Contrast the case of Mr. GLADSTONE, from whom anyone could draw a postcard and most people a chip of some recently-felled tree, and who is in my mind wonderful and supreme by reason of two inventions which, though no one would ever guess them to be the result of a Prime Minister's cogitations, deserve the widest fame. Of these one was the product of his unaided genius; the other the result of the collaboration with his wife.
Let us begin with the individual triumph.
Everyone who has ever stayed under anyone else's roof, from a dine-and-sleep at Windsor Castle to a week in lovely Lucerne, has been confronted, when packing-up time arrived, with the problem of the sponge. No matter how muscular the fingers that wring this article, no matter how thick and costly the rubbered receptacle that holds it, there is always the chance of dampness communicating itself to other things in the bag. Isn't there?
How so to squeeze the sponge as to drive out the last drop of moisture was the problem before the massive intellect of the Grand Old Man. Need I say that he solved it? His method, as he himself in his unselfish way, told one of the diarists, possibly Sir M.E. GRANT-DUFF, possibly Mr. G.W.E. RUSSELL--I forget whom--was to wrap up the sponge in a bath-towel and jump on it. Here, for the historical painter, is a theme indeed--something worth all the ordinary dull occasions which provoke his talented if somewhat staid brush: the great Liberal statesman, the promoter of Home Rule, the author of _The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture_, leaping upon the bath-towel that held his sponge. But no historical painter could do justice to such a scene. It needs the movies.
Those of us then who dry our sponges in this way--and I am a fervent devotee--owe the inventor a meed of praise. And equally those of us who put into our hot water bottles at night hot tea instead of hot water (as I never have done and never mean to do), so that, waking in the small hours, we may yet not be without refreshment, owe a meed of praise to the same inspired innovator, for, if the chroniclers are correct, it was Mrs. GLADSTONE'S habit to retire to rest with a bottle thus nutritiously filled, which would be ready for her great man on his return from the House weary and athirst.