lf. All this, however, did not fully manifest
itself at this time, nor for some years to come.

Strength of will found scope for exercise where some would not discover
the need for it. In native capacity for righteous Anger he abounded. The
flame soon kindled, and it was no fire of straw; but it did not master
him. Mrs. Gladstone once said to me (1891), that whoever writes his life
must remember that he had two sides--one impetuous, impatient,
irrestrainable, the other all self-control, able to dismiss all but the
great central aim, able to put aside what is weakening or disturbing;
that he achieved this self-mastery, and had succeeded in the struggle
ever since he was three or four and twenty, first by the natural power
of his character, and second by incessant wrestling in prayer--prayer
that had been abundantly answered.

Problems of compromise are of the essence of the parliamentary and
cabinet system, and for some years at any rate he was more than a little
restive when they confronted him. Though in the time to come he had
abundant difference with colleagues, he had all the virtues needed for
political co-operation, as Cobden, Bright, and Mill had them, nor did he
ever mistake for courage or independence the unhappy preference for
having a party or an opinion exclusively to one's self. 'What is wanted
above all things,' he said, 'in the business of joint counsel, is the
faculty of making many one, of throwing the mind into the common
stock.'[113] This was a favourite phrase with him for that power of
working with other people, without which a man would do well to stand
aside from public affairs. He used to say that of all the men he had
ever known, Sir George Grey had most of this capacity for throwing his
mind into joint stock. The demands of joint stock he never took to mean
the quenching of the duty in a man to have a mind of his own. He was
always amused by the recollection of somebody at Oxford--'a regius
professor of divinity, I am sorry to say'--who was accustomed to define
taste as 'a faculty of coinciding with the opinion of the majority.'

Hard as he strove for a broad basis in general theory and high abstract
principle, yet always aiming at practical ends he kept in sight the
opportune. Nobody knew better the truth, so disastrously neglected by
politicians who otherwise would be the very salt of the earth, that not
all questions are for all times. 'For my part,' Mr. Gladstone said, 'I
have not been so