‘Mr. Gladstone Close at Hand’ is the title of Dr. Parker’s article of gossip about Mr. Gladstone in the New Review. Once during his last Premiership Dr. Parker had the honour of breakfasting with Mr. Gladstone in Downing Street. After the meal Mr. Gladstone took down a book and read aloud an account of the circumstances under which Ireland was united to Great Britain. The account was so pathetic that the reader broke down and sobbed like a child. The ex-Premier permitted himself to be interviewed by means of a written catechism Dr. Parker sent him, and the answers are given in the article. Perhaps the way in which some of the questions are ingeniously not answered is as instructive as the direct replies to others. Asked whether, in his opinion, the Church of England had a firmer hold upon the people than ever it had, he said the Church suffered much from the general decline of what is called the prestige of churches, but had gained much from the transformation of the clergy. He does not believe in the interchange of pulpits. ‘With all respect for those clergymen who are willing to preach in Nonconformist pulpits, I must say,’ he replied, ‘they do not seem to form a proper conception of their own Church.’
Dr. Parker, not content with prose, broke out on one occasion into song, as follows:
‘An old Parliamentary Hand,
Bearing an axe and raising a shield,
Suspended the play with ominous words,
“Mine is the Bill that holds the field.”’
Lord Hatherley wrote in 1855: ‘There is but one man of genius in the House, I think—Gladstone.’
Professor Tyndall wrote in a letter to the Times: ‘Nature, which has so richly endowed him in many ways, has denied him the faculty of discerning the defeat which, even in the springtide of power and in the flush of victory, he has over and over again gratuitously wooed. In fact, he thinks too highly of himself and too meanly of his followers. Like Napoleon’s generals, they are to him mere mud, to be shaped and moulded according to his imperial will. The dissatisfaction arising from his conduct is not a thing of yesterday. God, as Mahomed says, has made men to be men—not foxes and wolves; and the love of truth and abhorrence of untruth inherent in the healthy British character have gradually opened the eyes of Mr. Gladstone’s most able and most independent supporters to his misdeeds. His errors of judgment, his political dishonesty, his impulsiveness and passion, so often invoked for purposes both ungenerous and unwise, his tampering for party ends with the sustaining bulwarks of the State, his cruel indifference to the fate of men far nobler than himself who had trustfully accepted from him tasks the faithful prosecution of which led them to a doom which he might have averted, but did not avert, the voice of many a brother’s blood crying from the ground, had already shaken the faith of honest Liberals in their idol, when his flagitious Irish policy put an end to their forbearance and caused them to fling abroad the banner of revolt. The cream of the Liberal party have been the seceders here; the men who above all others adorned the Liberal ranks have been the first to renounce the heresies of their recreant leader. A former worshipper of the ex-Prime Minister said to me some time ago: “Never in the history of England was there such a consensus of intellect arrayed against a statesman as that now arrayed against Mr. Gladstone. What a fall!” . . . I see with concern letters from Liberal Unionists in the Times which seem to indicate that the writers only deem it necessary for Mr. Gladstone to declare his abandonment of Home Rule to make all right again with the Liberals. But who is to guarantee Mr. Gladstone’s good faith in this matter? He apostatized, for party purposes, when he became a Home Ruler, and he will apostatize again whenever it suits his ambition to do so. I should not be surprised if, some fine day, he took those simple Unionists at their word and made the required declaration. But could we be sure of him afterwards? For years, according to his own confession, he nourished in the dark corners of his mind this fungus of Home Rule, while to all his friends he seemed earnestly bent on extirpating it. A man of this stamp has no claim to the trust or credence of Liberal Unionists.’
Writing in 1879, Principal Tulloch says: ‘I bought the Observer on my way back, and read Gladstone’s philippic against the Government. What a man he is! What avenging and concentrated passion and power of hatred at the age of seventy! If he gets back to power, he will certainly play the devil with something.’
Dr. Talmage, who visited Mr. Gladstone at Hawarden a year or two since, sailed from Liverpool on the following day on his return to America. While in the Holy Land he secured a large stone from Calvary, which is intended to form the corner-stone of his proposed new church in Brooklyn. Dr. Talmage, who was interviewed after his visit to Hawarden, said he found Mr. Gladstone hale and hearty, and he ran up and down the hills like a boy. The ex-Premier was sanguine that his Home Rule scheme would succeed. Dr. Talmage asked if his faith in Christianity had wavered in his old age. Mr. Gladstone answered: ‘The longer I live, the stronger grows my faith in God, and my only hope for the world is that the human race will be brought more into contact with Divine revelation.’
Mr. Mozley writes in his ‘Reminiscences’: ‘As for Mr. Gladstone, I have for many years seldom thought of him without being reminded of the terrible lines in which Horace describes one of the attendants of that fickle goddess whom he believed to be the arbiter of civil strife. Often have I felt that I would rather grow cabbage, like Cincinnatus, than be the public executioner of usurpations, monopolies, and other abuses. But, after indulging in the sentiment, I have swelled the triumph of justice, peace, and public good. I have generally been so unfortunate in the use of my electoral privileges that I have come to think them hardly worth the fuss made about them; but the most unfortunate use I ever made of them—so I felt at the time—was when I went up to Oxford to vote for Mr. Gladstone, and he was actually elected. It was some excuse for this ridiculous inconsistency that I scarcely ever looked into Mr. Gladstone’s weekly organ—of course, he had not a weekly organ in any other sense than he had a tail to his coat—without seeing some very offensive and utterly untrue allusion to myself. . . . But now, what is the singular good fortune or providential protection I began with? Simply this: I never in all my life once saw Mr. Gladstone, from the morning I met him in Hurdis Lushington’s room, three or four days after his arrival from Eton, till he was so good as to ask me to breakfast in June, 1882, and kindly suggest an alteration in my book. On the former occasion he had all the purple bloom and freshness of boyhood and the glow of generous emotion.’
Mr. Samuel Morley, M.P., wrote: ‘I regard Mr. Gladstone as the greatest, purest, and ablest statesman of the present age, and of all ages or of any age. How great the sympathy during his recent illness throughout the whole civilized world! With what? Not with Mr. Gladstone as M.P. for Midlothian; not with Gladstone as Premier or statesman; but simply with Gladstone as the embodiment of the highest and purest aspirations of that patriotism which desires the best of all good things for the greatest number of our own fellow-countrymen, and that the countrymen of all other countries may partake in these good things also. His life, his health, his genius, his power, and influence are of more consequence to the country than all or any of the most pressing questions now before Parliament.’
No one, as was to be expected, has been more variously or idiotically censured or blamed than Mr. Gladstone. Considerable ingenuity has been displayed by more than one pious clergyman to show that he is the beast of Revelation. In the opinion of one of them—the Rev. Canon Crosthwaite, of Kildare—beheading is too good for Mr. Gladstone. He has ‘bamboozled the House of Commons, and has persuaded it to rob God and put His patrimony into the Treasury of England. Essex lost his head for only talking to O’Neal across the river. What does not Mr. Gladstone deserve,’ asks the Canon, in the National Review, ‘for trafficking with Irish rebels and betraying to them all the rights of the British Crown? Yet this spoiler of the Church is allowed to read lessons.’ Another reverend, possibly a Dissenter, wrote to Mr. Gladstone to suggest that he would add to the services he has rendered religion by conducting a series of services in the Agricultural Hall. In reply, declining the suggestion, Mr. Gladstone wrote: ‘It would expose me, with justice, to that charge of ostentation which some think already attaches to me.’