PREFACE.

ALL observers of contemporary

society will admit that there is

a very natural, though somewhat inordinate desire on the part of those who are not actually on the scene of the political conflict, to know something more of the character of the combatants than can be learned by merely perusing the reports of their speeches. The gratification of this curiosity now forms what seems to be one of the leading departments of modern journalism. Statesmen are either 'interviewed' in their homes, or painted with pre-Raphaelite accuracy in their

official character. We are even told what they wear, and how they look when they are uttering certain words. Nor can it be denied that the information thus conveyed to us is altogether useless. The most trivial details are interesting, if they help to bring more clearly before the mind's eye the person and the character of an eminent

man.

I have not, in the following pages, sought to rival those graphic writers who have made it their business to describe for the benefit of the outer world, the clothes or the tricks of speech and gesture of living politicians. But I have endeavoured in writing these slight sketches, to bring those of whom I write somewhat more closely and clearly before the eyes of my readers, than they can be brought

through the medium of leading articles or reported speeches. In the case of Members of Parliament, I have wished to indicate to some extent the position they hold, and the reputation they enjoy in the House itself, where a standard very different from that ordinarily applied by the world at large to public persons, is is not

uncom

monly employed. Without pretending to have gone very deep in my search for details of the lives of those of whom I have written, I may say that in the majority of cases the sketches have been seen and-so far as matters of fact are concerned have been corrected-by the subjects of them.

Originally written to supply the readers of a provincial newspaper with information which they might

have found it difficult to obtain in any other shape, there is nothing ambitious either in the object of these sketches or in the mode in which they have been executed.

The

reader will see that I write as a Liberal, with a firm belief in those great principles which secured to the Liberal Party its long and splendid triumph between 1832 and 1874; and which, I trust, it will never abandon. But whether writing of political friends or political opponents, I have endeavoured to be just to all and ungenerous to none; and I trust that, in this matter at least, I have not been altogether unsuccessful.

LEEDS, October 1879.