said, and
truly, that 'though Gladstone's defeat at that precise juncture would
have been a misfortune, yet for his own sake hereafter, emancipation
from the thraldom of that constituency would be a blessing. It is a
millstone under which even Peel would have sunk.'

Was Mr. Gladstone right in his early notion of himself as a slow moving
mind? Would it be true to say that, compared with Pitt, for instance, he
ripened slowly? Or can we accurately describe him as having in any
department of life, thought, knowledge, feeling, been precocious?
Perhaps not. To speak of slowness in a man of such magical rapidity of
intellectual apprehension would be indeed a paradox, but we have seen
already how when he is walking in the middle path of his years, there is
a sense in which he was slow in character and motion. Slowness explains
some qualities in his literary and oratorical form, which was often, and
especially up to our present period, vague, ambiguous, and obscure. The
careless and the uncharitable set all down to sophistry. Better
observers perceived that his seeming mystifications were in fact the
result of a really embarrassed judgment. They pointed out that where the
way was clear, as in free trade, colonial government, dissenters'
chapels, Jewish disabilities, catholic bishoprics, nobody could run more
straight, at higher speed, or with more powerful stride. They began to
say that in spite of Russells, Palmerstons, Grahams, Mr. Gladstone,
after all, was the least unlikely of them 'to turn out a thoroughgoing
man of the people.' These anticipations of democracy there is no sign
that Mr. Gladstone himself, in the smallest degree, shared. The
newspapers, meanwhile, were all but unanimous in declaring that 'if
experience, talent, industry, and virtue, are the attributes required
for the government of this empire,' then the coalition government would
be one of the best that England had ever seen.

III

Mr. Gladstone's dislike and distrust of the intrusion not only of the
rude secular arm, but of anything temporal into the sphere of spiritual
things, had been marked enough in the old days of battle at Oxford
between the tractarians and the heads, though it was less manifest in
the Gorham case. In 1853 he found occasion for an honourable exhibition
of the same strong feeling. Maurice had got into trouble with the
authorities at King's College by essays in which he was taken to hold
that the