sight--which must have made his soul sink to even
profounder depths of depression--of members leaving the House in troops
and rushing to the lobby, the library, or the smoke-room, rather than
listen to a debater whose rise a few months ago would have meant a
general and excited incursion of everybody that could hear. Starting
thus, Mr. Balfour made the worst of a bad case, his speech was a
failure, and as the American would put it, a fizzle; in short, a ghastly
business.

[Sidenote: The G.O.M.'s outburst.]

It was in the midst of this debate that Mr. Gladstone made his
magnificent and unexpected outburst. He had been paying attention to the
debate--but very quietly, and not at all in a way that suggested an idea
of intervening in it. It was, too, about nine o'clock when Mr. Gladstone
stood up, and anybody acquainted with the House of Commons knows that
nine o'clock is in the very crisis of that dinner hour which nightly
makes the House of Commons a waste and a wilderness. Nor, indeed, was
there much in the opening sentences that seemed to indicate the
fact--the great fact--that the House of Commons was about to listen to
one of the most extraordinary manifestations of eloquence it has ever
heard during its centuries of existence. For the Old Man was in his most
benignant mood. He spoke of his opponents and their case in sorrow
rather than in anger. Evidently, the House was about to listen to one of
those delightful little addresses--half paternal, half pedagogic--to
which it has become accustomed in recent years, since Mr. Gladstone
threw off the fierce, warring spirit of earlier days, and became the
honey-tongued Nestor of the assembly. But, as time went on, the House
began to perceive that the Old Man was in splendid fighting trim, and
seized with one of those moments of positive inspiration, in which he
carries away an assembly as though it were floated into Dreamland on the
waves of a mighty magician's magic power. Smash after smash came upon
the Tory case--as though you could see the whole edifice crumbling
before your eyes, as though it were an earthquake slitting the rocks and
shaking the solid earth. And, all the time, no loss whatever of the
massive calm, the imperturbable good-humour, the deadly politeness which
the commercial gentlemen from Ulster have also found can kill more
effectively than the shout of rhetoric, or the jargon of faction, or the
raucous throat of bigotry.

[Sidenote: In the Empyrean.]