Mr. Kinglake thus describes Mr. Gladstone: ‘If he was famous for the splendour of his eloquence, for his unaffected piety, and blameless life, he was celebrated far and wide for a more than common liveliness of conscience. He had once imagined it to be his duty to quit a Government and to burst through strong ties of friendship and gratitude by reason of a thin shade of difference on the subject of white or brown sugar. It was believed that if he were to commit even a little sin or to imagine an evil thought he would instantly arraign himself before the dread tribunal which awaited him within his own bosom, and that his intellect being subtle and microscopic, and delighting in casuistry and exaggeration, he would be likely to give his soul a very harsh trial, and treat himself as a great criminal for faults too minute to be visible to the naked eyes of laymen. His friends lived in dread of his virtues, as tending to make him whimsical and unstable, and the practical politicians, perceiving that he was not to be depended upon for party purposes, and was bent on none but lofty objects, used to look upon him as dangerous, used to call him behind his back a good man—a good man in the worst sense of the term.’ In 1865 Carlyle wrote: ‘I had been at Edinburgh, and had heard Gladstone make his great oration on Homer there on retiring from office as Rector. It was a grand display. I never recognised before what oratory could do, the audience being kept for three hours in a state of electric tension, bursting every moment into applause. Nothing was said which seemed of moment when read deliberately afterwards; but the voice was like enchantment, and the street when we left the building was ringing with a prolongation of cheers.’ Again he meets Gladstone at Mentone in 1867, and thus describes him: ‘Talk copious, ingenious, but of no worth or sincerity; pictures, literature, finance, prosperities, greatness of outlook for Italy, etc.—a man ponderous, copious, of evident faculty, but all gone irrecoverably into House of Commons shape; man once of some wisdom or possibility of it, but now possessed by the Prince or many Princes of the Power of the Air. Tragic to me, and far from enviable, from whom one felt one’s self divided by abysmal chasms and immeasurabilities.’ On the passing of the measure of Irish Church Disestablishment, Carlyle writes: ‘In my life I have seen few more anarchic, factious, unpatriotic achievements than this of Gladstone and his Parliament in respect to such an Ireland as now is. Poor Gladstone!’ Again he writes: ‘Ten days ago read Gladstone’s article in the _Edinburgh Review_ with amazement. Empty as a blown goose egg. Seldom have I read such a ridiculous, solemn, addlepated Joseph Surface of a thing. Nothingness, or near it, conscious to itself of being greatness almost unexampled. . . . According to the People’s William, England with himself atop is evidently even now at the _top of the world_. Against