To me the surroundings, coupled with the irreverent and openly familiar attitude of the chief of my colleagues, came as a shock. I had anticipated that the Upper House would have sat in some gilded chamber of their own, or perhaps in one of the chapels of the Abbey. I had imagined myself, as the representative of the profane vulgar, sitting hidden away in some lofty gallery. But here I was hobnobbing with the Bishops, as it were. It was a sense of unsolicited intimacy that possessed me. And when I reflected that I was one of the very persons whose conduct was under debate, I had the further sensation of being a spy in the camp. Mr. Basil Cook, the chief of the staff reporting in Convocation, was disturbed by none of these scruples, and when he noticed that a Bishop was speaking from a written document, he went up to the venerable orator at the conclusion of his speech, and boldly asked him for his notes. In one case, indeed, the intrepid man seemed to collar the ecclesiastic’s notes by force. Of the debate nothing remains in my memory save the speech of the Bishop of Winchester. Tall, gaunt, marked down even then by Death, Harold Browne proved himself intellectually as well as physically head and shoulders above his brethren. His words were weighty, well chosen, impressive. His message was one of grave reproval. He deplored the introduction of the topic. He warned Convocation of the danger of registering its views in resolutions of the House. Resolutions which were foredoomed as inoperative, he argued, must stultify them as a high deliberative assembly. But the warnings of My Lord of Winchester fell on deaf ears. Their lordships were out after the Sunday amusements of the rich. They were not to be balked of their sport. They passed their resolutions. And from that hour the rich have gone on extending the scope and scenes of their Sunday amusements. Of my own descriptive account of the proceedings, of course, I say nothing. But Sala made it the text of one of his inimitable essays. His comments, I remember, concluded with these words: “It may interest these Reverend and Right Reverend Fathers in God to know that the resolutions which they have just registered will have about as much influence on the Sunday amusements of the rich as a similar set of resolutions passed by the Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes.”