Most people remember Gladstone as an old man.  He reached the summit of his career when he had just struck seventy.  After Easter, 1880, when he dethroned Lord Beaconsfield and formed his second Administration, the eighteen years of life that remained to him added nothing to his fame, and even in some respects detracted from it.  Gradually he passed into the stage which was indicated by Labouchere’s nickname of “The Grand Old Man”; and he enjoyed the homage which rightly attends the closing period of an exemplary life, wonderfully prolonged, and spent in the service of the nation.  He had become historical before he died.  But my recollections of him go back to the earlier sixties, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer in Lord Palmerston’s Government, and they become vivid at the point of time when he became Prime Minister—­December, 1868.

In old age his appearance was impressive, through the combination of physical wear-and-tear with the unconquerable vitality of the spirit which dwelt within.  The pictures of him as a young man represent him as distinctly handsome, with masses of dark hair thrown back from a truly noble forehead, and eyes of singular expressiveness.  But in middle life—­and in his case middle life was continued till he was sixty—­he was neither as good-looking as he once had been, nor, as grand-looking as he eventually became.  He looked much older than his age.  When he met the new Parliament which had been elected at the end of 1868, he was only as old as Lord Curzon is now; but he looked old enough to be Lord Curzon’s father.  His life had been, as he was fond of saying, a life of contention; and the contention had left its mark on his face, with its deep furrows and careworn expression.  Three years before he had felt, to use his own phrase, “sore with conflicts about the public expenditure” (in which old Palmerston had always beaten him), and to that soreness had been added traces of the fierce strife about Parliamentary Reform and Irish Disestablishment.  F. D. Maurice thus described him:  “His face is a very expressive one, hard-worked, as you say, and not perhaps specially happy; more indicative of struggle than of victory, though not without promise of that.  He has preserved the type which I can remember that he bore at the University thirty-six years ago, though it has undergone curious development.”

My own recollection exactly confirms Maurice’s estimate.  In Gladstone’s face, as I used to see it in those days, there was no look of gladness or victory.  He had, indeed, won a signal triumph at the General Election of 1868, and had attained the supreme object of a politician’s ambition.  But he did not look the least as if he enjoyed his honours, but rather as if he felt an insupportable burden of responsibility.  He knew that he had an immense amount to do in carrying the reforms which Palmerston had burked, and, coming to the Premiership on the eve of sixty, he realized that the time for doing it was necessarily short.  He seemed consumed by a burning and absorbing energy; and, when he found himself seriously hampered or strenuously opposed, he was angry with an anger which was all the more formidable because it never vented itself in an insolent or abusive word.  A vulnerable temper kept resolutely under control had always been to me one of the most impressive features in human character.