is
host, quickly drove with him amidst tumults of enthusiasm all along the
road to the hospitable shades of Dalmeny. "I have never," Mr. Gladstone
says in his diary, "gone through a more extraordinary day."

All that followed in a week of meetings and speeches was to match. People
came from the Hebrides to hear Mr. Gladstone speak. Where there were six
thousand seats, the applications were forty or fifty thousand. The weather
was bitter and the hills were covered with snow, but this made no
difference in cavalcades, processions, and the rest of the outdoor
demonstrations. Over what a space had democracy travelled, and what a
transition for its champion of the hour, since the days half a century
back when the Christ Church undergraduate, the disciple of Burke and
Canning, had ridden in anti-reform processions, been hustled by reform
mobs, and had prayed for the blessing of heaven on the House of Lords for
their honourable and manly decision in throwing out the bill. Yet the
warmest opponent of popular government, even the Duke of Buccleuch
himself, might have found some balm for this extraordinary display of
popular feeling, in the thought that it was a tribute to the most splendid
political career of that generation; splendid in gifts and splendid in
service, and that it was repaid, moreover, with none of the flattery
associated with the name of demagogue. Mr. Gladstone's counsels may have
been wise or unwise, but the only flattery in the Midlothian speeches was
the manly flattery contained in the fact that he took care to address all
these multitudes of weavers, farmers, villagers, artisans, just as he
would have addressed the House of Commons,--with the same breadth and
accuracy of knowledge, the same sincerity of interest, the same scruple in
right reasoning, and the same appeal to the gravity and responsibility of
public life. An aristocratic minister, speaking at Edinburgh soon after,
estimated the number of words in Mr. Gladstone's Midlothian speeches in
1879 at 85,840, and declared that his verbosity had become "a positive
danger to the commonwealth." Tory critics solemnly declared that such
performances were an innovation on the constitution, and aggravated the
evil tendencies of democracy.(358) Talk of this kind did not really impose
for an instant on any man or woman of common sense.

(M192) Oratory ever since the days of Socrates, and perhaps long before,
has been suspected as one of the black arts; and both