not forget Thee;
nor behave ourselves frowardly in Thy covenant. Our heart is not
turned back; neither our steps gone out of Thy way. No not when
Thou hast smitten us into the place of dragons: and covered us with
the shadow of death.' 4. On Monday, April 17, 1853 [his first
budget speech], it was: 'O turn Thee then unto me, and have mercy
upon me: give Thy strength unto Thy servant, and help the son of
Thine handmaid.' Last Sunday [Crimean war budget] it was not from
the Psalms for the day: 'Thou shalt prepare a table before me
against them that trouble me; Thou hast anointed my head with oil
and my cup shall be full.'

In that stage at least he had shaken off none of the grip of tradition,
in which his book and college training had placed him. His mind still
had greater faith in things because Aristotle or Augustine said them,
than because they are true.[124] If the end of education be to teach
independence of mind, the Socratic temper, the love of pushing into
unexplored areas--intellectual curiosity in a word--Oxford had done
none of all this for him. In every field of thought and life he started
from the principle of authority; it fitted in with his reverential
instincts, his temperament, above all, his education.

PLACE OF DANTE IN HIS MIND

The lifelong enthusiasm for Dante should on no account in this place be
left out. In Mr. Gladstone it was something very different from casual
dilettantism or the accident of a scholar's taste. He was always alive
to the grandeur of Goethe's words, _Im Ganzen, Guten, Wahren, resolut zu
leben_, 'In wholeness, goodness, truth, strenuously to live.' But it was
in Dante--active politician and thinker as well as poet--that he found
this unity of thought and coherence of life, not only illuminated by a
sublime imagination, but directly associated with theology, philosophy,
politics, history, sentiment, duty. Here are all the elements and
interests that lie about the roots of the life of a man, and of the
general civilisation of the world. This ever memorable picture of the
mind and heart of Europe in the great centuries of the catholic
age,--making heaven the home of the human soul, presenting the natural
purposes of mankind in their universality of good and evil, exalted and
mean, piteous and hateful, tragedy and farce, all commingled as a living
whole,--was exactly fitted to the quality of a genius so rich a