ntration_.' Slackness of mind, vacuity of
mind, the wheels of the mind revolving without biting the rails of the
subject, were insupportable. Such habits were of the family of
faintheartedness, which he abhorred. Steady practice of instant, fixed,
effectual attention, was the key alike to his rapidity of apprehension
and to his powerful memory. In the orator's temperament exertion is
often followed by a reaction that looks like indolence. This was never
so with him. By instinct, by nature, by constitution, he was a man of
action in all the highest senses of a phrase too narrowly applied and
too narrowly construed. The currents of daimonic energy seemed never to
stop, the vivid susceptibility to impressions never to grow dull. He was
an idealist, yet always applying ideals to their purposes in act. Toil
was his native element; and though he found himself possessed of many
inborn gifts, he was never visited by the dream so fatal to many a
well-laden argosy, that genius alone does all. There was nobody like him
when it came to difficult business, for bending his whole strength to
it, like a mighty archer stringing a stiff bow.

FORCE OF WILL AND POWER OR TOIL

Sir James Graham said of him in these years that Gladstone could do in
four hours what it took any other man sixteen to do, and he worked
sixteen hours a day. When I came to know him long years after, he told
me that he thought when in office in the times that our story is now
approaching, fourteen hours were a common tale. Nor was it mere mechanic
industry; it was hard labour, exact, strenuous, engrossing rigorous. No
Hohenzollern soldier held with sterner regularity to the duties of his
post. Needless to add that he had a fierce regard for the sanctity of
time, although in the calling of the politician it is harder than in any
other to be quite sure when time is well spent, and when wasted. His
supreme economy here, like many other virtues, carried its own defect,
and coupled with his constitutional eagerness and his quick
susceptibility, it led at all periods of his life to some hurry. The
tumult of business, he says one year in his diary, 'follows and whirls
me day and night.' He speaks once in 1844 of 'a day restless as the
sea.' There were many such. That does not mean, and has nothing to do
with, 'proud precipitance of soul,' nor haste in forming pregnant
resolves. Here he was deliberate enough, and in the ordinary conduct of
life even mi