Notes and Queries, Number 36, July 6, 1850

Mickleham, 1850.

STRANGERS IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS

(Vol. ii., p. 17.)

As far as my observation extends, i.e. the last thirty-one years, no alteration has taken place in the practice of the House of Commons with respect to the admission of strangers. In 1844 the House adopted the usual sessional order regarding strangers, which I transcribe, inserting within brackets the only material words added by Mr. Christie in 1845:—

"That the Serjeant-at-Arms attending this house do, from time to time, take into his custody any stranger or strangers that he shall see or be informed of to be in the house or gallery [appropriated to the members of this house, and also any stranger who, having been admitted into any other part of the house or gallery, shall misconduct himself, or shall not withdraw when strangers are directed to withdraw] while the House or any committee of the whole House is sitting, and that no person so taken into custody be discharged out of custody without the special order of the House.

"That no member of the House do presume to bring any stranger or strangers into the house, or the gallery thereof, while the House is sitting."

This order appears to have been framed at a time when there was no separate gallery exclusively appropriated to strangers, and when they were introduced by members into the gallery of what is called the "body of the house." This state of things had passed away: and for a long series of years strangers had been admitted to a gallery in the House of Commons in the face of the sessional order, by which your correspondent CH. imagines their presence was "absolutely prohibited."

When I speak of strangers being admitted, it must not be supposed that this was done by order of the House. No, every thing relating to the admission of strangers to, and their accommodation in the House of Commons, is effected by some mysterious agency for which no one is directly responsible. Mr. Barry has built galleries for strangers in the new house; but if the matter were made a subject of inquiry, it probably would puzzle him to state under what authority he has acted.

Mr. Christie wished to make the sessional order applicable to existing circumstances; and, it may be, he desired to draw from the House a direct sanction for the admission of strangers. In the latter purpose, however, if he ever entertained it, he failed. The wording of his amendment is obscure, but necessarily so. The word "gallery," as employed by him, can only refer to the gallery appropriated to members of the House; but he intended it to apply to the strangers' gallery. The order should have run thus, "admitted into any other part of the house, or into the gallery appropriated to strangers;" but Mr. Christie well knew that the House would not adopt those words, because they contain an admission that strangers are present whilst the House is sitting, whereas it is a parliamentary fiction that they are not. If a member in debate should inadvertently allude to the possibility of his observations being heard by a stranger, the Speaker would immediately call him to order; yet at other times the right honourable gentleman will listen complacently to discussions arising out of the complaints of members that strangers will not publish to the world all that they hear pass in debate. This is one of the consistencies resulting from the determination of the House not expressly to recognise the presence of strangers; but, after all, I am not aware that any practical inconvenience flows from it. The non-reporting strangers occupy a gallery at the end of the house immediately opposite the Speaker's chair; but the right hon. gentleman, proving the truth of the saying, "None so blind as he who will not see," never perceives them until just as a division is about to take place, when he invariably orders them to withdraw. When a member wishes to exclude strangers he addresses the Speaker, saying, "I think, Sir, I see a stranger or strangers in the house," whereupon the Speaker instantly directs strangers to withdraw. The Speaker issues his order in these words:—"Strangers must withdraw."

    C. Ross.

Strangers in the House of Commons.—As a rider to the notice of CH. in "NOTES AND QUERIES," it may be well to quote for correction the following remarks in a clever article in the last Edinburgh Review, on Mr. Lewis' Authority in Matters of Opinion. The Reviewer says (p. 547.):—

"This practice (viz., of publishing the debates in the House of Commons) which, &c., is not merely unprotected by law—it is positively illegal. Even the presence of auditors is a violation of the standing orders of the House."

    ED. S. JACKSON.

FOLK LORE

High Spirits considered a Presage of impending Calamity or Death:—

1. "How oft when men are at the point of death
Have they been merry! which their keepers call
A lightning before death."

Romeo and Juliet, Act v. Sc. 3.

2. "C'était le jour de Noel [1759]. Je m'étais levé d'assez bonne heure, et avec une humeur plus gaie que de coutume. Dans les idées de vieille femme, cela présage toujours quelque chose do triste.... Pour cette fois pourtunt le hasard justifia la croyance."—Mémoires de J. Casanova, vol. iii p. 29.

3. "Upon Saturday last … the Duke did rise up, in a well-disposed humour, out of his bed, and cut a caper or two.... Lieutenant Felton made a thrust with a common tenpenny knife, over Fryer's arm at the Duke, which lighted so fatally, that he slit his heart in two, leaving the knife sticking in the body."—Death of Duke of Buckingham; Howell. Fam. Letters, Aug. 5, 1628.

4. "On this fatal evening [Feb. 20, 1435], the revels of the court were kept up to a late hour … the prince himself appears to have been in unusually gay and cheerful spirits. He even jested, if we may believe the cotemporary manuscript, about a prophecy which had declared that a king should that year be slain."—Death of King James I.; Tytler, Hist. Scotland, vol. iii. p. 306.

5. "'I think,' said the old gardener to one of the maids, 'the gauger's fie;' by which word the common people express those violent spirits which they think a presage of death."—Guy Mannering, chap. 9.

6. "H.W.L." said: "I believe the bodies of the four persons seen by the jury, were those of G.B., W.B., J.B., and T.B. On Friday night they were all very merry, and Mrs. B. said she feared something would happen before they went to bed, because they were so happy."—Evidence given at inquest on bodies of four persons killed by explosion of firework-manufactory in Bermondsey, Friday, Oct. 12, 1849. See Times, Oct. 17, 1849.

Nos. 1, 2, 5, 6, are evidently notices of the Belief; Nos. 3, 4, are "what you will." Many of your correspondents may be able to supply earlier and more curious illustrations.

    C. FORBES

June 19.

THE HYDRO-INCUBATOR

Most, if not all, of your readers have heard of the newly-invented machine for hatching and rearing in chickens, without the maternal aid of the hen; probably many of them have paid a visit (and a shilling) at No. 4. Leicester Square, where the incubator is to be seen in full operation. The following extract will, therefore, be acceptable, as it tends to show the truth of the inspired writer's words, "There is no new thing under the sun:"—

"Therefore … it were well we made our remarks in some creatures, that might be continually in our power, to observe in them the course of nature, every day and hour. Sir John Heydon, the Lieutenant of his Majesties Ordnance (that generous and knowing gentleman and consummate souldier, both in theory and practice) was the first that instructed me how to do this, by means of a furnace, so made as to imitate the warmth of a sitting hen. In which you may lay several eggs to hatch and by breaking them at several ages, you may distinctly observe every hourly mutation in them, if you please. The first will be, that on one side you shall find a great resplendent clearness in the white. After a while, a little spot of red matter, like blood will appear in the midst of that clearness, fast'ned to the yolk, which will have a motion of opening and shutting, so as sometimes you will see it, and straight again it will vanish from your sight, and indeed, at first it is so little that you cannot see it, but by the motion of it; for at every pulse, as it opens you may see it, and immediately again it shuts, in such sort as it is not to be discerned. From this red speck, after a while, there will stream out a number of little (almost imperceptible) red veins. At the end of some of which, in time, there will be gathered together a knot of matter, which by little and little will take the form of a head and you will, ere long, begin to discern eyes and a beak in it. All this while the first red spot of blood grows bigger and solider, till at length it becomes a fleshy substance, and, by its figure, may easily be discern'd to be the heart; which as yet hath no other inclosure but the substance of the egg. But by little and little, the rest of the body of an animal is framed out of those red veins which stream out all about from the heart. And in process of time, that body encloses the heart within it by the chest, which grows over on both sides, and in the end meets and closes itself fast together. After which this little creature soon fills the shell, by converting into several parts of itself all the substance of the egg; and then growing weary of so strait a habitation, it breaks prison and comes out a perfectly formed chicken."—Sir Kenelm Digby's Treatise of Bodies, Ch. xxiv. p. 274. ed. 1669.

Could Sir Kenelm return to the scenes of this upper world, and pay a visit to Mr. Cantelo's machine, his shade might say with truthfulness, what Horace Smith's mummy answered to his questioner,—

"—We men of yore
Were versed in all the knowledge you can mention."

The operations of the two machines appear to be precisely the same: the only difference being the Sir Kenelm's was an experimental one, made for the purpose of investigating the process of nature; while Cantelo's, in accordance with "the spirit of the iron time," is a practical one, made for the purposes of utility and profit. Sir Kenelm's Treatise appears to have been first published in the year 1644.