vast majority of instances
where the woman falls into sin, she does so from motives less impure
and ignoble than those of the man.' He attacks with just vigour the
limitation of legal cruelty in this case to the cruelty of mere force
importing danger to life, limb, or health, though he was shocked in
after years, as well he might be, at the grotesque excess to which the
doctrine of 'mental cruelty' has been carried in some States of the
American Union. In this branch of the great controversy, at any rate, he
speaks in a nobler and humaner temper than Milton, who writes with a
tyrannical Jewish belief in the inferiority of women to men, and wives
to husbands, that was in Mr. Gladstone's middle life slowly beginning to
melt away in English public opinion. His second complaint, and in his
eyes much the more urgent of the two, was the right conferred by the
government bill upon divorced persons to claim marriage by a clergyman
in a church, and still more bitterly did he resent the obligation
imposed by the bill upon clergymen to perform such marriages. Here the
fight was not wholly unsuccessful, and modifications were secured as the
fruit of his efforts, narrowing and abating, though not removing, his
grounds of objection.[368]

IV

DEATH OF LADY LYTTELTON

Before the battle was over, he was torn away from the scene by a painful
bereavement. Mrs. Gladstone was at Hagley nursing her beloved sister,
Lady Lyttelton. He wrote to his wife in the fiercest hours of the fight
(11 Carlton House Terrace, Aug. 15): 'I read too plainly in your letter
of yesterday that your heart is heavy, and mine too is heavy along with
yours. I have been in many minds about my duty to-day; and I am all but
ready to break the bands even of the high obligations that have kept me
here with reference to the marriage bill. You have only to speak the
word by telegraph or otherwise, showing that I can help to give any of
the support you need, and I come to you. As matters stand I am wanted in
the House to-day, and am wanted for the Divorce bill again on Monday.'
Before Monday came, Lady Lyttelton was no more. Four days after her
death, Mr. Gladstone wrote to Mr. Arthur Gordon from Hagley:--

The loss suffered here is a dreadful one, but it is borne in the
way which robs death and all evil of its sting. My deceased
sister-in-law was so united with my wife; they so drew from their