ered from an inborn
tendency to exuberance which the long practice of oratory had
confirmed. It was diffuse, apt to pursue a topic into details, when
these might have been left to the reader's own reflection. It was
redundant, employing more words than were needed to convey the
substance. It was unchastened, indulging too freely in tropes and
metaphors, in quotations and adapted phrases even when the quotation
added nothing to the sense, but was suggested merely by some
association in his own mind. Thus it seldom reached a high level of
purity and grace, and though one might excuse the faults as natural to
the work of a swift and busy man, they were sufficient to reduce the
pleasure to be derived from the form and dress of his thoughts.
Nevertheless there are not a few passages of rare merit, both in the
books and in the articles, among which may be cited (not as
exceptionally good, but as typical of his strong points) the striking
picture of his own youthful feeling toward the Church of England
contained in the _Chapter of Autobiography_, and the refined criticism
of _Robert Elsmere_, published in 1888. Almost the last thing he
wrote, a pamphlet on the Greek and Cretan question, published in the
spring of 1897, has the force and cogency of his best days. Two things
were never wanting to him: vigour of expression and an admirable
command of appropriate words.

His writings fall into three classes: political, theological, and
literary--the last chiefly consisting of his books and articles upon
Homer and the Homeric question. All the political writings, except
the books on _The State in its Relations to the Church_ and _Church
Principles considered in their Results_, belong to the class of
occasional literature, being pamphlets or articles produced with a
view to some current crisis or controversy. They are valuable chiefly
as proceeding from one who bore a leading part in the affairs they
relate to, and as embodying vividly the opinions and aspirations of
the moment, less frequently in respect of permanent lessons of
political wisdom, such as one finds in Machiavelli or Tocqueville or
Edmund Burke. Like Pitt and Peel, Mr. Gladstone had a mind which,
whatever its original tendencies, had come to be rather practical
than meditative. He was fond of generalisations and principles,
but they were always directly related to the questions that came
before him in actual politics; and the number of weighty maxims or
illuminative