[414] Pinkerton's "Voyages," vol. ii. p. 506. Up to the year 1833 the doorkeepers and messengers of the House of Commons were paid principally in fees and gratuities. Members were called upon to contribute about £9 per session towards a fund raised on their behalf, and they received a small nominal salary of less than £13. The doorkeepers earned farther payment by delivering the Orders and Acts of the House to members, as well as various fees from parliamentary agents, and were likewise entitled to a quarter of the strangers' fees. In 1832 the two chief doorkeepers were making between £800 and £900 a year, and the chief messenger nearly £600. The man whose duty it was to look after the room above the ventilator to which ladies were admitted was not so successful as his colleagues, and complained that he only received about £10 a year in tips from the more economical sex.[415] [415] "Report of the Select Committee on the Establishment of the House of Commons" (1833), pp. 84-5. (To-day the messengers and doorkeepers, of whom there are about a score, earn regular salaries ranging from £120 to £300. Except for a share in the fund for messengers and police to which members may or may not contribute, no gratuities of any description are allowed to them.) Pearson, for over thirty years doorkeeper in the old House of Commons, was one of the most familiar figures in and about St Stephen's Chapel during the latter part of the eighteenth century. In his box near the gallery he sat-- "Like a pagod in his niche; The Gom-gom Pearson, whose sonorous lungs, With 'Silence! Room there!' drown an hundred tongues." Long service had given him a position of authority of which he took every advantage. If a member were negligent in the matter of paying the door-keeper his fee, or treated that official in a manner which he considered derogatory to his dignity, Pearson revenged himself by sending the offender to the House of Lords or the Court of Requests in search of imaginary friends. By such means he generally reduced the irritated member to submission, and could extract a handsome present and a promise of future politeness. Pearson had his own importance so much at heart, as we read in his biography, that he spurned a member's money unless he had previously humbled the man. Long experience had enabled him to time the length of a debate or even of an individual speech with extraordinary accuracy. Members wishing to be informed as to the probable hour of adjournment would ask him at what time the Speaker had ordered his carriage. "The Speaker has ordered his coach at eight," Pearson would reply, "but I'll be d----d if you get away before twelve!"[416]