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FROM THE MORNING AT HAWARDEN TO THE EVENING AT THE HOUSE OF COMMONS.

BY H. W. MASSINGHAM OF THE "LONDON CHRONICLE."

HIS PERSONALITY.

Personally Mr. Gladstone is an example of the most winning, the most delicate, and the most minute courtesy. He is a gentleman of the elder English school, and his manners are grand and urbane, always stately, never condescending, and genuinely modest. He affects even the dress of the old school, and I have seen him in the morning wearing an old black evening coat, such as Professor Jowett still affects. The humblest passer-by in Piccadilly, raising his hat to Mr. Gladstone, is sure to get a sweeping salute in return. This courtliness is all the more remarkable, because it accompanies and adorns a very strong temper, a will of iron, and a habit of being regarded for the greater part of his lifetime as a personal force of unequalled magnitude. Yet the most foolish, and perhaps one may add the most impertinent, of Mr. Gladstone's dinner-table questioners is sure of an elaborate reply, delivered with the air of a student in deferential talk with his master. To the cloth Mr. Gladstone shows a reverence that occasionally woos the observer to a smile. The callowest curate is sure of a respectful listener in the foremost Englishman of the day. On the other hand, in private conversation the premier does not often brook contradiction. His temper is high, and though, as George Russell has said, it is under vigilant control, there are subjects on which it is easy to arouse the old lion. Then the grand eyes flash, the torrent of brilliant monologue flows with more rapid sweep, and the dinner table is breathless at the spectacle of Mr. Gladstone angry. As to his relations with his family, they are very charming. It is a pleasure to hear Herbert Gladstone--his youngest, and possibly his favorite son--speak of "my father." All of them, sons and daughters, are absolutely devoted to his cause, wrapped up in his personality, and enthusiastic as to every side of his character. Of children Mr. Gladstone has always been fond, and he has more than one favorite among his grandchildren.

MR. GLADSTONE'S MORNING.

Mr. Gladstone's day begins about 7.30, after seven hours and a half of sound, dreamless sleep, which no disturbing crisis in public affairs was ever known to spoil. At Hawarden it usually opens with a morning walk to church, with which no kind of weather--hail, rain, snow, or frost--is ever allowed to interfere. In his rough slouch hat and gray Inverness cape, the old man plods sturdily to his devotions. To the rain, the danger of sitting in wet clothes, and small troubles of this kind, he is absolutely impervious, and Mrs. Gladstone's solicitude has never availed to change his lifelong custom in this respect. Breakfast over, working time commences. I am often astonished at the manner in which Mr. Gladstone manages to crowd his almost endlessly varied occupations into the forenoon, for when he is in the country he has practically no other continuous and regular work-time. Yet into this space he has to condense his enormous correspondence--for which, when no private secretary is available, he seeks the help of his sons and daughters--his political work, and his varied literary pursuits. The explanation of this extreme orderliness of mind is probably to be found in his unequaled habit of concentration on the business before him. As in matters of policy, so in all his private habits, Mr. Gladstone thinks of one thing and of one thing only at a time. When home rule was up, he had no eyes or ears for any political subject but Ireland, of course excepting his favorite excursions into the twin subjects of Homer and Christian theology. Enter the room when Mr. Gladstone is reading a book; you may move noisily about the chamber, ransack the books on the shelves, stir the furniture, but never for one moment will the reader be conscious of your presence. At Downing Street, during his earlier ministries, these hours of study were often, I might say usually, preceded by the famous breakfast at which the celebrated actor or actress, the rising poet, the well-known artist, the diplomatist halting on his way from one station of the kingdom to another, were welcome guests. Madame Bernhardt, Miss Ellen Terry, Henry Irving, Madame Modjeska, have all assisted at these pleasant feasts.

HIS AFTERNOON.

Lunch with Mr. Gladstone is a very simple meal which neither at Hawarden nor Downing Street admits of much form or publicity. The afternoon which follows is a very much broken and less regular period. At Hawarden a portion of it is usually spent out of doors. In the old days it was devoted to the felling of some giant of the woods. Within the last few years, however, Sir Andrew Clark, Mr. Gladstone's favorite physician and intimate friend, has recommended that tree-felling be given over; and now Mr. Gladstone's recreation, in addition to long walks, in which he still delights, is that of lopping branches off veterans whose trunks have fallen to younger arms.

AS A READER.

MR. GLADSTONE'S LIBRARY.

AT THE DINNER TABLE.

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 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.

SPEECH-MAKING.

WHERE MAN GOT HIS EARS.

BY HENRY DRUMMOND, LL.D., F.R.S.E., F.G.S.

One of the most humorous sights in nature, less common in America than Europe, is a snail wandering about with a shell on its back. The progenitors of snails once lived in the sea, and when they evolved themselves ashore they carried this relic of the water with them,--an anomaly which, seen to-day, seems as ridiculous as if one were to meet an Indian in Paris with his canoe on his back. But there are more animals besides snails that once lived in the water. If embryology is any guide to the past, nothing is more certain than that the ancient progenitors of Man once lived an aquatic life. As the traveller, wandering in foreign lands, brings back all manner of curios to remind him where he has been--clubs and spears, clothes and pottery, which represent the ways of life of those whom he has met, so the body of Man, returning from its long journey through the animal kingdom, emerges laden with the spoils of its watery pilgrimage. These relics are not mere curiosities; they are as real as the clubs and spears, the clothes and pottery. Like them, they were once a part of life's vicissitude; they represent organs which have been outgrown; old forms of apparatus long since exchanged for better, yet somehow not yet destroyed by the hand of time. The physical body of Man, so great is the number of these relics, is an old curiosity-shop, a museum of obsolete anatomies, discarded tools, outgrown and aborted organs. All other animals also contain among their useful organs a proportion which are long past their work; and so significant are these rudiments of a former state of things, that anatomists have often expressed their willingness to stake the theory of Evolution upon their presence alone.

Prominent among these vestigial structures, as they are called, are those which smack of the sea. At one time there was nothing else in the world but water-life; all the land animals are late inventions. One reason why animals began in the water is that it is easier to live in the water--anatomically and physiologically cheaper--than to live on the land. The denser element supports the body better, demanding a less supply of muscle and bone; and the perpetual motion of the sea brings the food to the animal, making it unnecessary for the animal to move to the food. This and other correlated circumstances call for far less mechanism in the body, and, as a matter of fact, all the simplest forms of life at the present day are inhabitants of the water.

When Man left the water, however,--or what was to develop into Man--he took very much more ashore with him than a shell. Instead of crawling ashore at the worm stage, he remained in the water until he evolved into something like a fish; so that when, after an amphibian interlude, he finally left it, many "ancient and fish-like" characters remained in his body to tell the tale. Now, it is among these piscine characteristics that we find the clue to where Man got his ears. The chief characteristic of a fish is its apparatus for breathing the air dissolved in the water. This consists of gills supported on strong arches, the branchial arches, which in the Elasmobranch fishes are from five to seven in number and uncovered with any operculum, or lid. Communicating with these arches, in order to allow the water which has been taken in at the mouth to pass out at the gills, an equal number of slits or openings are provided in the neck. Without these holes in their neck all fishes would instantly perish, and we may be sure Nature took exceptional care in perfecting this particular piece of the mechanism. Now it is one of the most extraordinary facts in natural history that these slits in the fish's neck are still represented in the neck of Man. Almost the most prominent feature, indeed, after the head, in every mammalian embryo, are the four clefts or furrows of the old gill-slits. They are still known in embryology by no other name--gill-slits--and so persistent are these characters that children have been known to be born with them not only externally visible--which is a common occurrence--but open, through and through, so that fluids taken in at the mouth could pass through them and trickle out at the neck. This fact was so astounding as to be for a long time denied. It was thought that when this happened, the orifice must have been accidentally made by the probe of the surgeon. But Dr. Sutton has recently met with actual cases where this has occurred. "I have seen milk," he says, "issue from such fistulae in individuals who have never been submitted to sounding."

N. B.--They appear as "clefts," marking not the adult fish, but the embryo at the corresponding stage.

"Evolution and Disease," p. 81.

In the common case of children born with these vestiges, the old gill-slits are represented by small openings in the skin on the sides of the neck and capable of admitting a thin probe. Sometimes the place where they have been in childhood is marked throughout life by small round patches of white skin. These relics of the sea, these apparitions of the Fish, these sudden resurrections, are betrayals of man's pedigree. Men wonder at mummy-wheat germinating after a thousand years of dormancy. But here are ancient features bursting into life after unknown ages, and challenging modern science for a verdict on their affinities.

When the fish came ashore, its water-breathing apparatus was no longer of any use to it. At first it had to keep it on, for it took a long time to perfect the air-breathing apparatus which was to replace it. But when this was ready the problem was, what to do with the earlier organ? Nature is exceedingly economical, and could not throw all this mechanism away. In fact Nature almost never parts with any structure she has once made. What she does is to change it into something else. Conversely, Nature seldom makes anything new; her method of creation is to adapt something old. Now when Nature started out to manufacture ears, she made them out of the old breathing apparatus. She saw that if water could pass through a hole in the neck, sound could pass likewise, and she set to work upon the highest up of the five gill-slits and slowly elaborated it into a hearing organ.

There never had been an external ear in the world till this was done, or any good ear at all. Creatures which live in water do not seem to use hearing much, and the sound-waves in fishes are simply conveyed through the walls of the head to the internal ear without any definite mechanism. But as soon as land-life began, owing to the changed medium through which sound-waves must now be propagated, a more delicate instrument was required. And hence one of the first things attended to was the construction and improvement of the ear.

It has long been a growing certainty to Comparative Anatomy that the external and middle ear in Man are simply a development, an improved edition, of the first gill-cleft and its surrounding parts. The tympano-Eustachian passage is the homologue or counterpart of the spiracle, associated in the shark with the first gill-opening. Professor His of Leipsic has worked out the whole development in minute detail, and conclusively demonstrated the mode of origin of the external ear from the coalescence of six rounded tubercles surrounding the first branchial cleft at an early period of embryonic life. Haeckel's account of the process is as follows: "All the essential parts of the middle ear--the tympanic membrane, tympanic cavity, and Eustachian tube--develop from the first gill-opening with its surrounding parts, which in the Primitive Fishes remains throughout life as an open blowhole, situated between the first and second gill-arches. In the embryos of higher Vertebrates it closes in the centre, the point of concrescence forming the tympanic membrane. The remaining outer part of the first gill-opening is the rudiment of the outer ear-canal. From the inner part originates the tympanic cavity, and further inward, the Eustachian tube. In connection with these, the three bonelets of the ear develop from the first two gill-arches; the hammer and anvil from the first, and the stirrup from the upper end of the second gill-arch. Finally as regards the external ear, the ear-shell , and the outer ear-canal, leading from the shell to the tympanic membrane--these parts develop in the simplest way from the skin-covering which borders the outer orifice of the first gill-opening. At this point the ear-shell rises in the form of a circular fold of skin, in which cartilage and muscles afterwards form."

HAECKEL: "Evolution of Man," vol. ii, p. 269.

SUTTON: "Evolution and Disease."

Dr. Sutton further calls attention to the fact that on ancient statues of fauns and satyrs cervical auricles are sometimes found, and he figures the head of a satyr from the British Museum, carved long before the days of anatomy, where a sessile ear on the neck is most distinct. A still better illustration may be seen in the Art Museum at Boston on a full-sized cast of a faun belonging to the later Greek period; and there are other examples in the same building. One interest of these neck-ears in statues is that they are not as a rule modelled after the human ear but taken from the cervical ear of the goat, from which the general idea of the faun was derived. This shows that neck-ears were common on the goats of that period--as they are on goats to this day--but the sculptor would hardly have had the daring to introduce this feature in the human subject unless he had been aware that pathological facts encouraged him. The occurrence of these ears in goats is no more than one would expect. Indeed one would look for them not only in Man, but in all the Mammalia, for so far as their bodies are concerned all the higher animals are near relations. Observations on vestigial structures in animals are sadly wanting; but they are certainly found in the horse, pig, sheep, and others.

That the human ear was not always the squat and degenerate instrument it is at present may be seen by a critical glance at its structure. Mr. Darwin records how a celebrated sculptor called his attention to a little peculiarity in the external ear, which he had often noticed both in men and women. "The peculiarity consists in a little blunt point, projecting from the inwardly folded margin or helix. When present, it is developed at birth, and according to Professor Ludwig Meyer, more frequently in man than in woman. The helix obviously consists of the extreme margin of the ear folded inwards; and the folding appears to be in some manner connected with the whole external ear being permanently pressed backwards. In many monkeys who do not stand high in the order, as baboons and some species of macacus, the upper portion of the ear is slightly pointed, and the margin is not at all folded inwards; but if the margin were to be thus folded, a slight point would necessarily project towards the centre."

"Descent of Man," p. 15.

Here then, in this discovery of the lost tip of the ancestral ear, is further and visible advertisement of man's Descent, a surviving symbol of the stirring times and dangerous days of his animal youth. It is difficult to imagine any other theory than that of Descent which could account for all these facts. That evolution should leave such clues lying about is at least an instance of its candor.

But this does not exhaust the betrayals of this most confiding organ. If we turn from the outward ear to the muscular apparatus for working it, fresh traces of its animal career are brought to light. The erection of the ear, in order to catch sound better, is a power possessed by almost all mammals, and the attached muscles are large and greatly developed in all but domesticated forms. This same apparatus, though he makes no use of it whatever, is still attached to the ears of Man. It is so long since he relied on the warnings of hearing, that by a well-known law the muscles have fallen into disuse and atrophied. In many cases, however, the power of twitching the ear is not wholly lost, and every school-boy can point to some one in his class who retains the capacity and is apt to revive it in irrelevant circumstances.

One might run over all the other organs of the human body and show their affinities with animal structures and an animal past. The twitching of the ear, for instance, suggests another obsolete or obsolescent power--the power, or rather the set of powers, for twitching the skin, especially the skin of the scalp and forehead by which we raise the eyebrows. Sub-cutaneous muscles for shaking off flies from the skin, or for erecting the hair of the scalp, are common among quadrupeds, and these are represented in the human subject by the still functioning muscles of the forehead, and occasionally of the head itself. Everyone has met persons who possess the power of moving the whole scalp to and fro, and the muscular apparatus for effecting it is identical with what is normally found in some of the Quadrumana.

When one passes from the head to the other extremity of the human body one comes upon a somewhat unexpected but very pronounced characteristic--the relic of the tail, and not only of the tail, but of muscles for wagging it. Everyone who first sees a human skeleton is amazed at this discovery. At the end of the vertebral column, curling faintly outward in suggestive fashion, are three, four, and occasionally five vertebrae forming the coccyx, a true rudimentary tail. In the adult this is always concealed beneath the skin, but in the embryo, both in man and ape, at an early stage it is much longer than the limbs. What is decisive as to its true nature, however, is that even in the embryo of man the muscles for wagging it are still found. In the grown-up human being these muscles are represented by bands of fibrous tissue, but cases are known where the actual muscles persist through life. That a distinct external tail should not be still found in Man may seem disappointing to the evolutionist. But the want of a tail argues more for the theory of Evolution than its presence would have done. It would have been contrary to the Theory of Descent had he possessed a longer tail. For all the anthropoids most allied to Man have long since also parted with theirs.

It was formerly held that the entire animal creation had contributed something to the anatomy of Man, that as Serres expressed it "Human Organogenesis is a condensed Comparative Anatomy." But though Man has not such a monopoly of the past as is here inferred--other types having here and there emerged and developed along lines of their own--it is certain that the materials for his body have been brought together from an unknown multitude of lowlier forms of life.

JAMES PARTON'S RULES OF BIOGRAPHY.

PREFATORY NOTE.

The following letters were written in 1888 and 1889, by James Parton to the Honorable Alfred R. Conkling of New York City. In December, 1888, Mr. Conkling wrote to Mr. Parton, making him a formal offer to assist in the preparation of the "Life and Letters of Roscoe Conkling." Mr. Parton generously declined to accept payment, but took a great interest in the work, and during the following year corresponded frequently with Mr. Conkling, advising upon specific points and setting forth the general principles of the art of biography.

We are indebted to Mr. Conkling for permission to print these letters, which are full of wise suggestion to the literary "recruit," and of genuine human interest to all lovers of good reading. They give us glimpses of Mr. Parton, not only as a conscientious writer of biography who had acquired a rare mastery of his art, but also as a man of aggressive interest in public affairs, of broad mind, and a singularly wholesome nature.

DEAR SIR: I am glad to learn from yours of yesterday that we are to have a biography of so interesting and marked a character as the lamented Roscoe Conkling, and I should esteem it a privilege to render any assistance toward it in my power.

The great charm of all biography is the truth, told simply, directly, boldly, charitably.

But this is also the great difficulty. A human life is long. A human character is complicated. It is often inconsistent with itself, and it requires nice judgment to proportion it in such a way as to make the book really correspond with the man, and make the same impression upon the reader that the man did upon those who knew him best.

My great rules are:

I have generally had the great advantage of loving my subjects warmly, and I do not believe we can do justice to any human creature unless we love him. A true love enlightens, but not blinds, as we often see in the case of mothers who love their children better, and also know them better, than anybody else ever does.

With regard to New York, I am always going there, but never go; still, I may have to go soon, and I will go anyway if I can do anything important or valuable in the way you suggest--but not "professionally," except as an old soldier helps a recruit.

Very truly yours,

JAMES PARTON.

DEAR SIR: I have examined with much interest and pleasure your work upon Mexico, with a title so extravagantly modest as almost to efface the author. Let us accept our fate. It is our destiny to live in an age when all human distinctions are abolished, or about to be abolished, except the advertiser and his victim. Your work appears to me to be quite a model, and I wish I were going to be a tourist in Mexico that I might have the advantage of using it.

One word more with regard to your biography. In the case of a person like Mr. Conkling, whose vocation it was to express himself in words, and whose utterances were often most brilliant and powerful, I think you should make great and free use of his letters and speeches. Is not a volume of five hundred pages too small? Could you not make a work in two volumes, and get Mark Twain to sell it by subscription?

Another: I hope you feel the peculiar character and importance of that part of New York of which Utica is the central point. It does not figure much in books, but there are many strong and remarkable families there. I should like to see it elucidated. The first questions to be asked of a man are: Where, and of whom, was he born?

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