The newspaper, however, is but a single agency for the literary influence exercised upon the public life of the day. Of late years periodicals, appearing at less frequent intervals, have among politicians themselves competed in attractiveness with the national assemblies at Westminster. In proportion as parliamentary reports have been in the daily press reduced to a few columns and in the case of all but speakers of the first rank to a few paragraphs or sentences; parliamentarians themselves have substituted the monthly Review for the stenographer or for Hansard as the depository of their views. Technically the presence of reporters in the gallery is even to-day connived at rather than constitutionally sanctioned. Yet the leader of the House of Commons, not very long since, reminded his hearers that those who were not present at his speech might master his points by referring to the parliamentary reports next day. Members with a taste for writing, having some carefully thought out message to deliver on an intricate topic of foreign or domestic policy are increasingly inclined entirely to pretermit the parliamentary stage of their exposition. By reserving their remarks for the monthly periodical, they can be sure of fixing popular attention more conspicuously. Their signatures are appended to their effusions. The editor incurs no responsibility either for the substance or the form of the opinions delivered. The reciprocity of the arrangement is, between him and his contributor, complete. On the one hand the literary impressario secures the advertisement of a familiar if not a famous name, good as he knows it to be for the sale of a certain number of copies, each one of which represents a clear if a small profit. On the other hand, assuming the senator to deserve an audience, he is more likely to secure one when his views are placed before the public for the first time with all the advantages of good type and paper, when they are read comfortably in library or club, not listened to with an effort, and even then but partially heard in the exhausted atmosphere of the House of Commons. Again if the Popular Chamber still be of the same intellectual calibre as of old, it has grown also more manifestly fastidious and more demonstratively intolerant of speakers who do not hit its taste. As Sir James Mackintosh and Lord Macaulay in different words both said, it was always a Chamber whose tastes and verdict were incalculable. Since, under a democratic franchise, it has become an Assembly primarily of business gentlemen, the chances of failure to satisfy it are so alarmingly numerous as to prevent all but the most self assured and impassive from making the effort. It prides itself above all things on its business-like tastes. Therefore, it abhors any approach to rhetoric. It fails not to remember its traditions of eloquence, or the ascendancy over itself which to a master of words and phrases, to a Disraeli, a Gladstone, a Lowe, a Canning, a Peel, it was proud to accord, like a horse that knows, and that takes a pleasure in, its rider. Therefore the House expects from those who address it something more than the bald, business talk of the Board room; an aptitude for clothing sound original reasons in diction which shall be without pretentiousness, but that shall not lack felicity and point always, and epigram sometimes. If these conditions be forthcoming; if the Chamber be in a good humour; if it be neither too long nor too soon since it lunched nor too near the hour when it dines; then the elective legislators will perhaps for a short time give their ear to one who rises at the right moment and in favour of whom they are predisposed. The conditions are obviously severe. It is therefore not to be wondered at that candidates for oratorical honours at St Stephen's tend steadily to diminish.