_À propos_ of Mr. Gladstone, who himself paid a tribute to the absence of rancour in his rival, I may be permitted to recall an anecdote told me by the late Sir John Millais. When Disraeli stood (though then suffering, he refused to _sit_) for his last portrait, his “dear Apelles” noticed his gaze riveted on an engraving of the artist’s fine portrait of the great premier. “Would you care to have it?” he inquired. “I was rather shy of offering it to you.” “I should be delighted to have it,” was the reply. “Don’t imagine that I have ever disliked Mr. Gladstone; on the contrary, my only difficulty with him has been _that I could never understand him_.” And Carlyle himself thawed when Disraeli, whom he had so long hysterically abused, but many of whose ideas, as I shall prove, he shared, offered him public recognition in a letter which gave as a reason for uninheritable honours, “I have remembered that you too, like myself, are childless.” But Carlyle, who had aspersed him, never denied that he looked facts in the face without mistaking phantoms for them. Even from the first he owned length of view. In his old age a certain far-awayness of expression was very noticeable. I have mentioned Mr. Gladstone. It was well for England that two great attitudes towards great questions should have been thrown into sharp relief for nearly a score of years by the duel between two great personalities; and it was also well for Disraeli that “England does not love coalitions.” We know from Mr. Gladstone’s own lips that much in his rival had won his respect, while from Mr. Morley we glean that Mr. Gladstone even struggled with a sort of subacid liking for one whom he too could “never comprehend.”[31] The letters of both after Lady Beaconsfield’s death are refreshing instances of how sworn enemies of the arena may grasp hands under the softening solemnity of bereavement, and for a moment forget the hard words which, under irritation, they certainly used of each other. Disraeli was older than Gladstone, and had been early acquainted with him. In the ’thirties he sat next to “young Gladstone” at the Academy dinner, and regretted that he had been relegated from “the wits,” with whom he had been ranged in the year previous, to “the politicians.” In the ’forties Disraeli made one of his few mistakes in prognostic, when he wrote to his sister, “I doubt if he has an ‘avenir’;” but the significance of Gladstone’s resignation at this juncture on “Maynooth,” and the peculiar circumstances of the Peelites must be borne in mind. Disraeli could scarcely then divine the surprises of oscillation in store.