nd in the Irish party--have produced.
On the third bench below the Gangway sate the Liberal Unionists, Mr.
Gladstone's deadliest foes, with pallid-faced, perky-nosed, malignant
Chamberlain at their head, the face distorted by the baffled hate, the
accumulated venom of all these years of failure, apostasy, and outlawry.
Not one of the renegade Liberals stood up, and there they sate, a solid
mass of hatred and rancour. On the Irish side, Mr. Redmond and the few
Parnellites kept up the tradition of their dead leader in his last years
of distrust and dislike of Mr. Gladstone by also remaining seated.

[Sidenote: The speech.]

The first notes of the Old Man suggested he was in excellent form. It is
always easy for those who are well acquainted with him to know when the
Old Man is going to make a great, and when he will deliver only a
moderately good speech. If he is going to do splendidly the tone at the
start is very calm, the delivery is measured, the sentences are long,
and break on the ear with something of the long-drawn-out slowness of
the Alexandrine. So it was on this occasion. Sentence followed sentence
in measured and perfect cadence; with absolute self-possession; and in a
voice not unduly pitched. And yet there were those traces of fatigue to
which I have alluded, and I have since heard that one of the few
occasions in his life when Mr. Gladstone had a sleepless night was on
the night before he introduced his second great Home Rule Bill. And it
should be added that, stirring and eloquent as were the opening
sentences, they were not listened to by the House with that
extraordinary enthusiasm which, on other occasions, sentences of this
splendid eloquence would have elicited. For what really the House wanted
to learn was the great enigma which had been kept for seven long
years--in spite of protests, hypocritical appeals, and, ofttimes,
tedious remonstrance from over-zealous and over-fussy friends.

[Sidenote: The Bill.]

By the time Mr. Gladstone had got to the Bill, he had exhausted a good
deal of his stock of voice, and yet he seemed to be less dependent than
usual on the mysterious compound which Mrs. Gladstone mixes with her own
wifely hand for those solemn occasions. It appeared that both she and
her husband had somewhat dreaded the ordeal. The bottle which Mr.
Gladstone usually brings with him is about the size of those small,
stunted little jars in which, in the days of our youth, the young buck
kept hi