THE REIGN OF VICTORIA (continued).

England in 1869—The Irish Church Difficulty—The Bishops in Debate—The Queen's Speech—Mr. Gladstone unfolds his Scheme—Provisions relating to Persons and Property—Private Endowments—Churches and Glebe-Houses—Conversion of the Church Property into Money—Disposal of the Surplus—The Maynooth Grant and the Regium Donum—Mr. Gladstone's Peroration—Debate on the Second Reading—A Bumper Majority—The Bill passes through the House of Commons—Lord Redesdale and the Coronation Oath—The Opposition in the Lords—Dr. Magee's Speech—Amendments in Committee—Concurrent Endowment—Mr. Gladstone rejects the Lords' Amendments—Lord Salisbury's Vigour of Language—Danger of a Collision between the Houses—The Queen and Archbishop Tait—Conference between Lord Cairns and Lord Granville—Their Compromise—Its Terms accepted by Mr. Gladstone—The Bill becomes Law—Its Neutral Results.

THE condition of the British empire at the beginning of 1869 was externally far from unsatisfactory. The successful and complete accomplishment of the objects for which the Abyssinian expedition had been undertaken was considered to reflect credit on the military administration; the state of Ireland was so much improved that the renewal of the Act suspending the Habeas Corpus in that country was deemed no longer necessary; above all, trade and finance were beginning to show signs of substantial recovery from the effects of the collapse of 1866, and to hold forth the promise of a new and vigorous expansion. With regard to the new Ministry which the deliberate preference of a large majority of the constituencies had just installed in power, confidence in Mr. Gladstone, and in his power to deal adequately with the great question of the day, was widely felt and freely expressed. Yet the difficulty of carrying a just and adequate measure of disestablishment, which should carefully unravel the thousand threads that in the course of three centuries had variously linked the ecclesiastical with the civil establishment of Ireland—a measure that should satisfy the just claims of individuals, and wisely dispose of the portion of the expropriated property not required for the purposes of compensation—was felt to be so great that few expected it to be overcome in the present Session. A succession of contests—a slow and painful adjustment—the attainment of a practical equilibrium after many trials, spread over two or three years—such seemed to be the prospect before the country. That the result was different and that this great work of demolition was accomplished in a single Session, was due to the thoroughness with which Mr. Gladstone laboured at the preparation of the necessary measure and to his genius for the perfecting of details.

There was considerable doubt as to the course that would be adopted by the Bishops. Wilberforce early made up his mind that some sort of surrender was inevitable and, as soon as the election returns left no doubt as to the country's answer to Mr. Gladstone's appeal, wrote to the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr. Trench—"The time seems now absolutely come, of which we have so often spoken, when you and we should consider whether any and what compromise is possible." The Primate, however, looked rather to a defeat of the Bill in Committee owing to a defection among Mr. Gladstone's following, when he considered that the Prime Minister, to get out of his difficulties, would offer terms that might be accepted. The Bishop of Oxford in a semi-public letter pointed out that such resistance would only aggravate the situation, and that disestablishment might be considered a matter determined. "Some believe that the measure may be resisted a little shorter, some a little longer time, but all are secretly convinced, or are ready openly to avow their opinion, that it is a question practically settled. Wholly unprincipled men like Disraeli are content to use religion, as they would use any other precious thing, as an instrument of obtaining ever so short a tenure of place at the cost of ever so entire a sacrifice of what they so use." He thought, however, that a stand might be made on the question of disendowment and that the following claims must be advanced: (1) entire freedom from State interference, (2) that the Irish Church should be constituted a corporation capable of self-government and of holding property, (3) that the satisfaction-money for vested interests should be in a common fund under common management. This middle course, embodied by Bishop Wilberforce in a pamphlet in the form of a letter to Lord Lyttelton, which, however, he was dissuaded from publishing, was by no means favoured by the Episcopal majority. Indeed, after two private debates, on the 10th of February and the 6th of May, they separated without coming to any conclusion. Though the accuracy of his notes on these discussions, which are reproduced in the third volume of his biography, was afterwards disputed, it is clear that many agreed with the Bishop of Rochester, who abruptly remarked, "I think the Bill iniquitous, and that it ought not to pass."

The formal business involved in the opening of a new Parliament had been despatched in the month of December, 1868. On the 16th of February, 1869, the real Session began. On this unique occasion, the like of which had not occurred since the assembling of the first Parliament elected after the passing of the Reform Bill of 1832, it might have been expected that the Queen would be present and deliver the Royal Speech; that duty, however, was, as on so many previous occasions, discharged by the Lord Chancellor. Mr. Gladstone afterwards explained that it had been her Majesty's earnest wish to meet her Parliament, but that her health, impaired by the severe nervous headaches to which her Majesty was subject, was found unequal to the effort; should, however, the House agree to the Address, her Majesty was desirous of coming to London and receiving it in person from both Houses of Parliament. This proposal was warmly received on both sides of the House; but the serious illness of the youngest son of her Majesty, Prince Leopold, occurring just about this time, prevented the execution of the design. In the Royal Speech, after allusion had been made to the settlement lately effected in the Conference at Paris of the rupture between Greece and Turkey, and to some insignificant disturbances that had broken out in New Zealand, the great legislative project of the year was thus vaguely shadowed forth:—"The ecclesiastical arrangements of Ireland will be brought under your consideration at a very early date, and the legislation which will be necessary in order to their final adjustment will make the largest demands upon the wisdom of Parliament." The Address was agreed to in both Houses without difficulty, Lord Cairns observing that he could not go into the subject of the Irish Church without more light than was afforded by the "rather fortuitous collocation of nouns and adjectives in which the Speech alluded to it." In the Commons Mr. Gladstone, the new Premier, lost no time in giving notice that, on the 1st of March, he should move that the Acts relating to the Irish Church Establishment and the grant to Maynooth College, and also the Resolutions of the House of Commons in 1868, be read; and that the House should then resolve itself into a committee to consider of the said Acts and Resolutions.

The appointed day arrived, and Mr. Gladstone, after causing the Clerk to read the titles of the Acts and the Commons' Resolutions of 1868, proceeded, in a speech of three hours' duration, to unfold to a crowded and expectant House the particulars of the scheme by which he proposed to redeem the pledge of disestablishing the Church of Ireland which he had induced the House to take in the preceding year. So perfect a mastery of all the details of a very complicated measure, joined to so rare a gift for marshalling and harmonising his matter, was perhaps never before found in an English statesman. There were facts to be told, explanatory narratives to be given, reasons to be unfolded, objections to be met, changes to be proposed, and arrangements necessitated by those changes to be precisely defined, as to times, places, and persons; and all these various requirements were to be satisfied in a single speech, and in such a manner that the thread of the exposition should never be broken, nor the interest of the hearer suffered to flag. All this was accomplished by Mr. Gladstone in this memorable speech.

Certain dates were first of all named, by keeping which in memory it became more easy to grasp the general bearing of the scheme. On the 1st of January, 1871 (this, however, was a date which the speaker did not regard as unalterable), the disestablishment of the Irish Church was to take legal effect. At that date the union between the Churches of England and Ireland would be dissolved, all ecclesiastical corporations would be abolished, the ecclesiastical courts would be closed, and the ecclesiastical laws would no longer be binding as laws, although they would still be understood to exist as part of the terms of a voluntary contract subsisting between clergy and laity till they were altered by the governing body of the disestablished Church. Secondly, from the date of the passing of the Act, the Irish Ecclesiastical Commission would cease and determine, and would be replaced by a temporary Commission, appointed for ten years, in which the property of the Irish Church would immediately vest. Thirdly, after a date which it was impossible exactly to define, but which would give time for the complete execution of all those complicated arrangements to which the satisfaction of vested interests under the Act would lead, the residue of the funds of the disendowed Church would be available for employment in such manners and on such objects as should be specified in a later portion of his statement.

From this point, since we cannot follow Mr. Gladstone into the extended exposition of every portion of his plan with which he favoured the House, we propose to describe the contents of the Bill on a different principle, and to consider the leading features of the scheme—(1) in its application to persons; (2) in its application to property.

The persons to whom the provisions of the new measure were to be primarily applied, who from the official clergy of a State Church were to be converted into the ministers of a voluntary association, were these following—two archbishops, ten bishops, and about 2,380 parochial clergy and curates. Before considering and guarding the rights of these persons, it was necessary to provide for the case of those who should, by nomination or election, be added to their number, in the interval between the passing of the Act and the date fixed for the legal disestablishment of the Church. It was provided that during this transition period the patronage exercised in favour of such persons should confer no freehold, and create for them no vested rights of any kind. In the case of episcopal vacancies, the Crown would still appoint, but only at the prayer of the bishops of the province in which the vacancy occurred for the consecration of an individual to be named by them. These interim appointments would carry with them no vested interest and no rights of peerage. With regard to the existing prelates and clergy, the former, as has been already stated, would lose their right to seats in the House of Lords from the date of the legal disestablishment. Before the 1st of January, 1871, the clergy and laity of the Church were invited to meet together and re-organise the institution on a voluntary basis, appointing at the same time a "governing body," through which it might communicate with the Government of the day by the intervention of the Ecclesiastical Commission nominated in the Act. The Irish Convocation had not met, Mr. Gladstone said, for a period of fully a century and a half, if not of two centuries; and not only were there great technical difficulties in the way of its revival, but there also existed a special statute called the Convention Act, certain clauses of which rendered it doubtful whether the Convocation could be legally convoked at all. One of the earliest enactments in the Bill was, accordingly, the repeal of the Convention Act, so far as it affected the Irish Church, and the removal of all disabilities of whatever kind that might hinder the clergy and laity from meeting in synod and reorganising the Church as a voluntary society. The Government would take no power for the Crown to interfere in the election of the governing body, but would merely require that it should be truly representative, as resulting from the joint action of bishops, clergy, and laity. The governing body so appointed would be recognised by the Government, and it would become incorporated under the present Act.

When the 1st of January, 1871, the date fixed for disestablishment, had arrived, the provisions of the Act for satisfying the vested interests, not only of the Protestant clergy, but also of the students and professors of Maynooth, and of the ministers of the Presbyterian Church, would begin to take effect. What is a vested interest? Mr. Gladstone defined it thus, after stating that the "expectation of promotion" could not possibly be comprehended in the definition:—"The vested interest of the incumbent [whether of a see or a benefice] is this—it is a title to receive a certain net income from the property of the Church, in consideration of the discharge of certain duties, to which he is bound as the equivalent he gives for that income and subject to the laws by which he and the religious body to which he belongs are bound." In the possession of such net income, subject only to deductions for the curates whom he might have permanently employed, every incumbent was secured by the Act for the term of his natural life, so long as he continued to discharge the equivalent duties. He might, however, if he chose, commute his right to receive his net income annually from the State for a capital sum to be calculated at a rate of interest of three and a half per cent. This commutation could only be made upon the application of the incumbent, and the sum of money would then be paid to the Church body, "subject to the legal trust of discharging the obligation or covenant which we had ourselves to discharge to the incumbent—namely, to give him the annuity in full so long as he discharged the duties." This commutation would be voluntary; but as it would be greatly to the interest of the State to relieve itself as quickly as possible from the task of maintaining relations of payment with the individual clergymen, the scale on which it was computed would be a liberal one; and Mr. Gladstone hoped that it would be very largely resorted to. The various incidents of the freehold tenure on which the existing incumbents now held their benefices or lands would be allowed to subsist during their lifetime, with two exceptions. The Tithe Rent charge (which, for various important reasons, it was desirable to have the power of dealing with immediately after disestablishment) would, from the date of the passing of the Act, vest in the new Commissioners without any intervening life-interest, the faith of Parliament being, of course, pledged to the payment of the whole proceeds that the clergymen could derive from it. The other exception related to ruined churches, the freehold of which might be in the incumbent; in these cases it would be taken from him and vested in the Irish Board of Works, with an allocation of funds necessary to preserve the churches from desecration or further injury. The vested interest of all incumbents, whether bishops or presbyters, was thus provided for. With regard to curates, Mr. Gladstone distinguished between those who were permanently and those who were temporarily employed. The Act left it to the Commissioners to determine in each case whether a curate applying for compensation had really been in permanent employment, stipulating only that, in order to be entitled to that character, he should have been employed on the 1st of January, 1869; and that he should continue to be so employed on the 1st of January 1871; or that, if he had ceased to be so employed, the cessation should be due to some cause other than his own free choice or misconduct. Such curates were to be held entitled to receive their stipends for life or to commute them, exactly on the same principles as the Act applied to incumbents. Curates of the transitory class were to be compensated by simple gratuities, on the principle recognised in the Civil Service Superannuation Acts.

We now proceed to the consideration of the manner in which the Act proposed to deal with the property of the Irish Church. The annual value of that property, roughly stated, came to about £670,000, and was derived from the following sources of income:—

To this must be added the annual value of glebelands farmed by incumbents, which was not, however, very considerable.

An important and difficult question immediately presented itself, to the solution of which Mr. Gladstone devoted all his powers of analysis and all his resources of expression. It was this: among the various endowments enjoyed by the Irish Church, which of them were of a public nature, and had accrued to it as the representative of the ancient endowed Church of the country? which of them were, on the other hand, of a private nature, and were made with the full knowledge and intention of the donors that they were assisting by their benefactions the Protestant Episcopal Church of Ireland, bound by such and such Articles, and using such and such a liturgy? In the adjustment of so complicated a matter mathematical accuracy was out of the question; but Mr. Gladstone considered that substantial justice would be done by fixing a date, all endowments anterior to which should be deemed public, and those posterior to it private. This date he proposed to fix at the epoch of the Restoration, 1660, on the ground that the Irish Establishment did not attain its regular organisation and definite Protestant character much before that date. On the whole, he thought that the value of the private endowments, so limited, did not exceed half a million sterling; and this sum the Act awarded in compensation for them to the disestablished Church.

By drawing the line at the year 1660, Mr. Gladstone excluded from the category of private endowments the grants of land in Ulster, which James I., after having planted large numbers of his Scottish countrymen in the room of the exterminated native proprietors, assigned to the dominant Church. These lands were commonly known as the Ulster glebes. A strenuous effort was made in the House of Lords to effect their retention for the Church, on the ground that they partook rather of the nature of private than of public benefactions. But Mr. Gladstone stood firm, and refused to allow these royal grants, the original motive for which was unquestionably in large measure political, to be treated differently from the general mass of the Church property.

An important item of the material belongings of the Establishment, yet one that could not easily be made to enter into any financial estimate, consisted in the churches themselves. As to these, the Act provided that, wherever the "governing body" made an application, accompanied by a declaration that they meant either to maintain the church for public worship, or to remove it to some more convenient position, it would be handed over to them. In the case of St. Patrick's Cathedral, and about a dozen other churches partaking of the character of national monuments, the Commissioners were empowered to allot a moderate sum for their maintenance. Churches not in use, or in ruins, were to be handed over to the custody of the Board of Works.

With regard to glebe-houses, Mr. Gladstone announced that he had changed the opinion that he had expressed in the preceding year. Then he was inclined to consider them as "marketable property," like lands or tithes, and as such to withhold them from the disestablished Church, and allow only a life interest in them to their present possessors. But having investigated the matter more closely, and discovered that although an expenditure of £1,200,000 upon them could be distinctly traced, their annual value could not be rated above £18,600, while there was a quarter of a million of building charges upon them, which the State would have to pay on coming into possession, he had come to the conclusion that the glebe-houses were not, in the strict sense of the words, "marketable property." The Act therefore proposed to hand over the glebe-houses to the Church body, on their paying the building charges; and they would also be allowed to purchase a certain amount of glebe-land round the houses at a fair valuation. The burial-grounds adjacent to churches went with the churches; all burial-grounds were to be reserved: and other existing rights to be handed over to the Poor Law Guardians.

The scheme being thus far developed, the aspect of affairs at the end of two years promised to be this—the churches and glebe-houses, together with strips of land around the latter, would then be the permanent property of the disestablished Church, while the tithes and Church lands, subject to various life-interests, would be vested in the State through its organ the "Commissioners of Irish Church Temporalities." But that the State should long retain all this mass of real property in its own hands was most undesirable. Mr. Gladstone therefore propounded an elaborate scheme for the final extinction of the tithe rent charge within forty-five years, and for the conversion of the lands into money. Landlords would be allowed, if they chose, to purchase the rent charge, so far as it affected their own properties, at twenty-two and a half years' purchase paid down; but if they declined to avail themselves of this option, power was taken for disposing of it to them by a compulsory sale, at a rate which would yield 4¹/₂ per cent. interest, they being at the same time credited with a loan at 3¹/₂, payable in instalments in forty-five years. Thus, if a landlord's property were burdened with the tithe rent charge to the extent of £90 a year, the State would compel him to buy it out and out for the sum of £2,000; which sum, however, he would not have to pay immediately, but only by instalments coming in the shape of an annual rent of £70, and terminating at the end of forty-five years. How greatly the landlords were gainers by this transaction is obvious. With regard to the Church lands, the tenants on them were to have a right of pre-emption, and three-fourths of the purchase money might be left on the security of the land; one way or other, they were to be converted into money with all practicable despatch.

When by these sales the property of the Irish Church should all have been realised, and its affairs wound up, Mr. Gladstone calculated that the balance sheet would stand as follows. The Tithe rent charge would have yielded £9,000,000; the lands and perpetuity rents would have been sold for about £6,250,000; these sums, together with a balance of £750,000 in money, would make a grand total of £16,000,000. Of this, the Bill would dispose of £7,350,000—viz.: Vested interests of incumbents, £4,900,000; ditto of curates, £800,000; lay compensation, £900,000; private endowments, £500,000; building charges, £250,000. To these would have to be added the sums required for the commutation of the Regium Donum and the Maynooth Grant, the particulars of which will be given presently, amounting to £1,100,000; and finally the expenses of the Commission, £200,000. Consequently there would remain, after the satisfaction of all claims, a surplus of between £7,000,000 and £8,000,000. After discussing various suggestions for the disposal of this surplus, and giving his reasons for not devoting any part of it to the endowment of any religious body or institution, Mr. Gladstone stated that, in the opinion of Government, it would be most fitly and profitably applied to the relief of "unavoidable calamities and suffering," not provided for by the Poor Law. Assuming that the surplus fund would produce an annual return of about £311,000 a year, the Act would allot £185,000 of this revenue to lunatic asylums, £20,000 to idiot asylums, £30,000 to institutions for the harbouring and training of the blind, and of deaf mutes, £15,000 to training-schools for nurses, £10,000 to reformatories, and £51,000 to county infirmaries; thus disposing of the whole revenue.

The arrangements for the extinction of the Regium Donum and the Maynooth Grant have still to be considered. The sum to be dealt with amounted to about £70,000, of which £26,000 was the Maynooth Grant, and the remainder was distributed among the various denominations of Presbyterians. The expectation of life among the clergy being known to be between thirteen and fourteen years, Mr. Gladstone had fixed fourteen years' purchase as the basis of commutation in the case of the incumbents of the Irish Church, and he now adopted the same scale for the Presbyterian Churches and for Maynooth. A sum amounting to fourteen times the annual grant in each case was to be set aside out of the Irish Church Fund, and devoted to the satisfaction of life-interests, or to their commutation, on conditions substantially agreeing with those already explained in the case of the Establishment. About £1,100,000 would be required for the purpose, two-thirds of which would go to the Presbyterians.

At the conclusion of his speech, Mr. Gladstone invited criticisms and suggestions as to the details of the Bill, which it was the desire of its framers to render as little harsh and onerous as possible, consistently with the complete and final execution of the task which they had undertaken. "I trust, Sir," he said, "that although its operation be stringent, and although we have not thought it either politic or allowable to attempt to diminish its stringency by making it incomplete, the spirit towards the Church of Ireland, as a religious communion, in which this measure has been considered and prepared by my colleagues and myself has not been a spirit of unkindness. Perhaps at this time it would be too much to expect to obtain full credit for any declaration of that kind. We are undoubtedly asking an educated, highly respected, and generally pious and zealous body of clergymen to undergo a great transition; we are asking a powerful and intelligent minority of the laity in Ireland, in connection with the Established Church, to abate a great part of the exceptional privileges they have enjoyed; but I do not feel that in making this demand upon them we are seeking to inflict an injury. I do not believe they are exclusively or even mainly responsible for the errors of English policy towards Ireland; I am quite certain that in many vital respects they have suffered by it; I believe that the free air they will breathe under a system of equality and justice, giving scope for the development of their great energies, with all the powers of property and intelligence they will bring to bear, will make that Ireland which they love a country for them not less enviable and not less beloved in the future than it has been in the past. As respects the Church, I admit it is a case almost without exception. I don't know in what country so great a change, so great a transition has been proposed for the ministers of a religious communion who have enjoyed for many ages the preferred position of an Established Church. I can well understand that to many in the Irish Establishment such a change appears to be nothing less than ruin and destruction; from the height on which they now stand the future is to them an abyss, and their fears recall the words used in King Lear when Edgar endeavours to persuade Gloster that he has fallen over the cliffs of Dover, and says:—

And yet but a little while after the old man is relieved from his delusion, and finds he has not fallen at all. So I trust that when, instead of the fictitious and adventitious aid on which we have too long taught the Irish Establishment to lean, it should come to place its trust in its own resources, in its own great mission, in all that it can draw from the energy of its ministers and its members, and the high hopes and promises of the Gospel that it teaches, it will find that it has entered on a new era—an era bright with hope and potent for good.... This measure is in every sense a great measure—great in its principles, great in the multitude of its dry, technical, but interesting details, and great as a testing measure; for it will show for one and all of us of what metal we are made. Upon us all it brings a great responsibility. We upon this bench are especially chargeable—nay, deeply guilty—if we have either dishonestly or even prematurely or unwisely challenged so gigantic an issue. I know well the punishments that follow rashness in public affairs, and that ought to fall upon those men, those Phaetons of politics, who, with hands unequal to the task, attempt to guide the chariot of the sun. But the responsibility passes beyond us, and rests on every man who has to take part in the discussion and decision on this Bill. Every man approaches the discussion under the most solemn obligations to raise the level of his vision and expand its scope in proportion with the greatness of the matter in hand. The working of our constitutional government itself is upon its trial, for I do not believe there ever was a time when the wheels of legislative machinery were set in motion under conditions of peace and order and constitutional regularity to deal with a question greater or more profound. And more especially, Sir, is the credit and fame of this great assembly involved. This assembly, which has inherited through many ages the accumulated honours of brilliant triumphs, of peaceful but courageous legislation, is now called upon to address itself to a task which would indeed have demanded all the best energies of the very best among your fathers and your ancestors. I believe it will prove to be worthy of the task." The right honourable gentleman concluded by moving for leave to bring in the Bill.

The leader of the Opposition, Mr. Disraeli, said that his own opinion, and that of his party, remained unaltered; they thought disestablishment was a political blunder, and disendowment a legalised robbery; but as the sense of the country had been clearly expressed in favour of dealing with the question, he should not object to the introduction of the Bill, but should offer it a determined opposition on the second reading. The Bill was then introduced, and read a first time, and the 18th of March was fixed for the second reading. On that day Mr. Disraeli moved in the usual form that the Bill be read a second time that day six months. In his speech there was little that was remarkable except where he protested against the confiscation of the Church property on the ground that it would probably end in the sole benefit of the landlords. He ridiculed in particular the project for the extinction of the tithe rent charge, predicting that the end of the whole operation would be that the property of the Church would go into the pockets of the landlords; and the consequence of these sacrilegious proceedings must be such deep discontent that either there must be restitution, or the same principles must be applied to the English Church,—and this, he declared, Mr. Gladstone by his language clearly contemplated. Experience of the absorption of commons and forests by the large landowners justified, it must be owned, a jealous and rigorous examination of this part of the measure; which on the very face of it, as above explained, made a present to the landlords of full twenty-two per cent. of the tithe rent charge to which their properties were previously liable. Mr. Bright made a telling speech in favour of the measure; and the same may be said of Mr. Lowe. On the other side, Sir Roundell Palmer, who had braved the loss, or, to speak more correctly, the postponement of high professional promotion, because he could not go with Mr. Gladstone on this question, disputed the doctrine that the State had the power absolutely to strip the Church of its property, though he admitted its right to restrict or reapportion it. Mr. Gathorne Hardy, who, among the abler opponents of the Bill, was perhaps the only one who spoke with absolute and entire conviction, delivered a bold and trenchant philippic, based on the old dicta of the superiority of the Protestant religion, and the right and duty of England to govern Ireland, not according to the wishes of the Irish, but upon principles approved by the majority of Englishmen. After a four nights' debate, the House divided on the second reading, with the following—for Government—triumphant result: for the second reading, 368; against it, 250; majority, 118. With so compact a majority against them, in a very full House, it was useless for the Conservatives to attempt to make considerable alterations in the Bill in committee. Substantially unchanged it emerged from the ordeal of committee, and the third reading was carried by a majority of 114 votes.

WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE.

FROM THE PAINTING BY SIR J. E. MILLAIS, BART., P.R.A., IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY.