nd the contention
had left its mark on his face, with its deep furrows and careworn
expression. Three years before he had felt, to use his own phrase,
"sore with conflicts about the public expenditure" (in which old
Palmerston had always beaten him), and to that soreness had been
added traces of the fierce strife about Parliamentary Reform and
Irish Disestablishment. F. D. Maurice thus described him: "His
face is a very expressive one, hard-worked, as you say, and not
perhaps specially happy; more indicative of struggle than of victory,
though not without promise of that. He has preserved the type which
I can remember that he bore at the University thirty-six years
ago, though it has undergone curious development."

My own recollection exactly confirms Maurice's estimate. In Gladstone's
face, as I used to see it in those days, there was no look of gladness
or victory. He had, indeed, won a signal triumph at the General
Election of 1868, and had attained the supreme object of a politician's
ambition. But he did not look the least as if he enjoyed his honours,
but rather as if he felt an insupportable burden of responsibility.
He knew that he had an immense amount to do in carrying the reforms
which Palmerston had burked, and, coming to the Premiership on the
eve of sixty, he realized that the time for doing it was necessarily
short. He seemed consumed by a burning and absorbing energy; and,
when he found himself seriously hampered or strenuously opposed, he
was angry with an anger which was all the more formidable because
it never vented itself in an insolent or abusive word. A vulnerable
temper kept resolutely under control had always been to me one of
the most impressive features in human character.

Gladstone had won the General Election by asking the constituencies
to approve the Disestablishment of the Irish Church; and this was
the first task to which he addressed himself in the Parliament
of 1869. It was often remarked about his speaking that in every
Session he made at least one speech of which everyone said, "That
was the finest thing Gladstone ever did." This was freely said
of it he speech in which he introduced the Disestablishment Bill
on the 1st of March, 1869, and again of that in which he wound up
the debate on the Second Reading. In pure eloquence he had rivals,
and in Parliamentary management superiors; but in the power of
embodying principles in legislative form and preserving unity of
purpose throu