! I know him for a solid, serious, silent-minded man; but how
with his Coleridge shovel-hattism he has contrived to relate himself to
_you_, there is the mystery. True men of all creeds, it _would_ seem,
are brothers.--_Correspondence of Carlyle and Emerson_, i. p. 217.

There is more than one reference to Emerson in Mr. Gladstone's book,
_e.g._ i. pp. 25, 130.

[106] The letters are given in full in _Gleanings_, vii. p. 106. See
also Trevelyan's _Macaulay_, chap. viii.

[107] Chapter of Autobiography, 1868.--_Gleanings_, vii. p. 115.

[108] _Aeneid_, vi. 896. But through the ivory gate the shades send to
the upper air apparitions that do but cheat us.

[109] Chapter i. p. 5.

[110] _Inferno_, xix. 115-7.

[111] It was translated into German and published, with a preface by
Tholuck, in 1843.

CHAPTER VI

CHARACTERISTICS

(_1840_)

Be inspired with the belief that life is a great and noble calling;
not a mean and grovelling thing that we are to shuffle through as
we can, but an elevated and lofty destiny.--GLADSTONE.[112]

It is the business of biography to depict a physiognomy and not to
analyse a type. In our case there is all the more reason to think of
this, because type hardly applies to a figure like Gladstone's, without
any near or distant parallel, and composed of so many curious dualisms
and unforeseen affinities. Truly was it said of Fenelon, that half of
him would be a great man, and would stand out more clearly as a great
man than does the whole, because it would be simpler. So of Mr.
Gladstone. We are dazzled by the endless versatility of his mind and
interests as man of action, scholar, and controversial athlete; as
legislator, administrator, leader of the people; as the strongest of his
time in the main branches of executive force, strongest in persuasive
force; supreme in the exacting details of national finance; master of
the parliamentary arts; yet always living in the noble visions of the
moral and spiritual idealist. This opulence, vivacity, profusion, and
the promise of it all in these days of early prime, made an awakening
impression even on his foremost contemporaries. The impression might
have been easier to reproduce, if he had been less infinitely mobile. 'I
cannot explain my own foundation,' Fenelon said; 'it escapes me; it
seems to change every hour.' How are we to seek an an