half-courses and whole-courses (providing an answer at last to the pathetic
query, "What is a sardine?" "A whole course, of course")--no change is so
striking as the fact that when a paper now refers to the PRIME MINISTER or
the PREMIER, it means no longer HERBERT HENRY but DAVID. In a world of flux
and mutability I had come to think of Mr. ASQUITH as a rock, a pyramid, a
pole-star. But, alas! even he was subject to alteration.

Thinking earnestly upon his career I have realised bow sad it is that he
has bequeathed us no ASQUITH legend. Always reserved and intent, he
discouraged Press gossip to such a degree as actually to have turned the
key on the Tenth Muse. Everybody else might lunch at the hospitable board
in Downing Street, but interviewers had no chance. In vain did the Quexes
of this frivolous city hope for even a crumb--there was nothing for them.
Mr. ASQUITH came into office, held it, and left it without a single
concession to Demos's love of personalia. He did not even wear comic
collars or white hats or a single eyeglass or any other grotesquely
significant thing; and how much poorer are we in consequence and how much
poorer will posterity be!

Contrast the case of Mr. GLADSTONE, from whom anyone could draw a postcard
and most people a chip of some recently-felled tree, and who is in my mind
wonderful and supreme by reason of two inventions which, though no one
would ever guess them to be the result of a Prime Minister's cogitations,
deserve the widest fame. Of these one was the product of his unaided
genius; the other the result of the collaboration with his wife.

Let us begin with the individual triumph.

Everyone who has ever stayed under anyone else's roof, from a
dine-and-sleep at Windsor Castle to a week in lovely Lucerne, has been