all passed off without
disturbance, the Irish party on the second division retiring under
protest.

I had communicated, with Mr. G.'s approval, my intention to close
the debate to Northcote, but to no one else, except May, from whom
I received much assistance. Northcote was startled, but expressed
no disapproval of the course proposed.

So ended the memorable sitting of January 31. At noon, on February 2, the
House assembled in much excitement. The question was put challenging the
Speaker's conduct. "I answered," he says, "on the spur of the moment that
I had acted on my own responsibility, and from a sense of duty to the
House. I never heard such loud and protracted cheering, none cheering more
loudly than Gladstone." "The Speaker's firmness in mind," Mr. Gladstone
reported to the Queen, "his suavity in manner, his unwearied patience, his
incomparable temper, under a thousand provocations, have rendered possible
a really important result."

IV

After coercion came a land bill, and here Mr. Gladstone once more
displayed his unequalled mastery of legislative skill and power. He had to
explain and be ready to explain again and again, what he told Lord
Selborne was "the most difficult measure he had ever known to come under
the detailed consideration of a cabinet." It was no affair this time of
speeches out of a railway carriage, or addressed to excited multitudes in
vast halls. That might be, if you so pleased, "the empty verbosity of
exuberant rhetoric"; but nobody could say that of the contest over the
complexities of Irish tenure, against the clever and indomitable Irish
experts who fought under the banner of Mr. Parnell. Northcote was not far
wrong when he said that though the bill was carried by two to one, there
was hardly a man in the House beyond the Irish ranks who cared a straw
about it. Another critic said that if the prime minister had asked the
House to pass the _Koran_ or the _Nautical Almanac_ as a land bill, he
would have met no difficulty.

The history of the session was described as the carriage of a single
measure by a single man. Few British members understood it, none mastered
it. The whigs were disaffected about it, the radicals doubted it, the
tories thought that property as a principle was ruined by it, the
Irishmen, when the humour seized them, bade him send the bill to line
trunks. Mr. Gladstone, as one observer truly says, "faced difficulties
such as no othe