MR. GLADSTONE AS HE LOOKS.
By Seth Low
I WAS much interested in the appearance of Mr. Gladstone as he rose to speak. A rather small, worn man he seemed from the visitors' gallery, whose thin gray hair betokened age, but whose active movement as he rose to his feet indicated abundant vigor. With a perfectly quiet manner, but with now and then a graceful gesture, his words came out in smoothly flowing sentences directly to the point. At times with a touch of irony, and often with a quiet humor which never failed of its mark, he showed himself the master of parliamentary fence which all men know him to be. When he sat down it was evident there was nothing left of the motion. Later on in the spring, as the fight waxed harder and heavier against him, he displayed, with all the fire of youth, those wonderful qualities which have made him, even to his contemporaries, a marvel. Men say he never fights better than when the battle is desperate. With a courage born of the most complete conviction that stopped at no risk and no labor, with an alertness that took in the whole field, with an eloquence which dazzled even his enemies, like a very Cœur de Lion he fought, almost single-handed, the unequal fight. At a distance, looking at him, it would seem wholly beyond his physical powers. Close at hand his face is marked, indeed, with the lines and wrinkles of many campaigns, and you see before you still an old man, but you see, also, what at a distance you miss, that the lines are the lines of endurance and hardy strength more than of weakness and old age.—Hon. Seth Low, in Brooklyn Magazine.