laborious day were over, he said:--

I have been a learner all my life, and I am a learner still; but I
do wish to learn upon just principles. I have some ideas that may
not be thought to furnish good materials for a liberal politician.
I do not like changes for their own sake, I only like a change
when it is needful to alter something bad into something good, or
something which is good into something better. I have a great
reverence for antiquity. I rejoice in the great deeds of our
fathers in England and in Scotland. It may be said, however, that
this does not go very far towards making a man a liberal. I find,
however, that the tories when it suits their purpose have much
less reverence for antiquity than I have. They make changes with
great rapidity, provided they are suitable to the promotion of
tory interests. But the basis of my liberalism is this. It is the
lesson which I have been learning ever since I was young. I am a
lover of liberty; and that liberty which I value for myself, I
value for every human being in proportion to his means and
opportunities. That is a basis on which I find it perfectly
practicable to work in conjunction with a dislike to unreasoned
change and a profound reverence for everything ancient, provided
that reverence is deserved. There are those who have been so happy
that they have been born with a creed that they can usefully
maintain to the last. For my own part, as I have been a learner
all my life, a learner I must continue to be.(131)

Chapter XII. Letters. (1859-1868)

There is no saying shocks me so much as that which I hear very
often; that a man does not know how to pass his time. 'Twould have
been but ill spoken by Methusalem, in the nine hundred sixty-ninth
year of his life; so far it is from us, who have not time enough
to attain to the utmost perfection of any part of any science, to
have cause to complain that we are forced to be idle for want of
work.--COWLEY.

(M53) As I said in our opening pages, Mr. Gladstone's letters are mostly
concerned with points of business. They were not with him a medium for
conveying the slighter incidents, fugitive moods, fleeting thoughts, of
life. Perhaps of these fugitive moods he may have had too few. To me, says
Crassus in Cicero, the man hardly seems to be free, who does not sometimes
do nothing.(132) In