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the Upper House a necessity. Immediately after the great reform of the Lower House in 1832, the Peers displayed upon Irish affairs, more especially upon the Irish Tithe Bill, a spirit of antagonism to the popular representatives, which drew from Thomas Babington Macaulay such words as The Lords are hastening the day of reckoning. . . . I am quite certain that in a few years the House of Lords must go after Old Sarum and Gatton.' The great Whig orator was mistaken; he lived to become himself a member of the House which he expected to see abolished, and once more, after the lapse of nearly half a century, a great Liberal majority in a recently elected House of Commons, eager to conciliate Ireland, has found itself paralysed by an opposition in the Lords which may almost be called unanimous. The position is indeed somewhat extraordinary. The Government of Mr. Gladstone, who is supported by an overwhelming majority both in the House of Commons and in the country, declared that they regarded a particular measure as necessary for the peaceable administration of Ireland during the next few months. They asserted that, unless such a bill were passed, the duty would devolve upon them of carrying out laws, which in their opinion were so unjust and oppressive as to have brought society in Ireland' within a measurable distance of civil war.' If the bill in question had been rejected by the House of Commons, after such a declaration, the course of the Government was sufficiently clear. A dissolution immediately after a general election would have been out of the question, and they would doubtless have at once resigned office. But the bill was not rejected; notwithstanding serious defections in a certain section of the Liberal party it passed the Commons by ample majorities. It is true that these majorities were largely composed of Irish representatives, but the Compensation for Disturbance' Bill being exclusively applicable to Ireland, the support accorded to it by Irish members might fairly have been regarded as a point in its favour.

The bill then went to the Upper House, where it received hardly any support at all, except from members of the Government, and was thrown out by an overwhelming majority; it would in fact have been rejected, even if no peers had voted besides those who profess to support a Liberal Government. Thus the House of Lords declared emphatically that they had no confidence in the Irish policy of ministers, who were rendered absolutely helpless to do anything for Ireland.

To propose the creation of new peers in this case would have been a futile remedy, as members of Mr. Gladstone's late government, ennobled within a few days, had voted against the Irish bill.

To dissolve the House of Commons, by whom the bill had been passed, would have been simply absurd. By resigning office the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland might at least have convinced the public that he believed in the necessity for the remedial

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measure, which he had himself proposed; but he did not resign. By 'tacking' the essential clauses of the ' Compensation for Disturbance' to the Appropriation' Bill, the Lords might have been compelled to reconsider their hasty decision, but the Government refused to entertain any such proposal. The final result of the whole affair has been a protest uttered by one Cabinet Minister in the House of Commons, and explained away by another in the House of Lords. Even this little ebullition of feeling was produced, not by the rejection of the Government measure, but of another Irish bill, introduced by an independent member, and affecting solely the registration of voters for the election of members of Parliament in Ireland.

When responsible ministers are contented to accept defeat of their Irish policy at the hands of hereditary and irresponsible legislators, when they neither consider it necessary to resign, nor to take any measures for giving practical effect to their policy, the crisis may perhaps be regarded as not particularly serious. The events of the late session have nevertheless brought home to the minds of many reformers the fact that parliamentary reform does not mean the reform of one House of Parliament only, and that each reform of the representative branch of the legislature renders more essential a reform of the hereditary branch, if the British Constitution is not to become unworkable. With a Conservative Ministry, and an unreformed House of Commons, the hereditary chamber has always worked smoothly enough. Since the Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867 collisions of opinion between the two Houses have been frequent, but notwithstanding the infusion of a considerable popular element into the Lower House, its general tone and sympathies are still aristocratic, and no hostility of class feeling has ever embittered these collisions. Many peers have occupied places on the green benches of the Lower House, and many members of that House have reason to believe that they will one day take their seats upon the red benches in another place.' The Liberal majority in the House of Commons, backed as it is by public opinion out of doors, knows well enough that it is quite unnecessary to accept Lords' amendments to popular measures, like the 'burials,' 'employers' liability,' or 'ground game' bills, but there is a distinct unwillingness to coerce or humiliate the Upper House, and mischievous amendments are often agreed to, the plea being that the bill, even as it stands, is too good to be lost. On the other hand, upon all minor questions, affecting small sections of the community only, and upon all bills in the hands of independent members of Parliament, the House of Lords is supreme, and may postpone for an indefinite period the relief of Jews from religious disabilities, the legalisation of marriage with a deceased wife's sister, the amendment of the laws affecting the property of married women, or the protection of ancient monuments from destruction. Members in charge of measures such as these in the House of Commons know from sad experience the perils of another

place,' even when the bill has been modified, so as to conciliate, as far as possible, the hostility of noble individuals, one or two of whom thus possess a practical veto upon all legislation, except first-class government measures.

Hence occasional outbursts of irritation against the hereditary chamber may take place in the House of Commons, but the personal sympathy between members of the two Houses is so general, and so strong, that no serious proposal for the reform of the Upper House is ever likely to originate in the Lower. The impulse to Parliamentary reform must come from outside, whether Lords or Commons are concerned; and if the nation could be brought to understand the futility of dealing with one House, while leaving the other intact, the reform of the peerage would soon become a question of practical politics. The assimilation of the county and borough franchise, with a complete redistribution of seats, must shortly occupy the attention of Parliament, and the next Reform Act will doubtless produce a considerable change in the House of Commons, intensifying the political antagonism, and diminishing the personal sympathy between members of the two Houses. If the peerage is to continue as a political, not merely a social, institution in this country, it must, like all other political institutions, submit to modification. Most important questions affecting the ownership of land must ere long be dealt with by the legislature, and upon such questions an hereditary legislative body, composed almost entirely of landowners, may find itself in a difficult and even dangerous position, considering the small proportion of landowners among the people of this country. A real collision between the representative and the hereditary assemblies would be as a collision between a brazen and an earthen vessel, but even the warmest admirers of representative government may well deprecate such a catastrophe. One lesson, however, may be learnt from the experience of Australia, viz., that the introduction of the representative element into a plutocratic second chamber not only increases the risk of collision with a popular chamber, but renders a collision more serious when it does occur. Members of an elected legislative council, with thousands of wealthy constituents at their back, are more formidable Conservatives than the British peers, who can never feel quite certain that they represent anybody except themselves.

Nomination by the responsible ministers of the Crown for life, or for a fixed period, seems to be the best method hitherto invented for recruiting a senate, which shall be in general harmony with popular sentiments, but shall be superior to any transitory popular impulse.

Anyhow, if the House of Peers has to be set in order, lest it should render itself impossible in the immediate future, the experience and example of our own colonies and of foreign nations, as to a second chamber, cannot be without significance at the present juncture.

DAVID WBDderburn.

GOSSIP OF AN OLD BOOKWORM.

I AGREE with Charles Lamb: Everybody should have a hobby,' even though, like Lamb's friend John Tipp, that hobby should be only a fiddle. John Tipp of the Old South Sea House, as Elia tells us, thought an accountant the greatest character in the world, and himself the greatest accountant in it. And John was not without his hobby. The fiddle relieved his vacant hours -as it has done those of wiser and greater men than John Tipp. I could point at this moment to one of the most valuable and hard-worked of public servants who found in his hobby, a fiddle, refreshment and almost rest' during the sixty years of his busy and most useful official life, and now, at upwards of fourscore, finds in it a pleasant change from that arrear of reading' which in his well-earned leisure he is trying to reduce.

More fortunate than John Tipp, I have had more than one hobby. How we get our hobbies is matter for curious speculation. Some, I suspect, are born with us, and we are indoctrinated with others from accidental circumstances, while my chief hobby was, I think, the result of that beautiful system of compensation on the part of Providence of which, as we pass through life, we see so many proofs.

I was always so extremely short-sighted that I was quite unfitted to take part in the majority of those athletic sports, such as cricket, in which boys delight. Indeed, there was only one branch of them in which I was at all an adept, and in these refined days I almost blush to refer to it: I was said to handle the gloves very nicely.

The consequence of my infirmity was, that almost as soon as I ceased to be one of the spelling' public I became one of the reading public; and on our holidays at school, instead of investing my small weekly allowance at the tuck shop,' I used to borrow from the small circulating library in the neighbourhood materials for an afternoon's reading. I suppose I began with the Mysteries of Udolpho, the Scottish Chiefs, &c. ; but before I left school in 1819 I had read and re-read all Scott's novels that had then appeared.

When I left school, and, by the kindness of the late Lord Farnborough, received an appointment in the Civil Service, my wise and good father, disregarding Shakespeare's condemnation of homekeeping youths,' and believing that for a youth who was released

from his office and official restraints at four o'clock there was no place like home to keep him out of mischief, gave up to me the small room in which his, if limited, still well-selected library of the best English writers was shelved, and made it mine, the room of which I was henceforth to be lord and master, with full liberty to invite to me there and at all times such friends as I pleased. I can never be too grateful for this thoughtful kindness. Perhaps my tendency to very varied if not omnivorous reading may be attributed to the fact that my father, who was a diligent reader of the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews, had a complete set of them; and these, with the Literary Gazette, which I began to take in on my own account, became great favourites with me.

My father was an inveterate walker, and yet so punctual a man of business that I do not believe during the many years he held his then office he was ever five minutes after ten, or ever missed his hour's walk before ten, or his hour's walk after four; and he strongly enjoined me to keep up my health by regular daily pedestrian

exercise.

Hence my two hobbies, my love of books, my love of walking, made up my great hobby, which I venture to designate bookstalling, and to the pursuit of that hobby I owe not only much enjoyment, but in a great measure the rather curious collection of literary treasures which during fifty years of bookstalling I have gathered round me. I wonder how many hundred miles I walked during the fifty years from 1819 to 1869, during which I pursued, with greater or less activity, my gleanings from old bookstalls.

Fortunately for me catalogues are now showered upon us thick as autumnal leaves in Vallombrosa; though I agree with a late dear friend of mine who was the exception to Chaucer's dictum that the greatest clerks are not the wisest men, and was at once the greatest clerk and the wisest man I ever knew, and who, speaking to me once on the formation of a library, expressed his belief that the majority of his most valuable books had been picked by him from the shelves of the booksellers, and not ordered from their catalogues, since from a catalogue you only get the title of the book, often very imperfect and deceptive, while turning over the pages of the book itself for a few minutes shows its scope and object sufficiently to enable you to decide how far it is worth your buying.

After all, a bookstall is only an open shop where you can, without troubling the owner, turn over such volumes as may strike your fancy; and with this additional advantage, that the books are not only generally priced, but the outdoor prices are, as a rule, considerably lower than those pencilled in mysterious symbols, known only to the bookseller, on the shelves of his shop. It is matter for curious speculation how many of the rarissimi' in the famous Roxburghe Library, which sold in 1812 for upwards of 22,000l., and