rituality. The
modern politician is smart, alive, pert, up-to-date; knows everything
about registration; hires a good agent; can run a caucus, and receive a
deputation. With us, as yet, the modern politician has not wholly
abandoned religious faith--as he has done among our neighbours on the
Continent--and has not come to regard this solid earth of ours as the
one standing-place in a universe alone worthy the consideration of
intelligent men. But the English politician is so far suffused with the
spirit of modernity as to prefer the newspaper to the book, to regard
more closely registration records than the classics, and generally is
wide awake rather than steeped in subtler and profounder forms of
sagacity and knowledge. The Prime Minister is a Survival. With all his
extraordinary adaptiveness, he stands in many respects in sharpest
contrast to his environment. I can never forget, as I look at him, all
those years he spent in that vanished epoch which knew nothing of
evolution or of science at all, and was content to regard a knowledge of
the classics as the beginning and the end of a gentleman's education.
After reading the life of Lord Aberdeen, I was brought back in spirit to
all those years during which Mr. Gladstone was a member of the Tory
party, and lived in an atmosphere of proud, scholarly exclusiveness--of
distrust of the multitude--of ecclesiasticism in the home, in the forum,
and as the foundation of all political controversy. When, therefore, Mr.
Gladstone is going through a crisis, it is intensely interesting to me
to watch him and to see how he carries himself amid it all; and then it
is that this thought occurs to me of how differently and clearly he
stands out from all his colleagues and surroundings.

[Sidenote: A reminiscence.]

Different things suggest early associations to different people. Mrs.
Solness, in the "Master Builder," could think only of her dolls when she
was telling the story of the fire that left her childless for ever. I
have heard of a great lady who cannot see a shell without recalling the
scenes of her dead youth before her. Next to the railway bridge which
spans the river in my native town, there is nothing which brings back
the past to me so palpably and so vividly--I might sometimes say, so
poignantly--as the echoes of books. One of my clearest recollections is
of a little room, looking out on a sunny and, as it appeared to me then,
a beautifully-kept garden, with a small but