a pyramid, a
pole-star. But, alas! even he was subject to alteration.

Thinking earnestly upon his career I have realised bow sad it is that he
has bequeathed us no ASQUITH legend. Always reserved and intent, he
discouraged Press gossip to such a degree as actually to have turned the
key on the Tenth Muse. Everybody else might lunch at the hospitable board
in Downing Street, but interviewers had no chance. In vain did the Quexes
of this frivolous city hope for even a crumb--there was nothing for them.
Mr. ASQUITH came into office, held it, and left it without a single
concession to Demos's love of personalia. He did not even wear comic
collars or white hats or a single eyeglass or any other grotesquely
significant thing; and how much poorer are we in consequence and how much
poorer will posterity be!

Contrast the case of Mr. GLADSTONE, from whom anyone could draw a postcard
and most people a chip of some recently-felled tree, and who is in my mind
wonderful and supreme by reason of two inventions which, though no one
would ever guess them to be the result of a Prime Minister's cogitations,
deserve the widest fame. Of these one was the product of his unaided
genius; the other the result of the collaboration with his wife.

Let us begin with the individual triumph.

Everyone who has ever stayed under anyone else's roof, from a
dine-and-sleep at Windsor Castle to a week in lovely Lucerne, has been
confronted, when packing-up time arrived, with the problem of the sponge.
No matter how muscular the fingers that wring this article, no matter how
thick and costly the rubbered receptacle that holds it, there is always the
chance of dampness communicating itself to other things in the bag. Isn't
there?

How so to squeeze the sponge as to drive out the last drop of moisture was
the problem before the massive intellect of the Grand Old Man. Need I say
that he solved it? His method, as he himself in his unselfish way, told one
of the diarists, possibly Sir M.E. GRANT-DUFF, possibly Mr. G.W.E.
RUSSELL--I forget whom--was to wrap up the sponge in a bath-towel and jump
on it. Here, for the historical painter, is a theme indeed--something worth
all the ordinary dull occasions which provoke his talented if somewhat
staid brush: the great Liberal statesman, the promoter of Home Rule, the
author of _The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture_, leaping upon the
bath-towel that held his sponge. But no historical painter could do justice