e with colleagues, and all the other operations
incident to the laborious machinery of government in the charge of a
master engineer. In this region of his true calling, all is order,
precision, persistency, and the firmness and ease of the strong. For many
years in that department all was action, strength, success. Church leaders
again contribute considerable piles, but these, too, mainly concern church
business for the hour, and the business has now even for adherents
naturally fallen out of memory. The more miscellaneous papers are
different. There a long and strange procession flits before our
eye--dreams, "little bustling passions," trivialities, floating like a
myriad motes into the dim Octagon. We are reminded how vast a space in our
ever-dwindling days is consumed by social invitations and the discovery of
polite reasons for evading them. "Bona verba" is a significant docket
prompting the secretary's reply. It is borne in upon us how grievously the
burden of man's lot is aggravated by slovenly dates, illegible signatures,
and forgetfulness that writing is something meant to be read. There is a
mountain of letters from one correspondent so mercilessly written, that
the labour of decyphering them would hardly be justified, even if one
could hope to recover traces of the second decade of Livy or the missing
books of the _Annals_ of Tacitus. Foreign rulers, Indian potentates,
American citizens, all write to the most conspicuous Englishman of the
time. In an unformed hand a little princess thanks him for a photograph,
and says, "I am so glad to have seen you at Windsor, and will try and
remember you all my life." There are bushels of letters whose writers "say
all that they conscientiously can" for applicants, nominees, and
candidates in every line where a minister is supposed to be able to lend a
helping hand if he likes. Actors send him boxes, queens of song press on
him lozenges infallible for the vocal cords, fine ladies dabbling in
Italian seek counsel, and not far off, what is more to the point, are
letters from young men thanking him for his generosity in aiding them to
go to Oxford with a view to taking orders. Charles Kean, a popular
tragedian of those times, and son of one more famous still, thanks Mr.
Gladstone for his speech at a complimentary dinner to him (March 1862),
and says how proud he is to remember that they were boys at Eton together.
Then there are the erudite but unfruitful correspondents, with t