In that perky, retrousse-nosed,
self-complacent, confidently smiling man you saw all the
flippancy--so-called realism--the petty commercialism of the end of the
middle of the nineteenth century. The mysticism, the poetry, the rich
devotion, the lofty and large ideals of the beginning of the century--of
the time that remembered Byron and produced Newman--all these things
were to be seen in the rapt look of that noble, beautiful and refined
face on the Treasury Bench. And yet there was something more. The
brilliant light of the early days of our century has become dim and cold
in those hearts and minds which have not had the power to grow and
expand with their ages. But with that splendid sanity of body as well as
mind which belongs to him, Mr. Gladstone is the creature of the ending
of the nineteenth as of the beginning of the twentieth century. Like the
man of Arctic climes, he stands almost at the same moment in the sunset
of one great century and the heralding light of the sunrise of another.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE BURSTING OF THE STORM.
[Sidenote: An Indian summer.]
There is a striking description in one of Mr. Rudyard Kipling's stories
of a night in an Indian city when the dog star rages.
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