happy, at any time of my life, as to be able
sufficiently to adjust the proper conditions of handling any difficult
question, until the question itself was at the door.'[114] He could not
readily apply himself to topics outside of those with which he chanced
at the moment to be engrossed:--'Can you not wait? Is it necessary to
consider now?' That was part of his concentration. Nor did he fly at a
piece of business, deal with it, then let it fall from his grasp. It
became part of him. If circumstances brought it again into his vicinity,
they found him instantly ready, with a prompt continuity that is no
small element of power in public business.

How little elastic and self-confident at heart he was in some of his
moods in early manhood, we discern in the curious language of a letter
to his brother-in-law Lyttelton in 1840:--

It is my nature to lean not so much on the applause as upon the
assent of others to a degree which perhaps I do not show, from that
sense of weakness and utter inadequacy to my work which never
ceases to attend me while I am engaged upon these subjects.... I
wish you knew the state of total impotence to which I should be
reduced if there were no echo to the accents of my own voice. I go
through my labour, such as it is, not by a genuine elasticity of
spirit, but by a plodding movement only just able to contend with
inert force, and in the midst of a life which indeed has little
claim to be called active, yet is broken this way and that into a
thousand small details, certainly unfavourable to calm and
continuity of thought.

Here we have a glimpse of a singular vein peculiarly rare in ardent
genius at thirty, but disclosing its traces in Mr. Gladstone even in his
ripest years.

AS ORATOR

Was this the instinct of the orator? For it was in the noble arts of
oratory that nature had been most lavish, and in them he rose to be
consummate. The sympathy and assent of which he speaks are a part of
oratorical inspiration, and even if such sympathy be but superficial,
the highest efforts of oratorical genius take it for granted. 'The work
of the orator,' he once wrote, 'from its very inception is inextricably
mixed up with practice. It is cast in the mould offered to him by the
mind of his hearers. It is an influence principally received from his
audience (so to speak) in vapour, which he pours back upon them in