CHAPTER XVI.

MR. GLADSTONE AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.

In 1853 Lord Blachford wrote, just after Mr. Gladstone had unfolded his famous Budget which took off newspapers the additional stamp required for supplements, and imposed a single stamp of a penny for every newspaper of whatever sort: 'If Gladstone has anything Conservative in him, he will find it difficult to remain in a Ministry which must eventually be thrown upon Radical support. But he is really so powerful a man that, whatever shakes and delays and loss of time there may be, he must come up near the surface. I expect he will show the best--_i.e._, most politically powerful--side of himself as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Pursuing details is so much his power if he is only not run away with by it. I think, if it is not a paradox, he has not poetry enough for the formation of a first-rate judgment. He has an immense mass of knowledge most methodically arranged, but the separate items must be looked for in their respective boxes, and do not combine. The consequence is not merely want of play, but that crotchety, one-sided, narrowish mode of viewing a matter uncorrected by the necessary comparisons and considerations which people call ingenious and subtle and Gladstonian. He looks at the details, not at the aspects of a subject, and masters it, I should imagine, by pursuing it hither and thither from one starting-point, and not by walking round it; and financial subjects will, I suppose, bear this mode of treatment better than any other.'

In a valuable work by a distinguished German, Dr. Geiffeken, of which an English translation appeared in 1889, the author thus described Mr. Gladstone: 'His eloquence shows as its prominent quality the acuteness of intelligent methodical thought, and a readiness which, united with the most complete mastery of the matter, seems to require no preparation. He is beyond all cavil the first speaker of his time on subjects connected with public business, and is unsurpassed in power of luminous presentation of complicated economic questions. Relying on a memory that never fails, he knows how to impart life to the dryest array of figures, to group them in attractive forms, and to expound them so that his hearers may have them completely within their grasp. Nor is he less able in mastering the most involved question of law. His imagination is short-winded, dry, and apt to lose itself in speculation. His pathos is without warmth, his diction lacks charm, in spite of his copious command of language, his clear periods, and the inexhaustible staying power of his voice. The most unfavourable side of him as a speaker is seen when he begins to argue. Mr. Escobar never understood so well as he how to use language against the use of language, to involve his thoughts in clouds, to explain away inconvenient facts, to leave himself a back-door open to escape, and to father upon his opponents assertions which they would in nowise acknowledge. He involves the truth so hopelessly that it is impossible to disentangle it.'

Sir Rowland Hill, in his 'Autobiography,' writes: 'There are few public men with whom I have not come on such excellent terms, and from whom I have received so much kindness, as from Mr. Gladstone.'

Archbishop Trench, writing to Bishop Wilberforce in 1864, says: 'I deeply regret Mr. Gladstone's Reform speech, which certainly may alter his future--may alter the whole future of England. No man but one endowed with his genius and virtues could effectually do mischief to the institutions of England, but he may do it.' Again he wrote: 'Nothing can hinder Mr. Gladstone from being the most remarkable man in England.'

In the autumn of 1859 Sir Archibald Alison, the historian, met Mr. Gladstone at the hospitable mansion of Mr. Stirling, of Keir, near Stirling. 'I had been acquainted with him,' he writes, 'when he was a young man, and he had dined once or twice at our house in St. Colome Street, but I had not seen him for above twenty years, and in the interval he had become a leading Parliamentary orator and a great man. I was particularly observant, therefore, of his manner and conversation, and I was by no means disappointed in either. In manner he had the unaffected simplicity of earlier days, without either the assumption of superiority which might have been natural from his Parliamentary eminence, or the official pedantry so common in persons who have held high office in the State. In conversation he was rapid, easy and fluent, and possessed in a high degree that great quality so characteristic of a powerful mind, so inestimable in discoursing, of quickly apprehending what was said on the other side, and in reply setting himself at once to meet it fairly and openly. He was at once energetic and discursive, enthusiastic, but at times visionary. It was impossible to listen to him without pleasure, but equally so to reflect on what he said without grave hesitation. He left on my mind the impression of his being the best discourser on imaginative topics, and the most dangerous person to be entrusted with practical ones, I had ever met with. He gave me more the impression of great scholastic acumen than of weighty, statesman-like wisdom. Eminent in the University, and transferred without any practical training in the school of life at once from its shades to the House of Commons, he was like the ecclesiastics who in Catholic countries were often transferred direct from the cloister to the Cabinet, and began to operate on mankind as they would do on a dead body to elucidate certain points of physics, and who have so often proved at once the ablest and most dangerous of governors.'

An able writer, Mr. Bagehot, contends Mr. Gladstone is spoilt by applause, as follows: 'But because his achievements have fallen so much below the standard of his expectations, because destiny has fought against him and proved too much for him, is Mr. Gladstone on that account dejected? On the contrary, although he may experience some passing emotions of chagrin and a pious resentment against circumstances, he cherishes the comfortable conviction that both what he has done and what he has abstained from doing are right. Facts may be against him, but, then, so much the worse for the facts. His view of foreign politics is that every male child born into the world, whether Indian or African, Mussulman, Egyptian fellah or Zulu Kaffir, Aztec or Esquimaux, is capable of being educated into a free and independent elector for an English borough. Parliamentary institutions and representative Government are to him, not only the supreme end at which to aim, but the regime to which all nationalities are instinctively capable of adapting themselves. He makes no allowance for difference of race or climate, historical antecedents, national peculiarities. Herein he displays a lack of imagination, which is more strange, seeing that he possesses a large allowance of the imaginative faculty in other respects, and that he is really poet first and statistician afterwards.

'Particular causes have combined to confirm this defect. Mr. Gladstone has spent his life in the House of Commons, and cannot imagine a political system or a scheme of popular rule without as accurate a copy as conditions permit of the English representative Chamber. Again, he understands the English people so well, he has so completely identified himself with the ideas and aspirations of the upper class of bourgeoisie, that he considers it scarcely worth while to attempt to understand any other race. If he attempts such an intellectual process he can only measure the unfamiliar by reference to the familiar object.

'Mr. Gladstone has drunk too deeply of the atmosphere of idolatry and incense by which he has been surrounded. His immense experience of public life, his great capacities as a financier, his moral earnestness, his religious fervour, his scholarship, culture, and conversational powers, have procured for him enthusiastic worshippers in every section of the community--among the lower classes; among the men of commerce and business; among the Whig aristocracy, with whom he has been educated, and who have long since seen in him the bulwark against revolution; among the clergy of the Anglican Church and the Nonconformist ministers; finally, among certain small and exclusive divisions of London society itself. No man can receive the homage that has fallen to the lot of Mr. Gladstone during so many years without experiencing a kind of moral intoxication and forming an excessive idea of his own infallibility. Nor is it good for him that domestic interposition should ward off the hostile expressions of opinions in the newspapers not attached to his cause, but which may, nevertheless, represent the views of a certain section of the English people.'

Mr. G. W. E. Russell, in his charming little book on Gladstone, refers to Mr. Gladstone's speech on the Don Pacifico debate, as illustrating his tendency 'to belittle England, to extol and magnify the virtues and graces of other nations, and to ignore the homely prejudice of patriotism. He has frankly told us that he does not know the meaning of prestige, and an English Minister who makes that confession has yet to learn one of the governing sentiments of

'"An old and haughty nation proud in arms."

Whether this peculiarity of Mr. Gladstone's mind can be referred to the fact that he has not a drop of English blood in his body is perhaps a fanciful inquiry; but its consequences are plain enough in the vulgar belief that he is indifferent to the interests and honour of the country which he has three times ruled, and that his love for England is swamped and lost in the enthusiasm of humanity.'

In an article on the Peelites in _Macmillan's_, Professor Goldwin Smith writes: 'Gladstone does not yet belong to history, and the only part of his career which fell specially under my notice was Oxford University Reform. He opposed inquiry when a Commission was announced by Lord John Russell, and afterwards, as a member of the Coalition Government, he framed what was for that day a drastic and comprehensive measure of reform. . . . It was impossible to be brought into contact with Mr. Gladstone, even in so slight a way, without being made sensible of his immense powers of work, of mastering and marshalling details, of framing a comprehensive measure, and of carrying it against opposition in the House of Commons. I also saw and appreciated his combative energy. The Bill had been miserably mauled in the Commons by Disraeli, with the aid of some misguided Radicals. When it got to the Lords I was placed under the steps of the throne, to be at hand if information on details was needed by those in charge of the Bill. The House seemed very full, but the Duke of Newcastle came to me and said that he did not believe Lord Derby intended to venture on a real opposition to the Bill, as there had not been a strong whip on the Conservative side. "In that case," I said, "what hinders you from reversing here the amendments which have been carried against you in the Commons?" A conference was held in the library to consider this suggestion, but Lord Russell, the leader of the Commons, peremptorily vetoed it on the ground of prudence. Mr. Gladstone was confined to his room by illness, but, in compliance with my earnest prayer, the question was referred to him. Next day the signal for battle was hung out, and I had the great satisfaction of looking on while a series of amendments in committee--the Commons amendments--were reversed, and the Bill was restored to a workable state.'

In 1868 Bishop Colenso writes: 'I had a very pleasant letter by the last mail from Mr. Gladstone, to whom I wrote ten months ago with reference to his language about Bishop Gray and myself at an S.P.G. meeting at Penmaenmawr. He had my letter before him for four months, as he says, but he begs me to believe that this long interval of silence has not been due to any indifference or disrespect; and, in short, he writes a very kind and courteous letter, administering a little rebuke to me at the end, "not so much with respect to particular opinions, as to what appears to be your method (technically so called) in the treatment of theological questions."' Again, in 1881: 'I need not say that I am utterly disappointed with Mr. Gladstone and Lord Kimberley, and particularly with the tone of the _Daily News_, speaking, I suppose, as the Government organ. I cannot help thinking that the present Government has lost a great deal of its power by the feebleness they have shown in their action with regard to South African affairs, where, as far as I can see, they have not righted a single wrong committed by Sir B. Frere, and only withdrawn him under great pressure, and when he had already set on foot further mischief.' In a little while the Bishop writes more approvingly: 'It gives us hope that other wrongs may be redressed when Mr. Gladstone is ready, even in the midst of defeats at Laing's Neck, Ingogo, and Majuba, to hold back the hand of Great Britain from cruelly chastising these brave patriots, so unequally matched with our power, which of course could overwhelm and crush them.'

Count Bismarck is reported to have said: 'If I had done half as much harm to my country as Mr. Gladstone has done to his country the last four years, I would not dare to look my countrymen in the face.'

Mr. Kinglake thus describes Mr. Gladstone: 'If he was famous for the splendour of his eloquence, for his unaffected piety, and blameless life, he was celebrated far and wide for a more than common liveliness of conscience. He had once imagined it to be his duty to quit a Government and to burst through strong ties of friendship and gratitude by reason of a thin shade of difference on the subject of white or brown sugar. It was believed that if he were to commit even a little sin or to imagine an evil thought he would instantly arraign himself before the dread tribunal which awaited him within his own bosom, and that his intellect being subtle and microscopic, and delighting in casuistry and exaggeration, he would be likely to give his soul a very harsh trial, and treat himself as a great criminal for faults too minute to be visible to the naked eyes of laymen. His friends lived in dread of his virtues, as tending to make him whimsical and unstable, and the practical politicians, perceiving that he was not to be depended upon for party purposes, and was bent on none but lofty objects, used to look upon him as dangerous, used to call him behind his back a good man--a good man in the worst sense of the term.'

In 1865 Carlyle wrote: 'I had been at Edinburgh, and had heard Gladstone make his great oration on Homer there on retiring from office as Rector. It was a grand display. I never recognised before what oratory could do, the audience being kept for three hours in a state of electric tension, bursting every moment into applause. Nothing was said which seemed of moment when read deliberately afterwards; but the voice was like enchantment, and the street when we left the building was ringing with a prolongation of cheers.' Again he meets Gladstone at Mentone in 1867, and thus describes him: 'Talk copious, ingenious, but of no worth or sincerity; pictures, literature, finance, prosperities, greatness of outlook for Italy, etc.--a man ponderous, copious, of evident faculty, but all gone irrecoverably into House of Commons shape; man once of some wisdom or possibility of it, but now possessed by the Prince or many Princes of the Power of the Air. Tragic to me, and far from enviable, from whom one felt one's self divided by abysmal chasms and immeasurabilities.' On the passing of the measure of Irish Church Disestablishment, Carlyle writes: 'In my life I have seen few more anarchic, factious, unpatriotic achievements than this of Gladstone and his Parliament in respect to such an Ireland as now is. Poor Gladstone!' Again he writes: 'Ten days ago read Gladstone's article in the _Edinburgh Review_ with amazement. Empty as a blown goose egg. Seldom have I read such a ridiculous, solemn, addlepated Joseph Surface of a thing. Nothingness, or near it, conscious to itself of being greatness almost unexampled. . . . According to the People's William, England with himself atop is evidently even now at the _top of the world_. Against bottomless _anarchy_ in all fibres of her spiritual and practical she has now a complete ballot-box--can vote and count noses as free as air. Nothing else wanted, clearly thinks the People's William. He would ask you with unfeigned astonishment what else. The sovereign thing in nature is _parmaceti_ (read ballot) for an inward bruise. That is evidently his belief, what he finds believable about England in 1870. Parmaceti, parmaceti--enough of him and it.' This was written in 1870.

In 1873 the old Chelsea Sage writes more bitterly still: 'The whole world is in a mighty fuss here about Gladstone and his Bill (Irish Education)--the attack on the third branch of the upas tree, and the question of what is to become of him in consequence of it. To myself, from the beginning, it seemed the consummation of contemptibilities and petty trickeries on his part; one of the most transparent bits of thimble-rigging to secure the support of his sixty Irish votes, the Pope's brass band, and to smuggle the education violin into the hands of Cullen and the sacred sons of Belial and the scarlet woman, I had ever seen from him before.' And again: 'Gladstone seems to me one of the contemptiblest men I ever looked on--a poor Ritualist, almost spectral kind of a phantasm of a man; nothing in him but forms and ceremonies and artistic mappings; incapable of seeing veritably any fact whatever, but seeing, crediting, and laying to heart the mere clothes of the fact, and fancying that all the rest does not exist. Let him fight his own battle in the name of Beelzebub, the god of Ekron, who seems to be his god. Poor phantasm!' When the catastrophe of 1874 came, and the People's William was flung from his pedestal, the general opinion was that his star had set for ever, till he saw who it was that the people had chosen to replace him. His mind misgave him then that the greater faults of his successor would lift Mr. Gladstone back again to a yet more giddy eminence and greater opportunities for evil.

'Finally,' remarks Mr. Froude, 'he did not look on Mr. Gladstone merely as an orator who, knowing nothing as it ought to be known, had flung his force into words and specious sentiments, but as the representative of the multitudinous cants of the age, religious, moral, political, literary; differing on this point from other leading men, that he believed in all, and was prepared to act on it. He, in fact, believed Mr. Gladstone to be one of those fatal figures created by England's evil genius to work irreparable mischief, which no one but he could have executed.'

In her 'Memories of Old Friends' Miss Caroline Fox tells us she asked Carlyle, 'Is not Gladstone a man of principle?' 'I did hope well of him once,' replied Carlyle, 'in 1867, and so did John Stirling, though I heard he was a Puseyite and so forth . . . and so I hoped something might come of him; but now he has been declaring that England is in such a wonderfully prosperous state--meaning that it has plenty of money in its breeches pockets and plenty of beef in its great ugly belly. But that is not the prosperity we want, and so I say to him: "You are not the lifegiver to England. I go my way; you go yours."' Mr. Froude, in his 'Oceana,' testifies to Mr. Gladstone's unpopularity in the Colonies. At Melbourne, at the time of the Gordon catastrophe, he writes: 'They did not love him before, and had been at a loss to understand the influence which he had so long exercised. His mighty popularity must, they thought, now be at an end. It could not survive a wound so deadly in his country's reputation. They were deceived, it seems,' adds Mr. Froude, speaking for them and himself. 'Yet perhaps they were forming an opinion prematurely which will hereafter be the verdict of mankind. He, after all, is personally responsible more than any other man for the helpless condition into which the executive administration of the English empire seems to have fallen.' 'Oceana' was published in 1886.

'Gladstone,' writes Professor Fawcett, 'made the speech of the evening. He is a fine speaker. He never hesitates, and his action and manner are admirable. In fact, in this respect he resembles Bright, but is far inferior to Bright, in my opinion, in not condensing his matter. Again, Gladstone is too subtle.' On more than one occasion Fawcett seems to have doubted the judgment of his leader.

Sir E. Watkin writes: 'Sir John A. Macdonald, then Mr. Macdonald, was once taken by me under the gallery, by special order of the Speaker, to hear a great speech of Mr. Gladstone, whom he had not heard before. When we went away I said: "Well, what do you think of him?" He replied: "He is a great rhetorician, but he is not an orator."

About twenty years ago Mr. Gladstone's future career as a Minister was predicted with singular accuracy by a very acute observer of men and things, who had held almost every possible office, from that of Ministerial Whip to Chancellor of the Exchequer and Secretary of State. Observing from the Peers' Gallery Mr. Gladstone's mismanagement of public business when he led the House of Commons in Lord Russell's short-lived second Administration, he said, in effect: 'We are coming to new times. Mr. Gladstone cannot manage the House of Commons as other Ministers have done, in the usual way, but he can force great measures through by bringing the pressure of outside opinion to bear upon it. This,' he added, 'is the way in which Mr. Gladstone will maintain himself in power. We shall have one violent proposal after another, as the means by which Mr. Gladstone may gain or keep office.'

Mr. John Morley writes: 'He sometimes shows a singular difficulty in apprehending what will be the average judgment even on ordinary proceedings. He showed this in the mistake concerning Sir Robert Collier's hardly more than colourable qualification to be made a member of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. He showed it again in a blunder of much the same kind--the special pleader's kind--in the appointment to the Ewelme Rectory of a clergyman who could only by a strained interpretation of the usual rule be regarded as eligible. He showed it more than ever in his attempt to interpret away Lord (then Mr.) Odo Russell's meaning in the language addressed by him in 1870 to Prince Bismarck on the subject of Russia's action concerning the Black Sea clause of the Treaty of Paris, and averring the necessity--England's necessity--for going to war with Russia with or without allies. His hasty resignation of the leadership of the Liberal party in 1874 was a still more important illustration of his rather erratic judgment. The latest instance of it is his letter to Count Carophyl, which shows at the same time, we think, a singularly just appreciation of the diplomatic concessions he had gained, and a singularly inadequate one as to the importance of a proud and lofty tone as one who writes as a spokesman of a great people.'

Mr. Spurgeon, writing to a Cardiff Liberal who opposes Mr. Gladstone's Irish policy, says:

'As to Ireland, I am altogether at one with you; especially I feel the wrong proposed to be done to our Ulster brethren. What have they done to be thus cast off? The whole scheme is as full of dangers and absurdities as if it came from a madman, yet I am sure Mr. Gladstone is only doing justice, and acting for the good of all. I consider him to be making one of those mistakes which can only be made by great and well-meaning men.'

In a further deliverance on the question, 'in answer to many friends,' and expressing himself as sorry to say what he does, liking to agree with Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Spurgeon says:

'We feel bound to express our great regret that the great Liberal leader should have introduced his Irish Bills. We cannot see what our Ulster brethren have done that they should be cast off. They are in great dismay at the prospect of legislative separation from England, and we do not wonder. They have been ever our loyal friends, and ought not to be sacrificed. Surely something can be done for Ireland less ruinous than that which is proposed. The method of pacification now put forward seems to us to be full of difficulties, absurdities, and unworkable proposals. It is well meant, but even the best and greatest may err. We cannot look forward with any complacency to Ulster Loyalists abandoned, and an established Irish Catholic Church, and yet they are by no means the greatest evils which we foresee in the near future, should the suggested policy ever become fact.'

There was a brief intercourse between the two, creditable to each. In 1838 Macaulay writes: 'I found Gladstone in the throng, and I accosted him, as we had never been introduced to each other. He received my advances with very great _empressement_ indeed, and we had a good deal of pleasant chat.'

In 1839 appeared the celebrated work on 'The State in its Relations to the Church.' Macaulay bought it, read it, and wrote to Jeffery: 'The Lord hath delivered him into our hands. I see my way to a popular and at the same time gentleman-like critique.' Again: 'I do think I have disposed of all Gladstone's theories unanswerably, and that there is not a line of the paper even so strict a judge as Sir Robert Inglis would quarrel with as at all indecorous.' Again Macaulay says: 'I have received a letter from Mr. Gladstone, who in generous terms acknowledged, with some reservations, the fairness of the article. "In whatever you write," continues Gladstone, "you can hardly hope for the privilege of most anonymous productions; but if it had been possible not to recognise, I should have questioned your authorship in this particular case, because the candour and single-mindedness which it exhibits are, in one who has long been connected in the most distinguished manner with a political party, so rare as to be almost incredible. . . . In these lacerating times one clings to everything of personal kindness, and husbands it for the future; and if you will allow me, I shall earnestly desire to carry with me such a recollection of your mode of dealing with a subject on which the attainment of truth, we shall agree, materially depends on the temperament in which the search for it is instituted and conducted."' 'How much,' writes Macaulay's biographer, 'this letter pleased Macaulay is evident by the fact of his having kept it unburned, a compliment which, except in this single instance, he never paid to any of his correspondents.' 'I have seldom,' he writes, in reply to Mr. Gladstone, 'been more gratified than by the very kind note which I have just received from you. Your book itself, and everything that I have heard about you--though almost all my information came, I must say, to the honour of our troubled times, from people very strongly opposed to you in politics--led me to regard you with respect and goodwill.' Again Macaulay wrote: 'I have no idea that he will ever acquire the reputation of a great statesman. His views are not sufficiently profound or enlarged for that.'

In 1853 Mrs. Beecher-Stowe, the far-famed author of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' was in London, and dined with Mr. Gladstone at the Duke of Argyll's. She writes: 'He is one of the ablest and best men in the kingdom. It is a commentary on his character that, although one of the highest of the High Church, we have never heard him spoken of among the Dissenters otherwise than as an excellent and highly-conscientious man. For a gentleman who has attained such celebrity, both in politics and theology, he looks remarkably young. He is tall, with dark hair and eyes, a thoughtful, serious cast of countenance, and is easy and agreeable in conversation.'

When the Commercial Treaty with France was being discussed, Cobden wrote: 'Gladstone is really almost the only Cabinet Minister of five years' standing who is not afraid to let his heart guide his head a little at times.' In 1860 Cobden wrote to Bright: 'I have told you before that Gladstone shows much heart in this business. . . . He has a strong aversion to the waste of money on our armaments. He has no class feeling about the services. It is a pity that you cannot avoid hurting his feelings by such sallies. . . . He has more in common with you and me than any other man of his power in Britain.' Again: 'I agree with you that Gladstone overworks himself. But I suspect that he has a conscience, which is at times a troublesome partner for a Cabinet Minister. I make allowances for him, for I have never yet been able to define to my own satisfaction how far a man with a view to utility ought to allow himself to be merged in a body of men called a Government, or how far he should preserve his individuality.' In 1862 Mr. Cobden writes: 'Then Gladstone lends his genius to all sorts of expenditure which he disapproves, and devises schemes for raising money which nobody else would think of.' Cobden's last reference to Gladstone seems to have been at the time of the Danish War, when he once more laments the fact that Palmerston was still Premier and able to use all parties for his ends. Cobden writes: 'With Gladstone and Gibson for his colleagues, and with a tacit connivance from a section of the Tories, there can be no honesty in our party life.'

In an 'Essay on the British Parliament' a writer gives the prize of eloquence to Mr. Gladstone. It is, as he truly says, 'Eclipse first, and the rest nowhere.'

'Mr. Gladstone is an appreciated man, but he is not understood. Why not? The first duty of a pretty woman, it has been said, is to let everyone know that she is pretty. Extending that kind of code to the other sex, it is surely the first duty of an intellectual man to be intelligible. In this age there is more of the suspicion that Mr. Gladstone is Talleyrandizing, and using his copious vocabulary for the concealment of thought. . . . He sees so much to say on all sides that he never clearly defines on which side lies the preponderating reasoning. He sums up controversies, rather than ranges himself in them. Debate is with him pure debate--a division appears, in his apprehension, rather to disfigure the proceedings. . . . If Premier himself, he could ally himself on one hand with Mr. Milner Gibson, and on the other with Mr. Spencer Walpole. He is the _juste milieu_ of the day, and, biding his time, he offers to his contingent supporters "chameleon's diet--eating the air promise-crammed.'"--'Political Portraits,' by E. M. Whittey, published in 1851, p. 226.

Mr. Hill, in his 'Political Portraits,' writes: 'If Mr. Gladstone has to make up his mind while he is on his legs whether he will or will not answer a delicate question, he will express himself somewhat after this fashion: "The honourable gentleman, in the exercise of that discretion which I should be the last to deny to any member of this House, least of all to one so justly entitled to respect as my hon. friend, both on account of his high personal character and his long Parliamentary experience, has asked me whether the Government intend to bring in a Bill for the establishment of secular education in Ireland. Now, the discretion which I freely concede to the hon. gentleman in regard to the proposal of this question, I must, as a member of the Government, reserve to myself in considering whether or how I shall answer the question. I have to consider it not only in itself, but in regard to the time at which it is put, and the circumstances which surround the topic." Mr. Gladstone then, perhaps, will say, what Lord Palmerston and Lord Russell would have said in a single sentence, that he must decline to answer it.'

Count Beust said: 'Independently of the demerits and dangers of Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule scheme, he has, to my mind, little or no excuse for introducing it, and the parallel he draws between it and the dual system I inaugurated is utterly fallacious. Agrarian agitation is the plea which he uses for giving the Irish people a separate Parliament. I believe that the agrarian system in Ireland has for centuries been a bad one, and the land legislation of 1881--whatever people may think of it from a moral point of view--will unquestionably bring about good results. But how these results are to be beneficially increased by giving Ireland a separate Parliament, and handing over its government to the avowed enemies of England, I cannot see, for one of its first acts would be to pass laws--virtually decrees of expulsion--against the landlords, to banish capital from the land, and materially to aggravate the general condition of the peasantry. As an old statesman, I should consider that the establishment of an Irish Parliament, raising, as it unquestionably would, aspirations on the part of the people to free themselves from the English yoke, and increasing the power of political agitators, is fraught with the gravest danger to England. I cannot understand Mr. Gladstone quoting Austria-Hungary as an example, for, independently of the great dissimilarity between the two systems, Mr. Gladstone forgets the condition of Austria when the Hungarian Parliament was established. Austria had been beaten after a short but most disastrous war; Prussia had forbidden her any further interference in German affairs; the country was almost in a state of latent revolution; and an outbreak in Hungary, promoted by foreign agents and foreign gold, with Klapka doing Count Bismarck's bidding, was in the highest degree probable, and would, had it occurred, have led to almost overwhelming disaster. Knowing this, I felt bound to advise the Emperor to accede to the views of the Deak party, securing the solidarity of the empire by the guarantees afforded through the systems of delegations and joint budget. Mr. Gladstone cannot urge upon your House of Commons the same reasons for granting Home Rule to Ireland. England has not been, and I trust never will be, beaten as Austria had been beaten. No foreign foe has been dictating terms at the gates of London. No revolution is latent, and, a point also worthy of consideration, the population of Ireland is only about five millions, including those Protestants who are against the Home Rule scheme, as compared with what I should think was the wish of the great majority of the thirty millions composing the population of Great Britain; whereas the area of Hungary is greater than that of Austria proper, and its population is nearly one-half of the total population of the empire.'

Well might Count Beust ask: 'How can Mr. Gladstone use my dualistic system as a precedent for his scheme of Home Rule?'

Mr. Joseph Cowen said: 'The super-subtlety of his intellect, his faculty for hair-splitting, and his love of party warfare, create distrust, and generate that strong sense of resentment which exists towards him amongst a numerous section of the community. If he were not so subtle he would be more successful. A plain straight man like Lord Hartington, or Lord John Russell, or Sir Stafford Northcote, impresses the average Englishman more favourably than a curiously acute one like the Prime Minister. The popular impression--that he is an austere purist, and would not resort to any of the tricks or wriggles that characterize ordinary party leaders--is altogether a mistake. Those who are brought in contact with the Legislature know that he can resort to any of the devices of partizanship as readily as men who are popularly accounted his inferiors. It is this many-sidedness that leads to the different estimates that are formed of him. He cannot but have felt very keenly the death of Gordon, and the massacre that ensued on the fall of Khartoum; yet I believe it is true that he went to the Criterion that night to see a very second-rate comedy. Ordinary persons having the responsibility that he had would not have been able to attend a theatre at such a time. The other day he laboured to impress the House of Commons with the extreme gravity of the position of affairs with Russia, and shortly after he went to see Miss Anderson play in "Pygmalion and Galatea." These sudden changes from seriousness to seeming frivolity foster that sense of distrust which a large number of sober Englishmen feel towards him. They cannot understand how a man engaged in such grave and weighty transactions can feel them very acutely when he can so easily throw them on one side and ignore the responsibilities they entail.'

'What a wonderful fellow Gladstone is, after all!' said Mr. Disraeli one day to McCullagh Torrens. 'He had a dreadful passage, I hear, coming back from Ireland, and the moment he got on shore he began to make a speech to the Welshmen, telling them that they were all right, and to keep so.'

'What an ardent creature!' he exclaimed as Mr. Gladstone rushed past them to vote on another occasion when a division had been called for.

Under the date of June 8, 1885, Sir Stafford Northcote writes: 'The great debate came off to-night. . . . The result, a majority of twelve against Government, took the House greatly by surprise, though we ourselves had reckoned on a victory by three or four votes. About forty of the Parnellites went with us. The excitement on the declaration of the numbers was very great, and displayed itself rather indecorously. Randolph Churchill jumped upon his seat and stood waving his pocket-handkerchief and shouting; Walter left the House with Algernon West, and said something about this being a curious end of Gladstone's career. West said: "Oh, this won't be the end now; you will see him come out more energetic than ever."' Sir Stafford Northcote, it may be stated, seems at times to have been a good deal bothered by Mr. Gladstone. 'The most incredulous man I ever met!' he writes in his diary; 'keeps on shaking his head whenever I refer to him.' Again he writes: 'Gladstone had been dining out to meet the authoress of "Sister Dora"--Miss Lonsdale--who was very much alarmed by the rapidity and variety of his questions.' Again we find him complaining of Gladstone's habit of speaking late into the dinner-hour, so that his opponent must either speak to empty benches or forego the advantage of replying on the instant. After this, we must admit Mr. Gladstone's description of himself on one occasion as an 'old Parliamentary hand.'

'Mr. Gladstone Close at Hand' is the title of Dr. Parker's article of gossip about Mr. Gladstone in the _New Review_. Once during his last Premiership Dr. Parker had the honour of breakfasting with Mr. Gladstone in Downing Street. After the meal Mr. Gladstone took down a book and read aloud an account of the circumstances under which Ireland was united to Great Britain. The account was so pathetic that the reader broke down and sobbed like a child. The ex-Premier permitted himself to be interviewed by means of a written catechism Dr. Parker sent him, and the answers are given in the article. Perhaps the way in which some of the questions are ingeniously not answered is as instructive as the direct replies to others. Asked whether, in his opinion, the Church of England had a firmer hold upon the people than ever it had, he said the Church suffered much from the general decline of what is called the prestige of churches, but had gained much from the transformation of the clergy. He does not believe in the interchange of pulpits. 'With all respect for those clergymen who are willing to preach in Nonconformist pulpits, I must say,' he replied, 'they do not seem to form a proper conception of their own Church.'

Dr. Parker, not content with prose, broke out on one occasion into song, as follows:

'An old Parliamentary Hand, Bearing an axe and raising a shield, Suspended the play with ominous words, "Mine is the Bill that holds the field."'

Lord Hatherley wrote in 1855: 'There is but one man of genius in the House, I think--Gladstone.'

Professor Tyndall wrote in a letter to the _Times_: 'Nature, which has so richly endowed him in many ways, has denied him the faculty of discerning the defeat which, even in the springtide of power and in the flush of victory, he has over and over again gratuitously wooed. In fact, he thinks too highly of himself and too meanly of his followers. Like Napoleon's generals, they are to him mere mud, to be shaped and moulded according to his imperial will. The dissatisfaction arising from his conduct is not a thing of yesterday. God, as Mahomed says, has made men to be men--not foxes and wolves; and the love of truth and abhorrence of untruth inherent in the healthy British character have gradually opened the eyes of Mr. Gladstone's most able and most independent supporters to his misdeeds. His errors of judgment, his political dishonesty, his impulsiveness and passion, so often invoked for purposes both ungenerous and unwise, his tampering for party ends with the sustaining bulwarks of the State, his cruel indifference to the fate of men far nobler than himself who had trustfully accepted from him tasks the faithful prosecution of which led them to a doom which he might have averted, but did not avert, the voice of many a brother's blood crying from the ground, had already shaken the faith of honest Liberals in their idol, when his flagitious Irish policy put an end to their forbearance and caused them to fling abroad the banner of revolt. The cream of the Liberal party have been the seceders here; the men who above all others adorned the Liberal ranks have been the first to renounce the heresies of their recreant leader. A former worshipper of the ex-Prime Minister said to me some time ago: "Never in the history of England was there such a consensus of intellect arrayed against a statesman as that now arrayed against Mr. Gladstone. What a fall!" . . . I see with concern letters from Liberal Unionists in the _Times_ which seem to indicate that the writers only deem it necessary for Mr. Gladstone to declare his abandonment of Home Rule to make all right again with the Liberals. But who is to guarantee Mr. Gladstone's good faith in this matter? He apostatized, for party purposes, when he became a Home Ruler, and he will apostatize again whenever it suits his ambition to do so. I should not be surprised if, some fine day, he took those simple Unionists at their word and made the required declaration. But could we be sure of him afterwards? For years, according to his own confession, he nourished in the dark corners of his mind this fungus of Home Rule, while to all his friends he seemed earnestly bent on extirpating it. A man of this stamp has no claim to the trust or credence of Liberal Unionists.'

Writing in 1879, Principal Tulloch says: 'I bought the _Observer_ on my way back, and read Gladstone's philippic against the Government. What a man he is! What avenging and concentrated passion and power of hatred at the age of seventy! If he gets back to power, he will certainly play the devil with something.'

Dr. Talmage, who visited Mr. Gladstone at Hawarden a year or two since, sailed from Liverpool on the following day on his return to America. While in the Holy Land he secured a large stone from Calvary, which is intended to form the corner-stone of his proposed new church in Brooklyn. Dr. Talmage, who was interviewed after his visit to Hawarden, said he found Mr. Gladstone hale and hearty, and he ran up and down the hills like a boy. The ex-Premier was sanguine that his Home Rule scheme would succeed. Dr. Talmage asked if his faith in Christianity had wavered in his old age. Mr. Gladstone answered: 'The longer I live, the stronger grows my faith in God, and my only hope for the world is that the human race will be brought more into contact with Divine revelation.'

Mr. Mozley writes in his 'Reminiscences': 'As for Mr. Gladstone, I have for many years seldom thought of him without being reminded of the terrible lines in which Horace describes one of the attendants of that fickle goddess whom he believed to be the arbiter of civil strife. Often have I felt that I would rather grow cabbage, like Cincinnatus, than be the public executioner of usurpations, monopolies, and other abuses. But, after indulging in the sentiment, I have swelled the triumph of justice, peace, and public good. I have generally been so unfortunate in the use of my electoral privileges that I have come to think them hardly worth the fuss made about them; but the most unfortunate use I ever made of them--so I felt at the time--was when I went up to Oxford to vote for Mr. Gladstone, and he was actually elected. It was some excuse for this ridiculous inconsistency that I scarcely ever looked into Mr. Gladstone's weekly organ--of course, he had not a weekly organ in any other sense than he had a tail to his coat--without seeing some very offensive and utterly untrue allusion to myself. . . . But now, what is the singular good fortune or providential protection I began with? Simply this: I never in all my life once saw Mr. Gladstone, from the morning I met him in Hurdis Lushington's room, three or four days after his arrival from Eton, till he was so good as to ask me to breakfast in June, 1882, and kindly suggest an alteration in my book. On the former occasion he had all the purple bloom and freshness of boyhood and the glow of generous emotion.'

Mr. Samuel Morley, M.P., wrote: 'I regard Mr. Gladstone as the greatest, purest, and ablest statesman of the present age, and of all ages or of any age. How great the sympathy during his recent illness throughout the whole civilized world! With what? Not with Mr. Gladstone as M.P. for Midlothian; not with Gladstone as Premier or statesman; but simply with Gladstone as the embodiment of the highest and purest aspirations of that patriotism which desires the best of all good things for the greatest number of our own fellow-countrymen, and that the countrymen of all other countries may partake in these good things also. His life, his health, his genius, his power, and influence are of more consequence to the country than all or any of the most pressing questions now before Parliament.'

No one, as was to be expected, has been more variously or idiotically censured or blamed than Mr. Gladstone. Considerable ingenuity has been displayed by more than one pious clergyman to show that he is the beast of Revelation. In the opinion of one of them--the Rev. Canon Crosthwaite, of Kildare--beheading is too good for Mr. Gladstone. He has 'bamboozled the House of Commons, and has persuaded it to rob God and put His patrimony into the Treasury of England. Essex lost his head for only talking to O'Neal across the river. What does not Mr. Gladstone deserve,' asks the Canon, in the _National Review_, 'for trafficking with Irish rebels and betraying to them all the rights of the British Crown? Yet this spoiler of the Church is allowed to read lessons.' Another reverend, possibly a Dissenter, wrote to Mr. Gladstone to suggest that he would add to the services he has rendered religion by conducting a series of services in the Agricultural Hall. In reply, declining the suggestion, Mr. Gladstone wrote: 'It would expose me, with justice, to that charge of ostentation which some think already attaches to me.'

Actually a reverend gentleman compiled, under the head of 'Musical Evenings with the Great and Good,' a service of song. The directions are to open with the hymn, 'Hark, my soul! it is the Lord.' A footnote informs us that 'this hymn of Cowper's has been translated by Mr. Gladstone into Italian.' The direct bearing of these facts is not at once apparent, but possibly enlightenment may arrive during the 'Prayer' which is to follow. The first verse of the next hymn runs:

'Sing we a song of praise to-day For battles fought and victories won, For strength vouchsafed upon our way, And noble work our cause has done; For joy that cometh after tears, And harvests reaped for fifty years.'

Later on a kind of parenthetic observation runs, that 'Oxford is an ancient seat of learning, and may be the fountain of intellectual light; but it has ever been the home of political darkness and the defender of exclusive privilege.' As Mr. Gladstone's earlier political career is very sweepingly condemned, and the evil influences of the University deplored, it is to be presumed that the half-century of harvest is a small stretch of the exuberant poetic licence that Mr. Thoseby permits himself occasionally. Personal encouragement to Mr. Gladstone, however, is not wanting, and he is told to

'Hold on, my brother, hold on! Hold on till the prize is won, Hold on to the plough, And weary not now, For the work is well-nigh done.'

A subsequent song informs him positively that

'The day shall appear, When the might with the right And the Truth shall be: Come there what may to stand in the way, That day the world shall see.'

And that there is to be

'No surrender, no surrender In the cause of truth and right.'

But perhaps the climax of Gladstonolatry is reached in the following passages:

'In Mr. Gladstone's work as legislator and administrator there is, from first to last, the same thoroughness and mastery. He never introduced a measure into the House in a crude and incomplete manner. He mastered every detail, and knew exactly the value and bearing of every suggestion and amendment offered, and whether he could admit it or not. He introduced no measures merely to curry favour, to strengthen his party, or catch the popular vote. He has always had regard to pressing needs, and has made it a matter of duty to press and pass the measures he introduced. And these measures have never been condemned except by "politicians in distress." In his work as administrator he has not left the work to be done by subordinates. He has attended to his own duties, and toiled to understand every particular, and, in consequence, he has never had to vacillate, taking a position to-day from which he has had to withdraw to-morrow; saying one thing to-day and contradicting it the next.'

Remarkable as is the polished literary style of this citation, it is surpassed in the following fantastic rhapsody:

'His beautiful residence at Hawarden Castle, in Cheshire, has much of the old baronial associations connected with it. It is delightfully situated in a finely-wooded park, where Mr. Gladstone's well-known penchant for tree-felling, as a relaxation, finds ample scope. And where he also may gaze with joy on hill and dale, and

'"Watch the wild birds soar and sing, Or build their nest, or plume their wing."'

And where, perchance, he may now and again sing to the birds. Might not those birds, those beautiful birds, represent Freedom! Political Freedom, the Sovereignty of Ideas, the Monarchy of Mind, the Republic of Intellect, Free Thought, Free Speech, Free Pews, Free Churches in a Free State, until there shall be no Party but God, and no Politics but Religion--the mighty Christ all in all.'

In 1870 Mr. Grant Duff, in the course of one of his addresses to his constituents, said that some years ago, when Mr. Gladstone's Administration was in power, a clever Tory, who hated both Mr. Gladstone and his Administration, wrote the following acrostic:

'G was the great man, mountain of mind; L a logician, expert and refined; A was an adept in rhetoric's art, D was the dark spot he had in his heart; S was the sophistry led him astray; T was the truth that he bartered away; O was the cipher his conscience became; N the new light that enlightened the same; E was the evil one, shouting for joy, "At it, and down with it, Gladstone, my boy."

This acrostic was repeated in a drawing-room in the presence of a young lady of good Liberal principles, and the daughter of a well-known Member of Parliament, who, without leaving the room, went to a table and wrote this answer to it:

'G is the genius that governs the nation; L are the Lords, who require education; A is the animus raised by the great; D are the donkeys who fear for the State: S is the standard that Liberals raise; T are the Tories who howl in dispraise; O 's Opposition, wanting a head; N is the nation, not driven, but led; E is old England, shouting for joy, "Stick to the Government, Gladstone, my boy."'

The bitterness of some of the attacks on Mr. Gladstone were at any rate a great testimony to his surpassing power and popularity. In 1880 appeared a handbill under the title of the 'Gladstonian Mess,' announcing: 'A grand banquet will be given at the Boar's Head Hotel immediately after the sale of the effects of Mr. John Bull, previously announced, carefully prepared by Mr. W. E. Gladstone, the auctioneer, and at the vendor's expense, to which all the company are invited.' The sale was announced--Mr. Gladstone the auctioneer: 'The whole of the vast landed estates, goods, chattels and effects of Mr. John Bull, who is retiring from business on account of advancing age and ill-health, induced by recent losses in the Transvaal venture, comprising three kingdoms (united or otherwise), one empire, one dominion, forty-eight colonies, and one Suzerainty, one large public-house, known as the Lords and Commons, also an extremely elegant, spacious, and well-built family residence, known as the Buckingham Palace, with greenhouses, gardens, stables, and every necessary appointment. The residence contains ample accommodation for a family of position, is situate in its own grounds, and commands good views of the Nelson Monument, St. Paul's Cathedral, and Westminster Abbey, and is within easy distance of the thriving market towns of London and Westminster.' As an indication, on the other hand, of Mr. Gladstone's popularity, let me refer to the Gladstone claret, which was supposed to be a peculiarly economical and refreshing beverage, and the Gladstone travelling-bag, which was described as a bag adapted for the requirements of all travellers, of all ages, of both sexes and in all grades of life. Someone took the trouble to issue the prospectus of what was called the Gladstone Exploitation Company, a further unintentional tribute.

The following appeared in a Turkish newspaper at the time of the Bulgarian atrocities: 'Mr. Gladstone is of Bulgarian descent. His father was a pig-dealer in the villayet of Kusteridje. Young Gladstone ran away at the age of sixteen to Servia, and was then with another pig-dealer sent to London to sell pigs. He stole the proceeds, changed his name from Troradin to Gladstone, and became a British subject. Fortune favoured him till he became Prime Minister. Gladstone has no virtues. Gold is his god. The Ottoman Government offered him five thousand pounds to put their finances in order, but subsequently withdrew the offer, and his vexation at this, combined with his bad Bulgarian nature, caused his opposition to the Turks. The surname "Gladstone" means lust for gold, and was given to him on account of his failings in that respect.'

In the 'Life of Lord Houghton' we find another illustrative anecdote. The writer says: 'One day, a few years before his death, when he was dining at the house of Mr. James Knowles, the conversation turned upon the relative characteristics of Mr. Gladstone and Lord Beaconsfield, and it was remarked by someone that if Lord Beaconsfield was a good judge of men, Mr. Gladstone was a still better judge of mankind. Houghton was asked to turn the epigram into verse, and he did it as follows:

'We spake of two high names of speech and pen, How each was seeing, and how each was blind; Knew not mankind, but keenly knew all men; Knew naught of men, but knew and loved mankind.'

In connection with these great men it is interesting to note that in 1867, when Parliament met, Mrs. Disraeli was lying seriously ill. Mr. Gladstone, in the opening sentence of his speech on the Address, gave public expression to the sympathy of all parties. Lord Houghton, in referring to the fact, adds: 'The scene in the House of Commons was very striking; Dizzy quite unable to restrain his tears.' When Lord Beaconsfield died, however, many were found to censure Mr. Gladstone for not having been present at the funeral of his distinguished rival.

Lord Blachford's letters contain many short notices of Mr. Gladstone. In 1858 he gives a sketch of him in a conference with Sir Edward Bulwer: 'It was very absurd to see them talking it over; Gladstone's clear, dark eye and serious face, and ponderous forehead and calm manner, was such a contrast with Sir E.'s lean and narrow face and humid, theatrical, conscious kind of ways.' In 1868 he writes to Newman: 'I have not yet got through Gladstone's autobiography. . . . Of course, as you say, some of his friends think it injudicious, and I am not sure that it is not injudicious on that very account. One great weight which Gladstone has to carry in the political race is a character for want of judgment, and every addition to that is an impediment.' In 1874, in July, when Mr. Gladstone appeared in Parliament after four months' absence to oppose the Bill for the Abolition of Church Patronage in Scotland, Lord Blachford writes: 'Gladstone's opposition is curious. I am sorry to say I cannot go with him on either of his points--indeed, I may almost say on any. I see no reason why the Scotch Church should not have their way about patronage. I think the cry against the Public Worship Bill a scare, and I particularly object to the principle and working of the Endowed Schools Act. However, everybody seems to agree that he made a great speech on the Public Worship Bill as a matter of oratory. He does not seem to care much about what was his party, who, I suppose, are dead against him on two out of three of these points.'

Of Mr. Gladstone, John Arthur Roebuck, a bellicose Radical--very noisy in his time--says: 'He may be a very good chopper, but, depend upon it, he is not an English statesman.' Of Tennyson, it is said that he loved Mr. Gladstone, but detested his policy.

The late Sir James Stansfeld is reported as saying to an interviewer: 'Mr. Gladstone's conduct in the Cabinet was very curious. When I first joined in 1871, I naturally expected that his position was so commanding that he would be able to say, "This is my policy; accept it or not, as you like." When Sir James Graham was examined before a committee on Admiralty administration, he was asked: "What would happen if a member of your Board did not agree with your policy?" He answered: "He would cease to be a member of my board." I thought Mr. Gladstone would have taken the same line, but he did not. He was always profuse in his expressions of respect for his Cabinet. There is a wonderful combination in Mr. Gladstone of imperiousness and deference; in the Cabinet he would assume that he was nothing.'

In the _Nineteenth Century_ appeared a curious estimate of Mr. Gladstone by an Indian gentleman. 'He has,' he writes, 'a natural prejudice, almost antipathy, to the name of Turk. His mind, in some respects, resembles that of some pious, learned, but narrow-minded priest of the middle ages; and his unreasoning prejudice against the Turk is indeed mediaeval, and worthy of those dark ages of blood, belief and Quixotic chivalry. A person of such character, however graphic and sublime he may be, should not have such a great political influence on the minds of millions of his fellow-beings; he should not be at the head of a vast empire such as that of England of to-day if he cannot constrain his emotions and his ecclesiastical prejudices. He is a sublime moral leader of men; but a statesman of Mr. Gladstone's position should be more calm, more deliberate, and should weigh his words carefully before he speaks. He should take care that his writings and speeches do not wound the feelings of millions of his fellow-subjects.'

On the defeat of the Liberal party in 1895, the _National Review_ wrote: 'One can now appreciate the previously provoking description of Mr. Gladstone as a great Conservative force. His Irish escapade has shattered the Liberal party, made the House of Lords invulnerable, and the Church unassailable.' Dr. Guinness Rogers wrote that Mr. Gladstone's retirement was one of the causes of the defeat of the Liberal party. 'It is to a large extent a measure of the enormous influence of that commanding personality. Not until the secret history of that period can be studied will it be known how tremendous was the loss which the Liberal party sustained by the withdrawal from the strife of a leader who towered head and shoulders over all his associates.'

Mr. Gladstone seems seldom to have made a speech but his friends favoured him with their criticisms. Thus, when in 1871 he visited Yorkshire and made speeches at Wakefield and Whitby, Lord Houghton wrote, after praising one of his speeches: 'I cannot say as much for your Whitby speech, for it confirmed my feelings that on the high mountain where you stand there is a demon, not of demagogism, but of demophilism, that is tempting you sorely. I am no alarmist, but it is undeniable that a new and thoroughly false conception of the relations of work and wealth is invading society, and of which the Paris Commune is the last expression. Therefore one word from such a man as you, implying that you look on individual wealth as anything else than a reserve of public wealth, and that there can be any antagonism between them, seems to me infinitely dangerous.' Mr. Gladstone replied, writes Lord Houghton's biographer, with his usual frankness and friendliness to the remonstrances of his old friend, 'whose criticisms are marked by the kindly tone which is habitual with you, though I do not agree with everything you say about property.'

Sir Francis Doyle will have it that to Mr. Disraeli is due the fact that Mr. Gladstone left the Conservatives. 'We may all of us recollect,' he writes, 'the Irish soldiers who marched up to and then passed a standard erected by William III. Some regiments moved to the right and others to the left, the right-hand division taking service under Louis XIV., the other division submitting to the English Government. On their first separation they were but an inch or two apart, but the distance gradually widened between them till they or their representatives met face to face at Fontenoy. So, after Sir Robert Peel's death, Lord Beaconsfield's presence established like that standard a line of demarcation between the two portions of the Tory party. Had it not been for the line fixed across their path, I think Mr. Gladstone, Herbert, and the other Peelites would have joined Lord Derby instead of the Whigs. Nor would Mr. Gladstone's logic have been in fault (when is it?), or failed to justify abundantly the course he had taken.'