h in
St. Andrew's Hall in the evening, and a substantial discourse on
receiving an address from the Corporation at ten o'clock at night. Some
of you may have been present at all these gatherings, some only at the
political meeting. If they were, they may remember the little incidents
of the meeting--the glasses which were hopelessly lost and then, of
course, found on the orator's person--the desperate candle brought in,
stuck in a water-bottle, to attempt sufficient light to read an extract.
And what a meeting it was--teeming, delirious, absorbed! Do you have
such meetings now? They seem to me pretty good; but the meetings of that
time stand out before all others in my mind.

This statue is erected, not out of the national subscription, but by the
contributions from men of all creeds in Glasgow and in the West. I must
then, in what I have to say, leave out altogether the political aspect
of Mr. Gladstone. In some cases such a rule would omit all that was
interesting in a man. There are characters, from which if you
subtracted politics, there would be nothing left. It was not so with
Mr. Gladstone.

To the great mass of his fellow-countrymen he was of course a statesman,
wildly worshipped by some, wildly detested by others. But, to those who
were privileged to know him, his politics seemed but the least part of
him. The predominant part, to which all else was subordinated, was his
religion; the life which seemed to attract him most was the life of the
library; the subject which engrossed him most was the subject of the
moment, whatever it might be, and that, when he was out of office, was
very rarely politics. Indeed, I sometimes doubt whether his natural bent
was toward politics at all. Had his course taken him that way, as it
very nearly did, he would have been a great churchman, greater perhaps
than any that this island has known; he would have been a great
professor, if you could have found a university big enough to hold him;
he would have been a great historian, a great bookman, he would have
grappled with whole libraries and wrestled with academies, had the fates
placed him in a cloister; indeed it is difficult to conceive the career,
except perhaps the military, in which his energy and intellect and
application would not have placed him on a summit. Politics, however,
took him and claimed his life service, but, jealous mistress as she is,
could never thoroughly absorb him.

Such powers as I have indicated seem