existing lord’s mother.  Writing his missives from afar—­invisible, unapproachable, unknown—­or known, rather, only by harsh refusal—­by dogged, obdurate rejection of all terms—­save the full pound of flesh—­not even rendered human by passionate and eloquent outburst of remonstrance, but represented by thin, brief, business-like and curt notes as of a very crusty solicitor—­such Lord Clanricarde appeared to the imaginations of the people of the district of which he was almost the supreme master.  There were riots—­fierce conflicts extending over days—­then dreary sentences of lengthy imprisonments, with gaol tragedies; but still this strange, dry, inarticulate, obstinate figure remained immutable, always invisible, unapproachable, obdurate, spectral.  Even the Tory leaders were disgusted and wearied, and Mr. Balfour was careful, in the very crisis and agony of his fight with the National League, to disavow all sympathy with the strange being that was bringing to his assistance all the mighty resources of an Empire’s army, an Empire’s exchequer, and an Empire’s overwhelming power to crush in blood, in the silence of the cell and the deeper silence of the tomb, all resistance to his imperious will.

[Sidenote:  Entry of a ghost.]

It must have been with something of a shock that the House of Lords, with all its well-trained and high-bred self-control, found that this curious and fateful figure was within its gates.  Probably, to scarcely half-a-dozen of his colleagues and fellow-peers, was this figure anything but a strange and unexpected incursion from the dim ghost-land, in which, hermit-like, he seems to dwell.  Indeed, the Marquis of Londonderry was careful to explain that he had no personal acquaintance with the man whose case he was defending against the action of the Commission presided over by Mr. Justice Mathew.  And it was easy to see, that Lord Clanricarde was a stranger, and a very lonely one, too, in that assembly in which he is entitled to sit and vote on the nation’s destinies.  On a back seat, on the Liberal side of the House, silent, forlorn, unspeaking and unspoken to, he sat throughout the long and tedious debate in which he was a protagonist.  There was, indeed, something shocking to the sense—­shocking in being so surprising—­that this should be the figure around which one of the fiercest and most tragic political struggles of our time should have surged.  He is a man slightly above the middle height, thin in face and in figure.  Somehow or other, there is a general air about him that I can only describe by the word shabby—­I had almost ventured on the term ragged.  The clothes hang somewhat loosely—­are of a pattern that recalls a half century ago—­and have all the air of having been worn until they are positively threadbare.  Altogether, there is about this inheritor of a great name—­of vast estates—­of a title that in its days was almost kingly—­an air that suggests a combination between the recluse and the poor man of letters, who makes his home in