hing with the young is to attract them to fine types of
character, the Huguenots had some grave, free, heroic figures, and in the
eighteenth century Turgot was the one inspiring example: when Mill was in
low spirits, he restored himself by Condorcet's life of Turgot. This
reminded him that Canning had once praised Turgot in the House of Commons,
though most likely nobody but himself knew anything at all about Turgot.
Talking of the great centuries, the thirteenth, and the sixteenth, and the
seventeenth, Mr. Gladstone let drop what for him seems the remarkable
judgment that "Man as a type has not improved since those great times; he
is not so big, so grand, so heroic as he has been." This, the reader will
agree, demands a good deal of consideration.

Then he began to talk about offices, in view of what were now pretty
obvious possibilities. After discussing more important people, he asked
whether, after a recent conversation, I had thought more of my own office,
and I told him that I fancied like Regulus I had better go back to the
Irish department. "Yes," he answered with a flash of his eye, "I think so.
The truth is that we're both chained to the oar; I am chained to the oar;
you are chained."

II

The electoral period, when it arrived, he passed once more at Dalmeny. In
a conversation the morning after I was allowed to join him there, he
seemed already to have a grand majority of three figures, to have kissed
hands, and to be installed in Downing Street. This confidence was
indispensable to him. At the end of his talk he went up to prepare some
notes for the speech that he was to make in the afternoon at Glasgow. Just
before the carriage came to take him to the train, I heard him calling
from the library. In I went, and found him hurriedly thumbing the leaves
of a Horace. "Tell me," he cried, "can you put your finger on the passage
about Castor and Pollux? I've just thought of something; Castor and Pollux
will finish my speech at Glasgow." "Isn't it in the Third Book?" said I.
"No, no; I'm pretty sure it is in the First Book"--busily turning over the
pages. "Ah, here it is," and then he read out the noble lines with
animated modulation, shut the book with a bang, and rushed off exultant to
the carriage. This became one of the finest of his perorations.(297) His
delivery of it that afternoon, they said, was most majestic--the picture of
the wreck, and then the calm that gradually brought down the towering
billo