Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/275

 recently in the Press and in Parliament. I am very much disposed to deliver a speech or a lecture in vindication of Australia, not on behalf of any party, but in the interests of the colony to which I feel under so much obligation."

When I called a second time on Neale for my Australian letters, he spoke with extraordinary enthusiasm about a young Irish member, Pope Hennessy, whom I had not yet seen. Disraeli's rise to political importance, he says, was nothing to Hennessy's; Disraeli failed over and over again in getting into Parliament; Hennessy got in at once, and he made no fatal failure in the House, but rose from the beginning. He would certainly sit in the next Cabinet. I inquired whether he did not mean that Hennessy would be a junior Lord of the Treasury. No, no, he said, he ought to take nothing short of the Cabinet, and he will become a millionaire as well as a statesman; important concessions had been made to him in continental countries, by the Pope for example, and at the Tuileries. He was at home with everybody, from Pio Nono to Louis Napoleon, who was his personal friend. The Irish priests applauded him, and so did the Irish Fenians. He had negotiated a great commercial transaction with Rothschild tête-à-tête. I inquired if he was going to become a new John Sadleir. No, he said, he was an honest man who meant well to Ireland, and would be of effectual service to her by and by. There was no one in the Tory Party between him and Disraeli. I suggested that if a benighted colonist might venture on an opinion, I thought some case might be made for Mr. Cairns, Lord Robert Cecil, and Lord Stanley, or, to limit myself to his own countrymen, Whiteside and Napier; but Neale had an answer ready in every case. Hoey, who does not rate Hennessy so extravagantly as Neale, says that it is undeniable that he has established friendly relations with various powers, potentates, and dominions, bitterly hostile to each other, and that Disraeli is fond of him.

My way to Neale's lay through Whitehall. The last fragment of poor old Parliament Street still protrudes itself between the Foreign Office and the new palace of Westminster, like a front tooth broken and jagged; a very miserable and ridiculous spectacle. If I were Prince of Wales (which the Lord