The family name was anciently Gledstane, and the ancestry on both sides of the house was purely Scotch. Sir John Gladstone made his own way in life, amassed a fortune as a corn merchant in Liverpool, and became a member of Parliament and a follower of Peel. His gentle and pious wife admirably supplemented his masterful nature, and the sons of the household were brought up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. At the age of eleven the third son, William Ewart Gladstone, was sent away to Eton, where his two brothers were already at school. Here his piety and studious habits militated against his popularity, but here his intellectual ambition was aroused and his soul was enriched by the closest intimacy with Arthur Hallam, whom Tennyson's "In Memoriam" has eulogized. Like Canning he was a precocious orator, and edited the school paper with an ability which led some of his contemporaries to predict a great future for him. "I am confident," said Arthur Hallam, "that he is a bud that will bloom with a richer fragrance than almost any whose early promise I have witnessed." At Christ Church, Oxford, he justified the hopes of his friends- -a quiet, abstemious, reading man, mighty in debate, learned and devout in theology, and a tower of strength in examinations. He graduated with a double first class (classics and mathematics) in 1831, as Robert Peel had done a generation earlier. His choice of a career would have taken him into the clergy of the Church of England, but his father saw in him the making of a parliamentary leader, and to the House of Commons he was accordingly returned in 1833, entering the first Reformed Parliament as a Tory.