Even in the humiliation of the Paisley campaign he was so noble a figure that the indulgence with which he appeared to regard the rather violent aid of a witty daughter was accepted by the world as touchingly paternal--the old man did not so much lean upon the arm of his child as smile upon her high-spirited antics.
One must trespass upon the jealously guarded private life to discover the true cause of his bewildering collapse.

Mr.Asquith surrendered some years ago the rigid Puritanism of early years to a domestic circle which was fatal to the sources of his original power.

Anyone who compares the photographs of Mr.Asquith before and after the dawn of the twentieth century may see what I mean.

In the earlier photographs his face is keen, alert, powerful, austere; you will read in it the rigidity of his Nonconformist upbringing, the seriousness of his Puritan inheritance, all the moral earnestness of a nobly ambitious character.

In the later photographs one is struck by an increasing expression of festivity, not by any means that beautiful radiance of the human spirit which in another man was said to make his face at the age of seventy-two "a thanksgiving for his former life and a love-letter to all mankind," but rather the expression of a mental chuckle, as though he had suddenly seen something to laugh at in the very character of the universe.