Dinner with Mr. Gladstone is the stately ceremonial meal which it has become to the upper and upper-middle class Englishman. Mr. Gladstone invariably dresses for it, wearing the high crest collar which Harry Furniss has immortalized, and a cutaway coat which strikes one as of a slightly old-fashioned pattern. His digestion never fails him, and he eats and drinks with the healthy appetite of a man of thirty. A glass of champagne is agreeable to him, and if he does not take his glass or two of port at dinner, he makes it up by two or three glasses of claret, which he considers an equivalent. Oysters he never could endure, but, like Schopenhauer and Goethe and many another great man, he is a consistently hearty and unfastidious eater. He talks much in an animated monologue, though the common complaint that he monopolizes the conversation is not a just one. You cannot easily turn Mr. Gladstone into a train of ideas which does not interest him, but he is a courteous and even eager listener; and if the subject is of general interest, he does not bear in it any more than the commanding part which the rest of the company invariably allows him. His speaking voice is a little gruffer and less musical than his oratorical notes, which, in spite of the invading hoarseness, still at times ring out with their old clearness. As a rule he does not talk on politics. On ecclesiastical matters he is a never wearied disputant. Poetry has also a singular charm for him, and no modern topic has interested him more keenly than the discussion as to Tennyson’s successor to the laureateship. I remember that at a 49 small dinner at which I recently met him, the conversation ran almost entirely on the two subjects of old English hymns and young English poets. His favorite religious poet is, I should say, Cardinal Newman, and his favorite hymn, Toplady’s “Rock of Ages,” of which his Latin rendering is to my mind far stronger and purer than the original English. When he is in town, he dines out almost every day, though, as I have said, he eschews formal and mixed gatherings, and affects the small and early dinner party at which he can meet an old friend or two, and see a young face which he may be interested in seeing. One habit of his is quite unvarying. He likes to walk home, and to walk home alone. He declines escort, and slips away for his quiet stroll under the stars, or even through the fog and mist on a London winter’s night. Midnight usually brings his busy, happy day to a close. Sleeplessness never has and never does trouble him, and at eighty-three his nights are as dreamless and untroubled as those of a boy of ten.
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.
