nised new social forces. His aims
for the church, that he loved as ardently as he gloried in a powerful and
beneficent state, had undergone a revolution. Since 1866 he had come into
contact with democracy at close quarters; the Bulgarian campaign and
Midlothian lighting up his early faith in liberty, had inflamed him with
new feeling for the voice of the people. As much as in the early time when
he had prayed to be allowed to go into orders, he was moved by a
dominating sense of the common claims and interests of mankind. 'The
contagion of the world's slow stain' had not infected him; the lustre and
long continuity of his public performances still left all his innermost
ideals constant and undimmed.

His fifty years of public life had wrought his early habits of severe
toil, method, exactness, concentration, into cast-iron. Whether they had
sharpened what is called knowledge of the world, or taught him insight
into men and skill in discrimination among men, it is hard to say. He
always talked as if he found the world pretty much what he had expected.
Man, he used often to say, is the least comprehensible of creatures, and
of men the most incomprehensible are the politicians. Yet nobody was less
of the cynic. As for Weltschmerz, world-weariness, ennui, tedium (M34)
vitae--that enervating family were no acquaintances of his, now nor at any
time. None of the vicissitudes of long experience ever tempted him either
into the shallow satire on life that is so often the solace of the little
and the weak; or on the other hand into the _saeva indignatio_, the sombre
brooding reprobation, that has haunted some strong souls from Tacitus and
Dante to Pascal, Butler, Swift, Turgot. We may, indeed, be sure that
neither of these two moods can ever hold a place in the breast of a
commanding orator.

II

I have spoken of his new feeling for democracy. At the point of time at
which we have arrived, it was heartily reciprocated. The many difficulties
in the course of public affairs that confronted parliament and the nation
for two years or more after Mr. Gladstone's second accession to power, did
little to weaken either his personal popularity or his hold upon the
confidence of the constituencies. For many years he and Mr. Disraeli had
stood out above the level of their adherents; they were the centre of
every political storm. Disraeli was gone (April 19, 1881), commemorated by
Mr. Gladstone in a parliamentary tribute that cost him