ll
loudly too, for a reformation, who when it arrives do by no means
like the severity of its aspect. Reformation is one of those
pieces which must be put at some distance in order to please. Its
greatest favourers love it better in the abstract than in the
substance.

--BURKE.

I

In July, 1871, Mr. Gladstone paid a Sunday visit to Tennyson among the
Surrey hills. They had two interesting days, "with talk ranging
everywhere." The poet read the _Holy Grail_, which Mr. Gladstone admired.
They discussed the Goschen parish council plan, and other social reforms;
Lacordaire and liberal collectivism; politics and the stormy times ahead.
Mr. Gladstone assured them that he was a conservative, and feared extreme
measures from the opposition. "A very noble fellow," Tennyson called him,
"and perfectly unaffected."(249) Mr. Gladstone, for his part, records in
his diary that he found "a characteristic and delightful abode. In
Tennyson are singularly united true greatness, genuine simplicity, and
some eccentricity. But the latter is from habit and circumstance, the
former is his nature. His wife is excellent, and in her adaptation to him
wonderful. His son Hallam is most attractive."

After a laborious and irksome session, "in which, we have sat, I believe,
150 hours after midnight," the House rose (Aug. 21). Mr. Gladstone spent
some time at Whitby with his family, and made a speech to his eldest son's
constituents (Sept. 2) on the ballot, and protesting against the spirit of
"alarmism." Towards the end of the month he went on to Balmoral. On
September 26 he was presented with the freedom of Aberdeen, and made a
speech on Irish home rule, of which, as we shall see, he heard a great
deal fifteen years later:--

_To Mrs. Gladstone._

_Balmoral, Sept. 28._--The time is rolling on easily at this
_quiet_ place.... We breakfast six or eight. The Prince and
Princess Louis of Hesse dine most days. To-day I walked with her
and her party. She is quick, kind, and well informed. I got her
to-day on the subject of the religious movement in the Roman
catholic church in Germany. She is imbued with her father's ideas,
and, I think, goes beyond them. She quoted Strauss to me, as
giving his opinion that the movement would come to nothing. She
said the infallibility was the legitimate development of the Roman
system. I replied that the Roman system had grown up by a