Eminent English Liberals in and out of Parliament
9781465592927
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
William Ewart Gladstone is the fourth son of Sir John Gladstone of Fasque, Kincardineshire, first baronet. He was born on the 29th of December, 1809, at Liverpool, where his father, who had originally come from Leith, was then famous as a successful merchant, and as an influential friend and partisan of Canning. The name was originally spelt Gladstanes or Gledstanes; gled being Lowland Scottish for a hawk, and stanes meaning rocks. It is still not uncommon in many parts of rural Scotland to call a man by the place of his abode at the expense of his proper patronymic. In earlier times such local appellations often adhered permanently to individuals, and it is to this process that the Gladstone family is indebted for its name. The Premier's mother was the daughter of Mr. Andrew Robertson, Provost of Dingwall, whose descent the credulous Burke traces from Robert Bruce, the patriot King of Scotland. Be this as it may, Mr. Gladstone is of pure Scottish blood,—a fact of which he has oftener than once expressed himself proud. Indeed, the perfervidum ingenium Scotorum is his in a remarkable degree; and it has its influence on public opinion across the border, notwithstanding his English training and his antipathetic High-Churchism. However England may abase herself before the gorgeous Lord Benjingo, Scotland will never turn her back on the undecorated Gladstone. There lives not a Scotsman that is not inwardly proud of him; for blood is, after all, thicker than water. Evicted from one English constituency after another for his devotion to Liberal principles, there is a sort of "fitness of things," not without a certain pathos, in the gallant and successful effort which the country of his forefathers has made to seize a seat for him from between the teeth of the great feudal despot of the North, "the bold Buccleuch," From a very tender age young Gladstone exhibited a wonderful aptitude for learning, and an almost superhuman industry, which age, instead of abating, seemingly increases. His daily autograph correspondence with high and low, rich and poor, conducted chiefly by the much-derided post-card, would afford ample employment for about six Somerset House clerks working at their usual pace. He possesses, I should say, without exception, the most omnivorous and untiring brain in England,—possibly in the whole world. No wonder that his course at Eton and at Oxford was marked by the highest distinction. A student of Christ Church, he graduated "double first" in his twenty-second year, a superlative master of the language and literature of Greece and Rome. He availed himself of every advantage the university could bestow; and, unlike most other scholars who subsequently become politicians and men of the world, he has never ceased to add to the immense store of his academic acquirements. He has published Latin sacred verses not appreciably inferior in grace to those of Buchanan and Milton; and as a Homeric student his "Studies of Homer and the Homeric Age" entitle him to no mean place among scholarly critics.
