dress, he feels himself to use again his own memorable expression—unmuzzled. There is no longer the dread of rousing popular passion against an institution, which, in his heart of hearts, the prime minister is more anxious to support than to assail. The inexorable necessity of caution weighs him down no longer. He approaches this new task with a buoyant delight in the easy triumph he is about to win. The five years have rolled off his brow. Erect, elastic, exultant, he can hardly wait till the five thousand in front have done cheering,—indeed, but for his obvious impatience to begin, they might be cheering till now. In the first sentence on Monday, you really hear his voice for the first time. No trace of fatigue from the long effort on Saturday. None of the hardness. of tone which was to be heard then. Compass, range, and quality are all enlarged and lettered.

"His task now is, to retort upon his opponents the charges they have been heaping up against him. For five years the Tories have gone about insisting, with vague but emphatic assertion and re-assertion, that the prime minister had falsified the pledges which Mr. Gladstone had given in the first Mid-Lothian speeches. Three-fourths of his speech on Monday are one triumphant cry, 'Prove it!' or, rather, 'You have tried to prove it. You have had the text. You have piled accusation upon accusation, you have years to get up your case. I challenge you to put your finger on one count of this long indictment which you have supported by one syllable of evidence.' He goes over the record. He reviews the situation. He passes from topic to topic, perhaps too rapidly; perhaps with a too comprehensive ambition, and with too much eagerness to survey, in one single statement, the whole course of his administration, and to condense into this hour and a half a complete epitome of all he said in a week, in 1879, and all that his enemies have said in five years since; and to set in a halo of light all the glaring contradictions, the baseless inventions of his critics, and the perfect and absolute harmony between his own pledges and the accomplished facts of his subsequent career. But what a scope such a programme gives him! How he revels in it!

How he heaps irony upon sarcasm! and how his defense rises to white-heat, and the steel you thought he was shaping into a shield suddenly flashes before you a two-edged sword, and cleaves asunder, in one blinding stroke, the unhappy foe!

"Oh, yes! this indeed is oratory; and in the two hours, less ten minutes, during which it lasts, you may find examples of nearly every charm which it is possible for an orator to work upon his hearers. The effect he produces does not owe much to gesture. There is gesture, but it often lacks expressiveness. The arms are used pretty constantly; but the same movement of the same muscles is made to signify, or meant to signify, very different things. It wants what on the French stage is called largeness or amplitude; and it is sometimes violent, sometimes deficient in the grace and suavity which the admirable smoothness of voice leads you to expect. The shoulders rise and fall with what I am afraid must at times be described as jerkiness. Indeed, at such moments, the voice itself sometimes loses its purity, and harsh notes are heard. The rather frequent passage of the right forefinger across the lips, and the curious touch of the thumb on a particular spot at the summit of the broad arch of the forehead, are peculiarities which I only mention for the sake of fidelity, and with every apology to the orator for taking note of such specks upon the general splendour of his delivery. So of the quick bending and straightening of the knees. The impression one gets from these exceptional things is but momentary. They are incidents due to the overmastering intensity of thought and aim,-nature in her cruder moods, getting the better of the consummate art which is the prevailing, and all but continuous, condition with the orator. If there be any deficiencies of this sort, you will hardly observe them unless after long familiarity with the speaker. It is the face which will rivet your gaze, -the play of features, alike delicate and powerful, and the ever-restless, far-searching glance. Never was such a tell-tale countenance. Expression after expression sweeps across it, the thought pictures itself to you almost before it is uttered;

and if your eyes by chance meet his, it is a blaze of sunlight which dazzles you. Nor do the little blemishes really matter. What masters, what impresses, you, and what you will carry away with you as a permanent and precious memory is, above all other things, the nobleness of presence, the beautiful dignity, the stateliness of bearing, the immense sincerity, which are visible to the eyes of the most careless spectator, and which fill the hall with their influence, and place the whole multitude wholly at the mercy of the one fellow-being who stands before them."

The charm of Hawarden is its park, as it is of every other noted European house. Mr. Gladstone delights chiefly in his trees, and he likes them too well to let them fall into decay. When a tree has reached its perfect growth, he rejoices to cut it down with a good American axe. He has a collection of thirty axes, many of which have been sent to him by persons sympathizing with his love of the woodsman's craft. For his own chopping he never uses an axe not made in New England.

There is a great deal of entertaining information about the daily life of the Grand Old Man in a recent issue of one of the English papers. Mr. Gladstone lives a very regular life at his home, we are told. He breakfasts lightly about seven o'clock in the morning, and shortly before eight walks to the Hawarden Church for prayers. Upon his return he retires to his study, where he peruses and answers his enormous mass of daily correspondence. Luncheon at the Castle is conducted in a homely manner. The "lunch is on the hob" at Hawarden Castle for an hour or two during the day, and is partaken of by those at home at various times. In the afternoon Mr. Gladstone takes a walk in the grounds and dines at eight o'clock. He retires early, and shortly after ten o'clock his day's labours are over. He drinks bitter beer with his luncheon. A glass or two of claret at dinner, and sometimes a glass of port, that nectar of orators, satisfy his very moderate requirements for stimulant.

Like General Ignatieff, he has never smoked. He belongs to the older school, which acquired its habits at a time when

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tobacco smoking was regarded as somewhat vulgar. Hence, neither pipe, cigar nor cigarette is ever to be seen between his lips. But Mr. Gladstone is not in any sense ascetic; he is a generous liver and is a great believer in the virtues of a glass of good port wine. When speaking, his fillip is a compound of sherry and egg, which is carefully prepared by Mrs. Gladstone, who attends to its manufacture with as much anxiety as if it were the elixir of life.

Mr. Gladstone usually has three books in reading at the same time, and changes from one to another when his mind. has reached the limit of absorption. This is a necessary corrective to the tendency to think only of one thing at one time, which sometimes in politics leads him to neglect that all-round survey of the situation which is indispensable to a Prime Minister. During the beginning of the Irish question in 1880 he was so absorbed in the question of the coercion of Turkey that he could hardly be induced to spare a thought for Ireland; now it is just as difficult to get him to think of any political question but that of Ireland.

He complains sometimes that his memory is no longer quite so good as it used to be, but, although that may be true, it is still twice as good as anybody else's, for Mr. Gladstone has an extraordinary faculty of not only remembering those things he ought to remember but for forgetting those things it is useless for him to remember.

He possesses the enormous gift of being able to sleep. All his life long he has been a sound sleeper. It used to be said that he had a faculty which was possessed by Napoleon Bonaparte of commanding sleep at will, and, what is perhaps still rarer, of waking up instantly in full possession of every faculty. Some people can go to sleep soon, but they take some time to wake. Mr. Gladstone, it used to be said, was capable of sitting down in a chair, covering his face with a handkerchief and going to sleep in thirty seconds, and after sleeping for thirty minutes or an hour, as the case might be, waking up as bright as ever, all drowsiness disappearing the moment he opened his eyes. During all Mr. Gladstone's career he has never lost his sleep, except once and that was

during the troubles that arose about Egypt, and General Gordon. Then he slept badly and for the first time, it was feared that he would not be able to maintain the burden of office. He has, however, got over the effect of that period of stress and strain and he is still able to count confidently upon at least five consecutive hours of sound and refreshing sleep every night. But for that he would long ago have

broken down.

Although Mr. Gladstone is pre-eminently a talker in society, yet he does not disdain the other arts by which people who dine out contrive to spend the time. In his younger days he used to be quite noted for singing either solos or part-songs, and even down to the present time the musical bass of his voice is often heard to great advantage in family worship at Hawarden on Sunday nights. Whether he still keeps up the practice of singing in company is doubtful, but there are legends of the wonderful effect with which he was wont to render a favourite Scotch song, and irreverent gossips have even declared that on one occasion Mr. Gladstone brought down the drawing-room by the vivacity and rollicking spirit with which he rendered the well-known Camptown Races with its familiar refrain:

"Gwine to ride all night,

Gwine to ride all day;

I bet my money on the bob-tail nag,

And somebody bet on the bay.

O du-dah-day!"

His high spirits break out at every moment, and he used to rejoice to play a comedy part on his own or his son's lawn. It would be incorrect to say that on the occasion of popular celebrations, of local fancy fairs and cottage gardening shows, Mr. Gladstone plays down to the level of his audience. On the contrary, he exhibits just sufficient sympathy to raise them to enthusiasm, and no more. Of Mr. Gladstone's lieutenant, Mr. Morley, it may be said that he has no amusements whatever. He neither boats, nor rides, nor cuts down trees, nor, as one veracious chronicler asserted, does he spend