fragments no long supplement is needed. Little of interest can
be certainly established about his far-off ancestral origins, and the
ordinary twilight of genealogy overhangs the case of the Glaidstanes,
Gledstanes, Gladstanes, Gladstones, whose name is to be found on
tombstones and parish rolls, in charter-chests and royal certificates,
on the southern border of Scotland. The explorations of the genealogist
tell of recognitions of their nobility by Scottish kings in dim ages,
but the links are sometimes broken, title-deeds are lost, the same name
is attached to estates in different counties, Roxburgh, Peebles, Lanark,
and in short until the close of the seventeenth century we linger, in
the old poet's phrase, among dreams of shadows. As we have just been
told, during the eighteenth century no traces of their gentility
survives, and apparently they glided down from moderate lairds to small
maltsters. Thomas Gladstones, grandfather of him with whom we are
concerned, made his way from Biggar to Leith, and there set up in a
modest way as corndealer, wholesale and retail. His wife was a Neilson
of Springfield. To them sixteen children were born, and John Gladstones
(b. Dec. 11, 1764) was their eldest son. Having established himself in
Liverpool, he married in 1792 Jane Hall, a lady of that city, who died
without children six years later. In 1800 he took for his second wife
Anne Robertson of Dingwall. Her father was of the clan Donnachaidh, and
her mother was of kin with Mackenzies, Munros, and other highland
stocks.[9] Their son, therefore, was of unmixed Scottish origins, half
highland, half lowland borderer.[10] With the possible exception of Lord
Mansfield--the rival of Chatham in parliament, one of the loftiest names
among great judges, and chief builder of the commercial law of the
English world, a man who might have been prime minister if he had
chosen.--Mr. Gladstone stands out as far the most conspicuous and
powerful of all the public leaders in our history, who have sprung from
the northern half of our island. When he had grown to be the most famous
man in the realm of the Queen, he said, 'I am not slow to claim the
name of Scotsman, and even if I were, there is the fact staring me in
the face that not a drop of blood runs in my veins except what is
derived from a Scottish ancestry.'[11] An illustrious opponent once
described him, by way of hitting his singular duality of disposition, as
an ardent Italian in the cust