CHARACTERISTICS OF GLADSTONE.

Patea Mail, Volume VIII, Issue 988, 24 January 1883, Page 4

CHARACTERISTICS OF GLADSTONE.

(London Daily Telegraph.) Subtracting what we may from the sum of Mr Gladstone’s greatness, enough, and more than enough remains to constitute him one of the most eminent men that ever held office in this or any other country. Frail and pallid as he looked when, fifty years since he first entered Parliament; frail and worn as he often looks at present when deeply moved or profoundly agitated, when irrepressable vigor and vitality there is in him, even now that the span oflife allotted to man by the Psalmist has long since been overstepped ! “ Don’t talk to me about Gladstone’s mind—it’s nothing to his body.” The serious working poition of Mr Gladstone’s life began when he was an Eton boy, and may therefore safely be said to have extended now over some sixty years. lit the opinion of those who know him best, it is doubtful whether any man ever yet lived who during so long a time has allowed fewer minutes to run unprofitably to waste. The truth is that fragile and exhausted as he often looks, Mr Gladstone, like many other light and sinewy men, hardly knows the meaning of the word idleness. His capacity for work equals that of Lord Bacon, who according to the late Lord Campbell, “ allowed no segment of time to pass without employment;” nor is he undeserving of the encomium bestowed by Cecil upon Sir Walter Raleigh: “ I know that he can toil terribly.” It is understood that every hour, we might almost say oveiy minute, of Mr Gladstone’s working time is so methodical and disciplined that be gets the most out of it ; and the results of this vast industry, it is said, are turned to account by a system and regularity which have been brought to absolute perfection, and which, as wo know from their memoirs, are most unusual among public men. “If you would but buy a few yards of red tape and lie up your papers,” said Grattan* to Sir James Mclntosh, “ you would be the greatest man in England.” Having paid a visit to Beaconsficld, William Wilberforcc returned to London exclaiming “ Burke’s papers are in greater confusion than my own.” It is notorious that Napoleon, particular as he was in military details, rarely answered letters and left piles of them unopened when he evacuated the Tuilleries. Mr Gladstone, on the other hand, it is stated, never received a letter of the smallest importance during his half-century of public life upon which he cannot, if necessary, lay his hand. His libraries, both at Hawarden Castle and in his London house, are said to contain no book of which he is not cognisant, and to which he cannot readily turn. In short he has carried to perfection that regulated and systematised industry of which- the late Sir Robert Peel, his Gamaliel in public life, Avas his first exemplar. Nobly indeed has that lithe and flexible body served the imperious and restless mind Avhich, so far from “ fretting it to decay,” has found in it an apt and evcr-ready minister. “It is the ‘ vivida viz animi,’ ” wrote one of Mr Gladstone’s warmest admirers, after watching him spring to bis feet after a long debate, “that conquers or nerves his physical fragility, dealing harshly with it at times, as betrayed only too clearly at intervals in an aspect and manner indicative of profound exhaustion.” It is not many years since Mr Gladstone . took for the first time to spectacles or magnifying glasses of any kind and he was able to read the smallest print—even to puzzle out the figures of “ Bradshaw’s Railway Guide”—with his naked eye, long after his sixtieth birthday had passed. If, as some assert, Avhile others deny it, there is in his pronunciation while speaking “ the ineradicable provincial twang of Lancashire,” his voice, at the end of a speech four or five hours long, rings out “ clear as a clarion with a silver sound.” There are few men, in short, of whom with greater justice it might be recoeded, as Livy says of Hannibal, that by no amount of labour could his body be tvearied, or his mind subdued.