fitting moment had arrived. He was, moreover, a master of detail,
slow to propound a plan until he had seen how its outlines were to
be filled up by appropriate devices for carrying it out in practice.
These qualities and habits of the minister profoundly affected his
gifted disciple. They became part of the texture of his own
political character, and in his case, as in that of Peel, they
sometimes brought censure upon him, as having withheld too long from
the public views or purposes which he thought it unwise to disclose
till effect could promptly be given to them. Such reserve, such a
guarded attitude and conservative attachment to existing
institutions, were not altogether natural to Mr. Gladstone's mind,
and the contrast between them and some of his other qualities, like
the contrast which ultimately appeared between his sacerdotal
tendencies and his political liberalism, contributed to make his
character perplexing and to expose his conduct to the charge of
inconsistency. Inconsistent, in the ordinary sense of the word, he
was not, much less changeable. He was really, in the main features
of his political convictions and the main habits of his mind, one of
the most tenacious and persistent of men. But there were always at
work in him two tendencies. One was the speculative desire to probe
everything to the bottom, to try it by the light of general
principles and logic, and where it failed to stand this test, to
reject it. The other was the sense of the complexity of existing
social and political arrangements, and of the risk of disturbing any
one part of them unless the time had arrived for resettling other
parts also. Every statesman feels both these sides to every
concrete question of reform. No one has set them forth more
cogently, and in particular no one has more earnestly dwelt on the
necessity for the latter, than the most profound thinker among
English statesmen, Edmund Burke. Mr. Gladstone, however, felt and