t
nobody ever had less to repent of from that worst waste in human life
that comes of unkindness. Kingsley noticed, with some wonder, how he
never allowed the magnitude and multiplicity of his labours to excuse
him from any of the minor charities and courtesies of life.

Active hatred of cruelty, injustice, and oppression is perhaps the main
difference between a good man and a bad one; and here Mr. Gladstone was
sublime. Yet though anger burned fiercely in him over wrong, nobody was
more chary of passing moral censures. What he said of himself in 1842,
when he was three and thirty, held good to the end:--

Nothing grows upon me so much with lengthening life as the sense of
the difficulties, or rather the impossibilities, with which we are
beset whenever we attempt to take to ourselves the functions of the
Eternal Judge (except in reference to ourselves where judgment is
committed to us), and to form any accurate idea of relative merit
and demerit, good and evil, in actions. The shades of the rainbow
are not so nice, and the sands of the sea-shore are not such a
multitude, as are all the subtle, shifting, blending forms of
thought and of circumstances that go to determine the character of
us and of our acts. But there is One that seeth plainly and judgeth
righteously.

HIS SILENCES

This was only one side of Mr. Gladstone's many silences. To talk of the
silences of the most copious and incessant speaker and writer of his
time may seem a paradox. Yet in this fluent orator, this untiring
penman, this eager and most sociable talker at the dinner-table or on
friendly walks, was a singular faculty of self-containment and reserve.
Quick to notice, as he was, and acutely observant of much that might
have been expected to escape him, he still kept as much locked up within
as he so liberally gave out. Bulwer Lytton was at one time, as is well
known, addicted to the study of mediaeval magic, occult power, and the
conjunctions of the heavenly bodies; and among other figures he one day
amused himself by casting the horoscope of Mr. Gladstone (1860). To him
the astrologer's son sent it. Like most of such things, the horoscope
has one or two ingenious hits and a dozen nonsensical misses. But one
curious sentence declares Mr. Gladstone to be '_at heart a solitary
man_.' Here I have often thought that the stars knew what they were
about.

Whether