[Sidenote: And eagerness.]
And what makes it all the more peculiar is that this strange gentleness
does not go side by side with want of interest in the struggle. On the
contrary, all those around him and near him declare that never has Mr.
Gladstone been more keen of any subject than he has been on this Home
Rule Bill. He thinks of nothing else; he enjoys it all. I saw a curious
instance of this intensity of his interest about that time. Having a
word to say to one of the Ministers, I was seated for a moment on the
Treasury Bench just beside the Chairman--Mr. Mellor. Mr. Gladstone had
gone out for a few minutes. Sir William Harcourt was in charge of the
Bill, and he was replying to some argument of the Unionists opposite.
Sir William Harcourt has an excellent method of dealing with futile and
dishonest amendments. He declines to argue them in detail. With that
rich humour of which the public know less than his friends and
intimates, Sir William airily dismisses the whole business, and with a
laugh brings down shivering to the ground a whole fabric of laboriously
constructed nonsense. Well, Sir William was in the middle of a sentence
in which he was speaking of the absurd suspicion of the Irish people
which was entertained by the Tories--and Mr.
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