political men. To these gifts must be
added a voice which age has not robbed of its sympathetic qualities, a
style of diction and a habit of pronunciation which belong to the
eighteenth century, and that formal yet facile courtesy which no one
less than eighty years old seems capable of even imitating.

I have instanced Mr. Villiers as an eminent talker. I now turn to an
eminent man who talks--Mr. Gladstone.[17] An absurd story has long been
current among credulous people with rampant prejudices that Mr.
Gladstone was habitually uncivil to the Queen. Now, it happens that Mr.
Gladstone is the most courteous of mankind. His courtesy is one of his
most engaging gifts, and accounts in no small degree for his power of
attracting the regard of young men and undistinguished people generally.
To all such he is polite to the point of deference, yet never
condescending. His manners to all alike--young and old, rich and
poor--are the ceremonious manners of the old school, and his demeanour
towards ladies is a model of chivalrous propriety. It would therefore
have been to the last degree improbable that he should make a departure
from his usual habits in the case of a lady who was also his Sovereign.
And, as a matter of fact, the story is so ridiculously wide of the mark
that it deserves mention only because, in itself false, it is founded on
a truth. "I," said the Duke of Wellington on a memorable occasion, "have
no small talk, and Peel has no manners." Mr. Gladstone has manners but
no small talk. He is so consumed by zeal for great subjects that he
leaves out of account the possibility that they may not interest other
people. He pays to every one, and not least to ladies, the compliment of
assuming that they are on his own intellectual level, engrossed in the
subjects which engross him, and furnished with at least as much
information as will enable them to follow and to understand him. Hence
the genesis of that absurd story about his demeanour to the Queen.

"He speaks to Me as if I was a public meeting," is a complaint which is
said to have proceeded from illustrious lips. That most successful of
all courtiers, the astute Lord Beaconsfield, used to engage her Majesty
in conversation about water-colour drawing and the third-cousinships of
German princes. Mr. Gladstone harangues her about the polity of the
Hittites, or the harmony between the Athanasian Creed and
Homer. The Queen, perplexed and uncomfortable, tries to make a
dig