direct interest in the main topics, and were not much or
not at all refreshed by his treatment of them, yet confessed themselves
sorry when the stream of fascinating melody ceased to flow. Then followed
luncheon in the university hall, where the principal, in proposing the
lord rector's health, expressed the hope that he had not grudged the time
given to the serene, if dull, seclusion of academic things. "I only
quarrel with your word dull," said Mr. Gladstone in reply. "Let me assure
you, gentlemen, nothing is so dull as political agitation." By this time
it was four o'clock. Before six he was at St. Andrew's Hall, confronting
an audience of some six thousand persons, as eager to hear as he was eager
to speak; and not many minutes had elapsed before they were as much aflame
as he, with the enormities of the Anglo-Turkish convention, the spurious
harbour in Cyprus, the wrongful laws about the press in India, the heavy
and unjust charges thrown upon the peoples of India, the baseless quarrel
picked with Shere Ali in Afghanistan, the record of ten thousand Zulus
slain for no other offence than their attempt to defend against our
artillery with their naked bodies their hearths and homes.

Once mentioning a well-known member of parliament who always showed fine
mettle on the platform, Mr. Gladstone said of him in a homely image, that
he never saw a man who could so quickly make the kettle boil. This was
certainly his own art here. For an hour and a half thus he held them, with
the irresistible spell of what is in truth the groundwork of every
political orator's strongest appeal--from Athenians down to Girondins, from
Pericles to Webster, from Cicero to Gambetta--appeal to public law and
civil right and the conscience of a free and high-minded people. This
high-wrought achievement over, he was carried off to dine, and that same
night he wound up what a man of seventy hard-spent years might well call
"an overpowering day," by one more address to an immense audience
assembled by the Glasgow corporation in the city hall, to whom he
expressed his satisfaction at the proof given by his reception in Glasgow
that day, that her citizens had seen no reason to repent the kindness
which had conferred the freedom of their city upon him fourteen years
before.

(M193) The audience in St. Andrew's Hall at Glasgow was, we may presume,
like his audiences elsewhere, and the sources of his overwhelming power
were not hard to analyse, if one we