mastery of the vulnerable temper is now so complete that the Old Man glides through scenes of insult and passes over what the humblest member of the House would often find it hard to endure.  There is something indeed strange, wistful, almost uncanny, in the unbreakable gentleness of that white figure, with the ivory complexion, the scant white hair, the large white collar and broad white shirt-front—­there is something which becomes almost an obsession to the observer in watching the figure with its strangely tranquil and gentle expression in the heat and centre of all this fierce Parliamentary battle.

[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. Gladstone, entering from behind the Speaker’s chair at that very moment, just caught that one phrase.  It was impossible for him to hear more than that one word “suspicion”; but at that word he pricked up his ears, and while he was still walking to his place—­before he had seated himself—­“Hear, hear,” he cried.  His eagerness would not let him wait till he had taken his seat.  His absolute absorption in the Bill before the House was so complete that, as he walked to his seat, you could see the rapt and concentrated look, which showed that, even during the few minutes he had been away, the brain had never left for one second its absorbing theme.

[Sidenote:  The consolations of old age.]

But—­as I have indicated—­this complete subjugation of temper which Mr. Gladstone has achieved, has its disadvantages when such a conflict is provoked as that with Mr. Chamberlain on the article in the Daily News.  Mr. Gladstone himself spoke of the consolations of old age; there is one consolation he did not mention.  His absorption in the Bill and the slight deafness in one of his