e reproof of his bishop?

His father is the steady centre of his life. 'My father,' he writes to
his brother, 'is as active in mind and projects as ever; he has two
principal plans now in embryo. One of these is a railroad between
Liverpool and Manchester for the conveyance of goods by
locomotive-steam-engine. The other is for building a bridge over the
Mersey at Runcorn.' In May 1827, the Gloucester and Berkeley canal is
opened: 'a great and enterprising undertaking, but still there is no
fear of it beating Liverpool.' Meanwhile, 'what prodigiously quick
travelling to leave Eton at twelve on Monday, and reach home at eight on
Tuesday!' 'I have,' he says in 1826, 'lately been writing several
letters in the _Liverpool Courier_.' His father had been attacked in the
local prints for sundry economic inconsistencies, and the controversial
pen that was to know no rest for more than seventy years to come, was
now first employed, like the pious AEneas bearing off Anchises, in the
filial duty of repelling his sire's assailants. Ignorant of his nameless
champion, John Gladstone was much amused and interested by the anonymous
'Friend to Fair Dealing,' while the son was equally diverted by the
criticisms and conjectures of the parent.

YOUTHFUL READING

With the formidable Keate the boy seems to have fared remarkably well,
and there are stories that he was even one of the tyrant's
favourites.[26] His school work was diligently supplemented. His daily
reading in 1826 covers a good deal of miscellaneous ground, including
Moliere and Racine, Blair's _Sermons_ ('not very substantial'), _Tom
Jones_, Tomline's _Life of Pitt_, Waterland's _Commentaries_, Leslie _on
Deism_, Locke's _Defence of The Reasonableness of Christianity_, which
he finds excellent; _Paradise Lost_, Milton's _Latin Poems_ and
_Epitaphium Damonis_ ('exquisite'), Massinger's _Fatal Dowry_ ('most
excellent'), Ben Jonson's _Alchemist_; Scott, including the _Bride of
Lammermoor_ ('a beautiful tale, indeed,' and in after life his favourite
of them all), Burke, Clarendon, and others of the shining host whose
very names are music to a scholar's ear. In the same year he reads 'a
most violent article on Milton by Macaulay, fair and unfair, clever and
silly, allegorical and bombastic, republican and anti-episcopal--a
strange composition, indeed.' In 1827 he went steadily through the
second half of Gibbon, whom he pronounces, 'elegant and acute as he