than Channing's--that to improve man's outward condition is not to
improve man himself; this must come from each man's endeavour within his
own breast; without that there can be little ground for social hope.
Well was it said to him, 'You have so lived and wrought that you have
kept the soul alive in England.' Not in England only was this felt. He
was sometimes charged with lowering the sentiment, the lofty and
fortifying sentiment, of national pride. At least it is a ground for
national pride that he, the son of English training, practised through
long years in the habit and tradition of English public life, standing
for long years foremost in accepted authority and renown before the eye
of England, so conquered imagination and attachment in other lands, that
when the end came it was thought no extravagance for one not an
Englishman to say, 'On the day that Mr. Gladstone died, the world has
lost its greatest citizen.' The reader who revolves all this will know
why I began by speaking of temerity.

That my book should be a biography without trace of bias, no reader will
expect. There is at least no bias against the truth; but indifferent
neutrality in a work produced, as this is, in the spirit of loyal and
affectionate remembrance, would be distasteful, discordant, and
impossible. I should be heartily sorry if there were no signs of
partiality and no evidence of prepossession. On the other hand there is,
I trust, no importunate advocacy or tedious assentation. He was great
man enough to stand in need of neither. Still less has it been needed,
in order to exalt him, to disparage others with whom he came into strong
collision. His own funeral orations from time to time on some who were
in one degree or another his antagonists, prove that this petty and
ungenerous method would have been to him of all men most repugnant. Then
to pretend that for sixty years, with all 'the varying weather of the
mind,' he traversed in every zone the restless ocean of a great nation's
shifting and complex politics, without many a faulty tack and many a
wrong reckoning, would indeed be idle. No such claim is set up by
rational men for Pym, Cromwell, Walpole, Washington, or either Pitt. It
is not set up for any of the three contemporaries of Mr. Gladstone whose
names live with the three most momentous transactions of his
age--Cavour, Lincoln, Bismarck. To suppose, again, that in every one of
the many subjects touched by him, besides exhibiting t