which passes through an AEolian harp.  You cannot utter a word which does not produce its full and immediate response.  You say a thing which has the remotest approach to an absurdity in it, and the whole House laughs consumedly and immediately.  You utter a phrase which excites party feeling, and at once—­quick as lightning falls—­comes back the retort of anger or approval; your way is studded and punctuated with some response or other, that signifies the readiness and the depth and amplitude of emotion in one of the most emotional, and noisy, and responsive assemblies in the world.  It is a curious change from all this to look on all these crowded benches sitting in a silence that is unbroken more than once in the course of half an hour.

[Sidenote:  Spencer’s serene courage.]

I have often had to admire Lord Spencer—­to admire him when he was a political foe as well as when he has been a political friend; but I don’t think I ever admired him so much as when he stood up on September 4th to address this strange assembly.  Hours he has passed through of all-pervading and all-surrounding gloom, danger, and assassination; but I do not suppose his nerve was ever put to a test more trying than when he confronted those large battalions of uncompromising and irresponsive foes.  There were foes on all sides of him.  They filled the many benches opposite to him; they filled, with equal fervour and multitudinousness, the benches on his own side.  It was remarkable to see the thoroughness with which the Tories had mustered their forces; but the spectacle of the Liberal Unionists’ Benches was even still more remarkable, for there was not a seat vacant; they had all come—­those renegade and venomous deserters from the Liberal ranks—­to do their utmost against the Liberal party and their mighty Liberal leader.  And what support had Lord Spencer against all these foes—­before him, around him—­on all sides of him?  On the benches immediately behind him there was a small band of men—­not forty all told—­looking strangely deserted, skeleton-like, even abashed in all their loneliness and isolation.  These were the friends—­few but faithful—­amid all the hundreds, who alone had a word of cheer for Lord Spencer in a long and trying speech he had to address to his irreconcilable foes.  But if there was any tremor in him as he stood up in surroundings so trying, I was unable to detect it.  Indeed, at the moment he rose, there was something very fine and very impressive in his figure.  He is, as most people know, a man of unusual height; hard exercise and the ride across country have kept him from having any of that tendency to embonpoint which destroys in middle age so many a fine figure.  On the contrary, there is not a superfluous ounce of flesh on that tall, alert figure; it is the figure of a trained athlete rather than the figure one would associate with a nobleman in the end of a self-indulgent and ever-eating and over-drinking century.  The features, strong yet gentle, though far from regular, have considerable distinction, and the flowing red beard makes the face stand out in any assembly.  Carefully but plainly dressed, erect, perfectly composed, and courteous in every word and look and gesture, Lord Spencer made his plea for justice to the nation where once his name was the symbol for hatred and wrong.