whole splendid display—­a brilliant intellect playing with all the ease of its brightest and best powers; but, after all, what a flood of holy rage the whole thing was calculated to rouse in any but rancorous breasts.  However, we had our revenge.  The resurgence of Jimmy Lowther seems to be a phenomenon, as disturbing to his friends as to his foes.  The ugly necessity for sharing responsibility for his vulgar and senseless excesses has come home to Mr. Balfour.  There was something very like a scene this night between him and the Newmarket steward.  Mr. Balfour was ready to accept the assurances which had been given to him by Mr. Gladstone—­assurances which, if anything, erred on the side of conciliation—­but Jimmy has entered on the frenzied campaign of obstruction to all and everything which his dull, narrow, and obstinate mind has mistaken for high policy.  This led to a strange and striking scene.  Mr. Balfour, speaking on some question, was interrupted by Mr. Lowther—­and then, in front of the whole House—­in words which everybody could hear, with gesture of his whole arm—­sweeping, indignant, irritated—­the gesture with which a master dismisses an importunate servant—­the Tory leader rebuked the interruptions of Mr. Lowther.

[Sidenote:  Jimmy flouts Mr. Balfour.]

But Mr. Lowther, in these days, is not to be put down, and doubtless he feels in his inner breast that wrong which has been done for years to his talents and his services; doubtless he remembers the silence and obscurity to which he has been condemned, while Mr. Balfour has been figuring largely before the general public, in the very situation which Jimmy held himself in days when Mr. Balfour stumbled and trembled from his place below the gangway.  At all events, Jimmy has determined to revive; and in these sad days, when nothing but the sheer brutality of obstruction is required, he is not a man to be trifled with.  And so he defied Mr. Balfour and insisted on a division.  Mr. Balfour ostentatiously left the House, but the majority of the Tory party followed Jimmy.

[Sidenote:  The pity of it.]

All this resuscitation of obstruction necessitated, on Mr. Gladstone’s part, an extreme step.  Before this time Mr. Gladstone was very rarely in the House after eight o’clock.  About that hour, he silently stole away and left the conduct of the business of the House to Sir William Harcourt.  He was thus able to get to bed at a reasonable hour, and to attend during the day to the business of the nation.  But when the emergency arises, Mr. Gladstone is never able to listen to the dictates of prudence, or selfishness, or peril.  He was determined to show the Tories that if they were going to play the game of obstruction, they would have to count with him more seriously than they imagine.  To his friends—­who doubtless were aghast at the proposition—­he announced that he was going to break through those rules which had been imposed upon him by a watchful physician and by his age.