HKB
Lord Randolph came up and said, "I am going in to hear you, Jennings; I have arranged not to speak till after dinner." And we all three entered the House.
Lord Randolph, who had then left the Ministry, sat on the bench in the second row below the gangway, on the Government side of the House. Mr. Jennings was seated on the bench behind, close to where he had found a place for me under the Gallery. He carefully arranged the notes for his speech, and directly the Member who had been addressing the House sat down, Mr. Jennings jumped to his feet to "catch the Speaker's eye." But Lord Randolph, who had been very restless all through the speech just delivered, sprang to his feet. Jennings leant over to him and said something, but Churchill waved him impatiently away, and the Speaker called upon Lord Randolph. Jennings sank back with a look of disgust and chagrin, which changed to astonishment when Lord Randolph fired out that famous Pigott speech, in which he attacked his late colleagues with a vituperation and vulgarity he had never before betrayed. His speech electrified the House and disgusted his friends--none more so than his faithful Jennings, who left the Chamber directly after his "friend's" tirade of abuse, returning later in the evening to make a capital speech, full of feeling and power, in which he finally threw over Lord Randolph. In the meantime, meeting me, he did not hide the fact that the incident had determined him to have nothing more to say to Churchill. And this was the man I once drew a cartoon of in Punch on all fours, with a coat covering his head (suspiciously like a donkey's head), with "Little Randy" riding on his back!
If Samson's strength vanished with his hair, Lord Randolph's strength vanished with the growing of his beard. The real reason why Lord Randolph so strangely transformed himself is not generally known, but it was for the simplest of all reasons--like that of the gentleman who committed suicide because he was "tired of buttoning and unbuttoning," Lord Randolph was tired of shaving or being shaved; hence the heroic beard, which has offended certain political purists who think that a man with an established reputation has no right to alter his established appearance. Still, if he had not vanished to grow his beard, I doubt if he would have survived the winter; and probably he discovered that it was good for any man to escape now and then from what the late Mr. R. L. Stevenson called "the servile life of cities." Perhaps no one received such a "sending off," or was more feted, than Lord Randolph Churchill. Happening to be a guest at more than one of those festive little gatherings, I heard Lord Randolph say that all the literary food that he was taking out with him to Mashonaland consisted of the works of two authors--one English, and the other French. We were asked who they were. "In Darkest England," suggested one. "Ruff's Guide to the Turf," said another. Both were wrong. And it ultimately transpired that, together with his friends' best wishes for his safe return, Lord Randolph was carrying with him complete sets of the works of Shakespeare and Moliere.