at the time and
afterwards Mr. Gladstone's speeches in his first Midlothian campaign were
disparaged, as I have just said, as sentiment rather than politics, as
sophistry not sound reason, as illusory enchantment not solid and
subsisting truth. We are challenged to show passages destined to
immortality. With all admiration for the effulgent catalogue of British
orators, and not forgetting Pitt on the slave trade, or Fox on the
Westminster scrutiny, or Sheridan on the begums of Oude, or Plunket on the
catholic question, or Grattan, or Canning, or Brougham, we may perhaps ask
whether all the passages that have arrived at this degree of fame and
grandeur, with the exception of Burke, may not be comprised in an
extremely slender volume. The statesman who makes or dominates a crisis,
who has to rouse and mould the mind of senate or nation, has something
else to think about than the production of literary masterpieces. The
great political speech, which for that matter is a sort of drama, is not
made by passages for elegant extract or anthologies, but by personality,
movement, climax, spectacle, and the action of the time. All these
elements Midlothian witnessed to perfection.

It was my fortune to be present at one whole day of these performances.
"An overpowering day," Mr. Gladstone calls it in his diary (December 5,
1879). "After a breakfast-party," he says, "I put my notes in order for
the afternoon. At twelve delivered the inaugural address as lord rector of
the university" [Glasgow]. This discourse lasted an hour and a half, and
themes, familiar but never outworn nor extinct, were handled with vigour,
energy, and onward flow that made them sound as good as novel, and even
where they did not instruct or did not edify, the noble music pleased. The
great salient feature of the age was described as on its material side the
constant discovery of the secrets of nature, and the progressive
subjugation of her forces to the purposes and will of man. On the moral
side, if these conquests had done much for industry, they had done more
for capital; if much for labour, more for luxury; they had variously and
vastly multiplied the stimulants to gain, the avenues of excitement, the
solicitations to pleasure. The universities were in some sort to check all
this; the habits of mind formed by universities are founded in sobriety
and tranquillity; they help to settle the spirit of a man firmly upon the
centre of gravity; they tend to self-c