lessed new year; but goes on in a very impertinent strain
attributing your 'inaction' in Ireland to unprincipled colleagues, and to
want of heavenly guidance. Encloses suggestions for prayer." In such
instances, even when the appeal came near to raving, Mr. Gladstone
whenever he thought the writer's motives sincere, seems to have replied
with patience, and at a length very different from the pithy brevity of
the Iron Duke upon the like occasions. Sometimes we may assume that the
secretary's phlegmatic docket sufficed, as on an epistle thus described:
"1. Sends review in ---- on his book. 2. Would like you to read ---- and ----
(his poems). 3. Will send you soon his prose on ----. 4. Hopes you will not
overwork yourself. 5. His children call you St. William." Sometimes we
know not whether it is simplicity or irony that inspires the grave
politeness of his replies. He seems to be in all sincerity surprised at
the view taken by somebody "of the reluctance of public men to hold
interviews for unexplained and indefinite purposes, and their preference
for written communications." Somebody writes a pamphlet on points of the
ministerial policy, and suggests that each member of the government might
order and distribute a competent number of copies. Mr. Gladstone
immediately indicates two serious difficulties, first that the ministers
would then make themselves responsible for the writer's opinion in detail
no less than in mass, and second their intervention would greatly detract
from its weight. Even importunity for a subscription never makes him curt:
"I am sure you will not misconstrue me, when I beg respectfully to state
that your efforts will stand better without my personal co-operation."

(M170) The correspondence is polyglot. In one little bundle, Cavour writes
in Italian and French; the Archbishop of Cephalonia congratulates him in
Greek on the first Irish Land bill; and in the same tongue the Archbishop
of Chios gives him a book on the union of the Armenian with the Anatolian
communion; Huber regales him with the luxury of German _cursivschrift_.
The archimandrite Myrianthes forwards him objects from the Holy Land. The
patriarch of Constantinople (1896) sends greetings and blessings, and
testifies to the bonds of fellowship between the eastern and anglican
churches undisturbed since the days of Cyril Lukaris. Dupanloup, the
famous Bishop of Orleans (1869), applauds the plan of _Juventus Mundi_,
its grandeur, its beauty, i