It may, at first sight, seem tasking the public memory too much to ask people if they remember the tension there was in the political atmosphere towards the end of Mr. Gladstone's career. But a very great many will not have forgotten it. The political weather is so far like the other sort that it is only borne in mind for its badness; that, however, was a terrible season. At the last, Mr. Gladstone seemed to have got into the air, and he did not improve the climate. He may urge, certainly, that Mr. Lowe had made himself very obnoxious, that Mr. Ayrton had been found to be intolerable, and that the great trade of the publicans, with all its supporters, was in arms against Mr. Bruce. That is all true; the country disliked each one of these his chief colleagues. But neither Mr. Lowe's hard cynicism, nor Mr. Ayrton's dogmatic inæstheticism, nor Mr. Bruce's stolid mechanical interference, stirred the large keen dissatisfaction which Mr. Gladstone's own incomprehensibility in the end did. He gave men's consciences a shock, and none of the others affected to feel so deeply as that: it was only he who had stood forward as a political moralist, and then set everybody by the ears discussing his conduct. It was the same outside Parliament and within it. Everybody was arguing Mr. Gladstone; nobody could make him out, nobody felt safe, or could imagine what was coming next. If the atmosphere had but been charged a little more with him, England would not have been worth living in. Luckily the elections came, and the air was cleared.