The Real Gladstone: An Anecdotal BiographyRitchie, J. Ewing (James Ewing)
History
The Real Gladstone: An Anecdotal Biography
Ritchie, J. Ewing (James Ewing)
Gladstone, W. E. (William Ewart), 1809-1898
About the same time Mr. Gladstone seems to have been not a little moved
by our military proceedings in India. When Lieutenant Eyre’s ‘Military
Operations in Cabool’ appeared, Mr. Murray sent Mr. Gladstone a copy. He
replied: ‘I have read it with great pain and shame, which are, I fear, as
one must say in such a case, the tests of its merits as a work. May
another occasion for such a narrative never arise!’ A humane wish, as
subsequent events show, not likely to be speedily realized.
‘Church and State’ soon reached a third edition, and led to the famous
review of it by Macaulay, in which he speaks of Gladstone as ‘the rising
hope of the stern and unbending Tories.’ ‘I have bought Gladstone’s book
on Church and State,’ he writes to Macvey Napier, ‘and I think I can make
a good article on it. It seems to me the very thing for a spirited,
popular, and at the same time gentlemanlike, critique.’ Again he writes:
‘I met Gladstone at Rome. We talked and walked together in St. Peter’s
during the best part of an afternoon, and I have in consequence been more
civil to him personally than I otherwise should have been. He is both a
clever and an able man, with all his fanaticism.’ At this time
Gladstone’s eyesight failed him, and the doctors recommended him to spend
the winter at Rome, where he met, besides Macaulay, Henry Manning and
Cardinal Wiseman and Grant, who afterwards became Roman Catholic Bishop
of Southwark. Among the visitors at Rome that winter were the widow and
daughters of Sir Stephen Richard Glynne, of Hawarden Castle, Flintshire.
Mr. Gladstone was already acquainted with these ladies, having been a
friend of Lady Glynne’s eldest son at Oxford and having also met him at
Hawarden. The visit to Rome threw him much into their society, and he
became engaged to Lady Glynne’s eldest daughter.
‘In 1839,’ writes Sir Francis Doyle, ‘I attended Mr. Gladstone’s wedding
at Hawarden as his best man. Catherine Glynne and her sister Mary, both
beautiful women, were married on the same day—the first to William
Gladstone, the second to Lord Lyttelton. The occasion was a very
interesting one from the high character of the two bridegrooms and the
warmth of affection shown for the two charming young ladies by all their
friends and neighbours in every rank of life. There was a depth and
genuineness of sympathy diffused around which, as the French say, spoke
for itself without any words.’
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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