and the end of a gentleman’s education.  After reading the life of Lord Aberdeen, I was brought back in spirit to all those years during which Mr. Gladstone was a member of the Tory party, and lived in an atmosphere of proud, scholarly exclusiveness—­of distrust of the multitude—­of ecclesiasticism in the home, in the forum, and as the foundation of all political controversy.  When, therefore, Mr. Gladstone is going through a crisis, it is intensely interesting to me to watch him and to see how he carries himself amid it all; and then it is that this thought occurs to me of how differently and clearly he stands out from all his colleagues and surroundings.

[Sidenote:  A reminiscence.]

Different things suggest early associations to different people.  Mrs. Solness, in the “Master Builder,” could think only of her dolls when she was telling the story of the fire that left her childless for ever.  I have heard of a great lady who cannot see a shell without recalling the scenes of her dead youth before her.  Next to the railway bridge which spans the river in my native town, there is nothing which brings back the past to me so palpably and so vividly—­I might sometimes say, so poignantly—­as the echoes of books.  One of my clearest recollections is of a little room, looking out on a sunny and, as it appeared to me then, a beautifully-kept garden, with a small but glistening river in the distance, and the air filled, not only with the songs of birds, but all the intoxicating and inaudible music of youth’s dreams and visions.  All this phantasmagoria of memory is accompanied by the echo of a melodious, rich voice, rising and falling, in the to me unfamiliar but delightful accent of an educated Englishman:  and the story of Ancient Greece—­sometimes her poetry with the loves of her gods, the fights, the shouts of battle, the exhortations and the groans of her heroes—­rises once more before me.  Or, again, I hear the tale told anew of that great last immortal day in the life of Socrates, as the great Philosopher sank to rest in a glory of self-sacrificing submission, serenity, and courage—­a story which moves the world to tears and admiration, and will continue so to do as long as it endures.  The voice of the teacher and the friend still survives, which had this extraordinary power of giving in the very different tongue of England all the glories of the poetry and the prose of Greece; and other youths, doubtless like me, look out under the spell of its music to that same green garden in far-off Galway, by the side of Corrib’s stream.

[Sidenote:  Gladstone dreams.]