lover of the guillotine who could wear so airy, so gay, and, above all, so juvenile and well-cut a suit of clothes.  Mr. Morley himself was overwhelmed with the amount of attention which his new suit attracted.  He, poor man, did not see the portentous political significance of the transaction, and almost sank under the multitude and variety of congratulations which he received from watchful friends.  He has done many great and successful things in the course of his brilliant career—­but he never achieved a triumph so complete and so prompt as he did when he put on his light tweed suit, and steered under its illuminating rays the Home Rule Bill through the rocks and shoals, the eddies and the cross-currents of the House of Commons.

[Sidenote:  A brilliant pas de deux.]

On the following afternoon there was another scene in which clothes had their share.  At about three o’clock there entered the House together two slight, alert figures—­in both cases a little above the middle height, and both clothed in a suit of clothes the exact counterpart of each other in make, shape, and colour.  There was a dominant and almost monotonous grey in their appearance; but there was little of grey in their looks.  When at once there burst from the Tory and Unionists Benches a loud, wild, prolonged huzzah, it was seen that this theatrical little entrance at one and the same time of Joe and Mr. Balfour, was their method of accentuating the Tory triumph in Linlithgow.  The two gentlemen seen entering together separated as they walked up the floor—­the Tory going to his place on the front Opposition Bench, the Unionist to his corner seat on the Liberal side.  It was a very skilfully arranged bit of business, though there were critics who thought its histrionic element a little out of place in the sombre and solemn realities of public life, and a great national controversy.  In the midst of it all I looked at Mr. Gladstone.  It is in such moments that you are able to get a glimpse into all the great depths of this extraordinary nature.  And I have written more than once in these columns that the greatest of all his characteristics is composure.  This mighty, restless, fiery fighter against wrong—­this stalwart and unconquerable wrestler for right, this Titan—­I might even say this Don Quixote—­who has gone out with spear and sword to assault the most strongly-entrenched citadels of human wrongs—­who has faced a world in arms—­this man has, after all, at the centre of his existence, and in the depths of his nature, a gospel which sustains him in the hours of defeat and gloom, and makes him one of the most restless of combatants, and the most tranquil.

[Sidenote:  The grand old philosopher.]