Mr. Winterbotham (M.P. for Stroud) has accepted the Under- Secretaryship
for the Home Department, in the place of Mr. Shaw Lefevre, who goes to the Secretaryship of the Admiralty, to help Mr. Goschen, while Mr. Baxter supplies Mr. Stansfeld's place as Financial Secretary of the Treasury. Mr. Winterbotham has fairly earned his admission to the Administration by Parliamentary ability of a very marked type,—his attack on the Education Bill last Session from the Dissenters' point of view having exhibited a very considerable amount of oratorical power. He has, too, the advantage of not having passed the age (he is 34) at which a man may hope without loss to himself to serve a fair apprenticeship to the business of administration even before the time comes for him to fill the higher posts. He boasts of his love of music ; but musicians are capable of enjoying discords in the right place, and on the last occasion (yesterday week) on which Mr. Winterbotham revelled in the discordant delights of the "wild shriek of liberty," he intimated that the Vice-President of the Council (Mr. Forster) was "an uncouth barbarian" for not encouraging music. Yet one would hardly have inferred from his oratory that music is his forte. For with all his rhetorical vigour, and that sense of rhythm which good speakers usually have, his voice is harsh and his style of expression not wholly free from the uncouth. He would not do ill, for the sake of the administrative career which we heartily wish him, if he were to make 'the uncouth barbarian,' both in rela- tion to the form and substance of parliamentary and administrative doings, his model.
