know, made a strong private protest. Mr. Morley's attitude in reply
could only have been that which is well expressed by a sentence of
Darmesteter's about Renan: "So pliant in appearance, so courteous in
manner, he became a bar of iron as soon as one sought to wrest from him
an act or word contrary to the intimate sense of his conscience."

But no man has a monopoly of conscience. The tragedy was that here were
two men, both democrats, both humanitarians, but that an executive
office, in a time of hideous difficulty, had been imposed upon the one,
from which the other--his critic--was free. Ten years later, when Mr.
Morley was Chief Secretary, it was pointed out that the same statesman
who had so sincerely and vehemently protested in the case of William
Forster and Mr. Balfour against the revival of "obsolete" statutes, and
the suppression of public meetings, had himself been obliged to put
obsolete statutes in operation sixteen times, and to prohibit twenty-six
public meetings. These, however, are the whirligigs of politics, and no
politician escapes them.

In my eyes Lord Morley's crowning achievement in literature is his
biography of Mr. Gladstone. How easy it would have been to smother Mr.
Gladstone in stale politics!--and how stale politics may become in that
intermediate stage before they pass finally into history! English
political literature is full of biography of this kind. The three
notable exceptions of recent years which occur to me are Mr. Churchill's
_Life_ of his father, the Disraeli biography still in progress, and the
_Gladstone_. But it would be difficult indeed to "stale" the story of
either Lord Randolph or Dizzy. A biographer would have to set about it
of malice prepense. In the case, however, of Mr. Gladstone, the danger
was more real. Anglican orthodoxy, eminent virtue, unfailing decorum; a
comparatively weak sense of humor, and a literary gift much inferior to