Sir William Harcourt was so dull at Ringwood on Wednes-
day, that we can almost believe that he had really been doing, what he described to his hearers in Mr. Carlyle's homely lan- guage,—namely, "filling his belly with the east wind,"—and that the diet had not agreed with him. Even his jokes were not amusing. He said that a Session of Parliament is like a three-volume novel. "You have the first volume before Easter, and the volume is very dull; you have another volume between Easter and Whitsuntide, and I expect in that the plot will thicken ; then you come to the third volume, when you wind up with the catastrophe. I will not say what is to happen to the principal characters, though I dare say you would like to know; but we must not skip." Now, in the novel it is not usually the first volume that is dull. The novelist always likes to begin with a lively interest. It is the second volume which is dull, when the "retarding element," as Goethe and Schiller called it, comes in. Yet it is the "retarding element," in the shape of active obstruction, on which Sir William Har- court appears to rely for the "thickening of the plot." And as to the catastrophe, it comes only at the end of a Parlia- ment, not at the end of a mere Session. If there be any likeness between Parliament and a novel, it is in the mighty novels of Richardson, in six or seven volumes, that the analogy must be looked for, not in the common three-volume novels of the present day.
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