the great bulk of the party did follow him, though many of the most
influential and socially important refused to do so. But neither
Mr. Gladstone nor any one else could have foretold this when his
intentions were first announced.

Two faults natural to a strong man and an excitable man were
commonly charged on him--an overbearing disposition and an irritable
temper. Neither charge was well founded. Masterful he certainly
was, both in speech and in action. His ardent manner, the intensity
of his look, the dialectical vigor with which he pressed an
argument, were apt to awe people who knew him but slightly, and make
them abandon resistance even when they were unconvinced. A gifted
though somewhat erratic politician used to tell how he once fared
when he had risen in the House of Commons to censure some act of the
ministry. "I had not gone on three minutes when Gladstone turned
round and gazed at me so that I had to sit down in the middle of a
sentence. I could not help it. There was no standing his eye."
But he neither meant nor wished to beat down his opponents by mere
authority. One of the ablest of his private secretaries, who knew
him as few people did, once observed: "When you are arguing with
Mr. Gladstone, you must never let him think he has convinced you
unless you are really convinced. Persist in repeating your view,
and if you are unable to cope with him in skill of fence, say
bluntly that for all his ingenuity and authority you think he is
wrong, and you retain your own opinion. If he respects you as a man
who knows something of the subject, he will be impressed by your
opinion, and it will afterward have due weight with him." In his
own cabinet he was willing to listen patiently to everybody's views,
and, indeed, in the judgment of some of his colleagues, was not, at
least in his later years, sufficiently strenuous in asserting and