articular
audience before him, that he forgot to address his reasonings to the
public beyond the House, and make them equally applicable and equally
convincing to the readers of next morning.

As dignity is one of the rarest qualities in literature, so elevation
is one of the rarest in oratory. It is a quality easier to feel than
to analyse. One may call it a power of ennobling ordinary things by
showing their relation to great things, by pouring high emotions round
them, by bringing the worthier motives of human conduct to bear upon
them, by touching them with the light of poetry. Ambitious writers and
speakers strain after effects of this kind; but they are effects which
study and straining cannot ensure. Vainly do most men flap their wings
in the effort to soar; if they succeed in rising from the ground it is
because some unusually strong burst of feeling makes them for the
moment better than themselves. In Mr. Gladstone the capacity for
feeling was at all times so strong, and the susceptibility of the
imagination so keen, that he soared without effort. His vision seemed
to take in the whole landscape. The points actually in question might
be small, but the principles involved were to him far-reaching. The
contests of to-day were ennobled by the effect they might have in a
still distant future. There are rhetoricians skilful in playing by
words and manner on every chord of human nature, rhetoricians who move
you, and may even carry you away for the moment, but whose sincerity
is doubted, because the sense of spontaneity is lacking. Mr. Gladstone
was not of these. He never seemed to be forcing an effect or assuming
a sentiment. To listen to him was to feel convinced of his own
conviction and to be warmed by the warmth with which he expressed it.
Nor was this due to the perfection of his rhetorical art. He really
did feel what he expressed. Sometimes, of course, like all statesmen,
he had to maintain a cause whose weakness he perceived, as, for
instance, when it became necessary to defend the blunder of a
colleague, or a decision reached by some Cabinet compromise which his
own judgment disapproved. But even in such cases he did not simulate
feeling, but reserved his earnestness for those parts of the case on
which it could be honestly expended. As this was generally true of the
imaginative and emotional side of his eloquence, so was it especially
true of his unequalled power of lifting a subject from the level on
whi