Arizona republican., 1918-11-03
HISTORIC ENGLAND

swelling under his mail. I learned that the lord chancellor was sitting that morLing and therefore the house Of lords was open free to the public. l presented myself at the gate of the Chapter house, in which the first par liament of England was held, and was soon traversing corridors lined with statues, lit with the living fire of such names as Pitt and Burke and Fox and Grafton and-nearer the doors of the peers chamber-Hampden and Rupert and Cromwell and Charles Stuart. The walls were panelled with historical paintings, and the achievements of Puritan and Cavalier were alternately and impartially chronicled both on canvas and in marble, although I fan cied that in painting the departure of the train bands from London the art ist had caricatured the PuT,tanS a lit tie.
 I entered the house of lords. It is more elaborately ornamented in the matter of woodwork and gliding than the United States senate chamber, but it is neither so large, so stately, so shapely nor so well furnished. There were benches covered with red leather for the peers, there was pulpit for the speakers chair, and generally it looked like a composite between an Episcopalian church and the cashier s room in a bank. In the space allotted to the public and the reporters, per haps forty people could stand. There were four gentlemen seated inside the bar listening to a man in black silk nightgown and a horsehair wig, who (the man, not the wig) was standing at the bar outside speaking snuffily and prosily concerning the difference between free fishery and common of piscary. The latter party was sur rounded by about dozen wigged and gowned individuals, who were crowded on the same little scaffold with him. self. Which was the lord chancellor and which the barristers; and whether it was lawyers who were listening and the chancellor who was speaking, or vice versa, I do not know and never shall. 1 paid no money and took nc pick. l did not think it much of a court anyhow. For unearthly dignity gravity of manner and venerable, aris- tocratic glare of eye, I will match 8 Phoenix justice of the peace against any lord chancellor that ever straddled | a Woolsack. For emphatic declama l AAcAAg 1Ci olAOlo LII Ol lung flAd CAPiCS Siveness of gesture, I will put an Ari- zona lawyer against the British bar 1T -aS-you-please talking match.
 Armed with pass from the Ameri. can minister, I visited the house oi commons. It was my fortune to reacf the small and confortless strangers 1 gallery at a time when an alleged great parliamentary orator was speak ing. His was conversational eloquenct -"elevated conversation"-no enthu- siasm, but little gesture, except witt fingers and eyeglass, some hemmine | and Stuttering which 1 believed to b, an affectation of unreadiness and al | unVarying monotony of voice. It Wa: a business speech such as any one c a hundred members of congress migh
 have made. only any member of con gresS would have infused more energ, into it. There was nothing forceful O fiery or flowery, nothing breezy or in
 spring or magnetic about it.
 l suppose that this is the regula
 thing in the British house of common
 and that American eloquence would b. out of place there, and yet this is tn country which once gave delighted ca | to Erskine and Brougham and Grattal and O'Connell
 On the whole, the Thames side o
 Westminster was disappointing. I pre-
 ferred the graveyard and crossed tn
 court to the abbey. The entrance t
 Westminster abbey is not imposing
 You pass under low, narrow doorwa,
 and enter between the dusty wall
 scanned with the crumbling traceries o
 time and stand in the presence of dea,
 kings and chieftains; of allegory, an,
 emblem, and types, and hieroglyphs But above the mall few simple in