his oratorical gift, so that the most famous of his speeches are but
cold reading now; interminable sentences, and an unfailing relish for
detail all important in its day, but long since dead and buried; the
kind of biography that, with this material, half a dozen of Mr.
Gladstone's colleagues might have written of him, for all his greatness,
rises formidably on the inward eye. The younger generation waiting for
the historian to come--except in the case of those whose professional
duty as politicians it would have been to read it--might quite well have
yawned and passed by.

But Mr. Morley's literary instinct, which is the artistic instinct,
solved the problem. The most interesting half of the book will always, I
think, be the later half. In the great matters of his hero's earlier
career--Free Trade, the Crimean War, the early budgets, the slow
development of the Liberal leader from the Church and State Conservative
of 1832, down to the franchise battle of the 'sixties and the "great
Ministry," as Mr. Morley calls it, of 1868, the story is told, indeed,
perhaps here and there at too great length, yet with unfailing ease and
lucidity. The teller, however, is one who, till the late 'seventies, was
only a spectator, and, on the whole, from a distance, of what he is
describing, who was indeed most of the time pursuing his own special
aims--i.e., the hewing down of orthodoxy and tradition, together with
the preaching of a frank and uncompromising agnosticism, in the
_Fortnightly Review_; aims which were, of all others, most opposed to
Mr. Gladstone's. But with the 'eighties everything changes. Mr. Morley
becomes a great part of what he tells. During the intermediate
stage--marked by his editorship of the _Pall Mall Gazette_--the tone of
the biography grows sensibly warmer and more vivid, as the writer draws
nearer and nearer to the central scene; and with Mr. Morley's election
to Newcastle and his acceptance of the Chief-Secretaryship in 1885, the