We who love and follow him hold our breaths, and our nervous anxiety rises almost to terror.  Can he stand the strain?—­will he break down from sheer physical fatigue and the exhaustion of long waiting?  The first few notes of the deep voice are reassuring.  The opening sentences also have that full roll which nearly always is inevitable proof that the great swelling opening will carry him on to the end; and yet there is anxiety.  Those who know him well cannot help observing that there is just a slight trace of excitement, nervousness, and anxiety in the voice and manner.  He has evidently been put out by the lateness of the hour to which the speech has been postponed.  There is beside him a vast mass of notes, and then, before he reaches that, there is the long speech to which he has just listened, many points of which it is impossible to leave unnoticed.  And so the first ten minutes strike me as rather poor—­poor, I mean, for Mr. Gladstone—­and my heart sinks.  In memory I go back to that memorable and unforgettable speech on that terrible night in 1886, when, with dark and disastrous defeat prepared for him in the lobbies the moment he sat down, Mr. Gladstone delivered a speech, the echoes of whose beautiful tones—­immortal and ineffaceable—­still linger in the ear.  And now the moment of Nemesis and triumph has come, and is he going to fall below the level of the great hour?

Ah! these fears are all vain.  The exquisite cadence—­the delightful bye-play—­the broad, free gesture—­the lofty tones of indignation and appeal—­but, above all, the even tenderness, composure, and charity that endureth all things—­all these qualities range through this magnificent speech.  Thus he wishes to administer to Sir Henry James a well-merited rebuke for his terrible and flagitious incitements, and, with uplifted hands, and in a voice of infinite scorn, Mr. Gladstone turns on Sir Henry, and overwhelms him, amid a tempest of cheers from the delighted Irishry and Liberals.

[Sidenote:  Chamberlain touched.]

But there is another and an even more extraordinary instance of the power, grace, and mastery of the mighty orator.  The G.O.M. had made an allusion to that pleasant and promising speech of young Austen Chamberlain, of which I have spoken already.  Just by the way, with that delightful and unapproachable lightness of touch which is the unattainable charm of Mr. Gladstone’s oratory, he alluded to the speech and to Mr. Chamberlain himself.  “I will not enter into any elaborate eulogy of that speech,” said Mr. Gladstone.  “I will endeavour to sum up my opinion of it by simply saying that it was a speech which must have been dear and refreshing to a father’s heart.”  And then came one of the most really pathetic scenes I have ever beheld in the House of Commons—­a scene with that touch of nature which makes the whole akin, and, for the moment, brings the fiercest personal and political foes into the holy bond of common human