Mr. Gladstone's so slowly passing through all the stages from Conservatism to Radicalism has had this effect,--that while all other public men of his standing have grown more or less antiquated in steady loyal service to their party, and by presenting a fixed if monotonous aspect to the public, this one Parliamentary personage kept a perennial freshness, simply by skilfully dividing his prolonged career into distinct periods and going on changing. Some political section has been always welcoming Mr. Gladstone newly into its ranks and to its spoils, for, as we have said, the two things unfailingly went together; and the shouts with which he was received were always strengthened by fainter murmurs of applause from other sections more advanced along the line, who hoped to receive him themselves later on. They did so. Really to each one of them he was a recruit from the last party. To the Palmerstonians he ought at the most to have been only a Peelite; to the Liberals at worst only a Palmerstonian. But by a surprising adroitness, it was always made to appear that in all his migrations from party to party, he joined each successive group as a new retreater from the Tories. It certainly was true in one sense; he was always going further away from them. But for all party purposes and reckoning, he had as much left them when he joined Palmerston as when he shook hands with Mr. Bright and took his place in front of the Radicals. These are only a first handful of specimens of a certain unfairness in Mr. Gladstone's position and career from first to last, from which he has largely profited, and which very naturally irked his opponents, who have had to suffer its inconveniences. He has posed as a sort of political orphan left lonely in the Parliamentary world at the death of Peel, who has been persecuted by wicked Tories from one Chancellorship of the Exchequer to another, until they finally drove him into the Premiership, but all this time he was successfully seceding from them, though they continued in pursuit. It must have been Mr. Gladstone's portentous earnestness of demeanour which has covered up from the general public a joke so huge and prolonged as this, preventing everybody from seeing that such a tale did not agree with his unprecedented prosperity. But if in these ways he has kept himself interesting to the country, and fresh and surprising for every group he has in rotation joined, both he and his changes have long been stale to the Conservatives. They are able to look along his whole track, and seeing him from behind, know him as a Peelite, a follower of Aberdeen, a Palmerstonian, a Russellite, and a Radical. They are debarred from applying his own name to the last stage, and calling him a Gladstonian. Strangely enough, and indeed very significantly, that term has never taken root in our politics. There really have never been any Gladstonians: no one ever was or ever will be called by that title. Mr.