W

WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE

(1809-1898)

ILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE, the greatest English statesman of

the second half of the nineteenth century, was born at Liverpool, December 29th, 1809. His father, a member of an old Scottish family, was a Liverpool merchant, with means sufficient to give him the best education England afforded. He graduated at Oxford in 1831, suggesting his future eminence by making "a double first-class" in the classics and mathematics. Returned to Parliament a year later (1832), he was immersed for the rest of his life in politics; and, though literature was his constant recreation, he acquired as a political speaker the style which characterizes all his essays. Among English orators since Macaulay he has had no equal in eloquence, and among English essayists since Gibbon no superior in capacity for research. As we read the luminous passages which shine out through his prose, we feel that the only thing he needed to take his place with Macaulay among essayists was Macaulay's power of self-limitation. This Gladstone distinctly lacked. He wrote many admirable treatises and delivered not a few noble orations, but in doing so he sacrificed the faculty supremely necessary for the essayist,- that ability to hew the unity of his governing thought out of the stubborn mass of his material, as a sculptor hews his statue out of the block. Gladstone "goes on and on," adding one thought to another, until out of the great wealth of his own intellect he has enriched us beyond our deserts, and if he is writing on the Hittites or on some of the Homeric topics he so dearly loved — beyond our abilities, it may be, to stagger away under the burden of his gifts. But if such excessive generosity be a fault, what cannot be forgiven Gladstone!

MACAULAY AS AN ESSAYIST AND HISTORIAN

MONG the topics of literary speculation, there is none more

A legitimate or more interesting than to consider who, among Α

the writers of a given age, are elected to live; to be enrolled among the band of the Immortals; to make a permanent addition to the mental patrimony of the human race.

There is

THE LUXEMBOURG PORTRAIT OF GLADSTONE.

After a Photograph from the Original by Hamilton.

HIS noted portrait of Gladstone was painted by Hamilton in 1890. It is now Number 1402 in the Luxembourg gallery.