In a jingle composed for the occasion, the refrain is—
“Honour give to sterling worth,
Genius better is than birth,
So here's success to Gladstone.”
In thanking a Newcastle correspondent for his reception, Mr. Gladstone writes (Oct. 20, 1862): “To treat these occurrences as matter of personal obligation to those who have taken a part in them would be to mistake the ground on which they rest. But I must say with unfeigned sincerity that I can now perceive I have been appropriating no small share of honour that is really due to the labour of others: of Mr. Cobden as to the French treaty, and of the distinguished men who have in our day by their upright and enlightened public conduct made law and government names so dear to the people of England.” “Indeed,” says a contemporary journalist, “if Middlesborough did not do honour to Mr. Gladstone, we don't know who should, for the French treaty has been a greater boon to the iron manufacturers of that young but rising seaport, than to any other class of commercial men in the north of England.”—Newcastle Daily Chronicle, Oct. 11, 1862.
Once at Hawarden I dropped the idle triviality that Mr. Pitt, Mr. Goschen, and a third person, were the three men who had been put into cabinet after the shortest spell of parliamentary life. (They were likewise out again after the shortest recorded spell of cabinet life.) “I don't believe any such thing,” said Mr. Gladstone. “Well, who is your man?” “What do you say,” he answered, “to Sir George Murray? Wellington put him into his cabinet (1828); he had been with him in the Peninsula.” On returning to London, I found that Murray had been five years in parliament, and having written to tell Mr. Gladstone so, the next day I received a summary postcard—“Then try Lord Henry Petty.” Here, as far as I make out, he was right.
“It is very unusual, I think,” Mr. Gladstone wrote to the prime minister (Jan. 6, 1866) “to put men into the cabinet without a previous official training. Lord Derby could not help himself. Peel put Knatchbull, but that was on political grounds that seemed broad, but proved narrow enough. Argyll was put there in '52-3, but there is not the same opportunity for previous training in the case of peers.”
Edmund John Armstrong (1841-65). Republished in 1877. Sir Henry Taylor, Edinburgh Review, July 1878, says of this poet: “Of all the arts Poetic, that which was least understood between the Elizabethan age and the second quarter of this century was the art of writing blank verse.
“Armstrong's blank verse [The Prisoner of Mount Saint Michael] not otherwise than good in its ordinary fabric, affords by its occasional excellence a strong presumption that, had he lived, he would have attained to a consummate mastery of it.”
Till
like a clock worn out with eating time,
The wheels of weary life at last stood
still.—Dryden's Œdipus.
1. The Lords' amendment as to curates to be adopted, £380,000. 2. The Ulster glebes, 465,000. 3. The glebe houses to be free, 150,000. Total £995,000.
Or the Bishop of Peterborough's amendment as to the tax upon livings in lieu of No. 3, would carry a heavier charge by 124,000. Total £1,119,000.
Carm. iii. 5, 27. In Mr. Gladstone's own translation, The Odes of Horace (p. 84):—
... Can wool repair
The colours that it lost when soaked with dye?
Ah, no. True merit once resigned,
No trick nor feint will serve as well.
A rendering less apt for this occasion finds favour with some scholars, that true virtue can never be restored to those who have once fallen away from it.
In 1871-73 the tories gained twenty-three seats against only one gained by the liberals; in the first three years of the government nine seats had been lost and nine gained.
“Individuals may recover from even serious sickness; it does not appear to be the way with governments.”—Mr. Gladstone, Nineteenth Century, Sept. 1887.
εὐδαίμων μὲν ὅς ὲκ θαλάσσας ἔφυγε χεῖμα, λιμέυα δ᾽ἔκιχεν; εὐδαίμων δ᾽ὅς ὕπερθε μόχθων ἐγένεθ.
Happy the man who from out the floods has fled the storm and found the haven; happy too is he who has surmounted toil and trouble.—Bacchae, 902-5.