rs not essential, yield to
one another. When all the facts of his life come to be known,
instances may be disclosed in which he was the victim of his own
casuistry or of his deference to Peel's maxim that a minister should
not avow a change of view until the time has come to give effect to
it. But it will also be made clear that he strove to obey his
conscience, that he acted with an ever-present sense of his
responsibility to the Almighty, and that he was animated by an
unselfish enthusiasm for humanity, enlightenment, and freedom.

Whether he was a good judge of men was a question much discussed
among his friends. With all his astuteness, he was in some ways
curiously simple; with all his caution, he was by nature unsuspicious,
disposed to treat all men as honest till they gave him strong reasons
for thinking otherwise. Those who professed sympathy with his views
and aims sometimes succeeded in inspiring more confidence than they
deserved. But where this perturbing influence was absent he showed
plenty of insight, and would pass shrewd judgments on the politicians
around him, permitting neither their behaviour towards himself nor his
opinion of their moral character to affect his estimate of their
talents. In making appointments in the Civil Service, or in the
Established Church, he rose to a far higher standard of public duty
than Palmerston or Disraeli had reached or cared to reach, taking
great pains to find the fittest men, and giving little weight to
political considerations.[71]

His public demeanour, and especially his excitability and vehemence of
speech, made people attribute to him an overbearing disposition and an
irritable temper. In private one did not find these faults. Masterful
he certainly was, both in speech and in action. His ardent manner, the
intensity of his look, the dialectical vigour with which he pressed an
argument, were apt to awe people who knew him but slightly, and make
them abandon resistance. A gifted though somewhat erratic politician
of long bygone days told me how he once fared when he had risen in the
House of Commons to censure some act of his leader. "I had not gone on
three minutes when Gladstone turned round and gazed at me so that I
had to sit down in the middle of a sentence. I could not help it.
There was no standing his eye." But he neither meant nor wished to
beat down his opponents by mere authority. One who knew him as few
people did observed to me, "When you are argui