Mr. Gladstone ever became what is called a good judge of men it
would be hard to say. Such characters are not common even among
parliamentary leaders. They do not always care to take the trouble. The
name is too commonly reserved for those who think dubiously or downright
ill of their fellow-creatures. Those who are accustomed to make most of
knowing men, do their best to convince us that men are hardly worth
knowing. This was not Mr. Gladstone's way. Like Lord Aberdeen, he had a
marked habit of believing people; it was part of his simplicity. His
life was a curious union of ceaseless contention and inviolable
charity--a true charity, having nothing in common with a lazy spirit of
unconcern. He knew men well enough, at least, to have found out that
none gains such ascendency over them as he who appeals to what is the
nobler part in human nature. Nestors of the whigs used to wonder how so
much imagination, invention, courage, knowledge, diligence--all the
qualities that seem to make an orator and a statesman--could be
neutralised by the want of a sound overruling judgment. They said that
Gladstone's faculties were like an army without a general, or a jury
without guidance from the bench.[120] Yet when the time came, this army
without a general won the crowning victories of the epoch, and for
twenty years the chief findings of this jury without a judge proved to
be the verdicts of the nation.

It is not easy for those less extraordinarily constituted, to realise
the vigour of soul that maintained an inner life in all its absorbing
exaltation day after day, year after year, decade after decade, amid the
ever-swelling rush of urgent secular affairs. Immersed in active
responsibility for momentous secular things, he never lost the breath
of what was to him a diviner aether. Habitually he strove for the lofty
uplands where political and moral ideas meet. Even in those days he
struck all who came into contact with him by a goodness and elevation
that matched the activity and power of his mind. His political career
might seem doubtful, but there was no doubt about the man. One of the
most interesting of his notes about his own growth is this:--

There was a singular slowness in the development of my mind, so far
as regarded its opening into the ordinary aptitudes of the man of
the world. For years and years well into advanced middle life, I
seem to have considered actions simply as they were in themselves,