‘It is idle to contend that between Gladstone and Disraeli any love was lost, and that many people thought it was unhandsome on the part of Mr. Gladstone not to attend his great rival’s obsequies, and to bury his animosities in the grave. In 1862 Disraeli complained to the Bishop of Oxford that he and others kept the Church as Mr. Gladstone’s nest-egg when he became a Whig till it was almost addled. At this time Disraeli wrote: “I wish you could have induced Gladstone to have joined Lord Derby’s Government when Lord Ellenborough resigned in 1858. It was not my fault that he did not; I almost went on my knees to him. Had he done so, the Church and everything else would have been in a very different position.” In 1867 the Bishop of Oxford writes: “The most wonderful thing is the rise of Disraeli. It is not the mere assertion of talent, as you hear so many say; it seems to me quite beside that. He has been able to teach the House of Commons almost to ignore Gladstone, and at present lords it over him, and, I am told, says that he will hold him down for twenty years.” Disraeli, however, did himself no good when, in 1878, he described Mr. Gladstone as a sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, and gifted with an egotistical imagination that at all times can command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments to malign his opponents and to glorify himself.’ Disraeli was never happy in statement. When he had to explain a policy, financial or other, he might really be regarded as a very dull speaker. Gladstone was specially brilliant in statement. He could give to an exposition of figures the fascination of a romance or a poem. Mr. Gladstone never could, under any circumstances, be a dull speaker. He was no equal of Disraeli in the gift of sarcasm, and what Disraeli himself called ‘flouts and jeers.’ But in his reply he swept his antagonist before him with his marvellous eloquence, compounded of reason and passion. On the breaking out of the American Civil War, Mr. Gladstone was undoubtedly on the side of the South: Jefferson Davis, he said, had made a nation of the South—a speech of which Mr. Gladstone repented a few years after. But it took a long time for the North to forgive or forget his unfortunate speech. Bishop Fraser, writing in 1865, says: ‘They have just got hold of about a dozen subscribers to the Confederate Loan, among whom is W. E. Gladstone, down, to my surprise, for £2,000. This, as you might expect, is a topic for excited editorials, and the cry is that the American Government ought to demand his dismissal from the Ministry.’