These are a few of the sentences of thanks: ‘I am ashamed,’ said Mr. Gladstone, ‘of the kindness that has been shown me. (“No.”) When I speak of my wife, when I acknowledge that there is greater justice in the tributes that you have so kindly paid to her, I there enjoy a relative and a comparative freedom, and no words that I could use would ever suffice to express the debt that I owe her in relation to all the offices that she has discharged on my behalf, and on the behalf of those who are near and dearest to us, during the long and happy period of our conjugal union. (Cheers.) I hope it will not sound like exaggeration—it is really a phrase dictated by my desire to express what I feel—if I say that I feel myself to be, as it were, drowned in an ocean of kindness.’ The other day Canon Scott Holland, in a touching sermon, described Mr. Gladstone as ‘spending his life in benedictions to those whom he leaves behind in this world, and in thanksgiving to God, to whom he rehearses over and over again, day after day, Newman’s hymn of austere and splendid admiration.’ Here is the hymn: ‘Praise to the Holiest in the height, And in the depth be praise: In all His words most wonderful; Most sure in all His ways! ‘O loving wisdom of our God! When all was sin and shame, A second Adam to the fight And to the rescue came. ‘O wisest love! that flesh and blood Which did in Adam fail, Should strive afresh against their foe, Should strive and should prevail; ‘And that a higher gift than grace Should flesh and blood refine, God’s Presence and His very Self, And Essence all-divine. ‘O generous love! that He who smote In man for man the foe, The double agony in man For man should undergo; ‘And in the garden secretly, And on the cross on high, Should teach His brethren and inspire To suffer and to die.’ At other times Mr. Gladstone has been known to say that his favourite hymns were ‘Rock of Ages’ and the version of ‘Dies Iræ’ which Scott introduced into ‘The Lay of the Last Minstrel’: ‘That day of wrath, that dreadful day, When heaven and earth shall pass away, What power shall be the sinner’s stay? How shall he meet that dreadful day?’ Mr. Gladstone, according to a writer in the _Daily News_, once remarked that he had made a careful study of all Toplady’s hymns, but had only found four other good lines in the whole of them. To those who have ever heard Mr. Gladstone recite these four lines, as he was often used to do, the recollection will come just now with pathetic poignancy: ‘Lord! it is not life to live, If Thy Presence Thou deny, Lord! if Thou Thy presence give, ’Tis no longer death—to die.’