But then Mr. Gladstone has too much of that splendid oratorical instinct not to fashion and shape his speech to the change in the surroundings.  He has an impressionability—­not to panic, not to depression, not to wounded vanity, but to the appropriateness and the demands of an environment, which is something miraculous.  I have already remarked, that the infinite variety of his oratory is Shakespearian in its completeness and abundance.  The speech on April 6th was an additional proof of this.  Comparisons were naturally made between this speech and the speech by which he introduced the Bill, and everybody who was competent thought that the second speech was the finer and better of the two.  Stories have trickled through to the public of the anxieties and worries with which Mr. Gladstone was confronted—­not from the Irish side—­on the very night before he had to bring forth this prodigious piece of legislative work.  It is these small worries that to many Statesmen are the grimmest realities and the most momentous and effective events of their inner lives.  It is reported that one of the few sleepless nights which have ever disturbed the splendidly even and sane and healthy tenor of this tempestuous and incessantly active life, was the night before the introduction of the Home Rule Bill.  There are points to be finally settled—­clauses to be ultimately fixed—­phrases to be polished or pared at the eleventh hour in all human affairs.  Measures finally settled and fixed for weeks before the last hour exist—­like all perfection—­only in the brains and pages of dramatists and novelists.

[Sidenote:  Sunburnt, vigorous, self-possessed.]

It was not unnatural under these circumstances that when Mr. Gladstone made his speech introducing the Home Rule Bill there should have been on his cheek a pallor deadlier even than that which usually sits upon his brow.  That pallor, by the way, I heard recently, has been characteristic of him from his earliest years.  A schoolfellow from that far-off and almost pre-historic time when our Grand Old Man was a thin, slim, introspective and prematurely serious boy at Eton, tells to-day that the recollection he has of the young Gladstone is of a slight figure, never running, but always walking with a fast step, with earnest black eyes, and with a pallid face—­the ivory pallor, be it observed, not of delicacy, but of robustness.  Still there was on that Home Rule night, a pallor that had the deadlier hue of sleeplessness, worry, over-anxiety—­the hideous burden of a great, weighty, and complex speech to deliver.

On April 6th all this was gone.  The fresh, youthful, cheerful man who stood up in his place had drunk deep of the breezes that sweep The Front at Brighton; his cheeks were burned by the blaze of a splendid spring sun; in the budding, blossoming vital air around him he had taken some of that eternal hopefulness with which the new birth of nature in the spring inspires every human being with any freshness of sensation left.  Perchance from his windows in the Lion Mansion he had looked in the evening over the broad expanse of frontierless waters, and risen to the exaltation of the chainless unrest, the tireless and eternal youth, the illimitable breadth of the sea.  At all events, he stood before the House visibly younger, brighter, serener than for many a day.