THE

GENTLEMAN'S MAGAZINE

NOVEMBER, 1863.

CHRISTOPHER KENRICK.

HIS LIFE AND ADVENTURES.

CHAPTER V.

FAMILY CRITICISM—A CHAPTER BY THE WAY.

T would have been more conducive to my own comfort, and probably more satisfactory to the reader, had I published no part of this story until it had become a finished and complete performance.

My neglect in this respect has, since the first portion of the narrative appeared, subjected me to a running fire of family criticism, objections, and remonstrances. This is not all; it has resulted in the introduction of a new feature here which I certainly never contemplated at the outset a new feature which may or may not please the reader.

The Gentleman's Magazine, containing my opening chapters, has not been in the house a day before Mrs. Kenrick favours me with her confidential opinion upon the work.

"It will not only be a failure, Christopher," she says; "it will do the family irreparable injury.”

"Why will it be a failure?" I inquire.

"Because it is too true, my dear," she says.

"And why will it injure the family ?" I ask.
"Because it is too true," my wife replies again.

"Its truthfulness will be its greatest charm with the public," I reply,

VOL. I., N. S. 1868.

3 A

proposes to turn Bank Stock into Terminable Annuities, or to wipe out the National Debt with a sponge, I shall think no worse of him for eating up his book on the "Union of Church and State," leaf by leaf, artichoke fashion, and running a tilt at the Irish Church, than I think of Mr. Disraeli for swallowing all his antiReform speeches, throwing his principles to the winds, and reestablishing the old Anglo-Saxon franchise of scot and lot as the basis of our system of parliamentary representation. Looking at the contest from this point of view, I can light my cigar with the Premier's address to his constituents, and, without the slightest twinge, picture the right hon. gentleman in his study at Hughenden or Grosvenor Gate casting up his gains and losses, and developing a policy to "heal the wounds of afflicted centuries" out of the speeches of Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Bright, and Sir Roundell Palmer. I know how skilfully Mr. Disraeli can spin Penelope's web; and when, by a long process of what logicians call approximation, the politics of Whig and Tory have been reduced to the colours of a straw, I can hardly find it in my heart to anathematise the right hon. gentleman's tactics, even though these tactics should, in the eyes of chivalrous politicians like the Marquis of Salisbury, illustrate the morals of an adventurer; for I am afraid we are all tarred with the same brush. There is, I know, a great deal to be said in favour of atoning for Lord Palmerston's lapses in principle by the sacrifice of Mr. Disraeli ; but, perhaps, after all, it might be juster to grant a general amnesty, and revive the golden age of politics in the Householders' Parliament under the leadership of Vivian Grey. We owe something ourselves to the memory of Lord Palmerston; and Mr. Disraeli, as Premier, pleasantly marks the irony of the situation.

I know only one drawback to parliamentary life, and that is a general election. To say nothing at all of election bills-the ugliest and dirtiest bills that one sees, and which it is generally prudent to use for cigar spills, and pay without looking at anything but the totals-there is an amount of hard work in the form of speaking and canvassing that is simply hideous to most men; and Mr. Disraeli, with these "ancient and constitutional franchises" of his, has simply added to the horrors of an election fourfold. "You have no conception of what I have to go through down here," says a friend of mine, who is contesting a borough which, at present, I can only say is somewhere between here and Cappadocia. "I have to pay my respects to about ten thousand electors. Four-fifths of them, the chairman of my committee assures me, on his honour, are Liberals to the core. I have been at work day and night for the past six weeks. I have not

had a single day's shooting or fishing; and yet I have still another fortnight's work before me. I am up four days out of the seven at five o'clock in the morning to pick up the early worms as they go to work, and I have to hunt up electors at all hours of the night in courts and alleys that will give me the yellow fever to think of next July. I attend ward meetings in public-houses and tan-yards twice a week to explain my views on the topics of the day to my future constituents, and to answer questions-and such questions! What I think of the three-cornered trick? How I voted upon the Dog Tax? What I think about Currency What my opinion is upon Courts of Conciliation? Whether I will vote for the Permissive Bill? How I got my pension? Whether I think I have either a moral or a legal right to it? How I intend to deal with Ritualists? Whether I will blow up the fortifications of Bermuda, throw up the colonies, disband the army, and put the navy out of commission; abolish all sinecures, relieve the bishops of their duties in Parliament, and pass an act for the protection of trade unions? Of course, I offend ten to every one that I conciliate by my replies; and the next day the Tory papers are down upon me, exposing my inconsistency and my faithlessness, denouncing my revolutionary and godless tendencies, and Heaven knows what besides. I am anathematised by the dean and chapter with bell, book, and candle; I am preached at every Sunday afternoon by the prebendaries, and lampooned and caricatured by the wits. I have a brace of Tories to fight, and a working men's candidate for a colleague, who is booking all the split votes on the hypothesis that I shall not want them. Thank God! it is a penal offence to bribe, or else—well, you know what Lowe said. If parliamentary life is to be tolerable under this system, we must have, not triennial or septennial Parliaments, but ten years' Parliaments." I can "vouch for every fact" of my friend's pathetic description of his contest; for I have had a run through the shires, and seen the constituencies exercising their right of baiting Cabinet Ministers and parliamentary representatives-and I speak from personal observation when I say that they bait them even more mercilessly than they are baited at two o'clock in the morning by the keenest and most audacious matadors of St. Stephen's-Bernal Osborne, Ayrton, or Bright. Of course, there is only one way of dealing with a cantankerous constituent or a riotous meeting, and that is by keeping up a sort of good-humoured audacity. Resent an interruption, lose your temper, or go off into an explanation, and get prosy, put in a good word for hares or rabbits, sneer at the ballot box, or mutter a syllable against the Permissive Bill, and it is all up with you. You

may as well finish off your speech at once; for when once you have raised the demon of democracy in an English mob you may try all the incantations of sophistry and eloquence in vain to lay the spirit you have called from its lair. It is a rough course of political training this, to put men of thought and culture through as a preliminary for the House of Commons; but if the gentlemen of England are to hold their own in the government of the country, to vindicate their superiority to mere demagogues, they must accustom themselves to it, and vanquish demagogues with their own weapons. England, it has been said, is unrivalled for two things-sport and politics. Happily, most of our politicians are sportsmen, and know how to ride at a five-barred gate after the hounds as well as they know how to face an ugly amendment in the House of Commons; and if sportsmen wish to keep the imperial game of politics in their own hands, they must study politics as they study pheasants and partridges.

Representative institutions in England are now on their trial; for in no other part of the world do representative institutions exist in all the simplicity and strength that they exist in this country. In America the power of the people is held in check by a series of stringent guards of a well-defined nature. In France the power of the people is little more than a phrase. Here, and here alone, popular power is what it professes to be; and here, till now, representation, as the basis of a system of imperial government, has been rather a fiction than a fact. Though the mother of parliaments, and the model of all free states, high political power in this country, up till now, has been practically vested in the hands of the aristocracy, and has been exercised by them with singular moderation and sagacity. That power is now in the hands of the mass of the people; and upon its exercise depend the position and the prosperity of the prerogative state of Europe. Under the old system the House of Commons has represented all the highest intelligence and practical ability of the country. Imperfect and faulty as our system has been, it is impossible to deny that it has worked well; for it has kept the doors of the House of Commons open to men of all ranks, men of every type of thought, of every variety of experience; and its legislation, as far as it has gone, has been just, enlightened, and successful. The House of Commons still possesses all its power. It still possesses all its original attractions for men of ambition, for men of property, for men of thought and culture. It still forms the avenue to all the highest honours of the state, to all the great posts of government, of diplomacy, and of law; and Englishmen of all ranks still look to a seat in the House of Commons as one of the highest

How far I have done well in trusting my pen to carry me safely and creditably through this somewhat extraneous chapter is for the reader to say.

I pull the scampering quill up, after its long unchecked gallop, and collect my thoughts to regain the old highway in which we are to follow the vagaries of that romantic Stonyfield printer, whose history crops up in my mind like a half-remembered dream, as if I really were not Christopher Kenrick at all.

CHAPTER VI.

THE STORY OF MY LIFE PROGRESSES.

HAVING sat up the remainder of the night on which I supped with Miss Belmont to finish my report of the magisterial proceedings already referred to, I was fully entitled to the leisure which I proposed for myself on the morrow.

I marvel at the physical power that I possessed in those early days. To sit up half the night, and get up, bright and brisk, early the next morning, was a common thing; and sometimes I did not go to bed at all. In the height of that short-hand agony, when I was getting into my mind Mr. Harding's strange characters, I have sat up for several nights in a week. It is true I often looked pale and ill; but a little additional rest soon put me right again, and I went on learning my newspaper lesson, and working out my destiny.

After rehearsal on this next day, I dived up that smudgy passage beyond which Miss Belmont lodged, and asked her if she would like to see some of the lions of Lindford.

The lady was most gracious. She thanked me for this mark of attention, and said she would accompany me with pleasure. I see her now in a light muslin dress, a little dingy in appearance, a Galway cloak, and a bonnet trimmed with blue. I see her companion in a suit of loose grey clothes, with a cane under his arm, a black hat just a trifle on one side of his head, and a certain amount of swagger in his gait. They are an odd-looking couple, and I do not wonder that people look twice at them as they pass along the High Street. I remember to have heard over and over again the remarks of one citizen to another, in an undertone, "That's Miss Belmont," and once I distinctly noted a voice saying, "And that's Mr. Kenrick."

Here was fame indeed! I am free to confess that this public