let it loose with. I think he may do a great deal.'

In the course of his three months of sojourn at Newark Mr. Gladstone
paid his first visit to the great man at Clumber.

The duke received me, he tells his father, with the greatest
kindness, and conversed with such ease and familiarity of manner as
speedily to dispel a certain degree of awe which I had previously
entertained, and to throw me perhaps more off my guard than I ought
to have been in company with a man of his age and rank.... The
utmost regularity and subordination appears to prevail in the
family, and no doubt it is in many respects a good specimen of the
old English style. He is apparently a most affectionate father, but
still the sons and daughters are under a certain degree of
restraint in his presence.... A man, be his station of life what it
may, more entirely divested of personal pride and arrogance, more
single-minded and disinterested in his views, or more courageous
and resolute in determination to adhere to them as the dictates of
his own conscience, I cannot conceive.

From this frigid interior Mr. Gladstone made his way to the genial
company of Milnes Gaskell at Thornes and had a delightful week. Thence
he proceeded to spend some days with his sick mother at Leamington. 'We
have been singularly dealt with as a family,' he observes, 'once
snatched from a position where we were what is called entering society,
and sent to comparative seclusion as regards family establishment--and
now again prevented from assuming the situation that seems the natural
termination of a career like my father's. Here is a noble trial--for me
personally to exercise a kindly and unselfish feeling, if amid the
excitements and allurements now near me, I am enabled duly to realise
the bond of consanguinity and suffer with those whom Providence has
ordained to suffer.' And this assuredly was no mere entry in a journal.
In betrothals, marriages, deaths, on all the great occasions of life in
his circle, his letters under old-fashioned formalities of phrase yet
beat with a marked and living pulse of genuine interest, solicitude,
sympathy, unselfishness, and union.

III

As always, he sought refreshment from turmoil that was only moderately
congenial to him, in reading and writing. Among much else he learns
Shelley by heart, but his devotion to Wordsworth is unshaken.