Macaulay's vast learning, his transcendent memory, and his matchless rhetoric,--making the heaviest subjects glow with life and power, effecting compositions which will live for style alone, for which in some respects he is unapproachable. Indeed, I cannot conceive of two great contemporary statesmen more unlike in their mental structure and more antagonistic in their general views than Gladstone and Macaulay, and unlike also in their style. The treatise on State and Church, on which Gladstone exhibits so much learning, to me is heavy, vague, hazy, and hard to read. The subject, however, has but little interest to an American, and is doubtless much more highly appreciated by English students, especially those of the great universities, whom it more directly concerns. It is the argument of a young Oxford scholar for the maintenance of a Church establishment; is full of ecclesiastical lore, assuming that one of the chief ends of government is the propagation of religious truth,--a ground utterly untenable according to the universal opinion of people in this country, whether churchmen or laymen, Catholic or Protestant, Conservative or liberal. On the fall of the Whig government in 1841, succeeded by that of Sir Robert Peel, Mr. Gladstone was appointed vice-president of the Board of Trade and master of the Mint, and naturally became more prominent as a parliamentary debater,--not yet a parliamentary leader. But he was one of the most efficient of the premier's lieutenants, a tried and faithful follower, a disciple, indeed,--as was Peel himself of Canning, and Canning of Pitt. He addressed the House in all the important debates,--on railways, on agricultural interests, on the abolition of the corn laws, on the Dissenters' Chapel Bills, on sugar duties,--a conservative of conservatives, yet showing his devotion to the cause of justice in everything except justice to the Catholics in Ireland. He was opposed to the grant to Maynooth College, and in consequence resigned his office when the decision of the government was made known,--a rare act of that conscientiousness for which from first to last he has been pre-eminently distinguished in all political as well as religious matters. His resignation of office left him free to express his views; and he disclaimed, in the name of law, the constitution, and the history of the country, the voting of money to restore and strengthen the Roman Catholic Church of Ireland. In deference to Sir Robert Peel and the general cause of education his opposition was not bitter or persistent; and the progressive views which have always marked his career led him to support the premier in his repeal of the corn laws, he having been, like his chief, converted to the free-trade doctrines of Cobden. But the retirement of such prominent men as the Duke of Buccleuch and Lord Stanley (of Alderley) from his ministry, as protectionists, led to its breaking up in 1846 and an attempt to form a