follies of a
strong man who can afford to waste a portion of his resources
without greatly affecting the sum total.... She has a huge free
margin, on which she might scrawl a long list of follies and even
crimes without damaging the letterpress. But where and what is the
free margin in the case of Italy, a country which has contrived in
less than a quarter of a century of peace, from the date of her
restored independence, to treble (or something near it) the
taxation of her people, to raise the charge of her debt to a point
higher than that of England, and to arrive within one or two short
paces of national bankruptcy?...

Italy by nature stands in alliance neither with anarchy nor with
Caesarism, but with the cause and advocates of national liberty
and progress throughout Europe. Never had a nation greater
advantages from soil and climate, from the talents and
dispositions of the people, never was there a more smiling
prospect (if we may fall back upon the graceful fiction) from the
Alpine tops, even down to the Sicilian promontories, than that
which for the moment has been darkly blurred. It is the heart's
desire of those, who are not indeed her teachers, but her friends,
that she may rouse herself to dispel once and for ever the evil
dream of what is not so much ambition as affectation, may
acknowledge the true conditions under which she lives, and it
perhaps may not yet be too late for her to disappoint the
malevolent hopes of the foes of freedom, and to fulfil every
bright and glowing prediction which its votaries have ever uttered
on her behalf.--_"__The Triple Alliance and Italy's Place in
it__"__ (Contemporary Review, Oct. 1889)._

The Glasgow Peroration. (Page 492)

_After describing the past history of Ireland as being for more than five
hundred years 'one almost unbroken succession of political storm and
swollen tempest, except when those tempests were for a time interrupted by
a period of servitude and by the stillness of death,' Mr. Gladstone went
on_:--

Those storms are in strong contrast with the future, with the
present. The condition of the Irish mind justifies us in
anticipating. It recalls to my mind a beautiful legend of ancient
paganism--for that ancient paganism, amongst many legends false and
many foul, had also some that were beautiful. There were two