What I like most about Mr. Gladstone is his antique spirituality. The modern politician is smart, alive, pert, up-to-date; knows everything about registration; hires a good agent; can run a caucus, and receive a deputation. With us, as yet, the modern politician has not wholly abandoned religious faith--as he has done among our neighbours on the Continent--and has not come to regard this solid earth of ours as the one standing-place in a universe alone worthy the consideration of intelligent men. But the English politician is so far suffused with the spirit of modernity as to prefer the newspaper to the book, to regard more closely registration records than the classics, and generally is wide awake rather than steeped in subtler and profounder forms of sagacity and knowledge. The Prime Minister is a Survival. With all his extraordinary adaptiveness, he stands in many respects in sharpest contrast to his environment. I can never forget, as I look at him, all those years he spent in that vanished epoch which knew nothing of evolution or of science at all, and was content to regard a knowledge of the classics as the beginning and the end of a gentleman's education. After reading the life of Lord Aberdeen, I was brought back in spirit to all those years during which Mr. Gladstone was a member of the Tory party, and lived in an atmosphere of proud, scholarly exclusiveness--of distrust of the multitude--of ecclesiasticism in the home, in the forum, and as the foundation of all political controversy. When, therefore, Mr. Gladstone is going through a crisis, it is intensely interesting to me to watch him and to see how he carries himself amid it all; and then it is that this thought occurs to me of how differently and clearly he stands out from all his colleagues and surroundings. [Sidenote: A reminiscence.]