A wider breach was this same year made in his inmost circle. In April of the year before a little daughter, between four and five years old, had died, and was buried at Fasque. The illness was long and painful, and Mr. Gladstone bore his part in the nursing and watching. He was tenderly fond of his little children, and the sorrow had a peculiar bitterness. It was the first time that death entered his married home.
When he returned to Fasque in the autumn he found that his father had taken 'a decided step, nay a stride, in old age'; not having lost any of his interest in politics, but grown quite mild. The old man was nearing his eighty-seventh year. 'The very wreck of his powerful and simple nature is full of grandeur.... Mischief is at work upon his brain—that indefatigable brain which has had to stand all the wear and pressure of his long life.' In the spring of 1851 he finds him 'very like a spent cannon-ball, with a great and sometimes almost frightful energy remaining in him: though weak in comparison with what he was, he hits a very hard knock to those who come across him.' When December came, the veteran was taken seriously ill, and the hope disappeared of seeing him even reach his eighty-seventh birthday (Dec. 11). On the 7th he died. As Mr. Gladstone wrote to Phillimore, 'though with little left either of sight or hearing, and only able to walk from one room to another or to his brougham for a short drive, though his memory was gone, his hold upon language even for common purposes imperfect, the reasoning power much decayed, and even his perception of personality rather indistinct, yet so much remained about him as one of the most manful, energetic, affectionate, and simple-hearted among human beings, that he still filled a great space to the eye, mind, and heart, and a great space is accordingly left void by his withdrawal.' 'The death of my father,' Mr. Gladstone wrote to his brother John, 'is the loss of a great object of love, and it is the shattering of a great bond of union. Among few families of five persons will be found differences of character and opinion to the same aggregate amount as among us. We cannot shut our eyes to this fact; by opening them, I think we may the better strive to prevent such differences from begetting estrangement.'
FOOTNOTES:
[233] Purcell, Manning, i. pp. 528-33.
[234] See J. B. Hope's letter (undated) in Purcell, i. p. 530.
[235] On March 13, Hope writes to Mr. Gladstone from 14 Curzon Street:—'Keble and Pusey have been with me to-day, and the latter has suggested some alterations in the resolutions; I have taken upon me to propose a meeting at your house at ¼ before 10 to-morrow morning. If you cannot or do not wish to be present, I do not doubt you will at any rate allow me the use of your rooms.' The meeting seems to have taken place, for the entry on March 14 in Mr. Gladstone's diary is this:—'Hope, Badeley, Talbot, Cavendish, Denison, Dr. Pusey, Keble, Bennett, here from 9¾ to 12 on the draft of the resolutions. Badeley again in the evening. On the whole I resolved to try some immediate effort.' This would appear to be the last meeting, and Manning is not named as present. On the 18th:—'Drs. Mill, Pusey, etc., met here in the evening, I was not with them.' On the same day Mr. Gladstone had written to the Rev. W. Maskell, 'As respects myself, I do not intend to pursue the consideration of them with those who meet to-night, first, because the pressure of other business has become very heavy upon me, and secondly and mainly, because I do not consider that the time for any enunciation of a character pointing to ultimate issues will have arrived until the Gorham judgment shall have taken effect.' No later meeting is ever mentioned.
[236] Purcell professed to rectify the matter in the fourth edition, i. p. 536, but the reader is nowhere told that Mr. Gladstone disavowed the original story.
[237] Letter to the Right Rev. William Skinner, Bishop of Aberdeen and Primus, on the functions of laymen in the Church, reprinted in Gleanings, vi. Also Letter to Mr. Gladstone on this letter by Charles Wordsworth, the Warden of Glenalmond. Oxford. J. H. Parker, 1852.
[238] Gleanings, vi. p. 17.