It was only the Old Man would have had the daring to begin the third stage of the greatest Bill of modern times at an hour so inauspicious—­noon on a Wednesday sitting.  Everybody knows that among all the dead hours of the House of Commons, there is no hour so utterly dead as that.  Indeed, very often such is the disinclination of the natural man for unreasonable and unseasonable hours—­it is very often extremely difficult for the Whips of the Government to get together the forty members who are necessary to form the quorum for the starting of business; and I have known cases where it was close upon two o’clock—­if not even later—­before there was a sufficient muster for the beginning of the day’s business.  However, Mr. Gladstone calculated correctly on the magic of his name and the witchery of his oratory; for by a few minutes past twelve, when he rose to make his speech, the House was crowded in almost every part, and he had an audience not only unprecedented in its fulness at such an hour, but also delightfully stimulating in its general responsiveness and sometimes even its ready enthusiasm.

[Sidenote:  A mighty speech.]

The speech of the Old Man was worthy of the occasion.  For some hours after it had ended nobody had anything to say about anybody or anything else; it was one of those speeches that create something like rapture; and that oft-repeated declaration that he had never done anything like it before—­a declaration I have heard too many times to now altogether accept.  The voice was splendid, the diction very fine, the argument close and well knit, the matter carefully prepared without any selfish adherence to the letter of a manuscript—­a fidelity which always spoils anything like spontaneity of oratory.  And the Old Man was in splendid physical condition and in the brightest of spirits.  Indeed, I was never more struck with the extraordinary physical perfection which Mr. Gladstone’s frame has maintained after his eighty-three years of full active and wearing life.  The back was straight, the figure erect, the motions free, unconstrained, easy; the gestures those of a man whose every joint moved easily in a fresh and vigorous frame.  And the face was wonderfully expressive, now darkened with passionate hatred of wrong, now bursting into the sunshine of genial and pleasant smiles.  And—­as is usual when he is in this mood—­he was extraordinarily quick at taking interruptions; he was, indeed, almost boisterous in his manner, and seemed to positively invite those interjectional interventions from the other side, which, in less exuberant moods he is sometimes inclined to resent.  Mr. Chaplin had quoted a portentous passage from Cavour to show that the great Italian statesman had declared against Home Rule.  Mr. Gladstone was able to cap this with another passage—­which, beginning with a strong indictment of English methods of government in Ireland, wound up with the declaration that Ireland ought to be treated with the same justice