conciliated. But when, after twenty-five years of his unquestioned
reign, the time for his own departure drew nigh, men asked how the
Liberal party in the House of Commons would ever hold together after
it had lost a leader of such consummate capacity. Seldom has a
prediction been more utterly falsified than that of the Whig critics
of 1864. They had grown so accustomed to Palmerston's way of
handling the House as to forget that a man might succeed by quite
different methods. And they forgot also that a man may have many
defects and yet in spite of them be incomparably the fittest for a
great place.

Mr. Gladstone had the defects that were ascribed to him. His
impulsiveness sometimes betrayed him into declarations which a
cooler man would have abstained from. The second reading of the
Irish Home-Rule Bill of 1886 would probably have been carried had he
not been goaded by his opponents into words which seemed to recall
or modify the concessions he had announced at a meeting of the
Liberal party held just before. More than once precious time was
wasted in useless debates because his antagonists, knowing his
excitable temper, brought on discussions with the sole object of
annoying him and drawing from him some hasty deliverance. Nor was
he an adept, like Disraeli and Sir John A. Macdonald, in the
management of individuals. He had a contempt for the meaner side of
human nature which made him refuse to play upon it. He had
comparatively little sympathy with many of the pursuits which
attract ordinary men; and he was too constantly engrossed by the
subjects of enterprises which specially appealed to him to have
leisure for the lighter but often very important devices of
political strategy. A trifling anecdote, which was told in London
about twenty-five years ago, may illustrate this characteristic.