by the proprietors of the Atlantic Monthly Review to give them an article on the same subject. My present" Recollections" are an augmented summary of those previously penned; and it gives me pleasure thus to revise and amplify them with the readers of the Gentleman's Magazine in this present February-the same month in which my beloved schoolfellow and poetical pupil closed his too brief career more than half a century since.

MEN OF THE GLADSTONE

PARLIAMENT.

T is only five years of English History. There is a new map of Europe. There is a Teutonic Empire. There is a French Republic. The Bonapartes are again in exile. The Bourbons have rejected the crown of Henri Quatre. A new dynasty has begun and ended in Spain. The sovereignty of the Church of Rome has been rounded off and finished after eleven centuries. This is the era of the first Parliament of household suffrage in Great Britain. We are at the opening of the sixth session and on the threshold of the dissolution. The Gladstone Adminishistory of England and

tration will demand a long chapter in the will figure conspicuously in the story of the century. Is it possible to forecast the judgment of history on the Administration or the Parliament ?

Not quite possible, perhaps; but then the judgment of history will not be infallible, and will undergo revision a good many times. There is scarcely an unquestioned verdict on men or deeds or policies in all the annals of mankind, and nothing in history is so old, or so well canvassed, or so isolated from all present influences that it will not have a different aspect according to temperament, or sentiment, or party feeling to-day. The character of Cromwell is a party question. So is that of Louis Quatorze, of Frederick the Great, of Charles James Fox, of Julius Cæsar, and of the Emperor Julian. There is not much more agreement about Pericles or Henry the Eighth than about Pio Nono or Prince Bismarck. The policy of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew is about as much an open question as the Ballot; for those who condemn the slaying of the Huguenots must admit that it was successful in perpetuating Catholic ascendency in France for several centuries, while as to the Ballot after only a few months' trial advocates and opponents are said to be changing places.

But the historian who pursues his work for its own sake does all he can to rise above party and contemporary bias; and according to the measure of his ability he succeeds, within limits. That success even the reviewer of what is passing under his own eyes may emulate if he follows certain rules which are not so essential to the historian

proper. He must devote his attention rather to men than to measures, in as far as the two can be separated. He must seek to analyse character, purpose, and motive. He must treat all questions of policy with a certain reserve. He must in some degree look upon government, administrative work, and legislation generally as a grand experiment made for the most part in good faith. For this there is warrant enough, seeing that social science is yet in its very infancy, and that there is scarcely a proposition of politics absolutely established. In this spirit, as far as may be, let us glance at these last five years of Parliamentary history in England, confining our attention mainly to the men. Let us look down on the stage of these five sessions as if we were watching a drama, ready to applaud now Cromwell the Protector and now Charles Stuart, now Wolsey and now Henry, as the dramatists and the players have taught us.

The era began with a great policy. The leader of the Opposition in the Disraeli Administration of 1868 stepped, as it were, into the Prime Minister's place before the country, and announced the issue on which the elections were to turn. Mr. Disraeli's name was on the Reform Act, and it was he who dissolved Parliament, because of the new registers which he had made in every constituency; but the Conservative chieftain stood aside while Mr. Gladstone gave the election "cry." From the moment when the fiat went forth that the people were to choose a new Parliament there seemed to be only one great figure in the world of politics, and the question was, "Aye or nay for Mr. Gladstone and the disestablishment of the Irish Church." This stern and dreadfully earnest soldier of what looked like almost a new form of Liberalism raised up a banner with devices on it of his own handwriting, and although there were enemies enough there appeared to be no other banner in the field. The question only was whether it should continue to be held aloft until the legend upon it should be fulfilled or whether it should be torn down and trampled upon in the strife. That was a memorable stroke of political generalship. It was a rare effort of courage. For there were many impartial lookers-on who thought that the Liberal leader had thrown away half his chances with the new constituencies and needlessly risked the game by the choice of a "cry." Spectators asked, or seemed to ask, whether there was no policy less hazardous than the demolition of a Church on which to appeal to the new electors at a crisis when it was not possible to gauge the mind either of the old voters or of the new. So sudden, so startling was the announcement of the new charter of Liberalism that for the moment the whole body of English Churchmen appeared to hesitate and to

ask themselves whether they must not lay aside party predilections and throw in their weight bodily on the Conservative side. The English Church and the Irish were one. English and Irish Churchmen were in the main a great united community on matters of Church politics. Six years ago there were not so many men in the Church as there are to-day prepared to reconsider the advantages and disadvantages of connection with the State, and the policy on which Mr. Gladstone decided to go to the country was a challenge cast at the feet of Churchmen of the Liberal party, the result of which he must be a wise and far-seeing man who could foretell. What result Mr. Gladstone expected he will perhaps one day declare. The boldness of the challenge was its strongest point. At any other time, when there was less uncertainty as to the future of the Liberal party, and when it might have appeared safer to rebel, it may be that the main body of Liberal Churchmen would have refused to follow the lead; but men could not tell what would be the voice of England under the Reform Act, and they had to choose whether or not they would cut themselves off from the Liberal army with whose future deeds and successes all their political feeling apart from their Church feeling was bound up. The leader played off the uncertainty of the future against those of his own followers whose allegiance on this policy was most open to doubt; and he carried the bulk of them with him. They shut their eyes and followed him. It was a lesson in sacrifice at the shrine of Liberalism, due in some degree perhaps to the sacrificial element in Mr. Gladstone's character. The Liberal Churchmen who rallied round this standard persuaded themselves that this was a just cause, but it is a safe conjecture that not one in fifty of them held the disestablishment of the Irish Church as a part of his political creed six months or six weeks before the flag was raised.

It is the declaration of the Irish Church policy at that crisis which has given Mr. Gladstone, as a personality, so conspicuous a position in these five or six years of our Parliamentary history. He succeeded Earl Russell as the leader of his party, and the striking out of this new line gave the party fresh life. The veteran hero of the Reform agitations of nearly forty years earlier had lost his hold on the reins, but his successor had a strong arm and a firm grip. Lord Russell understood no lines but the lines of '31 and '32; Mr. Gladstone's feeling was for battle in very different fields. He is an abstract thinker, and the introduction of abstract thinking into political leadership is a rarity. It is, no doubt, a dangerous element; and hence Mr. Gladstone alarms his followers often at the same time that

he arouses the fiercest hostility of his foes. It will be remembered, when Mr. Gladstone's character comes to be calmly estimated by posterity, that his most signal feat as a statesman was the one most marked by the quality of originality. Not that the disestablishment of the Irish Church was up to that time, an unheard of scheme, but that it had no conspicuous place on any programme; and to Mr. Gladstone as a statesman belonged all the merit or the blame of a great initiative policy. No man more frequently than he insists on the principle that what the people want they must compel Parliament and Ministers to give them; but no man has less taste for taking up with a measure thrust to the front by a long and increasing course of agitation, and no man takes greater delight in clever and more or less novel proposals, the workmanship of his own brain, for meeting grievances of long standing or grievances of his own discovery.

His great opponent, Mr. Disraeli, is ingenious enough, but his ingenuity is of another sort. It is the ingenuity of tactics, though unquestionably there is something far greater than tactical skill in the man. With all his singularity he appears, when we turn from Mr. Gladstone to him, to be a politician and statesman much more after the regular pattern of politicians and statesmen; dealing with men and measures as he finds them, playing the cards that are dealt and not venturing to invent a new game. But in order to understand the line he takes and to form an idea of what he will do under given circumstances it must always be remembered that he is not a Conservative Leader, but a Leader of Conservatives. There is all the difference in the world between the two, though he was perhaps the first in the history of English statesmanship to make plain a distinction which has come in our time to be a notable element in political life. Since this man became a conspicuous figure in the country his example has been followed, with certain modifications; and it would not be difficult to name a group of Conservative politicians whose rôle it is to limit and partially repress the Conservatism of those whom they represent. That would seem to be one of the prime differences between the natural history of Conservatism and that of Liberalism in our times-and perhaps to a somewhat less extent in foregoing periods. Liberal leaders drag the crowd after them; the captains of Conservatism regulate and control the reluctance of the mass of their party to accept change or to make concession. But in this respect Mr. Disraeli has been to the other representatives of Toryism what those other representatives have been to their constituents. Mr. Disraeli's nature is not made of Conservative material; and while as a matter of doctrine