From the time of first taking his seat in Parliament he was a conspicuous figure there; but it must be confessed that during the earlier sessions of his Parliamentary career he did little to inspire the public with any belief in his profound statesmanship. He arrayed himself on the side of the Opposition, and attacked the then-existing Cartier-Macdonald Administration with all the fiery eloquence at his command. "It was observed," says Mr. Fennings Taylor, "that he was a relentless quiz, an adroit master of satire, and the most active of partisan sharpshooters. Many severe, some ridiculous, and not a few savage things were said by him. Thus from his affluent treasury of caustic and bitter irony he contributed not a little to the personal and Parliamentary embarrassments of those times. Many of the speeches of that period we would rather forget than remember. Some were not complimentary to the body to which they were addressed, and some of them were not creditable to the person by whom they were delivered. It is true that such speeches secured crowded galleries, for they were sure to be either breezy or ticklish, gusty with rage, or grinning with jests. They were therefore the raw materials out of which mirth is manufactured, and consequently they ruffled tempers that were remarkable for placidity, and provoked irrepressible laughter in men who were regarded as too grave to be jocose. Of course they were little calculated to elicit truth, or promote order, or attract respect to the speaker. Mr. McGee appeared chiefly to occupy himself in saying unpleasant and severe things; in irritating the smoothest natures, and in brushing everybody's hair the wrong way." The personalities in which he permitted himself to indulge were frequently in the worst conceivable taste, and he raised up for himself many enemies. It began to be suspected that this brilliant Irishman, whose advent into Canadian political life had been heralded with so loud a flourish of trumpets, was no heaven-born statesman, after all. He said some clever things in the course of his speeches, and a good many other things that were neither clever nor sensible. There was an evident desire on his part to attract attention to himself, and his self-consciousness was sometimes so marked as to be positively offensive. It was difficult to say why he had joined the ranks of the Opposition. Of the local politics he, at the time of his entry into Parliament, knew little or nothing, and there was not much in common between him and the leaders of the Party to which he had attached himself. The latter could not feel as though their ranks had been very powerfully strengthened by such an accession. As the years passed by, however, D'Arcy McGee became more tractable, and--be it said--more sensible. He never entirely overcame his fondness for displaying his Irish wit on the floor of the House, but he taught himself to be more amenable to certain rules of debate which are tacitly