The remarks made on the following day to a Welsh
and Yorkshire party, who had sung to Mr. Gladstone, were much pleasanter, and more in the spirit of a host who is entertaining a multitude of agreeable guests. He complimented them on their songs, and said that, comparing their songs with American songs, which he had heard only by the medium of the telephone,—Mr. Gladstone meant the phonograph, as he afterwards explained, but forgot for the moment that the tele- phone has not yet been found able to communicate anything from a distance of three thousand miles,—Yorkshire and Wales had nothing to be ashamed of. It was rather a coincidence that on the same day on which Mr. Gladstone was talking of the performances of the phonograph as a listener, Professor Tyndall at Guildford was talking of it too, by way of illustrating Mr. Gladstone's own political feats in the art of in- spiring his political followers with his own changes of political creed, and the success with which he persuades them to repeat as obediently as any phonograph his most abrupt and remark- able retractations and repudiations of former opinion.
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