n with a daughter to marry, who being too
poor to find a dowry 'had decided on reverting to your Excellency's
well-known philhellenism, and with tears in his eyes besought that your
Excellency,' et cetera.

CORRESPONDENCE WITH BULWER

One incident was much disliked at home, as having the fearsome flavour
of the Puseyite. It had been customary at levees for the lord high
commissioner to bow to everybody, but also to shake hands with the
bishops and sundry other high persons. Mr. Gladstone stooped and
actually kissed the bishop's hand. Sir Edward Lytton inquired if the
story were true, as a question might be asked in parliament. It is true,
said Mr. Gladstone (February 7), but 'I hope Sir E. L. will not in his
consideration for me entangle himself in such a matter, but as he knows
nothing now, will continue to know nothing, and will say that the
subject did not enter into his instructions, and that he presumes I
shall be at home in two or three more weeks to answer for all my
misdeeds.'[378]

The secretary of state and his potent emissary--the radical who had
turned tory and the tory who was on the verge of formally turning
liberal--got on excellently together. Though he was not exact in
business, the minister's despatches and letters show shrewdness, good
sense, and right feeling, with a copious garnish of flummery. Demagogy,
he says to Mr. Gladstone, will continue to be a trade and the most
fascinating of all trades, because animated by personal vanity, and its
venality disguised even to the demagogue himself by the love of country,
by which it may be really accompanied. The Ionian constitution should
certainly be mended, for 'my convictions tell me that there is nothing
so impracticable as the Unreal.' He comforts his commissioner by the
reminder that a population after all has one great human heart, and a
great human heart is that which chiefly exalts the Man of Genius over
the mere Man of Talent, so that when a Man of Genius with practical
experience of the principles of sound government comes face to face with
a people whose interest it is to be governed well, the chances are that
they will understand each other.

IV

Mr. Gladstone applied himself with the utmost gravity to the affairs of
a pygmy state with a total population under 250,000. His imagination did
its work. While you seem, he said most truly, to be dealing only with a
few specks scarcely visibl