23 AUGUST 1884, Page 25

the author, "I have seen with my own eyes, or

heard with my own ears." There is a preliminary description of the House and its way of doing business, by which we mean its etiquette, rather than its formal method a procedure. Then come sketches of the leading Members (in one of which we observe the curious mistake that Sir William Harcourt was "returned to Parliament for the University of Oxford "). The third chapter, "The Installation of a Speaker- Swearing-in of Members," appropriately leads up to the chapter in four parts on "The Bradlaugh Scandal." "An Ambassador Insulted" tells the story of bow Mr. F. H. O'Donnell put a certain question about M. Challemel-Lacour. Then, after a parenthetic account of "Mr. Gladstone as an Elegiac Orator, and the Character of Lord Beaconsfield," comes the famous " scene " of the Speaker's Coup, d'etat. Mr. Anderson's book, though it contains little that we do not see in the newspapers which condescend to tell the personal history of Parliament, is eminently readable. And it is fair that neither "the Whig dogs" nor the Tory "have the worst of it."