John Wilkes, they say, to all appearance a “most uninteresting-looking man,” asked for only half an hour of a start to beat the handsomest gentleman in England at the game of games. Women forgot what he was like as soon as he began to talk.
Who has not seen women turning sidelong glances, with that surreptitious intentness we all know so well, towards some very ordinary man in whose voice they, but not we, detect the indefinable something that has the power of luring these shy creatures from their inaccessible retreats ? What man has not seen this play and puzzled over it ? The quality—is it perhaps something caressing, or something brutal and ultra-masculine, or both at once ? Who knows what it is that their intuition perceives ?
So we ask, we less favoured mortals, as we turn and look at him also, hard and long, only to give it up with a shrug !
When I am one of a crowd under the spell of an orator—a rare bird, by the way, in England—I feel his power less in what he says than in how he says it. Gladstone, for example, swayed his audience by the fervour of his personality, not by any beauty of word or thought in his rhetoric. How meaningless his speeches seem to us nowadays as we vainly try to read them, how involved, discursive, ambiguous, turgid. How dull ! And yet we
