er the Restoration, otherwise than as persons of
family. At that period there are traces of their having been fined
by public authority, but not for any ordinary criminal offence.
From this time forward I find no trace of their gentility. During
the eighteenth century they are, I think, principally traced by a
line of maltsters (no doubt a small business then) in Lanarkshire.
Their names are recorded on tombstones in the churchyard of Biggar.
I remember going as a child or boy to see the representative of
that branch, either in 1820 or some years earlier, who was a small
watchmaker in that town. He was of the same generation as my
father, but came, I understood, from a senior brother of the
family. I do not know whether his line is extinct. There also seem
to be some stray Gladstones who are found at Yarmouth and in
Yorkshire.[3]

ANCESTRY

My father's father seems from his letters to have been an excellent
man and a wise parent: his wife a woman of energy. There are
pictures of them at Fasque, by Raeburn. He was a merchant, in
Scotch phrase; that is to say, a shopkeeper dealing in corn and
stores, and my father as a lad served in his shop. But he also sent
a ship or ships to the Baltic; and I believe that my father, whose
energy soon began to outtop that of all the very large family, went
in one of these ships at a very early age as a supercargo, an
appointment then, I think, common. But he soon quitted a nest too
small to hold him. He was born in December 1764: and I have (at
Hawarden) a reprint of the _Liverpool Directory_ for 178-, in which
his name appears as a partner in the firm of Messrs. Corrie, corn
merchants.

Here his force soon began to be felt as a prominent and then a
foremost member of the community. A liberal in the early period of
the century, he drew to Mr. Canning, and brought that statesman as
candidate to Liverpool in 1812, by personally offering to guarantee
his expenses at a time when, though prosperous, he could hardly
have been a rich man. His services to the town were testified by
gifts of plate, now in the possession of the elder lines of his
descendants, and by a remarkable subscription of six thousand
pounds raised to enable him to contest the borough of Lancaster,
for which he