Such was the Gladstone I saw unveiled for a moment that day—a man of infinite private sympathy with good, and of whom one would affirm it impossible he should swerve a hair's breadth from the path of right.
But, alas, there was another Gladstone, the opportunist statesman, who was very different from the first, and whom I was presently to see playing in public "such fantastic tricks before high Heaven as make the angels weep."
I will attempt a character, drawn from my observation of him, which was a close one, during the next ten years, of this very remarkable personality.
Gladstone, as I have said, was two personages. His human side was very charming. He had an immense power of sympathy, and what I may call a lavish expenditure of enthusiasm for such things as attracted him, and he had also a certain humility of attitude, often towards persons far inferior to himself, which compelled their affectionate regard, as did certain little human weaknesses which have found no place in any memorial of him that has yet been published. All this made him beloved, especially by the young, by the women who knew him well, both those who were good and those who were less good. This was the happy, the consistent part of him. His public life was to large extent a fraud—as indeed the public life of every great Parliamentarian must be. The insincerities of debate were ingrained in him. He had begun them at school and college before he entered the House of Commons, and by the time he was thirty he had learnt to look upon the "Vote of the House" as the supreme criterion of right and wrong in public things. In deference to this he had had constantly to put aside his private predilections of policy, until towards the end of his life his own personal impulses of good had assumed the character of tastes rather than of