The Duke of Argyll has changed a good deal in physical appearance during the last twenty years. There was a time when he was was robust and squat, a rather stout little man, with a slightly strutting manner, head thrown back, and very fine and spacious forehead; a head of hair as luxurious and drooping as that of Mary Magdalene. The form has considerably shrunk with advanced years, but not with any disadvantage, for the face, pinched and lined though it appears, has a finer and more intellectual look than that of earlier days. Wrong-headed--perhaps very self-conceited--at all events, entirely left behind by the advancing democratic tide, the Duke of Argyll is yet always to me a sympathetic and striking figure. If he thinks badly, at least he thinks originally. His thoughts are his own, and nobody else's; and though he is a bitter controversialist, at least he feels the weight and gravity of the vast questions on which he pronounces. Above all things, he has a touch of the divine in his oratory. He is, indeed, almost the last inspired speaker left in the House of Lords. There is another speaker, of whom more presently, with extraordinary gifts, with also true oratorical powers, capable of producing mighty effects; but with Lord Rosebery the light is very clear and very dry; there is none of the softness and brilliancy, and poetic and imaginative insight which are to be found in the speeches of the Duke of Argyll. On September 6th the Duke used very vehement and some very whirling language about Mr. Gladstone; his reading of history was all wrong; his policy for Ireland was--to put it plainly--brutal. But what cannot be forgiven to a man who has still such a beautiful voice--who still gesticulates so beautifully--and, above all, who is capable of rising to the height of some of the passages in the speech on this particular Wednesday? For instance, what could have been more beautiful than that passage in which he put the argument that Ireland was too near to be treated in the same way as a distant colony--the passage in which he spoke of seeing from the Scotch Highlands the sun shining on the cornfields and cottage windows of Antrim? [Sidenote: Rosebery's great triumph.] On September 7th a very great event happened in the House of Lords. The mental mastership of that assembly was transferred from one man to another, from the master of many legions to the captain of a few thin and almost despised battalions. I heard the whole of Lord Rosebery's speech, and I heard three quarters of the speech of the Marquis of Salisbury, and no impartial man could deny the contrast between these two speeches on this occasion, the one being no less fine and complete, the other no less monotonous than I have set forth. It was not merely that Lord Salisbury proved himself vastly inferior to Lord Rosebery in mere oratory, but the speech of the Foreign Secretary was that of a finer speaker, and of a more serious, intellectual, and sagacious politician.