Who
but he could fail to have noticed the contrast, and noticing, who but he
could remain so loftily unobservant and unimpressed?
[Sidenote: In splendid form.]
But then Mr. Gladstone has too much of that splendid oratorical instinct
not to fashion and shape his speech to the change in the surroundings.
He has an impressionability--not to panic, not to depression, not to
wounded vanity, but to the appropriateness and the demands of an
environment, which is something miraculous. I have already remarked,
that the infinite variety of his oratory is Shakespearian in its
completeness and abundance. The speech on April 6th was an additional
proof of this. Comparisons were naturally made between this speech and
the speech by which he introduced the Bill, and everybody who was
competent thought that the second speech was the finer and better of the
two. Stories have trickled through to the public of the anxieties and
worries with which Mr. Gladstone was confronted--not from the Irish
side--on the very night before he had to bring forth this prodigious
piece of legislative work. It is these small worries that to many
Statesmen are the grimmest realities and the most momentous and
effective events of their inner lives.
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