Mr. Gladstone, meantime, was down early, after but a short stay for dinner. His face had that rapt look of reverie which it wears on all these solemn and great occasions, and there was a slightly deadlier pallor on the cheek. Mr. Balfour persisted with his speech to the bitter end, and now and then Mr. Gladstone gave an impatient and anxious look at the clock. The hands pointed to ten minutes to midnight before this man of eighty-three was on his legs to address a crowded, hot, jaded assembly in a speech that would wind up one of the great stages in the greatest controversy of his life. [Sidenote: The opening.] We who love and follow him hold our breaths, and our nervous anxiety rises almost to terror. Can he stand the strain?--will he break down from sheer physical fatigue and the exhaustion of long waiting? The first few notes of the deep voice are reassuring. The opening sentences also have that full roll which nearly always is inevitable proof that the great swelling opening will carry him on to the end; and yet there is anxiety. Those who know him well cannot help observing that there is just a slight trace of excitement, nervousness, and anxiety in the voice and manner. He has evidently been put out by the lateness of the hour to which the speech has been postponed. There is beside him a vast mass of notes, and then, before he reaches that, there is the long speech to which he has just listened, many points of which it is impossible to leave unnoticed. And so the first ten minutes strike me as rather poor--poor, I mean, for Mr. Gladstone--and my heart sinks. In memory I go back to that memorable and unforgettable speech on that terrible night in 1886, when, with dark and disastrous defeat prepared for him in the lobbies the moment he sat down, Mr. Gladstone delivered a speech, the echoes of whose beautiful tones--immortal and ineffaceable--still linger in the ear. And now the moment of Nemesis and triumph has come, and is he going to fall below the level of the great hour? Ah! these fears are all vain. The exquisite cadence--the delightful bye-play--the broad, free gesture--the lofty tones of indignation and appeal--but, above all, the even tenderness, composure, and charity that endureth all things--all these qualities range through this magnificent speech. Thus he wishes to administer to Sir Henry James a well-merited rebuke for his terrible and flagitious incitements, and, with uplifted hands, and in a voice of infinite scorn, Mr. Gladstone turns on Sir Henry, and overwhelms him, amid a tempest of cheers from the delighted Irishry and Liberals. [Sidenote: Chamberlain touched.]