Those were halcyon days for ministers, who were seldom or never worried over their Estimates by inquisitorial members; days when the numberless complicated votes of the Office of Works were run through in a sitting almost without a question. The heckling of ministers was an instrument of torture invented a few years later by that brilliant brotherhood known as the Fourth Party, under the lead of Lord Randolph Churchill, and afterwards carried on with much self-satisfaction and unction by such men as Sir George Campbell, an old Indian official, Mr. Peter Rylands, the “Good old Peter gone wrong,” over whose defection upon the Home Rule question Mr. Gladstone shed oratorical tears, and others. Under their united attacks the defence of Estimates became a ministerial nightmare. One day I met Lord Randolph in the Park; it was the morning after a series of awkward moments which my chief, the Liberal Government being then in power, had been undergoing—I suffering vicariously, a dumb dog under the Gallery. We walked together, and at last I said: “My dear Randolph, for goodness sake leave my unhappy Estimates alone!” “Very sorry for you, my dear fellow,” was the answer, “but we must harass the Government.” And harass them he did, for that was an art in which, even in those early days of a Parliamentary career which became so famous, he was already an adept. He held stoutly to the creed that it was the duty of Her Majesty’s Opposition (who invented that phrase?) to oppose, and he acted up to his belief with all the great strength that was in him. Randolph, as I first knew him, was the most delightful of boys, bubbling over with fun and the sweetest devilry, devoted to his father, idolizing his mother, that great Lady whom those whom she admitted to her intimacy were fain to worship; ready to sacrifice himself and incur for his brother’s sake what to most men would have been akin to social torture. When he had reached young-manhood and was already giving to a budding moustache the hoist made famous by John Tenniel and the caricaturists, he was always ready to give up any pleasure of his own if he could be of any use to one of those dear to him. His patience as a chaperon was saintly. Who could help loving him? Not I, for one—I treasure the memory of his friendship as one of the most precious recollections of a long life. By his desire I was one of the pall-bearers at the funeral of his brother; him too I had known from a boy, a youth of great promise marred by fate, shining in many branches of human endeavour, clever, capable of great industry, and within measurable distance of reaching conspicuous success in science, mathematics and mechanics, when his early death snapped the thread of what might have been a brilliant career, had not the gods willed it otherwise.