NEWS OF THE WEEK.
THE prominent anxiety of the week has not, after all, been our disaster in Afghanistan, profoundly as that has been felt, but the serious illness of the Prime Minister, which on Monday and Tuesday excited something like consternation. Mr. Gladstone was taken ill yesterday week while dining out, and was unable to attend the Cabinet on Saturday. There was some congestion of. the lung and a good deal of fever, and till Tuesday it was gravely feared that a long fever might be impending. On Tuesday, however, a change for the better took place, and on Wednesday the fever disappeared, leaving Mr. Gladstone very weak, but free from illness. The universal feeling of sorrow, which was generously shared by the Conservative party, amounted, amongst the many thousands of politicians who see in Mr. Gladstone not merely the survivor of a much greater political generation than our own, but the greatest figure of that greater age, to something like dismay. Indeed, in relation alike to statesmanship, to principle, to courage, to nerve, and to breadth of sympathy, Mr. Gladstone supplies us with a standard of political life that no other statesman of the day has yet ap- proached.
