stability and well-being; how few political changes are worth
purchasing by its sacrifice; how widely and seriously human
happiness is affected by the downfall or the perturbation of
national credit, or by excessive, injudicious, and unjust
taxation.--LECKY.

I

In finance, the most important of all the many fields of his activity, Mr.
Gladstone had the signal distinction of creating the public opinion by
which he worked, and warming the climate in which his projects throve. In
other matters he followed, as it was his business and necessity to follow,
the governing forces of the public mind; in finance he was a strenuous
leader. He not only led with a boldness sometimes verging on improvidence;
apart from the merits of this or that proposal, he raised finance to the
high place that belongs to it in the interest, curiosity, and imperious
concern of every sound self-governing community. Even its narrowest
technicalities by his supple and resplendent power as orator were suffused
with life and colour. When ephemeral critics disparaged him as mere
rhetorician--and nobody denies that he was often declamatory and
discursive, that he often over-argued and over-refined--they forgot that he
nowhere exerted greater influence than in that department of affairs where
words out of relation to fact are most surely exposed. If he often carried
the proper rhetorical arts of amplification and development to excess, yet
the basis of fact was both sound and clear, and his digressions, as when,
for example, he introduced an account of the changes in the English taste
for wine,(38) were found, and still remain, both relevant and extremely
interesting.

(M19) One recorder who had listened to all the financiers from Peel
downwards, said that Peel's statements were ingenious and able, but dry;
Disraeli was clever but out of his element; Wood was like a cart without
springs on a heavy road; Gladstone was the only man who could lead his
hearers over the arid desert, and yet keep them cheerful and lively and
interested without flagging. Another is reminded of Sir Joshua's picture
of Garrick between tragedy and comedy, such was his duality of attitude
and expression; such the skill with which he varied his moods in a single
speech, his fervid eloquence and passion, his lightness and buoyancy of
humour, his lambent and spontaneous sarcasm. Just as Macaulay made
thousands read history who before had turned from it as dry and