ZOUNDS! AN IRISHMAN IN BRITISH PARLIAMENT? This proposition had taken Phineas Finn so much by surprise that when first made to him by Barrington Erle it took his breath away. What! he stand for Parliament, twenty-four years old, with no vestige of property belonging to him, without a penny in his purse, as completely dependent on his father as he was when he first went to school at eleven years of age! And for Loughshane, a little borough in the county Galway, for which a brother of that fine old Irish peer, the Earl of Tulla, had been sitting for the last twenty years, -- a fine, high-minded representative of the thorough-going Orange Protestant feeling of Ireland! The second novel in the renowned The Pallisers series, Phineas Finn has been called one of the most beloved of Anthony Trollope's novels. Volume One takes the callow Irish lad, throws him into the outlandish stew that is the Victorian House of Commons, and adds some wonderful women and precarious politics to the simmering broth. More potent than Prozac, is one of literature's great reads.