declined to accept it. I
accordingly withdrew it. At this the tories were much put about. I, who
had thought of things only and not taken persons into view, was
surprised at their surprise. It did not occur to me that by my public
notification I had given to the opposition generally something _like_ a
vested interest in my proposal. I certainly should have done better
never to have given my notice. This is one of the cases illustrating the
extreme slowness of my political education.' The sentence about thinking
of things only and leaving persons out, indicates a turn of mind that
partly for great good, partly for some evil, never wholly disappeared.

Yet partially withdrawn as he was from active life in the House of
Commons, Mr. Gladstone was far too acute an observer to have any
leanings to the delusive self-indulgence of temporary retirements. To
his intimate friend, Sir Walter James, who seems to have nursed some
such intention, he wrote at this very time (Feb. 13, 1847):--

The way to make parliament profitable is to deal with it as a
calling, and if it be a calling it can rarely be advantageous to
suspend the pursuit of it for years together with an uncertainty,
too, as to its resumption. You have not settled in the country, nor
got your other vocation open and your line clear before you. The
purchase of an estate is a very serious matter, which you may not
be able to accomplish to your satisfaction except after the lapse
of years. It would be more satisfactory to drop parliament with
another path open to you already, than in order to seek about for
one.... I think with you that the change in the position of the
conservative party makes public life still more painful where it
was painful before, and less enjoyable, where it was enjoyable; but
I do not think it remains less a duty to work through the tornado
and to influence for good according to our means the new forms
into which, political combination may be cast.

In 1848 Northcote speaks of Mr. Gladstone as the 'patron saint' of the
coal-whippers, who, as a manifestation of their gratitude for the Act
which he had induced parliament to pass for them, offered their services
to put down the chartist mob. Both Mr. Gladstone and his brother John
served as special constables during the troubled days of April. In his
diary he records on April 10, 'On duty from 2 to 33/4 P.M.'