early all his life, the perplexities of party
could be but secondary. Those perplexities were never sharper than in
the four years from 1854 to 1859; and with his living sense of
responsibility for the right use of transcendent powers of national
service, it was practically inevitable that he should at last quit the
barren position of 'the one remaining Ishmael in the House of Commons.'

IV

Later in this year Mr. Gladstone was chosen to be the first lord rector
of the university of Edinburgh under powers conferred by a recent law.
His unsuccessful rival was Lord Neaves, excellent as lawyer, humorist,
and scholar. In April the following year, in the midst of the most
trying session of his life, he went down from the battle-ground at
Westminster, and delivered his rectorial address[393]--not particularly
pregnant, original, or pithy, but marked by incomparable buoyancy;
enforcing a conception of the proper functions of a university that can
never be enforced too strongly or too often; and impressing in melodious
period and glowing image those ever needed commonplaces about thrift of
time and thirst for fame and the glory of knowledge, that kindle sacred
fire in young hearts. It was his own career, intellectual as well as
political, that gave to his discourse momentum. It was his own example
that to youthful hearers gave new depth to a trite lesson, when he
exclaimed: 'Believe me when I tell you that the thrift of time will
repay you in after life with an usury of profit beyond your most
sanguine dreams, and that the waste of it will make you dwindle, alike
in intellectual and in moral stature, beneath your darkest reckonings.'
So too, we who have it all before us know that it was a maxim of his own
inner life, when he told them: 'The thirst for an enduring fame is near
akin to the love of true excellence; but the fame of the moment is a
dangerous possession and a bastard motive; and he who does his acts in
order that the echo of them may come back as a soft music in his ears,
plays false to his noble destiny as a Christian man, places himself in
continual danger of dallying with wrong, and taints even his virtuous
actions at their source.'

FOOTNOTES:

[387] Not, however, Sir Robert until 1862, when he was knighted on
becoming Queen's advocate. He was created baronet in 1881.

[388] Lord Hartington's motion was--'That it is essential for the
satisfactory result of our deliberation