boasted that he was not in the habit of noticing what appeared against him in the newspapers—­which is not true to a certain extent, or at least is not generally so thought, for it is understood that no man reads more carefully the extracts sent to him by those press-cutting agencies which have added either a new luxury or a new terror to public life.  But Mr. Chamberlain’s action had many roots.  First, like many others, very free in their comments and attacks, he is almost childishly sensitive.  Watch him in the House of Commons when an attack is being made upon him which he does not like, and the fierce and domineering temper reveals itself in the fidgety movement, the darkened brow, the deeper pallor on the white-complexioned face.  When he was a Cabinet Minister he could never, or rarely, be got to remain in the House of Commons during the whole of the evening; and one of the chief reasons, I have heard, he gave for thus absenting himself was that he could not stand the talk from the opposite side—­it made him so angry.

[Sidenote:  Joe’s motives.]

But there were other and more immediate reasons for his anger with the Daily News.  Joe was conscious of the growth of two feelings—­either of which was very perilous to him.  First, he began uneasily to feel that the country—­watching the struggle between him and the Old Man—­was getting a little disgusted at the business; and saw in it a want of that chivalry and fair play which it desires to see even in the fiercest political controversy.  This was not a pleasant sentiment to have growing up against one; and Joe felt that it has serious perils to his future political position.  And, secondly, he was conscious that the majority of the House of Commons was growing very restive under the desperate obstruction of which he had made himself the champion, and that this feeling might soon become strong enough to carry Mr. Gladstone and the Ministers off their feet, and compel drastic measures which had hitherto been steadily refrained from.  This would not suit the book of Joe at all, whose object it was to keep the struggle going as long as he possibly could manage it, careless of the traditions of Parliament, of the dignity and decency of the House of Commons, of the life and strength of Mr. Gladstone, of everything except his own greedy desire for personal revenge and triumph.

[Sidenote:  Mr. Gladstone’s gentleness.]

This was what lay behind the plausible and honeyed words in which Mr. Chamberlain attacked the article in the Daily News.  And here a curious difficulty arose which rather helped Joe, and almost enabled him to score a great triumph.  Everybody knows that between the temper of Mr. Gladstone and that of his friends and supporters there is an impassable gulf.  That mastery of a vulnerable temper, which accounted for many of the troubles of his earlier political career, which he himself has acknowledged in many a pathetic passage in his correspondence—­that