The Lord Mayor's Day is, as the French Ambassador said
on Tuesday, one of the most English things in England, and pro-
bably it was never more thoroughly English than under the presidency of its new,—some say its first,—Irish Lord Mayor, Alderman M'Arthur. Whatever the faults or excellences of Lord Beaconsfield, no one either expected or discovered in his speeches any of the special characteristics of an English states- man, and the colleagues of Lord Beaconsfield were apt to ac- commodate themselves to the taste which he had formed in them. This year, however, everything was natural, simple, and straightforward. The Lord Chancellor (Lord Selborne) talked of the two pillars of the State, Liberty and Law, and insisted, in the usual English way, that while the law ought always to be in course of improvement, it was essential to liberty that law, while it exists, should be strictly obeyed. Lord Granville was the single speaker who made any reference to party ques- tions, and that was only in an ironical allusion to Lord Salis- bury's speech at Taunton, which he described, in Lord Beacons- field's language, as a flight of the October political wild-geese in the far west. And Lord Hartington, in returning thanks for the House of Commons, bore his testimony to the patience, knowledge, and ability displayed by a very large proportion of its Members during the last Session, trying and difficult as that Session certainly was.
