IN THE HOUSE.
His afternoons when in town and during the season are, of course, given up pretty exclusively to public business and the House of Commons, which he usually reaches about four o’clock. He goes by a side door straight to his private room, where he receives his colleagues, and hears of endless questions and motions, which fall like leaves in Vallambrosa around the head of a prime minister. Probably steps will be taken to remove much of this irksome and somewhat petty burden from the shoulders of the aged minister. But leader Mr. Gladstone must and will be at eighty-three, quite as fully as he was at sixty. Indeed, the complaint of him always has been that he does too much, both for his own health and the smooth manipulation of the great machine which, as was once remarked, creaks and moves rather lumberingly under his masterful but over-minute guidance. During the last two or three years it has been customary for the Whigs to so arrange that Mr. Gladstone speaks early in the evening. He is not always able to do this while the Home Rule Bill is under discussion, but I do not think he will ever again find it necessary to follow the entire course of a Parliamentary debate. He never needed to do as much listening from the Treasury Bench as he was wont to do in his first and second ministries. I do not think that any prime minister ever spent half as much time in the House of Commons as did Mr. Gladstone; certainly no one ever made one-tenth part as many speeches. Indeed, it requires all Mrs. Gladstone’s vigilance to avert the physical strain consequent upon overwork. With this purpose she invariably watches him in the House of Commons, from a corner seat in the right hand of the Ladies’ Gallery which is always reserved for her, and which I have never known her to miss occupying on any occasion of the slightest importance.
