s general health was good and sound, but his sight and his
hearing were so rapidly declining, that he thought he might almost any day
have to retire from office. It was no moment for banal deprecation. He sat
silently pondering this vision in his own mind, of coming fate. It seemed
like Tennyson's famous simile--

So dark a forethought rolled about his brain,
As on a dull day in an ocean cave
The blind wave feeling round his long sea-hall
In silence.

It would have been preternatural if he had shown the same overwhelming
interest that had animated him when the Irish policy was fresh in 1886.
Yet the instinct of a strong mind and the lifelong habit of ardent
industry carried him through his Sisyphean toil. The routine business of
head of a government he attended to, with all his usual assiduity, and in
cabinet he was clear, careful, methodical, as always.

The preparation of the bill was carefully and elaborately worked by Mr.
Gladstone through an excellent committee (M178) of the cabinet.(301) Here
he was acute, adroit, patient, full of device, expedient, and the art of
construction; now and then vehement and bearing down like a three-decker
upon craft of more modest tonnage. But the vehemence was rare, and here as
everywhere else he was eager to do justice to all the points and arguments
of other people. He sought opportunities of deliberation in order to
deliberate, and not under that excellent name to cultivate the art of the
harangue, or to overwork secondary points, least of all to treat the many
as made for one. That is to say, he went into counsel for the sake of
counsel, and not to cajole, or bully, or insist on his own way because it
was his own way. In the high article of finance, he would wrestle like a
tiger. It was an intricate and difficult business by the necessity of the
case, and among the aggravations of it was the discovery at one point that
a wrong figure had been furnished to him by some department. He declared
this truly heinous crime to be without a precedent in his huge experience.

The crucial difficulty was the Irish representation at Westminster. In the
first bill of 1886, the Irish members were to come no more to the imperial
parliament, except for one or two special purposes. The two alternatives
to the policy of exclusion were either inclusion of the Irish members for
all purposes, or else their inclusion for imperial purposes only. In his
speech at Swansea in 1887, M