not merely
inexpedient, but unjust and tyrannical. Jowett, on the other hand, was
convinced that it must satisfy all reasonable reformers, and added
emphatically in writing to Mr. Gladstone, 'It is to yourself and Lord
John that the university will be indebted for the greatest boon that it
has ever received.' After the introduction of the bill by Lord John
Russell, the obscurantists made a final effort to call down one of their
old pelting hailstorms. A petition against the bill was submitted to
convocation; happily it passed by a majority of no more than two.

SECOND READING

At length the blessed day of the second reading came. The ever zealous
Arthur Stanley was present. 'A superb speech from Gladstone,' he
records, 'in which, for the first time, all the arguments from our
report were worked up in the most effective manner. He vainly
endeavoured to reconcile his present with his former position. But, with
this exception, I listened to his speech with the greatest delight....
To behold one's old enemies slaughtered before one's face with the most
irresistible weapons was quite intoxicating. One great charm of his
speaking is its exceeding good-humour. There is great vehemence but no
bitterness.'[324] An excellent criticism of many, perhaps most, of his
speeches.

'It must ever be borne in mind,' Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lord John at the
outset, 'with respect to our old universities that history, law, and
usage with them form such a manifold, diversified, and complex mass,
that it is not one subject but a world of subjects that we have to deal
with in approaching them.' And he pointed out that if any clever lawyer
such as Butt or Cairns were employed to oppose the bill systematically,
debate would run to such lengths as to make it hopeless. This was a
point of view that Mr. Gladstone's more exacting and abstract critics
now, and many another time, forgot: they forgot that, whatever else you
may say of a bill, after all it is a thing that is to be carried through
parliament. Everybody had views of his own. A characteristic
illustration of Mr. Gladstone's temper in the arduous work of practical
legislation to which so much of the energies of his life was devoted, is
worth giving here from a letter of this date to Burgon of Oriel. Nobody
answers better to the rare combination, in Bacon's words, of a 'glorious
nature that doth put life into business, with a solid and sober nature
that hath as m