manners were winning. His conduct was without a spot or
even a speck. He was that rare and blessed creature, _anima naturaliter
Christiana_. He read largely, and though not superficial, yet with an
extraordinary speed. He had no high or exclusive ways.' Thus, as so many
have known in that happy dawn of life, before any of the imps of
disorder and confusion have found their way into the garden, it was the
most careless hours,--careless of all save truth and beauty,--that were
the hours best filled.

ARTHUR HALLAM

Youth will commonly do anything rather than write letters, but the
friendship of this pair stood even that test. The pages are redolent of
a living taste for good books and serious thoughts, and amply redeemed
from strain or affectation by touches of gay irony and the collegian's
banter. Hallam applies to Gladstone Diomede's lines about Odysseus, of
eager heart and spirit so manful in all manner of toils, as the only
comrade whom a man would choose.[30] But the Greek hero was no doubt a
complex character, and the parallel is taken by Gladstone as an
equivocal compliment. So Hallam begs him at any rate to accept the other
description, how when he uttered his mighty voice from his chest, and
words fell like flakes of snow in winter, then could no mortal man
contend with Odysseus.[31] As happy a forecast for the great orator of
their generation, as when in 1829 he told Gladstone that Tennyson
promised fair to be its greatest poet. Hallam's share in the
correspondence reminds us of the friendship of two other Etonians ninety
years before, of the letters and verses that Gray wrote to Richard West;
there is the same literary sensibility, the same kindness, but there is
what Gray and West felt not, the breath of a busy and changing age. Each
of these two had the advantage of coming from a home where politics were
not mere gossip about persons and paragraphs, but were matters of
trained and continued interest. The son of one of the most eminent of
the brilliant band of the whig writers of that day, Hallam passes
glowing eulogies on the patriotism and wisdom of the whigs in coalescing
with Canning against the bigotry of the king and the blunders of
Wellington and Peel; he contrasts this famous crisis with a similar
crisis in the early part of the reign of George III.; and observes how
much higher all parties stood in the balance of disinterestedness and
public virtue. He goes to the opera a