feet, waving their hats, cheering themselves hoarse. And yet an
undercurrent and audible note of anxiety ran through all the enthusiasm.
The honeymoon of Home Rule is over, and, curiously enough, the very
sense of a great victory after a long struggle has always about it a
solemnity too sad for tears, too deep for joy. The Liberals and the
Irishry stood up; but, even at that hour, there were evidences of the
fissures and chasms which the two great political disruptions-the
disruption in the English Liberal and in the Irish party--have produced.
On the third bench below the Gangway sate the Liberal Unionists, Mr.
Gladstone's deadliest foes, with pallid-faced, perky-nosed, malignant
Chamberlain at their head, the face distorted by the baffled hate, the
accumulated venom of all these years of failure, apostasy, and outlawry.
Not one of the renegade Liberals stood up, and there they sate, a solid
mass of hatred and rancour. On the Irish side, Mr. Redmond and the few
Parnellites kept up the tradition of their dead leader in his last years
of distrust and dislike of Mr. Gladstone by also remaining seated.

[Sidenote: The speech.]

The first notes of the Old Man suggested he was in excellent form. It is
always easy for those who are well acquainted with him to know when the
Old Man is going to make a great, and when he will deliver only a
moderately good speech. If he is going to do splendidly the tone at the
start is very calm, the delivery is measured, the sentences are long,
and break on the ear with something of the long-drawn-out slowness of
the Alexandrine. So it was on this occasion. Sentence followed sentence
in measured and perfect cadence; with absolute self-possession; and in a
voice not unduly pitched. And yet there were those traces of fatigue to
which I have alluded, and I have since heard that one of the few
occasions in his life when Mr. Gladstone had a sleepless night was on