For many years the Commons went to the House of Lords in a way that was most unseemly in answer to the message of Black Rod, to hear the Speech from the Throne read by the Sovereign. So great was the rush and crush at one of the earlier openings of Parliament by Queen Victoria, that Joseph Hume, as he bitterly complained in the House of Commons, neither saw her Majesty nor heard her voice, although he was within touch of the Speaker as he stood at the Bar. “I was crushed into a corner,” he said, “my head being knocked against a post, and I might have been much injured if a stout Member had not come to my assistance.” Dickens, who was present at the ceremony a few years later, said the Speaker was like a schoolmaster with a mob of unmannerly boys at his heels. “He is propelled,” the novelist wrote, “to the Bar of the House with the frantic fear of being knocked down and trampled upon by the rush of M.P.’s.” In 1851 the Speaker was so pushed and hustled that his wig was knocked awry and his robe torn. Frank Hugh O’Donnell relates in his book on _The Irish Parliamentary Party_ how at one opening of Parliament in the later ’seventies he saved Disraeli from being knocked down by squaring his shoulders and elbows to keep off the pressure of the mob of M.P.’s from the frail person of the Prime Minister. Disraeli sent his secretary, Montagu Cory, to thank O’Donnell. The last time such a scene was enacted was in 1901, at the first opening of Parliament by King Edward. Since 1902 the Strangers’ Gallery of the House of Lords has been set apart for Members of the House of Commons, and they are allowed access to it before the King appears in the Chamber and Black Rod is sent to command the attendance of the Commons at the Bar. It is a spectacle well worth seeing—the King crowned and in his purple robes and standing on the Throne, surrounded by his Ministers, addressing the assembled Lords and Commons. It is the most noble and impressive sight to be seen at Westminster.