place; when night is advanced, the knot is always about half across Mr. Gladstone’s neck.  On the other hand, he is nearly always very carefully dressed; his black frock-coat—­a little ancient in make, and always of the smooth black, which has given way with younger men to the diagonals—­is a well-known feature of every great debate, and adds grace to his appearance and delivery.  When summer comes, however, he bursts into an almost dazzling glory of white waistcoats, grey cashmere coats, and hats of creamy-yellow whiteness, ethereal and almost aggressively summery.  The younger men are not slow to follow so excellent an example—­though generally there is the tendency to the dark grey, which is a compromise between the black of winter and the fiery white tweed which the man in the street is wont to wear.  Sir Charles Russell—­who, returning from Paris on the same day as Mr. Sexton, received a very warm welcome—­is also a child of his age in his clothes.  Time was when a great legal luminary—­especially if he were on the bench—­was supposed to be violating every canon of good taste if he did not wear garments which might be described as a cross between the garb of a bishop, an undertaker, and a hangman.  The judge on the bench, in fact, was always supposed to be putting on the black cap figuratively, and, therefore, was obliged to bear with him the outward sign of his damnable trade.  The late Lord Cairns was the first to break through this tradition, and affect the style of the prosperous stockbroker.  Sir Charles Russell is different, for he dresses in thorough taste; but when one saw him in the House of Commons in a grey suit and a deep-cut waistcoat, one might have taken him for a gentleman squire with a taste for study, varied by an occasional visit to Newmarket.

[Sidenote:  Mr. Morley’s tweed suit.]

All these observations have been suggested by the portentous fact that on June 15th Mr. John Morley startled the world of Parliament by appearing in a very neat, a very well cut, and a very light tweed suit.  If Mr. Morley figures in many Tory imaginations as a modern St. Just, longing for the music of the guillotine and the daily splash of Tory and orthodox blood, it is much more due to his clothes than to his writings; for ordinarily he is dressed after the fashion which one can well suppose reigned in the days when the men of the Terror were inaugurating a reign of universal love, brotherhood, and peace through the narrow opening between the upper and the lower knife of the guillotine.  His coat is blue:  so is his waistcoat; and his nether garments are of a severe drab brown.  It is impossible to imagine that any man who assumes such garments could be otherwise than a severe and sanguinary doctrinaire, anxious for his neighbours’ blood.  The genial smile with which the House of Commons has become familiar has invalidated the Tory estimate of Mr. Morley, but it was that memorable Thursday that completed the transformation of judgment.  No man could be a