I have certainly had a wonderful experience last night and this morning! Last night two hours' talk with Gladstone, this morning, again an hour and a half's strenuous argument, during which the great man got quite white sometimes and tremulous with interest and excitement.... The talk this morning was a battle royal over the book and Christian evidences. He was _very_ charming personally, though at times he looked stern and angry and white to a degree, so that I wondered sometimes how I had the courage to go on--the drawn brows were so formidable! There was one moment when he talked of "trumpery objections," in his most House of Commons manner. It was as I thought. The new lines of criticism are not familiar to him, and they really press him hard. He meets them out of Bishop Butler, and things analogous. But there is a sense, I think, that question and answer don't fit, and with it ever-increasing interest and--sometimes--irritation. His own autobiographical reminiscences were wonderfully interesting, and his repetition of the 42d psalm--"Like as the hart desireth the water-brooks"--_grand_! He said that he had never read any book on the hostile side written in such a spirit of, "generous appreciation" of the Christian side. Yes, those were hours to which I shall always look back with gratitude and emotion. Wonderful old man! I see him still standing, as I took leave of him, one hand leaning on the table beside him, his lined, pallid face and eagle eyes framed in his noble white hair, shining amid the dusk of the room. "There are still two things left for me to do!" he said, finally, in answer to some remark of mine. "One is to carry Home Rule; the other is to prove the intimate connection between the Hebrew and Olympian revelations!" Could any remark have been more characteristic of that double life of his--the life of the politician and the life of the student--which kept him fresh and eager to the end of his days? Characteristic, too, of the amateurish element in all his historical and literary thinking. In dealing "with early Greek mythology, genealogy, and religion," says his old friend, Lord Bryce, Mr. Gladstone's theories "have been condemned by the unanimous voice of scholars as fantastic." Like his great contemporary, Newman--on whom a good deal of our conversation turned--he had no critical sense of evidence; and when he was writing on _The Impregnable Rock of Scripture_ Lord Acton, who was staying at Hawarden at the time, ran after him in vain, with Welhausen or Kuenen under his arm, if haply he might persuade his host to read them.