book becomes the fascinating record of not one man, but two, and that
without any intrusion whatever on the rights of the main figure. The
dreariness of the Irish struggle is lightened by touch after touch that
only Mr. Morley could have given. Take that picture of the somber,
discontented Parnell, coming, late in the evening, to Mr. Morley's room
in the House of Commons, to complain of the finance of the Home Rule
Bill--Mr. Gladstone's entrance at 10.30 P.M., after an exhausting
day--and he, the man of seventy-seven, sitting down to work between the
Chief Secretary and the Irish leader, till at last, with a sigh of
weariness at nearly 1 A.M., the tired Prime Minister pleads to go to
bed. Or that most dramatic story, later on, of Committee Room No. 15,
where Mr. Morley becomes the reporter to Mr. Gladstone of that moral and
political tragedy, the fall of Parnell; or a hundred other sharp lights
upon the inner and human truth of things, as it lay behind the political
spectacle. All through the later chapters, too, the happy use of
conversations between the two men on literary and philosophical matters
relieves what might have been the tedium of the end. For these vivid
notes of free talk not only bring the living Gladstone before you in the
most varied relation to his time; they keep up a perpetually interesting
comparison in the reader's mind between the hero and his biographer. One
is as eager to know what Mr. Morley is going to say as one is to listen
to Mr. Gladstone. The two men, with their radical differences and their
passionate sympathies, throw light on each other, and the agreeable
pages achieve a double end, without ever affecting the real unity of the
book. Thus handled, biography, so often the drudge of literature, rises
into its high places and becomes a delight instead of an edifying or
informing necessity.

I will add one other recollection of this early time--i.e., that in
1881 the reviewing of Mr. Morley's _Cobden_ in the _Times_ fell to my