The Grand Old Man | Page 9

sixty years--the
lifetime of two generations. He is the custodian of all the traditions, the
hero of the experience of successive administrations, from a time dating
back longer than most of his colleagues can remember. For nearly forty
years he has had a leading part in making or unmaking of Cabinets; he
has served his Queen and his country in almost every capacity in office
and in opposition, and yet to-day, despite his prolonged sojourn in the
malaria of political wire-pulling, his heart seems to be as the heart of a
little child. If some who remember 'the old Parliamentary hand' should
whisper that innocence of the dove is sometimes compatible with the
wisdom of the serpent, I make no dissent. It is easy to be a dove, and to
be as silly as a dove. It is easy to be as wise as a serpent, and as wicked,
let us say, as Mr. Governor Hill or Lord Beaconsfield. But it is the
combination that is difficult, and in Mr. Gladstone the combination is
almost ideally complete.
"Mr. Gladstone is old enough to be the grandfather of the younger race
of politicians, but still his courage, his faith, his versatility, put the
youngest of them to shame. It is this ebullience of youthful energy, this
inexhaustible vitality, which is the admiration and despair of his
contemporaries. Surely when a schoolboy at Eton he must somewhere
have discovered the elixir of life, or have been bathed by some
beneficent fairy in the well of perpetual youth. Gladly would many a
man of fifty exchange physique with this hale and hearty octogenarian.
Only in one respect does he show any trace of advancing years. His
hearing is not quite so good as it was, but still it is far better than that of
Cardinal Manning, who became very deaf in his closing years.
Otherwise Mr. Gladstone is hale and hearty. His eye is not dim, neither
is his natural force abated. A splendid physical frame, carefully
preserved, gives every promise of a continuance of his green old age.
"His political opponents, who began this Parliament by confidently
calculating upon his death before the dissolution, are now beginning to
admit that it is by no means improbable that Mr. Gladstone may
survive the century. Nor was it quite so fantastic as it appears at first
sight, when an ingenious disciple told him the other day that by the

fitness of things he ought to live for twenty years yet. 'For,' said this
political arithmetician, 'you have been twenty-six years a Tory,
twenty-six years a Whig Liberal, and you have been only six years a
Radical Home Ruler. To make the balance even you have twenty years
still to serve.'
"Sir Provo Wallis, the Admiral of the Fleet, who died the other day at
the age of one hundred, had not a better constitution than Mr.
Gladstone, nor had it been more carefully preserved in the rough and
tumble of our naval war. If the man who smelt powder in the famous
fight between the Chesapeake and the Shannon lived to read the reports
of the preparations for the exhibition at Chicago, it is not so incredible
that Mr. Gladstone may at least be in the foretop of the State at the
dawn of the twentieth century.
"The thought is enough to turn the Tories green with sickening despair,
that the chances of his life, from a life insurance office point of view,
are probably much better than Lord Salisbury's. But that is one of the
attributes of Mr. Gladstone which endear him so much to his party. He
is always making his enemies sick with despairing jealousy. He is the
great political evergreen, who seems, even in his political life, to have
borrowed something of immortality from the fame which he has won.
He has long been the Grand Old Man. If he lives much longer he bids
fair to be known as the immortal old man in more senses than one."
[Illustration: GLADSTONE'S BIRTHPLACE, RODNEY STREET,
LIVERPOOL.]
CHAPTER II
AT ETON AND OXFORD
There is very little recorded of the boyhood of some great men, and this
is true of the childhood of William E. Gladstone, until he leaves the
parental home for school, which he does in 1821, at the early age of
eleven. He was fortunate in his parentage, but no less so in his early
associations, both in and out of school. We refer particularly to his
private preceptors, two of whom, the venerable Archdeacon Jones and

the Rev. William Rawson, first Vicar of Seaforth, a watering-place near
Liverpool, were both men of high character and great ability. Mr.
Gladstone always highly esteemed Mr. Rawson, his earliest preceptor,
and visited him on his death-bed. Dr. Turner, afterwards Bishop of
Calcutta, was