d in his ear from roaring surges of an outer world--from turbid ebb
and flow of all the struggle and clamorous hopes and half-blind mysterious
instincts of the nations.

Chapter III. The Octagon.

It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is
easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he
who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the
independence of solitude.--EMERSON.

Near the end of the eighties, Mr. Gladstone built for himself a fire-proof
room at the north-western corner of his temple of peace. In this
Octagon--"a necessity of my profession and history"--he stored the letters
and papers of his crowded lifetime. He estimated the "selected letters"
addressed to himself at sixty thousand, and the mass of other letters that
found their way into the Octagon without selection, along with more than a
score of large folios containing copies of his own to other people, run to
several tens of thousands more. There are between five and six hundred
holographs from the Queen, afterward designated by him in his will to be
an heirloom. "It may amuse you," he told Lord Granville, who always wrote
the shortest letters that ever were known, "to learn that your letters to
me weigh fifteen pounds and a-half." Probably no single human being ever
received sixty thousand letters worth keeping, and of these it is safe to
say that three-fourths of them might as well have been destroyed as soon
as read, including a certain portion that might just as well never have
been either written or read. This slightly improvident thrift recalls the
jealous persons who will not suffer the British Museum to burn its
rubbish, on the curious principle that what was never worth producing must
always be worth preserving.

(M168) As for Mr. Gladstone's own share, he explains his case in what he
says (1865) to the widow of Mr. Cobden: "Of the kind of correspondence
properly called private and personal, I have none: indeed for many long
long years it has been out of my power, except in very few instances, to
keep up this kind of correspondence." The exceptions are few indeed. Half
of the contents of this crowded little chamber are papers of
business,--nightly letters to the Queen, telling her what had gone on in
the House and what sort of figure had been cut by its debaters, reports of
meetings of the cabinet, memoranda for such meetings, notes for speeches,
endless correspondenc