s
twice in the same day. He had not been idle in his temporary retreat.
When the day comes to record his doings before the accurate scales of
Omnipotent and Omniscient Justice, he will stand out from all other men
in the absolute use of every available second of his days of life. It
was clear that during his retreat, as during his hours of official work,
his mind had been busy on the same absorbing and engrossing subject. He
was armed with a considerable manuscript, and had evidently thought out
his sentences, his arguments, his statements of facts with intense
devotion and thought.

This is one of the things which distinguishes him from other public men
of his time. There are men I wot of--and not very big men either--who
are nothing without their audience. They deem their dignity abused if
there be not the crowded bench, the cheering friends, the prominent and
ostentatious place. Not so Mr. Gladstone. Perhaps it is the splendid
robustness of his nerves, perhaps the absorption in his subject to the
forgetfulness of himself; whatever it is, he faces this small,
_distrait_, perhaps even depressed, audience with the same zest as
though he were once again before that splendid gathering which met his
eyes on the memorable night when he brought in his Home Rule Bill. Who
but he could fail to have noticed the contrast, and noticing, who but he
could remain so loftily unobservant and unimpressed?

[Sidenote: In splendid form.]

But then Mr. Gladstone has too much of that splendid oratorical instinct
not to fashion and shape his speech to the change in the surroundings.
He has an impressionability--not to panic, not to depression, not to
wounded vanity, but to the appropriateness and the demands of an
environment, which is something miraculous. I have already remarked,
that the infinite variety of his oratory is Shakespearian in its
completeness and abundance. The speech on April 6th was an additional
proof of this. Comparisons were naturally made between this speech and
the speech by which he introduced the Bill, and everybody who was
competent thought that the second speech was the finer and better of the
two. Stories have trickled through to the public of the anxieties and
worries with which Mr. Gladstone was confronted--not from the Irish
side--on the very night before he had to bring forth this prodigious
piece of legislative work. It is these small worries that to many
Statesmen are the grimmest realities and the most