e. But where the subject is a man who was four
times at the head of the government--no phantom, but dictator--and who
held this office of first minister for a longer time than any other
statesman in the reign of the Queen, how can we tell the story of his
works and days without reference, and ample reference, to the course of
events over whose unrolling he presided, and out of which he made
history? It is true that what interests the world in Mr. Gladstone is
even more what he was, than what he did; his brilliancy, charm, and
power; the endless surprises; his dualism or more than dualism; his
vicissitudes of opinion; his subtleties of mental progress; his strange
union of qualities never elsewhere found together; his striking
unlikeness to other men in whom great and free nations have for long
periods placed their trust. I am not sure that the incessant search for
clues through this labyrinth would not end in analysis and disquisition,
that might be no great improvement even upon political history. Mr.
Gladstone said of reconstruction of the income-tax that he only did not
call the task herculean, because Hercules could not have done it.
Assuredly, I am not presumptuous enough to suppose that this difficulty
of fixing the precise scale between history and biography has been
successfully overcome by me. It may be that Hercules himself would have
succeeded little better.

Some may think in this connection that I have made the preponderance of
politics excessive in the story of a genius of signal versatility, to
whom politics were only one interest among many. No doubt speeches,
debates, bills, divisions, motions, and manoeuvres of party, like the
manna that fed the children of Israel in the wilderness, lose their
savour and power of nutriment on the second day. Yet after all it was to
his thoughts, his purposes, his ideals, his performances as statesman,
in all the widest significance of that lofty and honourable designation,
that Mr. Gladstone owes the lasting substance of his fame. His life was
ever '_greatly absorbed_,' he said, '_in working the institutions of his
country_.' Here we mark a signal trait. Not for two centuries, since the
historic strife of anglican and puritan, had our island produced a ruler
in whom the religious motive was paramount in the like degree. He was
not only a political force but a moral force. He strove to use all the
powers of his own genius and the powers of the state for moral purposes
a