r trusted, though more than a little feared; and that Gladstone, with
his deeply lined face, his "glare of contentious eagerness," his seeming
over-righteousness, both chafed his friends and exasperated his foes. As
it was excellently put by a critic in the press,--the House was
indifferent, and Mr. Gladstone was earnest; the House was lax and he was
strict; it was cynical about popular equality, and he was enthusiastic; it
was lazy about details, he insisted upon teaching it the profoundest
minutiae.(156) About this time, Lord Russell told Lord Halifax that he had
gone down to see his brother the Duke of Bedford when he was dying, and
had said to him that things were drifting into the country being governed
by Disraeli and Gladstone, and the Duke observed that neither of them was
fit for it. And Halifax himself went on to say that Gladstone had, in
truth, no sympathy or connection with any considerable party in the House
of Commons. For the old whig party remembered him as an opponent for many
years; the radicals knew that on many points, especially on all church
matters, he did not agree with them, and though they admired his talents,
and hailed his recent exertions in favour of reform, they had no great
attachment to him, nor did he seem to be personally popular with any of
them.

Far away from the world of politics, we have an estimate of Mr. Gladstone
at this time from the piercing satirist of his age. "Is not he at any rate
a man of principle?" said a quaker lady to Carlyle. "Oh, Gladstone!" the
sage replied, "I did hope well of him once, and so did John Sterling,
though I heard he was a Puseyite and so forth; still it seemed the right
thing for a state to feel itself bound to God, and to lean on Him, and so
I hoped that something might come of him. But now, he has been declaiming
that England is such a wonderfully prosperous state, meaning that it has
plenty of money in its breeches pocket.... But that's not the prosperity
we want. And so I say to him, 'You are not the life-giver to England. I go
my way, you go yours, good morning (with a most dramatic and final
bow).' "(157) England however thought otherwise about life-givers, and
made a bow of a completely different sort. Yet not at once. It was Mr.
Disraeli who played the leading part in this great transaction, not by
inventing the phrase of household suffrage, for that principle was Mr.
Bright's; nor by giving his bill the shape in which it ultimately became
l