occasional visits to friends in London, Scotland and the south of France; but the remainder of his life was spent for the most part at Hawarden. He occupied his leisure by writing a rhymed translation of the Odes of Horace, and preparing an elaborately annotated edition of Butler’s Analogy and Sermons. He had also contemplated some addition to the Homeric studies which he had always loved, but this design was never carried into effect, for he was summoned once again from his quiet life of study and devotion to the field of public controversy. The Armenian massacres in 1894 and 1895 revived all his ancient hostility to “the governing Turk.” He denounced the massacres and their perpetrators at public meetings held at Chester on the 6th of August 1895, and at Liverpool on the 24th of September 1896. In March 1897 he recapitulated the hideous history in an open letter to the duke of Westminster.
But the end, though not yet apprehended, was at hand. Since his retirement from office Gladstone’s physical vigour, up to that time unequalled, had shown signs of impairment. Towards the end of the summer of 1897 he began to suffer from an acute pain, which was attributed to facial neuralgia, and in November he went to Cannes. In February 1898 he returned to England and went to Bournemouth. There he was informed that the pain had its origin in a disease which must soon prove fatal. He received the information with simple thankfulness, and only asked that he might die at home.Death. On the 22nd of March he returned to Hawarden, and there he died on the 19th of May 1898. During the night of the 25th of May his body was conveyed from Hawarden to London and the coffin was placed on a bier in Westminster Hall. Throughout the 26th and 27th a vast train of people, officially estimated at 250,000, and drawn from every rank and class, moved in unbroken procession past the bier. On the 28th of May the coffin, preceded by the two Houses of Parliament and escorted by the chief magnates of the realm, was carried from Westminster Hall to Westminster Abbey. The heir-apparent and his son, the prime minister and the leader of the House of Commons, were among those who bore the pall. The body was buried in the north transept of the abbey, where, on the 19th of June 1900, Mrs Gladstone’s body was laid beside it.
Mr and Mrs Gladstone had four sons and four daughters, of whom one died in infancy. The eldest son, W. H. Gladstone (1840–1891), was a member of parliament for many years, and married the daughter of Lord Blantyre, his son William (b. 1885) inheriting the family estates. The fourth Family. son, Herbert John (b. 1854), sat in parliament for Leeds from 1880 to 1910, and filled various offices, being home secretary 1905–1910; in 1910 he was created Viscount Gladstone, on being appointed governor-general of united South Africa. The eldest daughter, Agnes, married the Rev. E. C. Wickham, headmaster of Wellington, 1873–1893, and later Dean of Lincoln. Another daughter married the Rev. Harry Drew, rector of Hawarden. The youngest, Helen, was for some years vice-principal of Newnham College, Cambridge.
After a careful survey of Mr Gladstone’s life, enlightened by personal observation, it is inevitable to attempt some analysis of his character. First among his moral attributes must be placed his religiousness. From those early days when a fond mother wrote of him as having been “truly Character. converted to God,” down to the verge of ninety years, he lived in the habitual contemplation of the unseen world, and regulated his private and public action by reference to a code higher than that of mere prudence or worldly wisdom. A second characteristic, scarcely less prominent than the first, was his love of power. His ambition had nothing in common with the vulgar eagerness for place and pay and social standing. Rather it was a resolute determination to possess that control over the machine of state which should enable him to fulfil without let or hindrance the political mission with which he believed that Providence had charged him. The love of power was supported by a splendid fearlessness. No dangers were too threatening for him to face, no obstacles too formidable, no tasks too laborious, no heights too steep. The love of power and the supporting courage were allied with a marked imperiousness. Of this quality there was no trace in his manner, which was courteous, conciliatory and even deferential; nor in his speech, which breathed an almost exaggerated humility. But the imperiousness showed itself in the more effectual form of action; in his sudden resolves, his invincible insistence, his recklessness of consequences to himself and his friends, his habitual assumption that the civilized world and all its units must agree with him, his indignant astonishment at the bare thought of dissent or resistance, his incapacity to believe that an overruling Providence would permit him to be frustrated or defeated. He had by nature what he himself called a “vulnerable temper and impetuous moods.” But so absolute was his lifelong self-mastery that he was hardly ever betrayed into saying that which, on cooler reflection, needed to be recalled. It was easy enough to see the “vulnerable temper” as it worked within, but it was never suffered to find audible expression. It may seem paradoxical, but it is true, to say that Mr Gladstone was by nature conservative. His natural bias was to respect things as they were. In his eyes, institutions, customs, systems, so long as they had not become actively mischievous, were good because they were old. It is true that he was sometimes forced by conviction or fate or political necessity to be a revolutionist on a large scale; to destroy an established Church; to add two millions of voters to the electorate; to attack the parliamentary union of the kingdoms. But these changes were, in their inception, distasteful to their author. His whole life was spent in unlearning the prejudices in which he was educated. His love of freedom steadily developed, and he applied its principles more and more courageously to the problems of government. But it makes some difference to the future of a democratic state whether its leading men are eagerly on the look-out for something to revolutionize, or approach a constitutional change by the gradual processes of conviction and conversion.
Great as were his eloquence, his knowledge and his financial skill, Gladstone was accustomed to say of himself that the only quality in which, so far as he knew, he was distinguished from his fellow-men was his faculty of concentration. Whatever were the matter in hand, he so concentrated himself on it, and absorbed himself in it, that nothing else seemed to exist for him.
A word must be said about physical characteristics. In his prime Gladstone was just six feet high, but his inches diminished as his years increased, and in old age the unusual size of his head and breadth of his shoulders gave him a slightly top-heavy appearance. His features were strongly marked; the nose trenchant and hawk-like, and the mouth severely lined. His flashing eyes were deep-set, and in colour resembled the onyx with its double band of brown and grey. His complexion was of an extreme pallor, and, combined with his jet-black hair, gave in earlier life something of an Italian aspect to his face. His dark eyebrows were singularly flexible, and they perpetually expanded and contracted in harmony with what he was saying. He held himself remarkably upright, and even from his school-days at Eton had been remarked for the rapid pace at which he habitually walked. His voice was a baritone, singularly clear and far-reaching. In the Waverley Market at Edinburgh, which is said to hold 20,000 people, he could be heard without difficulty; and as late as 1895 he said to the present writer: “What difference does it make to me whether I speak to 400 or 4000 people?” His physical vigour in old age earned him the popular nickname of the Grand Old Man.
Lord Morley of Blackburn’s Life of Gladstone was published in 1903. (G. W. E. R.)
GLADSTONE, a seaport of Clinton county, Queensland, Australia, 328 m. by rail N.E. of Brisbane. Pop. (1901) 1566. It possesses a fine, well-sheltered harbour reputed one of the best in Queensland, at the mouth of the river Boyne. Gold, manganese, copper and coal are found in the neighbourhood. Gladstone, founded in 1847, became a municipality in 1863.
See J. F. Hogan, The Gladstone Colony (London, 1898).
GLAGOLITIC, an early Slavonic alphabet: also the liturgy written therein, and the people (Dalmatians and Roman Catholic
