Mr. Joseph Cowen said: ‘The super-subtlety of his intellect, his faculty for hair-splitting, and his love of party warfare, create distrust, and generate that strong sense of resentment which exists towards him amongst a numerous section of the community. If he were not so subtle he would be more successful. A plain straight man like Lord Hartington, or Lord John Russell, or Sir Stafford Northcote, impresses the average Englishman more favourably than a curiously acute one like the Prime Minister. The popular impression—that he is an austere purist, and would not resort to any of the tricks or wriggles that characterize ordinary party leaders—is altogether a mistake. Those who are brought in contact with the Legislature know that he can resort to any of the devices of partizanship as readily as men who are popularly accounted his inferiors. It is this many-sidedness that leads to the different estimates that are formed of him. He cannot but have felt very keenly the death of Gordon, and the massacre that ensued on the fall of Khartoum; yet I believe it is true that he went to the Criterion that night to see a very second-rate comedy. Ordinary persons having the responsibility that he had would not have been able to attend a theatre at such a time. The other day he laboured to impress the House of Commons with the extreme gravity of the position of affairs with Russia, and shortly after he went to see Miss Anderson play in “Pygmalion and Galatea.” These sudden changes from seriousness to seeming frivolity foster that sense of distrust which a large number of sober Englishmen feel towards him. They cannot understand how a man engaged in such grave and weighty transactions can feel them very acutely when he can so easily throw them on one side and ignore the responsibilities they entail.’ ‘What a wonderful fellow Gladstone is, after all!’ said Mr. Disraeli one day to McCullagh Torrens. ‘He had a dreadful passage, I hear, coming back from Ireland, and the moment he got on shore he began to make a speech to the Welshmen, telling them that they were all right, and to keep so.’ ‘What an ardent creature!’ he exclaimed as Mr. Gladstone rushed past them to vote on another occasion when a division had been called for.