peace of Utrecht in 1713, the peace of
Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, the peace of Paris in 1763, the peace of
Versailles in 1783, and the peace of Amiens in 1801. The single
exception was the peace of Paris in 1814. It would have been difficult
in this case, he said, for patriotism or faction to discover humiliation
'in a treaty dictated at the head of a victorious army in the capital of
the enemy.'

AT PENMAENMAWR

While the storm was raging, Mr. Gladstone made his way with his family
to Penmaenmawr, whence he writes to Lord Aberdeen (Aug. 9): 'It was a
charitable act on your part to write to me. It is hardly possible to
believe one is not the greatest scoundrel on earth, when one is assured
of it from all sides on such excellent authority.... I am busy reading
Homer about the Sebastopol of old time, and all manner of other fine
fellows.' In another letter of the same time, written to Sir Walter
James, one of the most closely attached of all his friends, he strikes a
deeper note:--

_Sept. 17._--If I say I care little for such an attack you will
perhaps think I make little of sympathy like yours and Lord
Hardinge's, but such, I beg you and him to believe, is not the
case. Public life is full of snares and dangers, and I think it a
fearful thing for a Christian to look forward to closing his life
in the midst of its (to me at least) essentially fevered activity.
It has, however, some excellent characteristics in regard to mental
and even spiritual discipline, and among these in particular it
absolutely requires the habits of resisting temper and of
suppressing pain. I never allow myself, in regard to my public
life, to realise, _i.e._ to dwell upon, the fact that a thing is
_painful_. Indeed life has no time for such broodings: neither in
session nor recess is the year, the day, or the hour long enough
for what it brings with it. Nor was there ever a case in which it
was so little difficult to pass over and make little of a personal
matter: for if indeed it be true, as I fear it is, that we have
been committing grave errors, that those errors have cost many
thousands of lives and millions of money, and that no glare of
success can effectually hide the gloom of thickening complications,
the man who can be capable of weighing his own fate and prospects
in the midst of such contingencies has nee