strange being that was bringing to his assistance all
the mighty resources of an Empire's army, an Empire's exchequer, and an
Empire's overwhelming power to crush in blood, in the silence of the
cell and the deeper silence of the tomb, all resistance to his imperious
will.

[Sidenote: Entry of a ghost.]

It must have been with something of a shock that the House of Lords,
with all its well-trained and high-bred self-control, found that this
curious and fateful figure was within its gates. Probably, to scarcely
half-a-dozen of his colleagues and fellow-peers, was this figure
anything but a strange and unexpected incursion from the dim ghost-land,
in which, hermit-like, he seems to dwell. Indeed, the Marquis of
Londonderry was careful to explain that he had no personal acquaintance
with the man whose case he was defending against the action of the
Commission presided over by Mr. Justice Mathew. And it was easy to see,
that Lord Clanricarde was a stranger, and a very lonely one, too, in
that assembly in which he is entitled to sit and vote on the nation's
destinies. On a back seat, on the Liberal side of the House, silent,
forlorn, unspeaking and unspoken to, he sat throughout the long and
tedious debate in which he was a protagonist. There was, indeed,
something shocking to the sense--shocking in being so surprising--that
this should be the figure around which one of the fiercest and most
tragic political struggles of our time should have surged. He is a man
slightly above the middle height, thin in face and in figure. Somehow or
other, there is a general air about him that I can only describe by the
word shabby--I had almost ventured on the term ragged. The clothes hang
somewhat loosely--are of a pattern that recalls a half century ago--and
have all the air of having been worn until they are positively
threadbare. Altogether, there is about this inheritor of a great
name--of vast estates--of a title that in its days was almost kingly--an
air that suggests a combination between the recluse and the poor man of
letters, who makes his home in the reading-room of the British Museum.
It was also a peculiarity of the position that he seemed an almost
unwelcome visitant, even to those who had to defend him. There was an
awful pause when he rose, silently and so spectre-like, from his seat in
the dim land of the back benches, and passed to the seat immediately
behind the Marquis of Salisbury. Lord Salisbury made a very vivid an