It would be, perhaps, unjustifiable to form a firm opinion on a man of Gladstone’s calibre from the few days of our intercourse, even in the freedom and openness of mind of a mountain walk, politics and Parliament forgotten; but the final impression he gave me was that of a man, on the whole, immensely greater than I had taken him to be, but with conflicting elements of greatness which neutralized each other to a certain extent.  He had in him the Platonist, the Statesman, and the Theologian, of each enough for an ordinary man, and one crowded the other in action.  The Platonist crowded the Statesman, and, at certain dangerous moments, the broad humanitarian feeling overlooked the practical dangers of the critical juncture in which he had to act.  His idealism took off the point of his statecraft, and what has always seemed, and still seems, to me his aberration in the artificial problems of our ecclesiastical theology, is the only thing I cannot yet understand in so great a man.

That winter I had a commission from the “Century” (then “Scribner’s”) to make an archaeological and literary venture in Greek waters, the results of which in a series of papers in the magazine were afterwards published in a volume entitled “On the Track of Ulysses.”

Accompanied by Mr. H.M.  Paget, the artist, I went to Corfu and hired the Kestrel, my old friend of the Cretan days, and I decided to follow the track of Ulysses in his return to Ithaca from Troy.  Beginning at Santa Maura we examined every point in the Ionian Islands to which any illusion is made in the “Odyssey” as far as Cerigo and Cerigotto, meeting a storm off the former island which might well have ended our trip.  A well-found Greek brig foundered only a short distance from us in the gale, and we drifted all day and till early in the morning of the day following, when we managed to make the port of Cerigo, during which time we could neither eat a meal nor even get a cup of coffee.  Paget made a capital sailor, and, though the old Maltese captain of former days was dead, his two sons, lads then, were dexterous sailors in the rough-and-ready, rule-of-thumb manner of the Levantine boatman, knowing nothing of navigation and little more of geography than Ulysses himself.  We had no charts, and only a very primitive compass, but we all had the antique love of adventure and indifference to danger.  Leaving Cerigotto, an island out of the line of traditional or historic interest, but, curious for its fine and extensive Pelasgic remains, we laid our course for Crete, starting with the breeze that at nightfall generally blows towards the land, which was visible from where we took our departure, and counted on being at Canea with the morning.