Once launched in any career, Gladstone was sure to imbibe the full spirit of the movement and lead the way. His Liberalism presently outstripped that of the Whigs. As the most conspicuous seceder from the Tory camp, he became the special object of antipathy to the Carlton Club, which was fond of speaking of him as insane. A member of the Carlton was reported to have said to a member of the Reform Club, “I am much better off for a leader than you are, my leader is only an unscrupulous intriguer; yours is a dangerous lunatic.” The story was current that Gladstone had bought the whole contents of a toyshop and ordered them to be sent to his house. This came to me once in so circumstantial a form, that I asked Lady Russell whether she thought it could be true. Her answer was: “I begin to think it is, for I have heard it every session for ten years.” It must be owned that Gladstone was impulsive, and that impulsiveness was the source not only of gibes to his enemies, but sometimes of anxiety to his friends. “What I fear in Gladstone,” said Archbishop Tait, “is his levity.” That he could easily throw off responsibility, I think I have myself seen. But a man on whom so heavy a load of responsibility rests, if he felt its full weight would be killed by it, and want of conscientiousness is not to be inferred from lightness of heart. It must have been, indeed it evidently was, much against the grain that the great Minister of peace and economy went into the Crimean War. He seems to have tried to persuade himself that the result, after all, would be the bringing of Turkey under control. More substantial was his resolution, as Chancellor of the Exchequer and holder of the purse, to make the generation which waged the war, as far as possible, pay for it by taxes, not cast the burden upon posterity by loans. Mr. Morley is right in pointing to Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, then unhappily Ambassador at Constantinople, as largely responsible for the war. Besides his hatred of Russia, the ambassador had a personal grudge against the Czar. But conspiring with him were Palmerston, intensely anti-Russian, the father of Jingoism, perhaps not unwilling to replace the pacific Lord Aberdeen; and the Emperor of the French, who wanted glory to gild his usurped throne and a better social footing in the circle of Royalties, which he gained by publicly embracing the British Queen. In the middle of the war, Gladstone seceded from the Ministry, reconstructed under Palmerston after its fall under Lord Aberdeen; not, I suspect, so much because Palmerston failed to oppose Roebuck’s motion of inquiry, against which it was useless to contend, as because he was himself thoroughly sick of the war. I happened just then to be with him one morning on business, at the conclusion of which he began to talk to me, or rather to himself, about the situation, saying, in his Homeric way, that if the Trojans would have given back Helen and her treasures,