and no vindictive act! This was due not perhaps entirely to natural
sweetness of disposition, but rather to self-control and to a certain
largeness of soul which would not condescend to anything mean or
petty. Pride, though it may be a sin, is to most of us a useful, to
some an indispensable, buttress of virtue. Nor should it be forgotten
that the perfectly happy life which he led at home, cared for in
everything by a devoted wife, kept far from him those domestic
troubles which have soured the temper and embittered the judgments of
not a few famous men. Reviewing his whole career, and summing up the
concurrent impressions and recollections of those who knew him best,
this dignity is the feature which dwells most in the mind, as the
outline of some majestic Alp thrills one from afar when all the lesser
beauties of glen and wood, of crag and glacier, have faded in the
distance. As elevation was the note of his oratory, so was magnanimity
the note of his character.

The Greek maxim that no one can be called happy till his life is
closed must, in the case of statesmen, be extended to warn us from the
attempt to fix a man's place in history till a generation has arisen
to whom he is a mere name, not a familiar figure to be loved or hated.
Few reputations made in politics so far retain their lustre that
curiosity continues to play round the person when those who can
remember him living have departed. Dante has in immortal stanzas
contrasted the fame of Provenzano Salvani that sounded through all
Tuscany while he lived with the faint whispers of his name heard in
his own Siena forty years after his death.[75] So out of all the men
who have held a foremost place in English public life in the
nineteenth century there are but six or seven--Pitt, Fox, Wellington,
Peel, Disraeli, possibly Canning, or O'Connell, or Melbourne--whose
names are to-day upon our lips. The great poet or the great artist
lives as long as his books or his pictures; the statesman, like the
singer or the actor, begins to be forgotten so soon as his voice is
still, unless he has so dominated the men of his own time, and made
himself a part of his country's history, that his personal character
is indissolubly linked to the events the course of which he helped to
determine. Tried by this test, Mr. Gladstone's fame seems destined to
endure. His eloquence will soon become merely a tradition, for his
printed speeches do not preserve its charm. If some of his books