his
charming and modest manner.

From a pleasing account of Ruskin at Hawarden privately printed, we may
take one passage:--

Something like a little amicable duel took place at one time
between Ruskin and Mr. G., when Ruskin directly attacked his host
as a "leveller." "You see _you_ think one man is as good as
another and all men equally competent to judge aright on political
questions; whereas I am a believer in an aristocracy." And
straight came the answer from Mr. Gladstone, "Oh dear, no! I am
nothing of the sort. I am a firm believer in the aristocratic
principle--the rule of the best. I am an out-and-out
_inequalitarian_," a confession which Ruskin treated with intense
delight, clapping his hands triumphantly.

The true question against Ruskin's and Carlyle's school was how you are to
get the rule of the best. Mr. Gladstone thought that freedom was the
answer; what path the others would have us tread, neither Ruskin nor his
stormy teacher ever intelligibly told us.

IV

Writing on November 1 to Madame Novikoff, Mr. Gladstone said:--

_Nov. 1, '78._--My opinion is that this government is moving to its
doom, and I hope the day of Lord Granville's succession to it may
be within a twelvemonth. It is not to be desired that this should
take place at once. The people want a little more experience of
Beaconsfield toryism.

Unfortunately this experience, whatever be the precise name for it, now
came with disastrous promptitude, and the nation having narrowly escaped
one war, found itself involved in two. The peril of a conflict in Europe
had hardly passed, before the country found itself committed to an attack
for which the government themselves censured their high-handed agent, upon
the fiercest of the savage tribes of South Africa. A more formidable
surprise was the announcement that, by a headlong reversal of accepted
Indian policy, war had been declared against the Ameer of Afghanistan.

Chapter VI. Midlothian. (1879)

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