n the chambers, but I really fear that after this year my
allowance in all will be greater not only than I have any title to, but
than I ought to accept without blushing.' He became a member of the
Oxford and Cambridge Club the previous month,[56] and now was 'elected
_without_ my will (but not more than without it) a member of the Carlton
Club.' He would not go to dinner parties on Sundays, not even with Sir
Robert Peel. He was closely attentive to the minor duties of social
life, if duties they be; he was a strict observer of the etiquette of
calls, and on some afternoons he notes that he made a dozen or fourteen
of them. He frequented musical parties, where his fine voice, now
reasonably well trained, made him a welcome guest, and he goes to public
concerts where he finds Pasta and Schroeder splendid. His irrepressible
desire to expand himself in writing or in speech found a vent in
constant articles in the _Liverpool Standard_, neither better nor worse
than the ordinary juvenilia of a keen young college politician. He was
confident that, whether estimated by their numbers, their wealth, or
their respectability, the conservatives indubitably held in their hands
the means and elements of permanent power. He discharges a fusillade
from Roman history against the bare idea of vote by ballot, quotes
Cicero as its determined enemy, and ascribes to secret suffrage the fall
of the republic. He quotes with much zest a sentence from an
ultra-radical journal that the life of the West Indian negro is
happiness itself compared with that of the poor inmate of our
spinning-mills. He scores a good point for the patron of Newark, by an
eloquent article on the one man who had laboured to retrieve the
miserable condition of the factory children, and ends with a taunting
reminder to the reformers that this one man, Sadler,[57] was the nominee
of a borough-monger, and that borough-monger the Duke of Newcastle.

LONDON LIFE

It need not be said that his church-going never flagged. In 1840 his
friend, the elder Acland, interested himself in forming a small
brotherhood, with rules for systematic exercises of devotion and works
of mercy. Mr. Gladstone was one of the number. The names were not
published, nor did any one but the treasurer know the amounts given. The
pledge to personal and active benevolence seems not to have been
strongly operative, for at the end of 1845 (Dec. 7) Mr. Gladstone writes
to Hope in r