frightful size required, were turned into first-rate electioneering
agents. Even without party microscopes, those who feel most warmly for
Mr. Gladstone's manifold services to his country, may often wish that he
had inscribed in letters of gold over the door of the Temple of Peace, a
certain sentence from the wise oracles of his favourite Butler. 'For the
conclusion of this,' said the bishop, 'let me just take notice of the
danger of over-great refinements; of going beside or beyond the plain,
obvious first appearances of things, upon the subject of morals and
religion.'[132] Nor would he have said less of politics. It is idle to
ignore in Mr. Gladstone's style an over-refining in words, an excess of
qualifying propositions, a disproportionate impressiveness in verbal
shadings without real difference. Nothing irritated opponents more. They
insisted on taking literary sin for moral obliquity, and because men
could not understand, they assumed that he wished to mislead. Yet if we
remember how carelessness in words, how the slovenly combination under
the same name of things entirely different, how the taking for granted
as matter of positive proof what is at the most only possible or barely
probable--when we think of all the mischief and folly that has been
wrought in the world by loose habits of mind that are almost as much the
master vice of the head as selfishness is the master vice of the heart,
men may forgive Mr. Gladstone for what passed as sophistry and subtlety,
but was in truth scruple of conscience in that region where lack of
scruple half spoils the world.

VERBAL REFINING

This peculiar trait was connected with another that sometimes amused
friends, but always exasperated foes. Among the papers is a letter from
an illustrious man to Mr. Gladstone--wickedly no better dated by the
writer than 'Saturday,' and no better docketed by the receiver than 'T.
B. Macaulay, March 1,'--showing that Mr. Gladstone was just as
energetic, say in some year between 1835 and 1850, in defending the
entire consistency between a certain speech of the dubious date and a
speech in 1833, as he ever afterwards showed himself in the same too
familiar process. In later times he described himself as a sort of
purist in what touches the consistency of statesmen. 'Change of
opinion,' he said, 'in those to whose judgment the public looks more or
less to assist its own, is an evil to the country, although a much
sma