Justice Mathew. And it was easy to see,
that Lord Clanricarde was a stranger, and a very lonely one, too, in
that assembly in which he is entitled to sit and vote on the nation's
destinies. On a back seat, on the Liberal side of the House, silent,
forlorn, unspeaking and unspoken to, he sat throughout the long and
tedious debate in which he was a protagonist. There was, indeed,
something shocking to the sense--shocking in being so surprising--that
this should be the figure around which one of the fiercest and most
tragic political struggles of our time should have surged. He is a man
slightly above the middle height, thin in face and in figure. Somehow or
other, there is a general air about him that I can only describe by the
word shabby--I had almost ventured on the term ragged. The clothes hang
somewhat loosely--are of a pattern that recalls a half century ago--and
have all the air of having been worn until they are positively
threadbare. Altogether, there is about this inheritor of a great
name--of vast estates--of a title that in its days was almost kingly--an
air that suggests a combination between the recluse and the poor man of
letters, who makes his home in the reading-room of the British Museum.
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