[Sidenote: Mr. Carson's exterior.]
Nature has stamped on Mr. Carson's exterior the full proclamation of his
character and career. There is something about his appearance and manner
that somehow or other seems to belong rather to the last than the
present century. He is a very up-to-date gentleman in every sense of the
word--clothes included. But the long, lantern, black-coloured jaws, the
protruding mouth, the cavernous eyes, the high forehead with the hair
combed straight back--all seem to suggest that he ought to be wearing
the wig, the queue, and the sword of the eighteenth century. He looks as
though he had come from consultation, not with Mr. Balfour, but Lord
Castlereagh, and as if the work he were engaged in was the sending of
the Brothers Sheares to Tyburn, not William O'Brien to Tullamore, and as
though he had stopped up o' nights to go over again the list of the
Irishmen that could be bought or bullied, or cajoled into the betrayal
of Ireland's Parliament.
Look at him as he stands at the box. You can see that he has been bred
into almost impudent self-confidence, by those coercion tribunals, in
which the best men of Ireland lay at the mercy of a creature like Mr.
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