In literature, Scott had just died; Carlyle was awaiting the publication
of his first characteristic book; Tennyson was regarded as worthy of
hope because of his juvenile poems; Macaulay was simply a brilliant
young man who had written some stirring verse and splendid prose; the
Brontes were schoolgirls; Thackeray was dreaming of becoming an artist;
Dickens had not written a line of fiction; Browning and George Eliot
were yet to come.

In theology, Newman was just emerging from evangelicalism; Pusey was an
Oxford tutor; Samuel Wilberforce a village curate; Henry Manning a young
graduate; and Darwin was commencing that series of investigations which
revolutionized the popular conception of created things.

Princess, afterwards Queen Victoria, was a girl of thirteen; Cobden a
young calico printer; Bright a younger cotton spinner; Palmerston was
regarded as a man-about-town, and Disraeli as a brilliant and eccentric
novelist with parliamentary ambition. The future Marquis of Salisbury
and Prime Minister of Great Britain was an infant scarcely out of arms;
Lord Rosebery, (Mr. Gladstone's successor in the Liberal Premiership),
Lord Spencer, Lord Herschell, Mr. John Morley, Mr. Campbell-Bannerman,
Mr. Asquith, Mr. Brice, Mr. Acland and Mr. Arnold Morley, or more than
half the members of his latest cabinet remained to be born; as did also
the Duke of Devonshire, Mr. Balfour and Mr. Chamberlain, among those who
were his keenest opponents toward the end of his public career.

At last the end of Mr. Gladstone's public life arrived, but it had been
extended to an age greater than that at which any English statesman had
ever conducted the government of his country.

Of the significance of the life of this great man, it would be