He corresponds with a learned French statesman, not on the insoluble Newfoundland problem, turning so much on the nice issue whether a lobster is a fish, and not on the vexed Egyptian question, but on the curious prohibition of pork as an article of food—a strange contradiction between the probable practice of the Phœnicians and that of the Jews, perpetuated in our times through all Mussulman countries, and a prohibition not to be explained on sanitary grounds, because to the present day Christians in the East all indulge in pork and are none the worse for it. A young member of parliament one night fell into conversation with him, as a branch from the subject of the eating of bovine flesh by the Greeks, on the eating of horseflesh, and the next day writes to mention to him that at a council in 785 with the Bishop of Ostia as president, it was decreed, “Many among you eat horses, which is not done by any Christians in the East: avoid this;” and he asks Mr. Gladstone whether he believed that by reason of the high estimation in which the Greeks held the horse, they abstained from his flesh. Mr. Gladstone (August 1889) replies that while on his guard against speaking with confidence about the historic period, he thought he was safe in saying that the Greeks did not eat the horse in the heroic period, and he refers to passages in this book and the other. “It was only a conjecture, however, on my part that the near relation of the horse to human feeling and life may probably have been the cause that prevented the consumption of horse-flesh.” In a further letter he refers his correspondent to the closing part of the Englishman in Paris for some curious particulars on [pg 538] hippophagy. Then he seems to have interested himself in a delicate question as to the personal claims of Socrates in the light of a moral reformer, and the sage's accommodation of moral sentiment to certain existing fashions in Athenian manners. But as I have not his side of the correspondence, I can only guess that his point was the inferiority of the moral ideals of Socrates to those of Christ. Gustave d'Eichthal, one of the celebrated group of Saint-Simonians who mingled so much of what was chimerical with much that was practical and fruitful, draws the attention of Mr. Gladstone, statesman, philosopher, and hellenist, to writings of his own on the practical use of Greek, as destined to be the great national language of humanity, perhaps even within the space of two or three generations. Guizot begs him to accept his book on Peel; and thanking him for his article on the “Royal Supremacy” (Feb. 9, 1864), says further what must have given Mr. Gladstone lively satisfaction:—
Like you, I could wish that the anglican church had more independence and self-government; but such as it is, and taking all its history into account, I believe that of all the Christian churches, it is that in which the spiritual régime is best reconciled with the political, and the rights of divine tradition with those of human liberty.... I shall probably send you in the course of this year some meditations on the essence and history of the Christian religion. Europe is in an anti-Christian crisis; and having come near the term of life, I have it much at heart to mark my place in this struggle.
Men Of Letters
For some reason Henry Taylor encloses him (April 5, 1837) “a letter written by Southey the other day to a wild girl who sent him some rhapsodies of her writing, and told him she should be in an agony till she should receive his opinion of them.” This recalls a curious literary incident, for the “wild girl” was Charlotte Brontë, and Southey warned her that “literature cannot be the business of a woman's life and ought not to be,” and yet his letter was both sensible and kind, though as time showed it was a bad shot.[330] Thackeray has been asked to breakfast but “I only got [pg 539] your note at 2 o'clock this afternoon, when the tea would have been quite cold; and next Thursday am engaged to lecture at Exeter, so that I can't hope to breakfast with you. I shall be absent from town some three weeks, and hope Mrs. Gladstone will permit me to come to see her on my return.” Froude, who was often at his breakfasts, gives him a book (year doubtful): “I took the liberty of sending it you merely as an expression of the respect and admiration that I have felt towards you for many years,”—sentiments that hardly stood the wear and tear of time and circumstance.
In 1850 what Macaulay styles a most absurd committee was appointed to devise inscriptions for medals to be given to the exhibitors at the great world-show of next year. Its members were, besides Macaulay himself and Gladstone, Milman, Liddell, Lyttelton, Charles Merivale. Milman bethought him of looking into Claudian, and sent to Mr. Gladstone three or four alternative lines fished out from the last of the poets of Roman paganism. Macaulay had another idea;—
My Dear Gladstone,—I am afraid that we must wait till Thursday. I do not much, like taking words from a passage certainly obscure and probably corrupt. Could we not do better ourselves? I have made no Latin verses these many years. But I will venture. I send you three attempts:—
Pulcher et ille labor, pulchros ornare labores.
Pulchrum etiam, pulchros palma donare labores.
Pulchrum etiam, pulchris meritam decernere palmam.
You will easily make better. If we can produce a tolerable line among us, we may pretend, as Lardner did, that it is in Haphorstrus or Masenius.—Yours ever, T. B. Macaulay.