on himself the task of furnishing an answer. His impromptu replies were on the average equal in length and ponderosity to an ordinary man's set speech, and sometimes the newspapers reporting the debates in Parliament have on a single morning presented as many as six speeches from Mr. Gladstone on various subjects. This unhappy propensity for talking fostered a defect which is faintly discernible in his earlier and better manner. His native wealth of words is unbounded. He can say "twice two are four" in half a dozen ways, each varied in the construction of the sentence, and yet each so cunningly linked to the other that if we could forget the simple obviousness of the fact originally asserted, we could not fail to be struck with admiration for the skill by which we were being led through various avenues all converging on the one point that two and two really make four. Reasonably confident as he may well be of his verbal resources, Mr. Gladstone springs up to answer a question affecting his administration, and pours forth a flood of talk in which, as in a whirlpool, the bewildered listener is carried round and round till such time as the speaker has fully resolved the question in his own mind and decided what he shall say, which done, the rotatory motion ceases, and the matter is disposed of in a sentence. This is a great gift-to be able to talk what sounds like sense, to seem to be really answering a question, and yet to commit yourself to nothing till such time as you have deliberately decided what you may judiciously say--but its exercise should be spared for great occasions. Mr. Gladstone avails himself of it continually, and by force of habit it has coloured his whole style, making it verbose and involved. is said that up in the Press Gallery the reporters, whilst they are in the habit of following out the meaning of ordinary speakers as sentence by sentence they evolve it, give up the task in the case of Mr. Gladstone. It is often hopeless to endeavour to discern for what goal his sentences, with their involutions, their qualifications, and their parenthetical sub-divisions, are bound; and so, as the right hon. gentleman has to be reported in full, the sentences are mechanically taken down in shorthand with the hope that they "will read" when they come to be written out. And this is a hope which is never falsified. The lengthiest and most portentous of Mr. Gladstone's sentences always have a clear and distinct thread of meaning running through them, and may be written out for the press as they are taken down from his lips without the alteration of a single word. The pity of it is that the thread is painfully attenuated in consequence of being stretched over such an unconscionably long course.

It is in a great debate, when the armies of political parties are

set in battle array, that Mr. Gladstone's transcendent abilities as an orator alone have full play. When before rising to speak he has definitively made up his mind which of "three" or more courses he shall take, and has nothing to do but declare his colours, build around them a rampart of argument, and seek to rally to them halting friends, then the marvellous clearness of his perception and his unusual ability for making dark places light is disclosed. purporting to answer a simple question, and taking a quarter of an hour to do it in, Mr. Gladstone sometimes sits down leaving the House in a condition of dismayed bewilderment, hopelessly attempting to grope its way through the intricacies of the sonorous sentences it has been listening to. But if he desires to make himself understood there is no one who can better effect the purpose. There are few instances of a Government measure which met with more determined and diversely motived opposition than the Irish University Act introduced last Session. It is a matter of history that it broke the power of the strongest Ministry that has ruled England in these latter days. The provisions of the measure were singularly intricate, but when Mr. Gladstone sat down after speaking for upwards of three hours in explanation of the Bill, he had not only made it clear from preamble to schedule, but he had momentarily talked the House of Commons over into the belief that it was a Bill that it would do well to accept. Mr. Horsman has been much laughed at because whilst the glamour of this great speech was still strong upon him he wrote an enthusiastic letter to the Times hailing Mr. Gladstone and his Bill as among the most notable of recent dispensations of a beneficent Providence words which he subsequently ate in the presence of a crowded House. But Mr. Horsman differed from seven-eighths of the House of Commons only in this, that he put pen to paper whilst he was yet under the influence of the orator's spell, whereas the rest of the members contented themselves by verbal and private expressions of opinion.

Mr. Gladstone's oratorical manner is much more strongly marked by action than is Mr. Bright's. He emphasises by smiting his right hand in the open palm of his left; by pointing his finger straight out at his adversary, real or representative; and, in his hottest moments, by beating the table with his clenched hand. Sometimes in answer to cheers he turns right round to his immediate supporters in the benches behind him, and speaks directly to them; whereupon the Conservatives, who hugely enjoy a baiting of the emotionable ex-Premier, call out "Order! order!" This call seldom fails in the desired effect of exciting the right hon. gentleman's irascibility, and

when he loses his temper his opponents may well be glad. Mr. Bright always writes out the peroration of his speeches, and at one time was accustomed to send the slip of paper to the reporters. Mr. Disraeli sometimes writes out the whole of his speeches. The one he delivered to the Glasgow students last November was in type in the office of a London newspaper at the moment the right hon. gentleman was speaking at the University. Mr. Gladstone never writes a line of his speeches, and some of his most successful ones have been made in the heat of debate, and necessarily without preparation. His speech in winding up the debate on the Irish University Bill last Session has rarely been excelled for close reasoning, brilliant illustration, and powerful eloquence; yet if it be referred to it will be seen that it is for the greater and best part a reply to the speech of Mr. Disraeli, who had just sat down, yielding the floor to his rival half an hour after midnight. It is speeches like this that add poignancy to the regret with which we think of Mr. Gladstone's every-day style of talking, and I look forward hopefully to the coming days of this Session when, relieved from the trammels of office and the fancied necessity for incessant speech-making, he may be content with speaking less frequently and in fewer words.

I had something to say about Mr. Fawcett in an article published in the Gentleman's last month, and then recorded the great strides he had made in a single Session towards position as a Parliamentary orator. It is this sudden improvement upon an old manner, rather than a positive acquisition of a faultless new one, which appears to justify the classification of the Professor in the brief list of orators in the House of Commons. Unquestionably Mr. Fawcett stands third, with only Mr. Bright and Mr. Gladstone above him; but he is as yet a bad third. His addresses to the House of Commons are still more of professorial exercitations than statesmanlike orations. He lacks the fancy and imagination which make the whole world the domain of the true orator and enable him to bring all its treasures to lay at the feet of his audience. Within the past year Mr. Fawcett has shown signs of the disenthralment of his mind from the trammels of sectarianism, and in proportion to his mental advances in this direction has been his advance in the estimation of the House of Commons. There will always be much of the Puritan about him; but latterly the manifestations of this spirit have been tempered by a fuller measure of charity, and he has tacitly admitted that those who differ from him on matters of opinion are not therefore necessarily predestined to perpetual residence in the place where the worm dieth not and the fire is never quenched. Mr. Fawcett's attitude

in the debate on the Education Act Amendment Bill of last Session fluttered his old associates, but it marked a new era in his Parliamentary career. Following upon his conduct in the matter of the Dublin University Bill he was instantly lifted up from the narrow paths of the partisan to the broad platform of the statesman; and there is every reason to believe that when he returns to the House he will continue to keep his new position, and even to improve upon it. A mere partisan can never be an orator, for the obvious reason that his view is bounded by the hedge of party; and I hold that an orator must, as necessary preliminaries to supreme excellence, be not only sincere and earnest, but absolutely fetterless.

WATERSIDE SKETCHES.

I. OUR OPENING DAY.

E are a very united family yonder, and not ashamed to avow ourselves followers of quaint, pure-hearted Izaak Walton. We aim, in our several ways, to emulate his spirit, which was eminently unselfish. We are unknown to the world, but we know each other, and hold as a primary article of faith that the man who possesses a good fishingrod, a stout walking-stick, and the opportunities and means of using both in moderation, ought to be happy and healthy.

This brotherhood of men who love the gentle art with unswerving fidelity includes persons through whose estates well-stocked salmonrivers sweep, but some of these days you shall see them enjoying with the keenest relish an afternoon's roach or gudgeon fishing by the banks of a prosaic stream. We hold that the poorest prenticeboy who trudges to Lea-side, five miles out and five miles home, on Sundays and holidays, and patiently angles for a handful of roachlets through the summer's day, has as good a right to the title of sportsman as the gentleman who pursues the lordliest game that water, air, or earth can supply; and we take leave to doubt most gravely the genuine sportsmanship of the man thinking, speaking, or writing disdainfully of the humble anglers who perforce must limit their pastime to the unpretentious float and matter-of-fact ground bait. We of this united family earn our right to recreation by work of divers kinds-on Exchanges, in Government offices, in establishments where printing-presses groan and struggle, in Westminster Hall, in chambers; we buy and sell, we toil by brain and hand, we are rich and poor, we are old and young, but we are not ashamed a second time to avow ourselves followers of quaint, pure-hearted Izaak Walton, whose nature was eminently unselfish.

It is the last night in March, and we muster in force amongst our old acquaintances, the trophies encased around the walls. How we fight our piscatorial battles over again! That monster pike glares as if he were cognisant of the story re-told of his folly and fall-how, greedily grabbing at the minnow that was intended for a passing