WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE

by James Bryce




CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION



No man has lived in our times of whom it is so hard to speak in a
concise and summary fashion as Mr. Gladstone. For forty years he
was so closely associated with the public affairs of his country
that the record of his parliamentary life comes near to being an
outline of English politics. His activity spread itself out over
many fields. He was the author of several learned and thoughtful
books, and of a multitude of articles upon all sorts of subjects.
He showed himself as eagerly interested in matters of classical
scholarship and Christian doctrine and ecclesiastical history as in
questions of national finance and foreign policy. No account of him
could be complete without reviewing his actions and estimating the
results of his work in all these directions. But the difficulty of
describing and judging him goes deeper. His was a singularly
complex nature, a character hard to unravel. His individuality was
extremely strong; all that he said or did bore its impress. Yet it
was an individuality so far from being self-consistent as sometimes
to seem a bundle of opposite qualities capriciously united in a
single person. He might with equal truth be called, and he has been
in fact called, a conservative and a revolutionary. He was