n Buonaparte," and his
epigram on the majority of preachers--that "they aim at nothing and they
hit it," proves his freedom from any touch of sacerdotalism. His
"Rhetoric," his "Logic," and his "Political Economy" were praised by so
eminent a judge as John Stuart Mill, though criticised by Hamilton; and
Lecky remarks on the "admirable lucidity of his style."

His work, however, was as a whole too fragmentary to become standard,
and he regarded it himself as "the mission of his life to make up
cartridges for others to fire."

* * * * *

We may notice that in writing of _Jane Austen_, only six years after
Scott, though still measured and judicial, he permits himself a much
more assured attitude of applause; and the article affords most valuable
indication of the steady progress by which her masterpieces achieved the
supremacy now acknowledged by all.

WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE

(1809-1898)

It would be no less impertinent, and unnecessary, to dwell in these
pages upon the political, or literary, work of the greatest of modern
premiers. It is sufficient to recall the certainty which used to follow
a notice by Gladstone of a large and immediate rise in sales. Mr. John
Morley remarking that Gladstone's "place is not in literary or critical
history, but elsewhere," reminds us that his style was sometimes called
Johnsonian, though without good ground.... Some critics charged him in
1840 with "prolix clearness." "The old charge," says Mr. Gladstone upon
this, was obscure compression. I do not doubt that both may be true, and
the former may have been the result of a well-meant effort to escape
from the latter.

* * * * *

Mr. Morley, again, selects the essay on Tennyson for especial praise.
Though one is apt to forget it, the Laureate did not meet with anything
like immediate recognition; and, though coming twenty-eight years after
the appreciation by J.S. Mill, this article does not assume the
supremacy afterwards accorded the poet by common consent.

SAMUEL WILBERFORCE

(1805-1873)

"One of the most conspicuous and remarkable figures" of his generation
the versatile Bishop of Oxford is said to have come "next to Gladstone
as a man of inexhaustible powers of work." Known from his Oxford days as
Soapy Sam, he was involved through no fault of his own, in some of the
odium attached to the "Essays and Reviews" and "Colenso" cases: his
private life was em