdain nothing that is human, and fresh from the patronage of kings he does not contemn those of meaner birth. For instance, he records quite cheerfully that one day he met "Baron Dimsdale, Lord Strathmore, Lord Ailesbury, and other friends." What they talked about does not "transpire," as the reporters say. Perhaps they talked about nothing. Perhaps it was enough for these great men to gaze and pass on in silence. And it cannot be denied that in in his encounters Mr Browning was more fortunate than most. To-day Lord Lytton comes to tea. Yesterday he met Howard Sturgis and the Duke of St Albans. And even if he caught nothing better than a Cabinet Minister, there was some consolation in writing "Mr Childers, an intimate friend of mine," or "Mr Bryce said to me." The interest ex of these meetings lies, as we have pointed out, not in the mere words which were changed, but in the consoling reflection that we are permitted to read the memoirs of one who has always kept the best company. Nor was the Channel any check upon Mr Browning's enterprise. He made up his mind in early youth to become acquainted with the leading men in every country. He was still young when he could write without boastfulness: "I must at that time have known nearly everybody in Rome worth knowing.' That he had his failures, like other great men, goes without saying. Once, when he was at Pontresina, George Eliot asked him to meet her at Dresden, and he was unable to go. Another time he received an invitation from Ottilie, Goethe's daughterin-law, in whose arms the poet died, to spend an evening with her. "I was obliged to refuse it," he writes, 66 as it was my duty to return to Eton by a certain day." And, like the hero he is, he would let nothing stand in the way of duty. Still worse befell him on March 17, 1880. On that day he was starting for Normandy "with an undergraduate named Willink." The rest must be told in his own words: "Going to take tea at the Athenæum Club, I saw Lord Houghton talking to Lord Granville and Lord Selborne. Lord Granville took Lord Houghton out of the room, and asked to be introduced to me. After a little conversation, he invited me to dinner for that evening. I declined, because I was going abroad, but I have always regretted that I did so, for a dinner with Lord Granville in those days was an experience not to be missed. I had to content myself with the Criterion instead." This, indeed, was Mr Browning's Moscow, and we would give much to know how the "undergraduate named Willink," the cause of an unparalleled disaster, fared at the Criterion and on the journey, inauspiciously begun. But if now and again there was a check in Mr Browning's triumphal progress, his achievements are such as to turn other collectors green with envy. "I have frequently sat in BurneJones's studio and seen him paint," he writes with the natural modesty of grandeur. Some poor fools have asserted that George Eliot composed 'Romola' at Florence. Mr Browning is better informed. "Of course she wrote 'Romola ' in a room I know well." He never in his life received a letter from the late Professor Jebb which was not signed yours affectionately." When the Princess Louise was married to the Marquis of Lorne, not merely was Mr Browning present at the wedding, but the bridegroom's brother afterwards had tea with him at Eton. Is there a living man who can surpass that record? And more than this, Mr Browning has been the most eminent trainer of youth that his century has seen. His early ambition was to be the Dugald Stewart of Cambridge. He became the Socrates not of Cambridge only, but of Eng- have pointed out, he deigns not to report what they said to him, or with what spirit he sustained the dazzling conversation. He is content to remember that he met them; he is content to shine in the ineffectual radiance of others. It would be difficult to find an unworthier ambition. It would be difficult to match the indiscretion which allows an author to speak of Willie Gladstone, Charlie Wood, and Teddy Goschen, not in the privacy of his own house, but in a work which he who wills may borrow of the lending library. If England decays, here, in truth, is one cause of her decadence. A man is memorable by the work that he does, not by the persons, more or less distinguished, whom he meets in his passage through the world. Had Mr Browning anything of interest to tell us of his friends we would forgive everything. As we lay aside this book He tells us nothing but their of memoirs, we conclude, with names. He does not speak ill profound regret, that it could of them. His amiability is have been written only by an never at fault. He merely Englishman. The peculiar says nothing. And, being vice of snobbishness, which satisfied with enumeration, it illustrates, can be found he is curious concerning the nowhere else save in England. opinion which others cherish It has no other object than to of him. "I wonder what prove to us, what is absolutely they would write of me," he immaterial, that Mr Browning asks. And it is part of has lived for sixty years on the tragedy, or comedy, of terms of affability with crowned his life that probably he will and titled persons. As we never know. AN HISTORIC IMMEDIATELY after the General Election of 1710, giving the Tory Party in the House of Commons a large majority, a measure known as "the Occasional Conformity Bill," which had already been thrice carried in the House of Commons and thrice rejected by the Lords, was, after an interval of some years, reintroduced by the Government. The object of it was to prevent the systematic evasion of the law as laid down in the Test and Corporation Acts. Good or bad, it was a law designed for the protection of the Church of England against the undisguised hostility of the Nonconformists, who, when they got the upper hand before, had pulled down the Church, the Monarchy, and the Constitution altogether. It is needless to say that such a measure commanded the full support of the Tory Party, while encountering the bitterest opposition from the Whigs. It was carried at the end of 1710, in the House of Commons, but was eventually shelved owing to the resistance it met with in the House of Lords. In 1711 it was carried in the Lower House by a majority of eightythree, and rejected in the Upper by a majority of twelve. It was once more carried in the Commons, and rejected in the Lords by an increased majority of twenty-one. The Opposition in the Lords took their stand on the famous Whig principle of "civil and PARALLEL. religious liberty." The Bill, they said, was a revival of religious persecution, to which every Whig was conscientiously opposed. It was, in fact, their test principle. Walpole declared that the Bill was worthy only of Julian the Apostate. The other great question on which the Lords were at issue with the Government was the Peace of Utrecht. The Whigs were loud for the further prosecution of the war, though it is now generally admitted, and by none more readily than by Lord Macaulay, that in bringing the war to a close the Tory Government were consulting the best interests of the country. None had been more violent in condemning the prolongation of the war than Lord Nottingham, the leader of the High Church Tories and the special champion of the Occasional Conformity Bill. It is unnecessary to reproduce here the arguments for and against the Treaty of Utrecht. It is sufficient to say that Nottingham had always been the most zealous supporter of the policy which it represented, and had even wept over the ruin entailed upon his country by the persistency of the Whigs in prolonging a costly war after every object for which it had been originally undertaken was accomplished. Now, what followed. In order to pass a Resolution, as the Whigs desired, |