nor things were objects of scrutiny and calculation, far
beyond the habit of most men. For he was lowlander as well as
highlander. But a vast percentage of his letters from boyhood onwards
contain apologies for haste. More than once when his course was nearly
run, he spoke of his life having been passed in 'unintermittent hurry,'
just as Mill said, he had never been in a hurry in his life until he
entered parliament, and then he had never been out of a hurry.

It was no contradiction that deep and constant in him, along with this
vehement turn for action, was a craving for tranquil collection of
himself that seemed almost monastic. To Mrs. Gladstone he wrote a couple
of years after their marriage (Dec. 13, 1841):--

You interpret so indulgently what I mean about the necessity of
quiescence at home during the parliamentary session, that I need
not say much; and yet I think my doctrine must _seem_ so strange
that I wish again and again to state how entirely it is different
from anything like disparagement, of George for example. It is
always relief and always delight to see and to be with you; and you
would, I am sure, be glad to know, how near Mary [Lady Lyttelton]
comes as compared with others to you, as respects what I can hardly
describe in few words, my mental rest, when she is present. But
there is no _man_ however near to me, with whom I am fit to be
habitually, when hard worked. I have told you how reluctant I have
always found myself to detail to my father on coming home, when I
lived with him, what had been going on in the House of Commons.
Setting a tired mind to work is like making a man run up and down
stairs when his limbs are weary.

If he sometimes recalls a fiery hero of the _Iliad_, at other times he
is the grave and studious benedictine, but whether in quietude or
movement, always a man with a purpose and never the loiterer or lounger,
never apathetic, never a sufferer from that worst malady of the human
soul--from cheerlessness and cold.

We need not take him through a phrenological table of elements, powers,
faculties, leanings, and propensities. Very early, as we shall soon see,
Mr. Gladstone gave marked evidence of that sovereign quality of Courage
which became one of the most signal of all his traits. He used to say
that he had known three men in his time possessing in a supreme degree
the virtue of parliamentary courage-