sides, which contrast pleasantly with such contests at the present day. To these amenities, Mr. Bourke's personal popularity contributed in no small measure. 'I pledge you my honour,' shouted Mr. Daunt the Repealer, to certain of his followers who were interrupting the young Conservative candidate, 'I pledge you my honour I will leave the hustings if this gentleman is not heard.' 'I again declare,' Mr. Daunt exclaimed in another crisis of cat-calls, 'I will quit the Courthouse if this gentleman does not get a fair hearing.'
The result of the poll was to return the Marquess of Kildare and Mr. Bourke to Parliament. So in the middle of his twenty-sixth year Mr. Richard Southwell Bourke entered the House of Commons for his own County — a moderate Conservative of the hereditary type, willing to go steadily with his party in English measures, and resolved, as far as in him lay, to secure their help in carrying Irish Land Reforms.
From 1847 to 1849 Mr. Bourke sat as a silent member. In 1848 he married Miss Blanche Wyndham; her father, afterwards Lord Leconfield, presenting the young couple with a town-house in Eccleston Square. Ever since his return from Russia, Mr. Eourke had been an active farmer and horse-breeder on his family lands in Ireland. In 1849 his father succeeded to the Earldom of Mayo, and Mr. Bourke became Lord Naas. But the new Earl, not liking the principal house of Palmerstown so well as his old residence at Hayes, gave up the Kildare mansion, with its large home-farm of 500 acres, to his son.
