de its impenetrable
and echoless walls are left behind the shouts of faction, the noise of
battle, the rise and fall of the good and ever-enduring fight between
wrong and right. Within that tabernacle Mr. Gladstone has the power of
withdrawing himself at will, just as in the Agora of Athens, and on the
last great day when he discoursed on immortality, and drank the mortal
hemlock, Socrates could withdraw himself, and listen to the inner
whisper of his daemon. All this, I say, you could see in the abstracted,
resigned and composed look of Mr. Gladstone at the moment when his
triumphant enemies, in their summer garb, with their smiling faces, and
strutting walk, entered the House of Commons. If you wanted to see at
once the contrast, not only of the temper of the hour, but the still
greater and more momentous contrast of temperaments, you had only to
look from the face of Mr. Gladstone to that of Mr. Chamberlain. The
contrast of their years--the deeper contrast of their natures--above
all, the profounder contrast of their worlds of thought, training and
environment--all were brought out. In that perky, retrousse-nosed,
self-complacent, confidently smiling man you saw all the
flippancy--so-called realism--the petty commercialism of the end of the
middle of the nineteenth century. The mysticism, the poetry, the rich
devotion, the lofty and large ideals of the beginning of the century--of
the time that remembered Byron and produced Newman--all these things
were to be seen in the rapt look of that noble, beautiful and refined
face on the Treasury Bench. And yet there was something more. The
brilliant light of the early days of our century has become dim and cold
in those hearts and minds which have not had the power to grow and
expand with their ages. But with that splendid sanity of body as well as
mind which belongs to him, Mr. Gladstone is the creature of the ending
of the nineteenth as of the beginning of the twentieth century. Like the
man of Arctic climes, he stands almost at the same moment in the sunset
of one great century and the heralding light of the sunrise of another.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE BURSTING OF THE STORM.

[Sidenote: An Indian summer.]

There is a striking description in one of Mr. Rudyard Kipling's stories
of a night in an Indian city when the dog star rages. Luridly, but
vigorously, the author brings home to you the odious discomfort, the
awful suffering, and, finally, the morose anger and almo