table-talk he could be as disengaged, as marked in
ease and charm, as any one; he was as willing as any one to accept topics
as they came, which is the first of all conditions for good conversation.
When alone in his temple of peace it was not his practice to take up his
pen in the same sauntering and devious humour. With him the pen was no
instrument of diversion. His correspondence has an object, and a letter
with an object is not of a piece with the effusions of Madame de Sevigne,
Cowper, Scott, FitzGerald, and other men and women whose letters of genial
satire and casual play and hints of depth below the surface, people will
read as long as they read anything. We have to remember a very
intelligible fact mentioned by him to Lord Brougham, who had asked him to
undertake some public address (April 25, 1860):--

You have given me credit for your own activity and power of work:
an estimate far beyond the truth. I am one of those who work very
hard while they are at it, and are then left in much exhaustion. I
have been for four months overdone, and though my general health,
thank God, is good, yet my brain warns me so distinctly that it
must not be too much pressed, as to leave me in prudence no course
to take except that which I have reluctantly indicated.

We might be tempted to call good letter-writing one of "the little
handicraft of an idle man"; but then two of the most perfect masters of
the art were Cicero and Voltaire, two of the most occupied personages that
ever lived. Of course, sentences emerge in Mr. Gladstone's letters that
are the fruits of his experience, well worthy of a note, as when he says
to Dr. Pusey: "I doubt from your letter whether you are aware of the
virulence and intensity with which the poison of suspicion acts in public
life. All that you say in your letter of yesterday I can readily believe,
but I assure you it does not alter in the slightest degree the grounds on
which my last letter was written."

He thanks Bulwer Lytton for a volume of his republished poems, but chides
him for not indicating dates:--

This I grant is not always easy for a conscientious man, for
example when he has almost re-written. But I need not remind you
how much the public, if I may judge from one of its number, would
desire it when it can be done. For in the case of those whom it
has learned to honour and admire, there is a biography of the mind
that is