In his autobiography he writes, “With a quiet temper and a real wish to please, I have been obliged all my life to submit to an amount of unpopularity which I really did not deserve, and to feel myself condemned for what were really physical rather than moral deficiencies.”
There was an anecdote current in the University of Oxford down to my time that when Lowe was examining in the examination which the statutes call “Responsions,” the dons “Little-go,” and the undergraduates “Smalls,” a friend coming in while the viva voce was in progress, asked him how he was getting on. “Excellently,” said Lowe; “five men plucked already, and the sixth very shaky.” Another tale, not likely to have been invented, relates that when he and several members of the then Liberal Ministry were staying in Dublin with the Lord Lieutenant, and had taken an excursion into the Wicklow hills, they found themselves one afternoon obliged to wait for half an hour at a railway station. To pass the time, Lowe forthwith engaged in a dispute about the charge with the car-drivers who had brought them, a dispute which soon became hot and noisy, to the delight of Lowe, but to the horror of the old Lord Chancellor, who was one of the party.
Essays on Reform, published in 1867.
The then borough qualification, which Mr. Gladstone’s Bill proposed to reduce to £7.
Mr. Gladstone said to me in 1897 that the extension of the suffrage had, in his judgment, improved the quality of legislation, making it more regardful of the interests of the body of the people, but had not improved the quality of the House of Commons.