Once he had loved, but failed to wed, And still when time had turned him gray, We could go on quoting Mr. Dobson for ever, so full are his pages of pleasant thoughts, of felicitous phrases, of delicate fancies, of true pathos and poetry, though touched with so light a hand. He has saturated himself so thoroughly with the manners and phraseology of the eighteenth century that he can call up its atmosphere at will with a certainty of success, and the reader is constantly delighted by some happy phrase or humorous picture. But the limits of our space are reached, and we can but end with the recommendation to those who have not read Mr. Dobson that they should read him, and to those who have read him that they should read him again. Finishing with Mr. Dobson, we are bound to finish in a good temper and at charity with all men. It is the fashion to write with a fine contempt of the minor poet, unless he is your own discovery; but for ourselves we are grateful to nearly all of them—or, if that is too large a phrase, to nearly all of those whom we have read. Many of them, in the natural course of things, cannot expect a very extended immortality of fame, which is granted only to those who contribute some new note to the choir of our poets. But they may be pleasant in their own generation, when they repeat the accents which suit our present taste, and embody the thoughts and emotions and desires of to-day. That is the function of those who are gifted with poetic sensibility but not with originality; and meanwhile they hand on the torch until the new poet shall arise with new splendour to outshine them, ὡς ἄστρων διακρίνει φάη νυκτὸς διχομήνιδος εὐφεγγὴς σελάνα. 1 Dobson, Collected Poems, pp. 9-13. In Memoriam. WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE. WHEN it was suggested to the writer of this In Memoriam to the late Mr. Gladstone that he should undertake the task, there was in his mind one scruple against compliance. He must begin by confessing that in his view (he speaks only for himself) Mr. Gladstone, with all his genius and eloquence, was far from being a consummate statesman, or even politician.1 He failed to realize the vastness of the empire. He sometimes shrank back from the spectre of war; sometimes overlooked the possibility that his powerful words might be translated into battles, not less dangerous because they were crusades. There was strangely little that was prophetic in his forecast of the consequences of great historical events like the American Civil War. Above all, political crimes of a resonant and startling character were looked upon by him, towards the close of his career, with a 'sombre acquiescence.' He was inclined to consider them as the fierce summer heat that 'ripened' questions which had lingered too long in perplexing immaturity. His sudden adoption of the Irish Nationalist Movement has been to him and to his party very much what Mr. Fox's extreme patronage of the French Revolution was to himself and to his followers-a fissiparous principle, possibly involving a prolonged exclusion from power. The most questionable of his great measures to many minds must, we think, in justice be allowed to have had practically many mitigating circumstances. Existing rights were fairly, and even delicately, recognized. Mr. Gladstone had a passion for details as well as principles. Both financially, and in the provision of a suitable framework for the temporal organization of the old Church, his action was at once farseeing and benevolent. Such a confession of the writer's political view as this may seem an unfitting prelude to the present paper. Yet he may set against it two things. He is saved from any temptation to convert the faults of the statesman into personal sins by having undergone the spell of that magical fascination. What is more important, he fully believes that political shortcomings may serve even to accentuate that element of spiritual truth, beauty, and power in Mr. Gladstone's nature, which has for a time hushed every voice in reverence for a saintly character. The politician is of all men the most fallible in his judgment of the real attributes, even morally, of measures which are necessary for the cause in which he believes. Yet it is largely admitted that Mr. Gladstone's aims were lofty and his motives pure. 1 In the immortal passage where Macaulay describes the characteristics of the statesmen who share with Mr. Gladstone the portion of the Abbey where he rests, either by actual sepulture or by busts placed there, how much is there which would sound like satire applied to him who has just been laid among them! For instance: 'Chatham's effigy, made by a cunning hand, seems still with eagle face and outstretched arms to bid England be of good cheer, and to hurl defiance at her enemies.' Public men in England have been compared to bees which work under glass hives. Mr. Gladstone began public life early, and was peculiarly exposed to public observation from his very boyhood. Those who can still bear personal witness to the immaculate dawning of his day are, of course, very few. Several years before his death Mr. Gladstone might have quoted the touching lines of Charles Wesley which John Wesley read from the pulpit at his brother's funeral: 'My company before is gone, And I am left alone with Thee.' ་ But there is abundant attestation to the fact that the Eton boy was a religious boy, and the Christ Church student a religious youth; chaste, sober, constant in prayer, a devout observer of Sunday, a reader of the Bible, and lover of the Prayer-book. He was still, for a statesman, almost young, when he flung out to European public opinion his terrible indictment of Neapolitan tyranny. The world seems then for the first time to have found that something vital in his style' which Milton speaks of as the sure earnest of imperishable fame. That negation of God,' he cries, 'erected into a system of Government! It is time that either the veil should be lifted from scenes fitter for hell than earth, or some considerable mitigation should be voluntarily adopted. I have undertaken this wearisome and painful task in the hope of doing something to diminish a mass of suffering as huge, I believe, and as acute, as any that the eye of Heaven beholds.' 1 These sentences were but the preludes of others from the same pen or lips that have rung down the corridors of Time; for Mr. Gladstone was one of the spirits anointed by Freedom and Truth to communicate to the masses of humanity the momentum, the tumult, the energy of his convictions. 'Words, words, words,' 2 has often been the weary answer to the question, 'What do you read?' (or 'hear?'). But some writers and speakers are able to breathe a spirit of life into their words, to impregnate them with seminal principles of creative growth, or load them with explosives of destruction. Not less than the song :' 'The speech which stirs a nation's heart From an early period of his Oxford life Mr. Gladstone was under the influence of the Church Movement. It laid hold of his heart, imagination, and intellect. It was not, as in many instances, the whim of a year or two, laid aside when it pressed inconveniently upon conduct or worldly interest. It was the conviction of an existence. The iron of Puritanism was in his blood from the beginning. The new element introduced into it did not expel or disintegrate the old. It was an influence which softened and clarified, but did not weaken. What he gained of the new spiritual power incorporated itself with previous thoughts and prayers, almost imperceptibly. He 1 First Letter to the Earl of Aberdeen on the State Prosecutions of the Neapolitan Government, 1851, Gleanings of Past Years, vol. iv. 2 Hamlet, act ii. sc. 2. VOL. XLVI.-NO. XCII. I H gained in width without losing in intensity. All that was contradictory to his primary convictions fell away as if spontaneously. He could admire the strong organization of Rome; but the terrible drill of the Italian ecclesiastical barrack-yard offended his love of liberty. Modern innovations and the arguments by which they were maintained were alike distasteful to his love of truth. In the services of his own Church he prized grave and serious beauty; tawdry travesties of alien rites were not much to his liking. There are four imperfect forms, broken segments of the spiritual life, departments too often mistaken for the whole region-emotionalism, doctrinalism, humanitarianism, observationalism. These are systems which practically make the Christian life a series of mystical feelings, or of concatenated formulæ, or of philanthropic labours, or of detached and ever-renewed observances. None of these singly, nor even all combined, absorbed Mr. Gladstone's entire being. The pursuit of a renewed character was ever being followed out with a sensitive restlessness. Above and below all else was a simple love of God, faith in Christ's work, reverence for the Church as His body. What he was to those near him is well illustrated by a touching little anecdote which we happened to read in a local paper. An old dependent in a very humble position, full of anxiety about her son's unsatisfactory moral and spiritual condition, spoke to Mr. Gladstone of that which weighed upon her heart. The august old man reasoned with the misguided boy, then kindly laid his hand upon the lad's and said, 'Now let us have a word of prayer.' The young man rose from a penitential baptism of tears, given back again to God and duty. arm, Mr. Gladstone's remains were laid in the grave with a funeral such as England has scarcely seen before. The stately melancholy of military music, the measured tread of regiments in mourning, must have given a peculiar grandeur to the obsequies of Wellington. The torchlight burial of Addison in the Abbey inspired a second-rate poet with lines whose pathetic cadences and simple majesty were unsurpassed until Tennyson's Ode upon the Funeral of the Duke.'1 But influences from a higher sphere lifted Mr. Gladstone's funeral into another world. His remains were watched over in Westminster Hall with love stronger than death and prayers that never ceased. They were visited by tens of thousands of English men and English women, in the unbroken hush, with the tremulous reverence which is the true magnificence of public sorrow. Inside the Abbey when the watch was over, and the function began, the service was simple, 1 Tickell upon Addison's funeral by torchlight in Westminster Abbey, one of the few instances of picturesque Anglican ceremonials in the last century: 'Grief unaffected suits but ill with art, Or flowing numbers with a bleeding heart. severe, sublime. No mere pageantry marred the simplicity; no varied vestments or clouds of incense tempered the severity; no vast wreaths of flowers ostentatiously vulgarized the sublimity. It had been Mr. Gladstone's intense conviction that death was the penalty of sin. He thought it almost an evasion to hide the confession of that penalty under a lavish expenditure which can only give the scents of an hour and the colours of a day. The highest representatives of Church and State filled the Abbey. Beside the coffin stood Royal personages, relatives, political friends and opponents, wrapped in a common grief; only the music was of surpassing beauty, as sweet as ever died into a wail of sorrow, or rose into a storm of triumphal hope. The Hymn-book gave of its most precious treasures—the lines of Toplady, to whose sweetness and awe Mr. Gladstone had himself added the mystic richness and indefinable solemnity of Latin rhyme; the loftiest and most thoughtful of Newman's verses. It was everywhere felt and recognized that the secret of the influence of the funeral was the death of the man; the secret of the death a life hid with Christ in God. The incidents of the death-bed which were recorded were, as was fitting, not very numerous, but they were touched with the pathetic brightness of a Christian's setting sun. His face seemed gradually to become more Christlike in its own human and limited measure as the shadow of the crown of thorns grew darker over the white lips. The telegraph and the newspaper made him appear to die, after the beautiful mistranslation in our Bible (if the critic will have it so), 'in the presence of all his brethren '— 1 'Homelike and herolike the death he died.' But the home continued, as it ever had been, in the precincts of heaven; the heroism was that which the great Oxford orator had long loved to trace in the language of the great Oxford Christian philosopher to creatures like ourselves resignation is almost the whole of virtue and piety.' One thing only we will add to what has been said of the incidents of the funeral. The sublimity of the silence grew almost painful within the Abbey as the tragic form of a lady in black, supported by filial love, moved up the choir, while all stood reverently as if for the passage of a queen. Who shall blame or wonder if pride found its way to her soul as she thought of the heritage of splendid memories which the man she loved with a love stronger than death was leaving to their children? In a sentence which a consummate critic has pronounced to 1 Genesis, xxv. 18. See Kalisch, Genesis, p. 485. 2 An address delivered in Great St. Mary's, Cambridge, in presence of the Mayor and Corporation, on Saturday, May 28, 1898, at the hour of Mr. Gladstone's interment in Westminster Abbey, by Dr. Butler, Master of Trinity-an address which the writer believes to be one of the grandest ever delivered from any pulpit. Robert Hall is the author of the sentence quoted in the text. |
