fellow-subjects my portrait is not overdrawn. The real Gladstone may be
other than this, but this is probably more like the Gladstone for whom
the electors believe they are voting, than a picture of Gladstone,
'warts and all,' would be. And when I am abused, as I know I shall be,
for printing such a sketch, I shall reply that there is at least one
thing to be said in its favor. To those who know him best, in his own
household, and to those who only know him as a great name in history, my
sketch will only appear faulty because it does not do full justice to
the character and genius of this extraordinary man."

Mr. Gladstone appeals to the men of to-day from the vantage point of
extreme old age. Age is so frequently dotage, that when a veteran
appears who preserves the heart of a boy and the happy audacity of
youth, under the 'lyart haffets wearing thin and bare' of aged manhood,
it seems as if there is something supernatural about it, and all men
feel the fascination and the charm. Mr. Gladstone, as he gleefully
remarked the other day, has broken the record. He has outlived Lord
Palmerston, who died when eighty-one, and Thiers, who only lived to be
eighty. The blind old Dandolo in Byron's familiar verse--

The octogenarian chief, Byzantium's conquering foe,

had not more energy than the Liberal leader, who, now in his
eighty-third year, has more nerve and spring and go than any of his
lieutenants, not excluding the youngest recruit. There is something
imposing and even sublime in the long procession of years which bridge
as with eighty-two arches the abyss of past time, and carry us back to
the days of Canning, and of Castlereagh, of Napoleon, and of Wellington.
His parliamentary career extends over sixty years--the lifetime of two
generations. He is the custodian of all the traditions, the hero of the