His infinite variety, his boundless resource, seem to be without any limitations.

By this time, you would have expected that one who had listened to him for nearly twenty years would imagine that he had no further oratorical worlds to conquer, and that he certainly would not have waited to his eighty-fourth year to do something better than ever he had done before.

But so it was.

In passion, in destructive sarcasm, in dramatic force, in the rush and resistless sweep of language, Mr.Gladstone was more potent in the dinner hour of that Thursday night than he was ever at any other single moment in his almost sixty years of triumphant oratory.
[Sidenote: His powers as a mimic.] Observers are divided as to his temper when he rose.

Some onlookers, observing the tremendous force of voice and language--the broad, ample, and frequent gestures--the tremulousness that sometimes underlies the swell of passion--the deadly and startling pallor of the face--thought that he was suffering from excitement almost touching and perhaps affrighting to behold; while others thought that the chief and most impressive feature of this perfect tornado of triumphant eloquence, was the perfect calm that lay in the heart and bosom of all that storm.
There are two things which will tell you of the omnipotence of an orator--one is the effect of his speech on foes as well as friends, and the other is its effect upon himself.