There are men I wot of--and not very big men either--who are nothing without their audience.

They deem their dignity abused if there be not the crowded bench, the cheering friends, the prominent and ostentatious place.

Not so Mr.Gladstone.Perhaps it is the splendid robustness of his nerves, perhaps the absorption in his subject to the forgetfulness of himself; whatever it is, he faces this small, _distrait_, perhaps even depressed, audience with the same zest as though he were once again before that splendid gathering which met his eyes on the memorable night when he brought in his Home Rule Bill.

Who but he could fail to have noticed the contrast, and noticing, who but he could remain so loftily unobservant and unimpressed?
[Sidenote: In splendid form.] But then Mr.Gladstone has too much of that splendid oratorical instinct not to fashion and shape his speech to the change in the surroundings.
He has an impressionability--not to panic, not to depression, not to wounded vanity, but to the appropriateness and the demands of an environment, which is something miraculous.

I have already remarked, that the infinite variety of his oratory is Shakespearian in its completeness and abundance.