I have instanced Mr. Villiers as an eminent talker.  I now turn to an eminent man who talks—­Mr. Gladstone.[17] An absurd story has long been current among credulous people with rampant prejudices that Mr. Gladstone was habitually uncivil to the Queen.  Now, it happens that Mr. Gladstone is the most courteous of mankind.  His courtesy is one of his most engaging gifts, and accounts in no small degree for his power of attracting the regard of young men and undistinguished people generally.  To all such he is polite to the point of deference, yet never condescending.  His manners to all alike—­young and old, rich and poor—­are the ceremonious manners of the old school, and his demeanour towards ladies is a model of chivalrous propriety.  It would therefore have been to the last degree improbable that he should make a departure from his usual habits in the case of a lady who was also his Sovereign.  And, as a matter of fact, the story is so ridiculously wide of the mark that it deserves mention only because, in itself false, it is founded on a truth.  “I,” said the Duke of Wellington on a memorable occasion, “have no small talk, and Peel has no manners.”  Mr. Gladstone has manners but no small talk.  He is so consumed by zeal for great subjects that he leaves out of account the possibility that they may not interest other people.  He pays to every one, and not least to ladies, the compliment of assuming that they are on his own intellectual level, engrossed in the subjects which engross him, and furnished with at least as much information as will enable them to follow and to understand him.  Hence the genesis of that absurd story about his demeanour to the Queen.

“He speaks to Me as if I was a public meeting,” is a complaint which is said to have proceeded from illustrious lips.  That most successful of all courtiers, the astute Lord Beaconsfield, used to engage her Majesty in conversation about water-colour drawing and the third-cousinships of German princes.  Mr. Gladstone harangues her about the polity of the Hittites, or the harmony between the Athanasian Creed and Homer.  The Queen, perplexed and uncomfortable, tries to make a digression—­addresses a remark to a daughter or proffers biscuit to a begging terrier.  Mr. Gladstone restrains himself with an effort till the Princess has answered or the dog has sat down, and then promptly resumes:  “I was about to say—­” Meanwhile the flood has gathered force by delay, and when it bursts forth again it carries all before it.

No image except that of a flood can convey the notion of Mr. Gladstone’s table-talk on a subject which interests him keenly—­its rapidity, its volume, its splash and dash, its frequent beauty, its striking effects, the amount of varied matter which it brings with it, the hopelessness of trying to withstand it, the unexpectedness of its onrush, the subdued but fertilized condition of the subjected area over which it has passed.  The bare mention of a topic