On another occasion, shortly after skating on rollers was introduced, Mrs. Fawcett went to a rink, and as she came in was told that a most extraordinary thing was going on—there was a blind man trying roller-skating. It was her husband, whizzing round delightedly. Fawcett was having a royal time, darting like a huge swallow in swift circles about the skating rink. He revelled in the motion and the exercise, which put him into a fine glow. The merry noise of many little wooden wheels rolling smoothly over the polished floor—the lifting and stumbling of awkward feet, and the skilful glide of the good skaters gave him a happy consciousness of the gay revolving spectacle through which he winged his way. CHAPTER XVIII GLADSTONE PRIME MINISTER Opposition to Gladstone—‘The most Thorough Radical Member in the House’—Growing Dissatisfaction with the Government—The Irish Universities Bill—Helping to Defeat his own Party. [Sidenote: Gladstone and Fawcett.] In the new Parliament Gladstone became Prime Minister for the first time. Fawcett had much appreciation of his leader’s wonderful powers, of his ability as a financier, of his sincerity as a reformer, and of his right to the support of the Liberal party. But the ramifications, subtleties and luminosities of Gladstone’s marvellous intellect and culture were a closed book to Fawcett’s downright, strong, unimaginative and limited mind, limited in a sense by its very excellencies, its honesties, its insistence on the real, the well proved, his willingness to consider the workable problem only, rejecting all inquiries which savoured of the visionary, the philosophic, or the purely æsthetic. Whatever Fawcett’s mind was willing to dally with or to assimilate must have the qualities of serviceableness and a certain homespun simplicity. Culture for its own sake, the higher flights of the imagination, and struggles to pierce the veil of the unknown seemed to him a sentimental waste of good time which could better be spent on real work or good play. [Sidenote: A Difference in Temperaments.] The great flights which Gladstone’s intellect revelled in, his delight in ancient as well as in the most recent philosophy, seemed as amusing and unnecessary to Fawcett as it was to him profitless and extravagant. In their entirely divergent points of view we must recognise the cause of much of the later incompatibility of these two temperaments which really never understood each other, and had not the power to meet on a truly common footing. [Sidenote: The Bills of 1869.]