hole fade under his flow of
eloquence, seen the bow of his tie travel round to the back of his
neck."

[Illustration: MR. GLADSTONE.

"I have seen the flower in his buttonhole fade under his flow of
eloquence."

_Engraved on wood from an original study._]

Thus I spoke night after night from the platform, and the laugh always
came with the collars. It was not as a serious critic that I was posing
before the audience, so I could fittingly describe the collars rather
than the man. But when I had left the platform and the limelight, and my
caricatures, I have had many a chat with Mr. Gladstone's admirers, with
regard to the light in which I saw the great man without his collars,
and this fact I will put forward as my excuse for publishing in my
"Confessions" a few studies that I have made from time to time of the
Grand Old Man, as an antidote not only to my own caricatures, but to the
mass of Gladstone portraits published, which, with very few exceptions,
are idealised, perfunctory, stereotyped, and worthless. Generations to
come will not take their impressions of this great man's appearance from
these unsatisfactory canvases, or from the cuts in old-fashioned
illustrated papers, in which all public men are drawn in a purely
conventional tailor's advertisement fashion, with perfect-fitting coats,
trousers without a crease, faces of wax, and figures of the fashionable
fop of the period. The camera killed all this. But the photographer,
although he cannot alter the cut of the clothes, can alter, and does
alter, everything else. He touches up the face beyond recognition, and
the pose is the pose the sitter takes before the camera, and probably
quite different from his usual attitude. So it will be the caricatures,
or, to be correct, the character sketches, that will leave the best
impressions of Mr. Gladstone's extraordinary individuality.

[Illustration: MR. GLADSTONE--CONVENTIONAL PORTRAIT.]

I heard Mr. Gladstone express his own views on portraiture one evening
at a small dinner-party. My host of that evening had hit on the happy
idea of having portraits of the celebrities of the age painted for him
by a rising young artist. It was curious to note Mr. Gladstone as he
examined these portraits. His manner was a strange comment on the
political changes which had taken place, for as he came to the portraits
of those of his old supporters who no longer fought under his colours,
he would pass them by as though he had not