practical too!'

[129] See below, p. 323.

[130] Glanville's _Vanity of Dogmatising_.

[131] See Shaftesbury's _Life_, iii. p. 495. He refused to be on a
committee for a memorial to Thirlwall. (1875.)

[132] First Sermon, _Upon Compassion_.

[133] _Gleanings_, vii. p. 100, 1868.

[134] _Rosamund Gray_, chap. xi.

[135] Mr. Gladstone's rendering of the speech of Piccarda (_Paradiso_,
iii. 70) is in the volume of collected translations (p. 165), under the
date of 1835:

'In His Will is our peace. To this all things
By Him created, or by Nature made,
As to a central Sea, self-motion brings.'

[136] _Gleanings_, ii. p. 20, 1845.

CHAPTER VII

CLOSE OF APPRENTICESHIP

(_1839-1841_)

What are great gifts but the correlative of great work? We are not
born for ourselves, but for our kind, for our neighbours, for our
country: it is but selfishness, indolence, a perverse
fastidiousness, an unmanliness, and no virtue or praise, to bury
our talent in a napkin.--CARDINAL NEWMAN.

Along with his domestic and parliamentary concerns, we are to recognise
the ferment that was proceeding in Mr. Gladstone's mind upon new veins
of theology; but it was an interior working of feeling and reflection,
and went forward without much visible relation to the outer acts and
facts of his life during this period. As to those, one entry in the
diary (Feb. 1st, 1839) tells a sufficient tale for the next two years.
'I find I have, besides family and parliamentary concerns and those of
study, _ten_ committees on hand: Milbank, Society for Propagation of the
Gospel, Church Building Metropolis, Church Commercial School, National
Schools inquiry and correspondence, Upper Canada, Clergy, Additional
Curates' Fund, Carlton Library, Oxford and Cambridge Club. These things
distract and dissipate my mind.' Well they might; for in any man with
less than Mr. Gladstone's amazing faculty of rapid and powerful
concentration, such dispersion must have been disastrous both to
effectiveness and to mental progress. As it is, I find little in the way
of central facts to remark in either mental history or public action. He
strayed away occasionally from the Fathers and their pastures and dipped
into the new literature of the hour, associated with names of dawning
popularity. Carlyle he found hard to lay down. Some of Emerson, too, he