n of comparative science,
whence many a product most unwelcome to him and alien to his own beliefs
has been since extracted. When all is said, however, Mr. Gladstone's place
is not in literary or critical history, but elsewhere.

His style is sometimes called Johnsonian, but surely without good ground.
Johnson was not involved and he was clear, and neither of these things can
always be said of Mr. Gladstone. Some critic charged him in 1840 with
"prolix clearness." The old charge, says Mr. Gladstone upon this, was
"obscure compression. I do not doubt that both may be true, and the former
may have been the result of a well-meant effort to escape from the
latter." He was fond of abstract words, or the nearer to abstract the
better, and the more general the better. One effect of this was
undoubtedly to give an indirect, almost a shifty, air that exasperated
plain people. Why does he beat about the bush, they asked; why cannot he
say what he means? A reader might have to think twice or thrice or twenty
times before he could be sure that he interpreted correctly. But then
people are so apt to think once, or half of once; to take the meaning that
suits their own wish or purpose best, and then to treat that as the only
meaning. Hence their perplexity and wrath when they found that other doors
were open, and they thought a mistake due to their own hurry was the
result of a juggler's trick. On the other hand a good writer takes all the
pains he can to keep his reader out of such scrapes.

His critical essays on Tennyson and Macaulay are excellent. They are
acute, discriminating, generous. His estimate of Macaulay, apart from a
piece of polemical church history at the end, is perhaps the best we have.
"You make a very just remark," said Acton to him, "that Macaulay was
afraid of contradicting his former self, and remembered all he had written
since 1825. At that time his mind was formed, and so it remained. What
literary influences acted on the formation of his political opinions, what
were his religious sympathies, and what is his exact place among
historians, you have rather avoided discussing. There is still something
to say on these points." To Tennyson Mr. Gladstone believed himself to
have been unjust, especially in the passages of _Maud_ devoted to the
war-frenzy, and when he came to reprint the article he admitted that he
had not sufficiently remembered that he was dealing with a dramatic and
imaginative composition.(322)