his two brothers-in-law, subject to certain
existing interests; and in May Sir Stephen Glynne resumed legal
possession of the wreck of Oak Farm. The burden on Hawarden was over
L250,000, leaving its owner with no margin to live upon.

Into this far-spreading entanglement Mr. Gladstone for several years
threw himself with the whole weight of his untiring tenacity and force.
He plunged into masses of accounts, mastered the coil of interests and
parties, studied legal intricacies, did daily battle with human
unreason, and year after year carried on a voluminous correspondence.

OAK FARM

There are a hundred and forty of his letters to Mr. Freshfield on Oak
Farm alone. Let us note in passing what is, I think, a not unimportant
biographic fact. These circumstances brought him into close and
responsible contact with a side of the material interests of the country
that was new to him. At home he had been bred in the atmosphere of
commerce. At the board of trade, in the reform of the tariff, in
connection with the Bank act and in the growth of the railway system, he
had been well trained in high economics. Now he came to serve an arduous
apprenticeship in the motions and machinery of industrial life. The
labour was immense, prolonged, uncongenial; but it completed his
knowledge of the customs, rules, maxims, and currents of trade and it
bore good fruit in future days at the exchequer. He manfully and
deliberately took up the burden as if the errors had been his own, and
as if the financial sacrifice that he was called to make both now and
later were matter of direct and inexorable obligation. These, indeed,
are the things in life that test whether a man be made of gold or clay.
'The weight,' he writes to his father (June 16, 1849), 'of the private
demands upon my mind has been such, since the Oak Farm broke down, as
frequently to disqualify me for my duties in the House of Commons.' The
load even tempted him, along with the working of other considerations,
to think of total withdrawal from parliament and public life. Yet
without a trace of the frozen stoicism or cynical apathy that sometimes
passes muster for true resignation, he kept himself nobly free from
vexation, murmur, repining, and complaint. Here is a moving passage from
a letter of the time to Mrs. Gladstone:--

_Fasque, Jan. 20, 1849._--Do not suppose for a moment that if I
could by waving my hand strike out for ever from