There are few, even among those who differed from him, who would deny to Mr. Gladstone the title of a great statesman: and in order to appreciate his wonderful career, it is necessary to realize the condition of the world of thought, manners and works at the time when he entered public life.

In medicine there was no chloroform; in art the sun had not been enlisted in portraiture; railways were just struggling into existence; the electric telegraph was unknown; gas was an unfashionable light; postage was dear, and newspapers were taxed.

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 BrontËs 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 superfluous to speak. The story will signally fail of its purpose if it does not carry its own moral with it. We can best conclude these introductory remarks by applying to the subject of the following pages, some words which he applied a generation ago to others:

In the sphere of common experience we see some human beings live and die, and furnish by their life no special lessons visible to man, but only that general teaching in elementary and simple forms which is derivable from every particle of human histories. Others there have been, who, from the times when their young lives first, as it were, peeped over the horizon, seemed at once to—