most pleasant introduction for his unquestionable
poetic genius.' A third was James Milnes Gaskell, a youth endowed with
precocious ripeness of political faculty, an enthusiast, and with a
vivacious humour that enthusiasts often miss. Doyle said of him that his
nurse must have lulled him to sleep by parliamentary reports, and his
first cries on awaking in his cradle must have been 'hear, hear'!
Proximity of rooms 'gave occasion or aid to the formation of another
very valuable friendship, that with Gerald Wellesley, afterwards dean of
Windsor, which lasted, to my great profit, for some sixty years, until
that light was put out.' In Gaskell's room four or five of them would
meet, and discuss without restraint the questions of politics that were
too modern to be tolerated in public debate. Most of them were friendly
to catholic emancipation, and to the steps by which Huskisson, supported
by Canning, was cautiously treading in the path towards free trade. The
brightest star in this cheerful constellation was the rare youth who,
though his shining course was run in two-and-twenty years, yet in that
scanty span was able to impress with his vigorous understanding and
graceful imagination more than one of the loftiest minds of his
time.[29] Arthur Hallam was a couple of years younger than Gladstone, no
narrow gulf at that age; but such was the sympathy of genius, such the
affinities of intellectual interest and aspiration spoken and unspoken,
such the charm and the power of the younger with the elder, that rapid
instinct made them close comrades. They clubbed together their rolls and
butter, and breakfasted in one another's rooms. Hallam was not strong
enough for boating, so the more sinewy Gladstone used to scull him up to
the Shallows, and he regarded this toilsome carrying of an idle
passenger up stream as proof positive of no common value set upon his
passenger's company. They took walks together, often to the monument of
Gray, close by the churchyard of the elegy; arguing about the articles
and the creeds; about Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley; about free will, for
Hallam was precociously full of Jonathan Edwards; about politics, old
and new, living and dead; about Pitt and Fox, and Canning and Peel, for
Gladstone was a tory and Hallam pure whig. Hallam was described by Mr.
Gladstone in his old age as one who 'enjoyed work, enjoyed society; and
games which he did not enjoy he left contentedly aside. His temper was
as sweet as his