nd
powerful as Mr. Gladstone's in the range of its spiritual intuitions and
in its masculine grasp of all the complex truths of mortal nature. So
true and real a book is it, he once said,--such a record of practical
humanity and of the discipline of the soul amidst its wonderful poetical
intensity and imaginative power. In him this meant no spurious
revivalism, no flimsy and fantastic affectation. It was the real and
energetic discovery in the vivid conception and commanding structure of
Dante, of a light, a refuge, and an inspiration in the labours of the
actual world. 'You have been good enough,' he once wrote to an Italian
correspondent (1883), 'to call that supreme poet "a solemn master" for
me. These are not empty words. The reading of Dante is not merely a
pleasure, a _tour de force_, or a lesson; it is a vigorous discipline
for the heart, the intellect, the whole man. In the school of Dante I
have learned a great part of that mental provision (however
insignificant it may be) which has served me to make the journey of
human life up to the term of nearly seventy-three years.' He once asked
of an accomplished woman possessing a scholar's breadth of reading, what
poetry she most lived with. She named Dante for one. 'But what of
Dante?' 'The Paradiso,' she replied. 'Ah, that is right,' he exclaimed,
'that's my test.' In the Paradiso it was, that he saw in beams of
crystal radiance the ideal of the unity of the religious mind, the love
and admiration for the high unseen things of which the Christian church
was to him the sovereign embodiment. The mediaeval spirit, it is true,
wears something of a ghostly air in the light of our new day. This
attempt, which has been made many a time before, 'to unify two ages,'
did not carry men far in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Nevertheless it were an idle dream to think that the dead hand of
Dante's century, and all that it represented, is no longer to be taken
into account by those who would be governors of men. Meanwhile, let us
observe once more that the statesman who had drunk most deeply from the
mediaeval fountains was yet one of the supreme leaders of his own
generation in a notable stage of the long transition from mediaeval to
modern.

'At Oxford,' he records, 'I read Rousseau's _Social Contract_ which had
no influence upon me, and the writings of Burke which had a great deal.'
Yet the day came when he too was drawn by the movement of things into
the flaming