'One
remarkable similarity prevails between Wordsworth and Shelley; the
quality of combining and connecting everywhere external nature with
internal and unseen mind. But how different are they in applications. It
frets and irritates the one, it is the key to the peacefulness of the
other.' Two books of _Paradise Regained_, he finds 'very objectionable
on religious grounds,'--the books presumably where Milton has been
convicted of Arian heresy. He still has energy enough left for more
mundane things, to write a succession of articles for the _Liverpool
Standard_, and he finds time to record his joy (December 7) 'over five
Eton first classes' at Oxford. Then, by and by, the election accounts
come in. The arrangement had been made that the expenses were not to
exceed a thousand pounds, of which the duke was to contribute one half,
and John Gladstone the other half. It now appeared that twice as much
would not suffice. The new member flung himself with all his soul into a
struggle with his committee against the practice of opening public
houses and the exorbitant demands that came of it. Open houses, he
protested, meant profligate expenditure and organised drunkenness; they
were not a pecuniary question, but a question of right and wrong. In the
afternoon of the second day of polling, his agent had said to him,
speaking about special constables, that he scarcely knew how they could
be got if wanted, for he thought nearly every man in the town was drunk.
It was in vain that the committee assured him of the discouraging truth
that a certain proportion of the voters could not be got to the poll
without a breakfast; and an observer from another planet might perhaps
have asked himself whether all this was so remarkable an improvement on
the duke doing what he liked with his own. Mr. Gladstone still stood to
it that a system of entertainment that ended in producing a state of
general intoxication, was the most demoralising and vicious of all forms
of outlay, and the Newark worthies were bewildered and confounded by the
gigantic dialectical and rhetorical resources of their incensed
representative. The fierce battle lasted, with moments of mitigation,
over many of the thirteen years of the connection. Of all the measures
that Mr. Gladstone was destined in days to come to place upon the
statute book, none was more salutary than the law that purified corrupt
practices at elections.[54]

HIS BIRTHDAY