he looked old enough to be Lord Curzon's father. His life had been,
as he was fond of saying, a life of contention; and the contention
had left its mark on his face, with its deep furrows and careworn
expression. Three years before he had felt, to use his own phrase,
"sore with conflicts about the public expenditure" (in which old
Palmerston had always beaten him), and to that soreness had been
added traces of the fierce strife about Parliamentary Reform and
Irish Disestablishment. F. D. Maurice thus described him: "His
face is a very expressive one, hard-worked, as you say, and not
perhaps specially happy; more indicative of struggle than of victory,
though not without promise of that. He has preserved the type which
I can remember that he bore at the University thirty-six years
ago, though it has undergone curious development."

My own recollection exactly confirms Maurice's estimate. In Gladstone's
face, as I used to see it in those days, there was no look of gladness
or victory. He had, indeed, won a signal triumph at the General
Election of 1868, and had attained the supreme object of a politician's
ambition. But he did not look the least as if he enjoyed his honours,
but rather as if he felt an insupportable burden of responsibility.
He knew that he had an immense amount to do in carrying the reforms
which Palmerston had burked, and, coming to the Premiership on the
eve of sixty, he realized that the time for doing it was necessarily
short. He seemed consumed by a burning and absorbing energy; and,
when he found himself seriously hampered or strenuously opposed, he
was angry with an anger which was all the more formidable because
it never vented itself in an insolent or abusive word. A vulnerable
temper kept resolutely under control had always been to me one of
the most impressive features in human character.