On his birthday at the close of this eventful year, here is his entry in
his diary:--'On this day I have completed my twenty-third year.... The
exertions of the year have been smaller than those of the last, but in
some respects the diminution has been unavoidable. In future I hope
circumstances will bind me down to work with a rigour which my natural
sluggishness will find it impossible to elude. I wish that I could hope
my frame of mind had been in any degree removed from earth and brought
nearer to heaven, that the habit of my mind had been imbued with
something of that spirit which is not of this world. I have now
familiarised myself with maxims sanctioning and encouraging a degree of
intercourse with society, perhaps attended with much risk.... Nor do I
now think myself warranted in withdrawing from the practices of my
fellow men except when they really _involve_ an encouragement of sin, in
which case I do certainly rank races and theatres....' 'Periods like
these,' he writes to his friend Gaskell (January 3, 1833), 'grievous
generally in many of their results, are by no means unfavourable to the
due growth and progress of individual character. I remember a very wise
saying of Archidamus in Thucydides, that the being educated [Greek: en tois
anankaiotatois] brings strength and efficacy to the character.'[55]

In one of his letters to his father at this exciting epoch Mr.
Gladstone says, that before the sudden opening now made for him, what he
had marked out for himself was 'a good many years of silent reading and
inquiry.' That blessed dream was over; his own temperament and outer
circumstances, both of them made its realisation impossible; but in a
sense he clung to it all his days. He entered at Lincoln's Inn (January
25), and he dined pretty frequently in hall down to 1839, meeting many
old Eton and Oxford acquaintances, more genuine law students than
himself. He kept thirteen terms but was never called to the bar. If he
had intended to undergo a legal training, the design was ended by
Newark. After residing for a short time in lodgings in Jermyn Street, he
took quarters at the Albany (March 1833), which remained his London home
for six years. 'I am getting on rapidly with my furnishing,' he tells
his father, 'and I shall be able, I feel confident, to do it all,
including plate, within the liberal limits which you allow. I cannot
warmly enough thank you for the terms and footing on which you propose
to place me i