However, the unpopularity of the new Poor Law told against Ministers in the rural constituencies, and the elections left parties almost unchanged. When the first Parliament of Queen Victoria assembled on November 20, 1837, the Whig Government reckoned a majority of about thirty in the House of Commons. "Of power," wrote the contemporary compiler of the _Annual Register_, "in a political sense, they had none. They could carry no measure of any kind but by the sufferance of Sir Robert Peel." One incident in the short winter session of 1837, often as it has been recorded, retains a lasting interest because of the subsequent celebrity of the individual who gave rise to it. Mr. Benjamin Disraeli, the son of a distinguished man of letters, had just entered Parliament for the first time as Member for Maidstone. He chose a debate on Irish Election Petitions as the opportunity for his maiden speech. "A bottle-green frock coat," writes an eye-witness, "and a waistcoat of white, of the Dick Swiveller pattern, the front of which exhibited a network of glittering chains; large, fancy pattern pantaloons, and a black tie, above which no shirt-collar was visible, completed the outward man. A countenance lividly pale, set out by a pair of intensely black eyes, and a broad but not very high forehead, overhung by clustering ringlets of coal-black hair, which, combed away from the right temple, fell in bunches of well-oiled ringlets over his left cheek." [Illustration: AN EARLY SIGNAL CABIN.] [Illustration: A MODERN SIGNAL CABIN. The Cabin here represented is that at Crow West Junction, Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway.] Not a prepossessing personality in the eyes of the British House of Commons, and when the young orator proceeded to launch into profuse and florid metaphor, accompanied by exaggerated theatrical gestures, the forbearance usually shown towards a new member's first appearance was overborne by impatience at Disraeli's ludicrous affectation. He spoke amid incessant interruption and laughter. "At last, losing his temper, which until now he had preserved in a wonderful manner, he paused in the midst of a sentence, and looking the Liberals indignantly in the face, raised his hands, and opening his mouth as widely as its dimensions would admit, said in a remarkably loud and almost terrific tone, 'I have begun several times many things, and I have often succeeded at last; ay, sir, and though I sit down now, the time will come when you will hear me.'" The contrast between the early manner of this statesman, and his peculiarly quiet and leisurely bearing in the debates of later years, betrays the close study which he devoted to outward effect.