Mr Low the barrister, who had given so many lectures to our friend Phineas Finn, lectures that ought to have been useful, was now himself in the House of Commons, having reached it in the legitimate¹ course of his profession. At a certain point of his career, supposing his career to have been sufficiently² prosperous, it becomes natural to a barrister to stand for some constituency, and natural for him also to form his politics at that period of his life with a view to his further advancement³, looking, as he does so, carefully at the age and standing⁵ of the various candidates for high legal office. When a man has worked as Mr Low had worked, he begins to regard the bench wistfully, and to calculate the profits of a two years’ run in the Attorney-Generalship. It is the way of the profession, and thus a proper and sufficient number of real barristers finds its way into the House. Mr Low had been angry with Phineas because he, being a barrister, had climbed into it after another fashion, having taken up politics, not in the proper way as an assistance to his great profession, but as a profession in itself. Mr Low had been quite sure that his pupil had been wrong in this, and that the error would at last show itself, to his pupil’s cost. And Mrs Low had been more sure than Mr Low, having not unnaturally⁶ been jealous that a young whipper-snapper of a pupil — as she had once called Phineas — should become a Parliament man before her husband, who had worked his way up gallantly⁷, in the usual course. She would not give way a jot⁹ even now — not even when she heard that Phineas was going to marry this and that heiress. For at this period of his life such rumours¹⁰ were afloat about him, originating probably in his hopes as to Violet Effingham and his

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