he painted ceiling.

It was surprising to notice to what heights party feeling ran amongst
the reporters in the gallery. When Mr Gladstone came into power,
hundreds of malicious and impossible stories were current about him
amongst the supporters of the Opposition, and in the little Tabagie at
the foot of the gallery stairs in which most of our spare hours were
spent, there were heated discussions in which his eloquence, his
financial capacity and his scholarship were all decried. I remember one
occasion when the veteran of _The Daily Telegraph_ staff walked into the
room with the announcement that "that eternal old woman was on her legs
again," and a general groan went round. I was, and have never ceased to
be, an ardent admirer of Mr Gladstone's character and genius, and I used
constantly to chafe at his belittling by little men, but I never found a
real opportunity for the expression of my own opinion until one day
when I was sent down to report the annual outing of the Commissioners
of Epping Forest. We had a jolly day, winding up with a very substantial
dinner and a drive back to London in a string of open brakes. There was
a basket of champagne aboard the brake in which I found a seat, and
it turned out that nobody in the whole assembly was in possession of
anything which could be utilised as a champagne opener. One gentleman,
however, was very skilful in knocking off the necks of the bottles, and
before we were half-way home we were all in a state of great contentment
and joviality. There was a rather noisy discussion about politics
and, with one exception, my companions were all fierce opponents of
Gladstone. I fired at last--I daresay the champagne had something to do
with it--and I ventured to tell those gentlemen that they seemed to me
to be crawling about beneath the instep of a great man's boot, under
the impression that they were taking an architectural survey of the man.
"You will have," I said, "to travel to a telescopic distance before
you will be able to realise his proportions," and there I burst into
quotation:

"Every age,
Through being beheld too close, is ill-discerned
By those who have not lived past it; we'll suppose
Mount Athos carved, as Persian Xerxes schemed,
To some colossal statue of a man:
The peasants, gathering brushwood in his ear,
Had guessed as little of any human form
Up there, as would a flock of browsing goats.

They'd