e ludicrous.(279) Mr.
Gladstone had persuaded himself that in the humour of the day persistence
in seclusion did harm; it was his duty to give advice accordingly, and
this duty he could not consent to shirk.

In other ways his very awe of the institution made him set an exacting
standard for the individual who represented it. The letters contain a
hundred instances. One may suffice. On the occasion of the Irish Church
bill of 1869, the prime minister sent to the Queen a print of its clauses,
and along with this draft a letter, covering over a dozen closely-written
quarto pages, in explanation. Himself intensely absorbed and his whole
soul possessed by the vital importance of what he was doing, he could not
conceive that the sovereign, nursing a decided dislike of his policy,
should not eagerly desire to get to the bottom of the provisions for
carrying the policy out. The Queen read the letter, and reread it, and
then in despair desired a gentleman practised in dealing with
parliamentary bills, happening at that time to be at Osborne, to supply
her with a summary.(280) The gaunt virtues of a _precis_--a meagre thing
where qualifying sentences drop off, parentheses are cut out, adverbs
hardly count, the noun stands denuded of its sheltering adjective--were
never congenial to Mr. Gladstone's copious exactitude in hypothesis,
conditions, and contingencies. Neither of these two illustrious personages
was without humour, and it seems at once a wonder and a pity that the
monarch did less than justice to this laborious and almost military sense
of discipline and duty in the minister; while the minister failed in
genial allowance for the moderation of a royal lady's appetite for bread
and honey from the draftsman's kitchen. If failing there were, it was
natural to a man of earnest and concentrated mind. Be all this as it may,
he became more and more conscious that the correspondence and occurrences
of 1871-2 had introduced a reserve that was new. Perhaps it recalled to
him the distance and formality that marked the relations between King
George III. and the proudest, the most intrepid, and the greatest of his
prime ministers.

III

Once in a conversation with Mr. Gladstone I asked him whether he
remembered Peel's phrase to Cobden about the odious power that patronage
confers. He replied, "I never felt that, when I was prime minister. It
came in the day's work like the rest. I don't recall that I ever felt
plagued by imp