Mr. Gladstone has no occasion for the exercise of this ingenuity. He may, without reproach, snatch his forty winks when he will, none daring to make him afraid. He admits that, "at my time of life," he finds a long and prosy speech irresistible, often enriching him between questions and the dinner-hour with the dower of a quiet nap. [Illustration: "FORTY WINKS."] [Sidenote: IN THE DIVISION LOBBY.] This contrast of demeanour on the Treasury Bench as between Mr. Disraeli and Mr. Gladstone was equally marked in the division lobby. The passage through the division lobby, which sometimes occupies a quarter of an hour, is for Mr. Gladstone an opportunity for continuing his work. It was one of the most dramatic incidents on the historic night in June, 1885, when his Ministry fell that, engaged in writing a letter when the House was cleared for the particular division, he carried his letter-pad with him, sat down at a table in one of the recesses of the lobby, and went on writing as, at another tragic time of waiting, Madame Defarge went on knitting. It was his letter to the Queen recording the incidents of the night. Returning to the Treasury Bench, Mr. Gladstone, still Premier, placed the pad on his knee and quietly continued the writing, looking up with a glance of interested inquiry when the shout of exultation, led by Lord Randolph Churchill, following on the announcement of the figures, told him that he might incidentally mention to Her Majesty that the Government had been defeated by a majority of twelve. [Illustration: "SEEING NOBODY."] [Sidenote: A LOST VOTE.] On the very few occasions when Mr. Gladstone visits the inner lobby on his way to and from the Whips' room, he strides through the groups of members with stiffened back and head erect, apparently seeing nobody. This is a habit, certainly not discourteously meant, which cost him a valuable friend, and made for the Liberal party one of its bitterest and most effective enemies. Twenty years ago there entered the House of Commons in the prime of life a man who early proved the potentiality of his becoming one of its brightest ornaments. A Radical by conviction, instinct, and habits dating from boyhood, he had raised in an important district the drooping flag of Liberalism, and amid the disaster that attended it at the General Election of 1874, had carried nearly every seat in his own county.