Like Pitt, Gladstone was a first-rate sleeper. At the time when he had exposed himself to great obloquy and violent attacks by his secession from the Palmerston Government, in the middle of the Crimean War, one of his intimate friends spoke of him to me as being in so extreme a state of excitement that he hardly liked to go near him. Next day, I had business with him. He went out of the room to fetch a letter, leaving me with Mrs. Gladstone, to whom I said that I feared he must be severely tried by the attacks. She replied that he was, but that he would come home from the most exciting debate and fall at once into sound sleep. A bad night, she said, if ever he had one, upset him. But this was very rare. He chronicles his good and bad nights, showing how thoroughly he felt the necessity of sound sleep. In extreme old age he took long walks and felled trees, conversed with unfailing vivacity, and seemed to be the last of the party in the evening to wish to go to bed. At the same time he was doing a good deal of work. The hero was fond of dwelling on his Scottish extraction. His domicile, however, was Liverpool, and his father was a West Indian proprietor and slave-owner; a circumstance perhaps not wholly without influence on one or two passages of his life. To his Scottish shrewdness and aptitude for business, Eton and Oxford added the highest English culture. Eton in those days would teach him only classics. But there was a good deal of interest in public affairs among the boys, many of whom were scions of political houses. There was a lively debating club, called “Pop,” of which Gladstone was the star. At Oxford he added mathematics to classics, taking the highest honours in both. There, also, he was the star of the debating club. It was a fine time for budding debaters, being the epoch of the great struggle about the Reform Bill. Gladstone led vehemently and gloriously on the Tory side. The result was that his fellow collegian, Lord Lincoln, introduced him as a most promising recruit to his father the old Duke of Newcastle, the highest of Tories, and Gladstone was elected to Parliament for Newark, a borough under the Duke’s influence. I have been allowed to read the correspondence, and there is nothing in it derogatory to the young man’s independence.