HOW TO GET STRONG
to feel that the climax of his life had come. His years dropped from him like a cloak. His voice was like a deep-toned bell, clear and clarion. Not for a moment did it fail him during the hour that he held the House under the absolute spell of his eloquence. Not a single oratorical arrow was absent from his quiver, and he used them all. Wit, satire, invective, logic, pleading, scorn, and denunciation followed each other in overwhelming succession. Mr. Gladstone in oratorical passion is magnificent and terrible. Last night he was vengeance incarnate. Words that were blows fell upon his enemies with a fury that made the great gladiator seem something more than a human antagonist. At the same time it was a scene and a speech which made it more evident than any previous event in his career that Mr. Gladstone, at the present moment, embodies greater power in personal leadership than any man of his time."—New York Sun, February 4, 1893.
A pretty good man that at eighty-three, surely!
"Mr. Gladstone never appears to greater advantage than when taking a walk in the country with a congenial friend whose physical powers are equal to the task of keeping up with a pedestrian whom no distance could tire. It was not until he was well advanced in life that he took, partly as an amusement and partly for exercise, to the practice of felling trees. In this difficult art he attained a skill which was the marvel of professional woodsmen; and of which the muscles of his arm, wiry and spare, like the rest of his body, gave little promise. In his youth he often spoke of himself as being good upon any day for a forty-mile walk, and, although he never accomplished the feat performed more than once by his second son, the Rev. Stephen Gladstone, of walking up from Oxford to London in a day (fifty-six miles); it
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