Unionist named Cochrane.  The Scotch Unionist is one of the most bitter of the venomous tribe to which he belongs.  Mr. Gladstone is a man of peace and unfailing courtesy, but the old lion has potentialities of Olympian wrath, and when he is stirred up a little too much his patience gives way, and he has a manner of shaking his mane and sweeping round with his tail which is dangerous to his enemies and a delight and fascination to his friends.  He took up the witless and unhappy Cochrane, shook him, and dropped him sprawling and mutilated, in about as limp a condition as the late Lord Wolmer—­I call him late in the sense of a person politically dead—­when that distinguished nobleman was called to account for his odious calumny on the Irish members.

[Sidenote:  Baiting the lion.]

At last, however, the Cochranes and the rest of the gang that had thought it fine fun to bait an old man were silenced; but even yet the ordeal of Mr. Gladstone was only beginning.  I have seen many disgusting sights in my time in the House of Commons; but I never saw anything so bad as this scene.  Mr. Gladstone looked—­as I thought—­wan and rather tired.  He had been down to Brighton; and I have a profound disbelief in these short hurried trips to the seaside.  But Mr. Gladstone seems to like them, and haply they do him good.  He looked as if the last trip had rather tired him out.  Or was it that he had had to sit for several hours the day before at a Cabinet Council?  These Cabinet Councils must often be a great trial to a leader’s nerves; for all Councils in every body in the world mean division of opinion, personal frictions, ugly outbursts of temper, from which even the celestial minds of political leaders are not entirely free.  Anyhow Mr. Gladstone looked pale, fagged, and even a little dejected.  You—­simple man—­who are only acquainted with human nature in its brighter and better manifestations, would rush to the conclusion that the sight of the greatest man of his time in his eighty-fourth year, thus wan, wearied, pathetic, would appeal to the imaginations or the hearts of even political opponents.  Simple man, you know nothing of the ruthless cruelty which dwells in political breasts, of the savagery which lies in the depths of the horse-jockey squire or the overdressed youth—­anxious to distinguish himself, if it be only by throwing mud at a stately column—­you have no idea of these things.

[Sidenote:  The lion lashes out.]

Time after time—­again and again—­in this form and in that—­the Tories, young and old, experienced and senseless, rose to try and corner Mr. Gladstone.  Mr. Frank Lockwood, examining a hostile witness in the divorce court, could not have been more persistent than the Lowthers, and the Cranbornes, and even Mr. Balfour.  But he was equal to them all—­met them man after man, question after question, and, though he had to be on his feet a score of times in the course of a few minutes, was always ready, firm, alert.  How we enjoyed the