he
retort of anger or approval; your way is studded and punctuated with
some response or other, that signifies the readiness and the depth and
amplitude of emotion in one of the most emotional, and noisy, and
responsive assemblies in the world. It is a curious change from all this
to look on all these crowded benches sitting in a silence that is
unbroken more than once in the course of half an hour.

[Sidenote: Spencer's serene courage.]

I have often had to admire Lord Spencer--to admire him when he was a
political foe as well as when he has been a political friend; but I
don't think I ever admired him so much as when he stood up on September
4th to address this strange assembly. Hours he has passed through of
all-pervading and all-surrounding gloom, danger, and assassination; but
I do not suppose his nerve was ever put to a test more trying than when
he confronted those large battalions of uncompromising and irresponsive
foes. There were foes on all sides of him. They filled the many benches
opposite to him; they filled, with equal fervour and multitudinousness,
the benches on his own side. It was remarkable to see the thoroughness
with which the Tories had mustered their forces; but the spectacle of
the Liberal Unionists' Benches was even still more remarkable, for there
was not a seat vacant; they had all come--those renegade and venomous
deserters from the Liberal ranks--to do their utmost against the Liberal
party and their mighty Liberal leader. And what support had Lord Spencer
against all these foes--before him, around him--on all sides of him? On
the benches immediately behind him there was a small band of men--not
forty all told--looking strangely deserted, skeleton-like, even abashed
in all their loneliness and isolation. These were the friends--few but
faithful--amid all the hundreds, who alone had a word of cheer for Lord
Spencer in a long and trying speech he had to address to his
irreconcilable foes. But if there was any tremor in him as he stood up
in surroundings so trying, I was unable to detect it. Indeed, at the
moment he rose, there was something very fine and very impressive in his
figure. He is, as most people know, a man of unusual height; hard
exercise and the ride across country have kept him from having any of
that tendency to _embonpoint_ which destroys in middle age so many a
fine figure. On the contrary, there is not a superfluous ounce of flesh
on that tall, alert figure; it is the figur