With a bow, and a delighted and delightful smile, the Old Man took the glass, and drank almost greedily.  And then, turning to his opponents, he said, “I wish the right hon. gentleman who uses me so kindly, were as willing to take from my fountainhead as I am from his.”  The grace, the courtesy, the readiness with which it was said, took the House by storm, and it was hard to say whether the delighted laughter and cheers came in greater volume from the Tory or the Liberal side of the House.

[Sidenote:  The peroration.]

And Mr, Gladstone’s power increased with his power over the House.  It looked as if you were watching some mighty monarch of the air that rises and rises higher, higher into the empyrean on slow-poised, even almost motionless, wing.  Leaving behind the narrow issues of the particular motion before the House, Mr. Gladstone entered on a rapid survey of the mournful and touching relations between English officialism and Irish National sentiment.  From the dead past, he called up the touching, beautiful, and sympathetic figure of Thomas Drummond, and all his efforts to reconcile the administration of the law with the rights and sentiments of the Irish people.  The time for cheering had passed.  All anybody could do was to listen in spellbound silence, as sonorous sentence rolled after sonorous sentence.  And then cams the end, in a softer and lower key.  It was a direct personal allusion to Mr. Morley.  It was the whole weight of the Government and of its head thrown to the side of the Chief Secretary in the new policy in Ireland.  “We claim,” said Mr. Gladstone, “to be partakers of his responsibility, we appeal to the judgment of the House of Commons, and we have no other desire except to share his fate.”  And then a hurricane of applause.

[Sidenote:  A first experience.]

It was impossible not to feel sympathy for Lord Randolph Churchill in the difficult task of following such a speech.  The first thing he had to do was to bear testimony to the extraordinary effect the speech had made upon the House of Commons.  It was, he said, a speech “impressive and entrancing”—­two most happily-chosen epithets to describe it.  And then Lord Randolph told a little bit of personal history which was interesting.  In all his Parliamentary career, this was the first time he had been called upon to immediately follow a speech of Mr. Gladstone.  He would willingly have abandoned the opportunity, for it was a speech which no man in the House of Commons was capable of confronting.  After it, everything else was bound to fall flat, dull, and unimpressive.  Lord Randolph had the misfortune of having prepared a speech of considerable length—­going into the dead past, forgotten things, and found himself—­almost for the first time in his life—­incapable of holding the attention of the House of Commons.  Then the division followed, with 47 of a majority—­and loud ringing cheers came from the friends of the Government—­and especially from the Irish benches—­represented in the division by every single member of the party, with the exception of one, absent on sick leave.