t quite so
valid as he seems to have thought it. 'The defects,' writes Hope, 'are
such as must almost necessarily occur when a great subject is handled
piecemeal and at intervals; and I should recommend, with a view to
remedying them, that you procure the whole to be copied out in a good
legible hand with blank pages, and that you read it through in this
shape once connectedly, with a view to the whole argument, and again
with a view to examining the structure of each part.'[101] Hope took as
much trouble with the argument and structure of the book as if he were
himself its author. For many weeks the fervid toil went on.

The strain on his eyesight that had embarrassed Mr. Gladstone for
several months now made abstinence from incessant reading and writing
necessary, and he was ordered to travel. He first settled with his
sister at Ems (August 15th), whither the proofs of his book with Hope's
annotations followed, nor did he finally get rid of the burden until the
middle of September. The tedium of life in hotels was almost worse than
the tedium of revising proofs, and at Milan and Florence he was strongly
tempted to return home, as the benefit was problematical; it was even
doubtful whether pictures were any less trying to his eyes than books.
He made the acquaintance of one celebrated writer of the time. 'I went
to see Manzoni,' he says, 'in his house some six or eight miles from
Milan in 1838. He was a most interesting man, but was regarded, as I
found, among the more fashionable priests in Milan as a _bacchettone_
[hypocrite]. In his own way he was, I think, a liberal and a
nationalist, nor was the alliance of such politics with strong religious
convictions uncommon among the more eminent Italians of those days.'

October found him in Sicily,[102] where he travelled with Sir Stephen
Glynne and his two sisters, and here we shall soon see that with one of
these sisters a momentous thing came to pass. It was at Catania that he
first heard of the publication of his book. A month or more was passed
in Rome in company with Manning, and together they visited Wiseman,
Manning's conversion still thirteen years off. Macaulay too, now
eight-and-thirty, was at Rome that winter. 'On Christmas Eve,' he says,
'I found Gladstone in the throng, and I accosted him, as we had met,
though we had never been introduced to each other. We talked and walked
together in St. Peter's during the best part of an afternoon. He is both
a clever an