Of all this I sate musing during some idle moments in the middle of March; for, as I looked at Mr. Gladstone, the whole scene was, by a curious trick of memory and association, brought back to me.  Everyone who knew the great old Philosopher of Athens, will remember that he had his familiar daemon, and that he believed himself to have constant communication with him.  If I remember rightly, there is a good deal about that daemon in his “Phaedo”—­that wonderful story to which I have just alluded, and which lives so vividly in my memory.  Sometimes I think that Mr. Gladstone has the same superstition.  He has moments—­especially if there be the stress of the sheer brutality of obstructive and knavish hostility—­when he seems to retire into himself—­to transfer himself on the wings of imagination to regions infinitely beyond the reach, as well as the ken, of the land in which the Lowthers, the Chamberlains, and the Bartleys dwell.  At such moments he gives one the impression of communing with some spirit within his own breast—­a familiar daemon, whose voice, though still and silent to all outside, shouts louder than the roar of faction or the shouts of brutish hate.  Then it is that I remember what depths of religious fervour there are in this leader of a fierce democracy, and can imagine that ofttimes his communings may, perchance, be silent prayer.

[Sidenote:  In contrast with Lowther.]

As I have said, there have been many such moments in those days in Parliament.  Mr. Gladstone can be severe—­wrathful—­even cruel.  It is not often that he is so, but sometimes he has, in sheer self-defence, to notice the dogs that yelp at his heels, and to lash out and maul them so as to keep off the rest.  Nobody will forget how, in a few words, Mr. Gladstone mercilessly and for ever crushed that impudent young gentleman, who is titled and considered to-day largely because Mr. Gladstone was the patron of his sanctimonious father.  Mr. Jesse Collings hides under a painfully extorted smile the agonies he endures on the few occasions when Mr. Gladstone deems it worth his while to scornfully refer to his apostasy.  But, speaking generally, Mr. Gladstone uses his giant powers with extraordinary benignity and mercifulness, and is almost tender with even his bitterest opponents.  When, therefore, Mr. Gladstone was being baited by beef-headed Lowther, he for the most part looked simply pained; and took refuge in that far-off self-absorption which enabled him to forget the odious reality in front of him.  And assuredly, if you looked at the face of Gladstone, and then at the face of Lowther, and thought of the different purposes of the two men, you could not be surprised that Mr. Gladstone should desire to forget the existence of Mr. Lowther.  Mr. Lowther’s face, with its high cheek-bones, its heavy underhung lip, like the national bulldog in size, and in its impression of brutal, dull, heavy tenacity—­its grotesque good-humour—­its unrelieved coarseness—­brings