character," and whom his Lordship, if he were now alive, would speak of as "the old man with personal fame unspotted," could step aside in one of his articles to recognize the public debt due to Jack Wilkes as a helper forward of our freedom. Wherever a national service has been done, Mr. Gladstone's eulogy always has been ready. Down to this point we have not spared so much as a hint to his magnificent oratory, his unsurpassed debating skill, his not infrequent successes in literary style. These were not the things that anybody needed reminding of, and that necessity was the prescribed limit of our self-imposed task. Who has forgotten when the expounding of the Budget was the greatest intellectual treat of the Session, when sugar and railway duties and tea became natural themes for eloquence, and the unfolding of the surplus was breathlessly waited for like the _dénouement_ of a novelist's plot? Those scenes are long past, it is true, but the echoes of them can still be heard, for each year since has brought a disappointing reminder to awaken them. But the matchless vigour and splendour of his debating fence has never slackened, never weakened; the only privilege of the older generation in respect of it, is that they can boast to have witnessed more of it, not to have seen better displays. As to his writings, there least of all is any reminder wanted, for he presents the public with an improving specimen each month. If any one laid themselves out to find fault with Mr. Gladstone's literature, the very worst thing they could discover to say of it, would be that it still was oratory, only written down. This is the man who, after a few weeks of leisure, reappears next month in Midlothian; first in the field, as if that appearance was his by right of custom. How well he compares with the rest of our older party leaders! Mr. Bright, grown a little pursy, though also stricken by domestic misfortune, rests rather inertly on his laurels, which certainly are plentiful enough to invite repose; Mr. Forster has never succeeded in quite finding his way out of the clauses of his own Education Act, where he sees himself confronted with the Church of England at the end of so many vistas, that he is lost in admiration of its architecture; Mr. Goschen, by some strange weakness (which, let us hope, is only temporary) has got a scare from meeting the County Franchise wearing Joseph Arch's coat and hat; while Mr. Lowe is riding hobbies, bicycle-wise, in and out before the very select constituency of the London University, with readers of _The Fortnightly Review_ for outside spectators, just by way of showing off his little feats of mental gymnastic. In the meanwhile, Mr. Gladstone, the veteran of them all, is putting on his harness for a fresh contest, a riper, better Liberal to-day than on any previous day of fight. It is for the younger men to rally round him.