shirt-front--there is something
which becomes almost an obsession to the observer in watching the figure
with its strangely tranquil and gentle expression in the heat and centre
of all this fierce Parliamentary battle.

[Sidenote: And eagerness.]

And what makes it all the more peculiar is that this strange gentleness
does not go side by side with want of interest in the struggle. On the
contrary, all those around him and near him declare that never has Mr.
Gladstone been more keen of any subject than he has been on this Home
Rule Bill. He thinks of nothing else; he enjoys it all. I saw a curious
instance of this intensity of his interest about that time. Having a
word to say to one of the Ministers, I was seated for a moment on the
Treasury Bench just beside the Chairman--Mr. Mellor. Mr. Gladstone had
gone out for a few minutes. Sir William Harcourt was in charge of the
Bill, and he was replying to some argument of the Unionists opposite.
Sir William Harcourt has an excellent method of dealing with futile and
dishonest amendments. He declines to argue them in detail. With that
rich humour of which the public know less than his friends and
intimates, Sir William airily dismisses the whole business, and with a
laugh brings down shivering to the ground a whole fabric of laboriously
constructed nonsense. Well, Sir William was in the middle of a sentence
in which he was speaking of the absurd suspicion of the Irish people
which was entertained by the Tories--and Mr. Gladstone, entering from
behind the Speaker's chair at that very moment, just caught that one
phrase. It was impossible for him to hear more than that one word
"suspicion"; but at that word he pricked up his ears, and while he was
still walking to his place--before he had seated himself--"Hear, hear,"
he cried. His eagerness would not let him wait till he had taken his
seat. His absolute absorption in the Bill before the House was so
complete that, as he walked to his seat, you could see the rapt and
concentrated look, which showed that, even during the few minutes he had
been away, the brain had never left for one second its absorbing theme.

[Sidenote: The consolations of old age.]

But--as I have indicated--this complete subjugation of temper which Mr.
Gladstone has achieved, has its disadvantages when such a conflict is
provoked as that with Mr. Chamberlain on the article in the _Daily
News_. Mr. Gladstone himself spoke of the consolations of old age; th