I have tried to revive the spirit of this attack as some of those who listened describe it, for _Hansard_ reduces it to a very bald account. But, although Lord Randolph Churchill never commanded the surge and majesty of Mr. Gladstone’s oratory, he held the House docile and responsive in his grip. Whatever liberties he chose to take, they chose to cheer. So through a speech of an hour and a half, all devoted to a pitiless reproach of ‘that policy of base and cowardly surrender to Russia which marks your daily life.’ Was it wonderful that party newspapers and party men rallied to this bold champion of their grievances? ‘Why was it left to Lord Randolph Churchill,’ they asked, ‘alone to raise a protest against Mr. Gladstone’s treacherous conduct? Where were the occupants of the Front Opposition Bench? Have they resigned their functions? If so, let them resign their position’; and so forth. The next day Lord Granville took occasion to refer to this speech at length in the House of Lords. He declared that he had marked no less than nine passages, ‘some of them inaccurate and some exactly opposed to the truth.’ Lord Randolph rejoined, through the columns of the _Times_, in a celebrated--or perhaps I should write ‘notorious’--letter. He accused Lord Granville, among other things, of showing ‘the petty malice of a Whig’; ‘of his usual shamelessness’; and of ‘sneaking down to the House of Lords to make without notice a variety of deliberate misrepresentations, deliberate misquotations, and false assertions which were quite in accordance with the little that was known about the public career of Earl Granville, Knight of the Garter, and, to the misfortune of his country, Her Majesty’s principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.’ The _Times_ was so horrified at this that, not content with printing the letter in a column of its largest type, it devoted another column and a half to repeating, for the purpose of dissociating itself from, its insults, and rebuking the bad taste of the author.