Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from St. Stephen's in the Fifties: The Session 1852-3; A Parliamentary Retrospect
Aberdeen of that day, the Administration which gave the opportunity for Mr Gladstone as its Chancellor of the Exchequer to secure his first great combined triumph as financier and orator. The author of the articles that make up this volume appears to have dashed off his descriptive and critical essays with almost as much rapidity as a war correspondent of the present day has to display when preparing on the battlefield itself the narrative which is to be sent along the wires of the telegraph. The effect of that very rapidity is to give in the one instance as well as in the other the idea of a living reality to the pictures it puts into words. The author of these letters differs, how ever, from the war correspondent in the fact that he is above all things else a satirist. He describes the ways and the doings of. Each House of Parliament in a spirit of utter irreverence, and he criticises the measures and the men and even the manners in the style of one who is much more inclined to mockery than to adulation. He is a remarkably brilliant writer and a happy master of epigrammatic epithet and phrase, and his letters would be well worth reading if only because of their mere literary skill. He has little respect for the House of Commons, as it then existed, and no respect whatever for the House of Lords.
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