and your imagination mixes the man and the event together. Who can think of Peel without remembering the Corn Laws and the reverberating sentence: "I shall leave a name execrated by every monopolist who, for less honourable motives, clamours for Protection because it conduces to his own individual benefit; but it may be that I shall leave a name sometimes remembered with expressions of good-will in the abode of those whose lot it is to labour and to earn their daily bread with the sweat of their brow, when they shall recruit their exhausted strength with abundant and untaxed food, the sweeter because it is no longer leavened with a sense of injustice." But round what are our memories of Disraeli to cluster? Sir William Fraser speaks rapturously of his wondrous mind and of his intellect, but where is posterity to look for evidences of either? Certainly not in Sir William's book, which shows us a wearied wit and nothing more. Carlyle once asked, "How long will John Bull permit this absurd monkey "-meaning Mr. Disraeli-" to dance upon his stomach?" The question was coarsely put, but there is nothing in Sir William's book to make one wonder it should have been asked. Mr. Disraeli lived to offer Carlyle the Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath, and that, in Sir William's opinion, is enough to dispose of Carlyle's vituperation; but, after all, the Grand Cross is no answer to anything except an application for it. A great many other people are made to cross Sir William Fraser's stage. His comments upon them are lively, independent, and original. He liked Cobden and hated Bright. The reason for this he makes quite plain. He thinks he detected in Cobden a deprecatory manner-a recognition of the sublime truth that he, Richard Cobden, had not been half so well educated as the mob of Tories he was addressing. Bright, on the other hand, was fat and rude, and thought that most country gentlemen and town-bred wits were either fools or fribbles. This was intolerable. Here was a man who not only could not have belonged to the "world," but honestly did not wish to, and was persuaded the gross fellow-that he and his world were better in every respect than the exclusive circles which listened to Sir William Fraser's bons mots and tags from the poets. Certainly there was nothing deprecatory about John Bright. He could be quite as insolent in his way as any aristocrat in his. He had a habit, we are told, of slowly getting up and walking out of the House in the middle of Mr. Disraeli's speeches, and just when that ingenious orator was leading up to a carefully prepared point, and then immediately returning behind the Speaker's chair. If this is true, it was perhaps rude, but nobody can deny that it is a Tory dodge of indicating disdain. What was really irritating about Mr. Bright was that his disdain was genuine. He did think very little of the Tory party, and he did not care one straw for the opinion of society. He positively would not have cared to have been made a baronet. Sir William Fraser seems to have been really fond of Disraeli, and the very last time he met his great man in the Carlton Club he told him a story too broad to be printed. The great man pronounced it admirable, and passed on his weary way. T GLADSTONE1 1903 HE first impulse of every kind-hearted man on completing his reading of Mr. Morley's great book must be to congratulate the biographer on his restoration to freedom. Authorship when the author is an artist is a terrible tyranny, controlling, entrancing, enslaving; no day, scarcely an hour, is free from bondage to the idea of the conception shaping in the author's brain; the very sea and sky and all "the wild benefit of nature" become but similes and illustrations, seeming to exist but to point a paragraph or aid the adornment of a tale. It is indeed a veritable House of Bondage. When the work in hand is biography on a great scale, and Mr. Morley's Life of Gladstone is biography on a great scale, the tension is increased by the necessity of spending day after day of the biographer's own life in the effort of re-living day by day the life of another man, of illustrating his actions and of diving or trying to dive into the secret recesses of his breast to discover his motives. In such a case as the one under consideration the work that has been done was work worth doing, but for all that, even the most ordinary biographer has his 1 The Life of William Ewart Gladstone. By John Morley. Three volumes (Macmillan, 1903). From the Contemporary Review. own life to lead, his own place in the sun, his own identity to serve, and that is why it is I obey the impulse just mentioned and humbly proffer to Mr. Morley my sincere congratulations upon completing a task which, as he humorously suggests, there is no reason to believe could have been better performed by Hercules himself. When in May, 1720, Mr. Pope completed his great translation of the Iliad which, whether it be Homer or not, still holds the field against all comers, the poet Gay, after the delightful and friendly fashion of the time, circulated a copy of verses, twenty-one stanzas of ottava rima, obviously, says Mr. Courthope, imitated from the opening of the forty-sixth canto of the Orlando Furioso, in which he describes all the author's friends coming in crowds to welcome him back from Troy. Hail to the bard whom long as lost we mourned, The first of these agreeable stanzas runs as follows: Long hast thou, friend, been absent from thy soil, I have been witness of thy six years' toil, It is a pity we have no Parliamentary bard to welcome Mr. Morley back to his place in the House of Commons in lines as good as Gay's, which still bubble with true feeling after the lapse of well-nigh two centuries. Mr. Morley's Life of Gladstone is a big book as well as a long one. It is composed on a generous scale. You can live in it comfortably for three weeks, for it is not only full of matter, but of life and literature. It is a roomy book, touching many points and suggesting an infinity of thoughts. There is philosophy in it, and passion, scholarship and party feeling. In Mr. Morley's literary portraits there is always an effective, heart-stirring background. So it is with the great Italian masters of painting, in whose canvases we not only see the imposing figures in the foreground, but behind them "the cold convent spire" rising amidst the "sapphire mountains and the golden sky." Mr. Morley never forgets to give us a background suggestive of the far distances: The world which was ere I was born, All of us can understand, almost to their full, the words with which Mr. Morley opens out his vast undertaking: I am well aware that to try to write Mr. Gladstone's life at all the life of a man who held an imposing place in many high national transactions, whose character and career may be regarded in such various lights, whose interests were so manifold, whose years bridged so long a span of time-is a stroke of temerity. To try to write his life to-day is to push temerity still farther. To ask the question, How has Mr. Morley done his work, and to provide an answer by warmly praising this bit, and more coldly commending that other: This likes me more, and this affects me less; by gently mixing blame with praise, acidulating |