the oratorical temperament. His writings, even on imaginative subjects, even on the poetry of Homer, are singularly devoid of the highest imagination. They abound in acute remarks; they excel in industry of detail; they contain many animated and some eloquent passages. But there is no central conception running through them; there is no binding idea in them; there is nothing to fuse them together; they are elaborate aggregates of varied elements; they are not shaped and consolidated wholes. Nor, it is remarkable, has his style the delicate graces which mark the productions of the gentle and meditative mind; there is something hard in its texture, something dislocated in its connections. In his writings, where he is removed from the guiding check of the listening audience, he starts off, just where you least expect it. He hurries from the main subject to make a passing and petty remark. As he has not the central idea of his work vividly before him, he overlays it with tedious, accessory, and sometimes irrelevant detail.

His intellect has suffered also. He is undeniably defective in tenacity of first principle. Probably there is nothing which he would less like to have said of him, and yet it is certainly true. We speak of course of intellectual consistency, not of moral probity. And he has not an adhesive mind; such adhesiveness as he has is rather to projects than principles. We will give it is all we have space to give-a single remarkable instance of his peculiar mutability. He has adhered to his projects of reducing the amount levied in England by indirect taxation in the year 1860. He announced in 1853 that he would do so, and, what was singular enough, he was able to do it when the time came. But this superficial consistency must not disguise from us the entire inconsistency in abstract principle between the Budget of 1853 and the Budget of 1860. The most important element in English finance at present is the income-tax. In 1853 that tax was, Mr. Gladstone explained to us, an occasional, an exceptional, a sacred reserve. It had done much that was wonderful for our fathers in the French war; Sir R. Peel had used it with magical efficiency in our own time; but it was to be kept for first-rate objects. In 1860 the income-tax has become the tax of all work. Whatever is to be done, whatever other tax is to be relinquished, it is but a penny more or a penny less of this ever-ready and omnipotent impost. We do not blame Mr. Gladstone for changing his opinion. We believe that an income-tax of moderate amount should be a permanent element in our financial system. We think that additions to it from time to time are the best ways of meeting any sudden demand for exceptional expenditure. But we cannot be unaware of the transition which he has

made. His opinion as to our most remarkable tax has varied, not only in detail, but in essence. It was to be a rare and residuary agency; it is now a permanent and principal force. The inconsistency goes further. He used to think that he would be guilty of a "high political offence" if he altered the present mode of assessing the income-tax, if he equalised the pressure on industrial and permanent incomes, But he is now ready to consider any plan with that object,-in other words, he is ready to do it if he can. A great change in his fundamental estimate of our greatest tax has made an evident and indisputable change in his mode of viewing proposed reforms and alterations in it.

Mr. Gladstone's inclination-his unconscious inclination for the art of advocacy-increases his tendency to suffer from the characteristic temptations of his oratorical temperament. It is scarcely necessary to say that professional advocacy is unfavourable to the philosophical investigation of truth; a more battered commonplace cannot be found any where. To catch at whatever turns up in favour of your own case; to be obviously blind to every thing which tells in favour of the case of your adversary; to imply doubts as to principles which it is not expedient to deny; to suggest with delicate indirectness the conclusive arguments in favour of principles which it is not wise directly to affirm,-these, and such as these, are the arts of the advocate. A political orator has them almost of necessity, and Mr. Gladstone is not exempt from them. Indeed, without any fault of his own, he has them, if not to an unusual extent, at least with a very unusual conspicuousness. His vehement temperament, his "intense and glowing mind,” drive him into strong statements, into absolute and unlimited assertions. He lays down a principle of tremendous breadth to establish a detail of exceeding minuteness. He is not a "hedging" advocate. He does not understand the art which Hume and Peel,-different as were their respective spheres,practised with almost equal effect in those spheres. Mr. Gladstone dashes forth to meet his opponents. He will believe easily, he will state strongly whatever may confute them. An incessant use of ingenious and unqualified principles is one of Mr. Gladstone's most prominent qualities; it is unfavourable to exact consistency of explicit assertion, and to latent consistency of personal belief. His scholastic intellect makes matters worse. He will show that any two principles are or may be consistent; that if there is an apparent discrepancy, they may still, after the manner of Oxford, "be held together." One of the most remarkable of Father Newman's Oxford Sermons explains how science teaches that the earth

goes round the sun, and how Scripture teaches that the sun goes round the earth; and it ends by advising the discreet believer to accept both. Both, it is suggested, may be accom modations to our limited intellect-aspects of some higher and less discordant unity. We have often smiled at the recollection of the old Oxford training in watching Mr. Gladstone's ingenious "reconcilements." It must be pleasant to have an argumentative acuteness which is quite sure to extricate you, at least in appearance, from any intellectual scrape. But it is a dangerous weapon to use, and particularly dangerous to a very conscientious man. He will not use it unless he believes in its results; but he will try and believe in its results in order that he may use it. We need not spend further words in proving that a kind of advocacy at once acute, refined, and vehement, is unfavourable both to consistency of statement and to tenacious sluggishness of belief.

In this manner the disorganising effects of his greatest pecuHarities have played a principal part in shaping Mr. Gladstone's character and course. They have helped to make him annoy the old Whigs, confound the country gentlemen, and puzzle the nation generally. They have contributed to bring on him the long array of depreciating adjectives, extravagant, inconsistent, incoherent,' and 'incalculable.'

Mr. Gladstone's intellectual history has aggravated the unfavourable influence of his characteristic tendencies. Such a mind as his required, beyond any man's, the early inculcation of a steadying creed. It required that the youth, if not the child, should be father to the man; it required that a set of fixed and firm principles should be implanted in his mind in its first intellectual years, that those principles should be precise enough for its guidance, tangible enough to be commonly intelligible, true enough to stand the wear and tear of ordinary life. The tranquil task of developing coherent principle might have calmed the vehemence of Mr. Gladstone's intellectual impulses,

might have steadied the impulsive discursiveness of his nature. A settled and plain creed which was in union with the belief of ordinary men might have kept Mr. Gladstone in the common path of plain men-might have made him intelligible and safe. But he has had no such good fortune. He began the world with a vast religious theory; he embodied it in a book on Church and State; he defended it, as was said, mistily,-at any rate, he defended it in a manner which requires much careful pains to appreciate, and much preliminary information to understand; he puzzled the ordinary mass of English Churchmen; he has been half out of sympathy with them ever since. The creed which he had chosen, or which his Oxford training

stamped upon him, was one not likely to be popular with common Englishmen: it has a scholastic appearance and a mystical essence which they dislike almost equally; but this was not its worst defect. It was a theory which broke down when it was tried. It was a theory with definite practical consequences, which no one in these days will accept-which no one in these days will propose. It was a theory to be shattered by the slightest touch of real life, for it had a definite teaching which was inconsistent with the facts of that life-which all persons who were engaged in it were, on some ground or other, unanimous in rejecting. In Mr. Gladstone's case it has been shattered. He maintained that a visible church existed upon earth; that every state was bound to be directed by that church; that all members of that state should, if possible, be members of that church; that at any rate none of the members should be utterly out of sympathy with her; that the state ought to aid her in her characteristic work, and refrain from aiding all her antagonists in that work; that within her own sphere the church, though thus aided, is substantially independent; that she has an absolute right to elect her own bishops, to determine her own creed, to make her own definitions of orthodoxy and heresy. This is the high Oxford creed; and, in all essential points, it was Mr. Gladstone's first creed. But a curious series of instructive events proved that England at least would not adopt it, that the actual Church of England is not the church of which it speaks,-that the actual English State is by no means the state of which it speaks. The additional endowment of the Maynooth College which Sir Robert Peel proposed was an express relinquishment of the principle that the Church of England had an exclusive right to assistance from the State; it proved that the Conservative party -the special repository of constitutional traditions-was ready to aid a different and antagonistic communion. The removal of the Jewish disabilities struck a still deeper blow: it proved that persons who could not be said to participate in even the rudiments of Anglican doctrine might be prime ministers and rulers in England. The theory of the exclusive union of a visible church with a visible state vanished into the air. The real world would not endure it. We fear it must be said that the theory of the substantial independence of the English church. has vanished too. The case of Dr. Hampden proved conclusively that the intervention of the English church in the election of her bishops was an ineffectual ceremony; that it could not be galvanised into effective life; that it was one of those lingering relics of the past which the steady English people are so loth to disturb. Undisputed practice shows that the prime

minister, who is clearly secular prince, is the dispenser of ecclesiastical dignities. And the judgment of her Majesty's Council in the Gorham case went further yet. It touched on the finest and tenderest point of all. It decided that, on the critical question, heresy or no heresy, the final appeal was not to an ecclesiastical court, but to a lay court-to a court, not of saintly theologians, but of tough old lawyers, to men of the world most worldly. The Oxford dream of an independent church, the Oxford dream of an exclusive church, are both in practice forgotten; their very terms are strange in our ears; they have no reference to real life. Mr. Gladstone has had to admit this. He has voted for the endowment of Maynooth; he has voted for the admission of Jews to the House of Commons; he has acquiesced in the Hampden case; he sees daily the highest patronage of the church distributed by Lord Palmerston, the very man who, on any high-church theory, ought not to dispense it, to the very men who, on any high-church theory, ought not to receive it. He wrote a pamphlet on the Gorham case, but he does not practically propose to alter the constitution of the judicial committee of the Privy Council; he has never proposed to bring in a bill for that purpose; he acquiesces in the supreme decision of the most secular court which can exist over the most peculiarly ecclesiastical questions that can be thought of. These successive changes do credit to Mr. Gladstone's good sense; they show that he has a susceptible nature, that he will not live out of sympathy with his age. But what must be the effect of such changes upon any mind, especially on a delicate and high-toned mind. They tend, and must tend, to confuse the first principles of belief; to disturb the best landmarks of consistency; to leave the mind open to attacks of oratorical impulse; to foster the catching habit of advocacy; to weaken the guiding element in a disposition which was already defective in that element. The "movement of 1833," as Father Newman calls it, has wrecked many fine intellects, has broken many promising careers: it could not do either for Mr. Gladstone, for his circumstances were favourable, and his mental energy was far too strong; but it has done him harm, nevertheless; it has left upon his intellect a weakening strain and a distorting mark.

Mr. Gladstone was a likely man to be enraptured with the first creed with which he was thrown, and to push it too far. He wants the warning instincts. Some one said of him formerly, "He may be a good Christian, but he is an atrocious pagan;" and the saying is true. He has not a trace of the protective morality of the old world, of the modus in rebus, the Méoov, the shrinking from an extreme which are the prominent characteristics of the ethics of the old world, which are