Later in the evening, Mr. Graham, M.P. for North-West Lanarkshire,
made his maiden speech, in the character of a new Parliamentary hamourist of a very ambitions kind. The jokes do not appear to us very good, though they were certainly ostentatiously jocular; but they were well received, for the House is very sick of its own dullness, and is but too delighted to laugh at a mediocre joke. This was the kind of thing. Speaking of Lord Randolph Churchill, he said :—" Yesterday, he was ; to- day, he was not,—gone like the froth on licensed victuallers' beer, or the foam on petroleum champagne." And, again, of Mr. Goschen he said :—" We had gone to Egypt by the advice of that illustrious statesman and economist who had raised the art of carpet-bagging from its primitive rudeness into a political science, and who so well illustrated the Scriptural injunction, When they persecute in one city, flee to another.' " " Primitive rudeness " seems to us the very essence of that kind of jocularity.
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