momentous and
effective events of their inner lives. It is reported that one of the
few sleepless nights which have ever disturbed the splendidly even and
sane and healthy tenor of this tempestuous and incessantly active life,
was the night before the introduction of the Home Rule Bill. There are
points to be finally settled--clauses to be ultimately fixed--phrases to
be polished or pared at the eleventh hour in all human affairs. Measures
finally settled and fixed for weeks before the last hour exist--like all
perfection--only in the brains and pages of dramatists and novelists.

[Sidenote: Sunburnt, vigorous, self-possessed.]

It was not unnatural under these circumstances that when Mr. Gladstone
made his speech introducing the Home Rule Bill there should have been on
his cheek a pallor deadlier even than that which usually sits upon his
brow. That pallor, by the way, I heard recently, has been characteristic
of him from his earliest years. A schoolfellow from that far-off and
almost pre-historic time when our Grand Old Man was a thin, slim,
introspective and prematurely serious boy at Eton, tells to-day that the
recollection he has of the young Gladstone is of a slight figure, never
running, but always walking with a fast step, with earnest black eyes,
and with a pallid face--the ivory pallor, be it observed, not of
delicacy, but of robustness. Still there was on that Home Rule night, a
pallor that had the deadlier hue of sleeplessness, worry,
over-anxiety--the hideous burden of a great, weighty, and complex speech
to deliver.

On April 6th all this was gone. The fresh, youthful, cheerful man who
stood up in his place had drunk deep of the breezes that sweep The
Front at Brighton; his cheeks were burned by the blaze of a splendid
spring sun; in the budding, blossoming vital air around him he had taken
some of that eternal hopefulness with which the new birth of nature in
the spring inspires every human being with any freshness of sensation
left. Perchance from his windows in the Lion Mansion he had looked in
the evening over the broad expanse of frontierless waters, and risen to
the exaltation of the chainless unrest, the tireless and eternal youth,
the illimitable breadth of the sea. At all events, he stood before the
House visibly younger, brighter, serener than for many a day.

The voice bore traces of the transformation of body and soul which this
short visit to the sea has produced. It was soft, mellow, stron