Lord Rosebery was for a prolonged season the man in English political life upon whom the eyes of expectation were turned. He is a younger man than most of his political colleagues and rivals, but it is not because of his comparative youth that the eyes of expectation were and still are turned upon him. Not one of those who stand in the front ranks of Parliamentary life to-day could be called old, as we reckon age in our modern estimate. Palmerston, Gladstone, and Disraeli won their highest political triumphs after they had passed the age which Lord Salisbury and Sir William Harcourt have now reached; Mr. Balfour is still regarded in politics as quite a young man, and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman has but lately been elected leader of the Liberal party in the House of Commons. Lord Rosebery has already held the highest political offices. He has been Foreign Secretary and he has been Prime Minister. He has been leader of the Liberal party. No other public man in England has so many and so varied mental gifts, and no other public man has won success in so many distinct fields. We live in days when, for the time at least, the great political orator seems to have passed out of existence. The last great English orator died at Hawarden a few short years ago. We have, however, several brilliant and powerful Parliamentary debaters, and among these Lord Rosebery stands with the foremost, if he is not, indeed, absolutely the foremost. As an orator on what I may call great ceremonial occasions he is, according to my judgment, the very foremost we now have. As an after-dinner speaker--and after-dinner speaking counts for a great deal in the success of an English public man--he has never had an equal in England during my time. Then Lord Rosebery has delivered lectures or addresses in commemoration of great poets and philosophers and statesmen which may even already be regarded as certain of an abiding place in literature. Lord Rosebery is a literary man, an author as well as a statesman and an orator; he has written a life of Pitt which is already becoming a sort of classic in our libraries. There are profounder students, men more deeply read, than he, but I doubt if there are many men living who have so wide an acquaintance with general literature. He is a lover as well as a student and a connoisseur of art, he is an accomplished yachtsman, has a thorough knowledge of horses, is famous on the turf, and the owner of two horses which won the Derby. The legendary fairy godmother seems to have showered upon him at his birth all her richest and most various gifts, and no malign and jealous sprite appears to have come in, as in the nursery stories, to spoil any of the gifts by a counteracting spell. He was born of great family and born to high estate; he married a daughter of the house of Rothschild; he has a lordly home near Edinburgh in Scotland, a noble house in the finest West End square of London, and a delightful residence in one of our most