66

When he was a young man he was condemned; Acland took him to Madeira for several years; he recovered his health, and has grown into the grand old man we all know." By and by Mr. Gladstone gave us a most amusing account of how he had gone, as a young man, to a music hall. It was when I was less well known ; I dursn't do it now; it was quite respectable, but oh! so dull. By and by, looking round, I found that no one was drunk, but that everybody about me was quietly boozing, and I retired as being a very unprofitable attendant." In the library, to which we adjourned, he spoke mainly about Greece, ancient and modern. He thought that after the Crimean War a great Turk might have restored Turkey; now she had sunk beyond recovery. He thought that Homer had intended to write, or rather sing, two more poems, on the wanderings of Menelaus and on the last days and death of Odysseus. He did not believe the existing poems were largely interpolated: "nowhere can you pick out five lines which have not the characteristic Homeric style; Homeric atmosphere pervades the whole Homeric poems."

D. G. H. says: I recall that he arrived rather late . . . his conversation throughout was addressed to the company present. He spoke of having seen Routh in Convocation; he talked most of the events of his own youth, seeming to remember them much more clearly than those of his middle life. . . . When we passed into the library a semicircle was formed, with Mr. Gladstone at one horn of it on the left and myself next to him. He was very deaf, and I had to repeat to him many things said by others in the company. He talked to me about the nearer East, of which he had heard that I had seen something, of his own mission to the Ionian Isles, of the present Sultan. He spoke hopefully of Greece, and asked if brigandage had ceased. When the circle broke up, I recall that he spoke to E. of the quantity of port habitually consumed by his (E.'s) ancestor, Lord Eldon. To the president of the O.U.B.C. he commented on the respective sizes of the heads of men in the Cambridge and Oxford boats. . . . When he left the house two females emerged stealthily from behind a chapel buttress and followed him to the Lodge, and up the High Street. I had to go up the street also, and I saw them following him past Queen's College, where all the cabmen on the stand lined up and touched or took off their hats to him. Mr. G. was in academical dress and carried a large gamp umbrella; he walked very fast, with long strides, responding to all salutes.'

Friday, 31.-All his portraits make him too fierce. There is great mobility and play of face, as well as of gesture with the hands, which he is fond of bringing down plump on the table to emphasise a point (not good for our table, which is a very old, thin bit of the

finest mahogany). Eyes grey-blue, and though occasionally they light up so much as to be describable as ' fierce,' in ordinary converversation they are essentially mild. On the only occasion on which I heard him in the House ten years ago he looked big (I suppose men do look big there), but really he is short of stature and slight. Both sight and hearing are slightly affected, but he marches bravely; simply lives in his cap and gown, and mislays it whenever he has to take it off. Likes to accept little attentions from Juniors, and accepts them very prettily.

2

I was not presented to him to-night, but he spoke to me accidentally on some point of College history. He has 'le grand air bourbonien,' and his manners are very perfect. Quite without affectation, he has the views and habits of an earlier age. He spoke very prettily to H. W. B., who was too much struck with the suddenness of the address to converse with him, when Gladstone said, 'We were at Eton together, were we not?' (By the way, B. always used to say of his Eton days: Yes, Gladstone was a horrid boy, horrid boy, asked me to belong to a debating society once!') Gladstone has a strong Lancashire accent; calls prefer prefurr'; conform' almost became 'confurrm,' but not, you understand, the Scottish 'r.' Occasionally, as old people will, he elides an h; 'erb, 'armony came as a surprise to-night. I cau.ht

1 I take exception to the epithet 'slight.'-W. R. A.

C. W. O. says: 'My first impression of him was that he was a much bigger man than I had expected.'

2 It was sometimes very difficult to induce Mr. Gladstone to divest himself of his gown, and I am sure that he regarded the less frequent use of academical dress as a sign of decadence in university life. On one night of his visit he went with me to dine at the Club, a dining society of twelve persons then just completing the first century of its existence. The member who entertained the Club on that evening was Dr. Bellamy, who was then Vice-Chancellor. Mr. G. started with me in full academical dress. I remarked that we did not wear gowns at the Club dinner, and he replied that in the presence of the Vice-Chancellor he must wear his gown. I did not pursue the subject, and during the rest of our short drive we discussed, heaven knows why, the comparative efficiency of municipal government at Manchester and Liverpool. When we entered the drawing-room at St. John's, Dr. Bellamy said at once, after the first greetings, Mr. Gladstone, you must take off your gown.' 'But,' said Mr. G., 'in the presence of the Vice-Chancellor' 'Oh, no,' said Dr. Bellamy, we make no account of Vice-Chancellors in the Club. You must take off your gown.' 'Well,' said Mr. Gladstone, sadly, in this lawless assembly I suppose I must conform to its rules.'-W. R. A.

the following scraps of conversation. Yes, I did hear Lord John [Russell] tell the story of his being presented to Napoleon at Elba.'

There have been no great musical composers for fifty years. Donizetti, Rossini, and Bellini are the last. "La Donna è mobile is the last air that has been written. Women's voices are not what they were. Now there's L. T.: she has a nice voice, but absolutely no style.'

G. I view with the greatest alarm the progress of Socialism at the present day.'

H. H. H. Mr. G., it lies with you to give it a great impulse forward or backward.'

G. 'Whatever influence I can use, Mr. H., will be used in the direction of st pping it. It will not be in my day, but it is alarming. It is the upper classes who are largely responsible for it.' [Who's he thinking of?]

He ate everything. He drank, perfectly unconscious of what he was drinking, the first wine that came round to him. I thus noticed him drinking severally port, claret, which the 'Screw' [the Junior Fellow who decants the wine] in his agitation had by mistake poured into a port-decanter, and brown sherry. He talked incessantly from seven till ten-twenty.

'Mr. Gladstone,' says W. R. A., ' only fell back upon brown sherry because the Junior Fellow had so maltreated the port. I had not noticed this mishap, and recollect calling Mr. Gladstone's attention to the decanter out of which he was helping himself, as I thought he might have misread the labels. He replied that our port was excellent, but that his doctor had enjoined upon him the drinking of a drier wine. I did not discover till later the strange combination of flavours which had been presented to him in the guise of port.'

With regard to Socialism T. R. notes that he said further: 'For me Socialism has no attractions; nothing but disappointment awaits the working classes if they yield to the exaggerated anticipations which are held out to them by the Labour party.'

H. H. H. adds: 'He also expressed himself very positively on the subject of the greater class selfishness of the upper classes compared with the lower. I asked him whether Christianity was in his opinion as great a force in English politics now as it was fifty years ago. He said in reply that he thought it was greater, though the manner of its expression had changed, "a change which I, as a denominationalist and a dogmatist, cannot wholly approve." said that an indication of improvement was the better conduct of members at prayers. This was not the only occasion on which he described himself as "a denominationalist and a dogmatist.'

He

When someone" drew" him on the question of Church schools, it was, he told us, in this dual capacity that he "regarded the Board School as a most unsatisfactory solution of the problem of popular education." T. R. adds again: 'Democracy indeed he seemed to accept, but he thought a wide franchise was not an advantage to the cause of reform. He tried to show that the real reforms of 1830-1880 would all have been carried by the unreformed House of Commons. This, I believe, was a favourite theme with him.' To this A. H. H.: 'I remember his rather staggering me by observing that the Duke of Wellington was quite right when he said in 1830 that the Constitution was incapable of improvement, and by his defending the saying on the ground that the control, which the House of Lords exercised by means of the pocket boroughs over the House of Commons, established an ideal as well as a real equilibrium between the component parts of Parliament. He went on to say that the Reform Bill of 1832 destroyed this equilibrium, and that thenceforward the Constitution was logically bound to develop on purely democratic lines, a result which he seemed to regard as a doubtful blessing.' He also told C. G. L. outright that 'in point of ability and efficiency he thought the country had never been better governed than in the period preceding the first Reform Bill.'

We made at All Souls an exception in Mr. Gladstone's favour. No Fellow in my recollection ever spoke to another, however much his senior, as Mr.,' but instinctively everyone called the honorary Fellow, Mr. Gladstone.'

On this point C. G. L. remarks: 'It fell to me on the first morning to have to address some formal question to him, and I addressed him of course as "Mr. Gladstone." He smiled and said, "Surely it ought to be 'Gladstone' here" (we were in the Common Room). But of course we could not take him at his word; do you think anyone ever addressed the Great Commoner as Pitt "?"

(To be concluded.)

489

A MEMORY OF SEVILLE.

I.

'SEVILLA! Sevilla!' is the cry from the brazen throats of a hundred excited porters as they rush towards the doors of our railway carriages; 'Sevilla, Sevilla!' echoes the sigh of relief from the weary hearts of the passengers who have spent the last one or two or three nights in the train in order to reach Seville in time for the ceremonies of Holy Week. The scene at the station is one of indescribable confusion; travel-stained pilgrims, jaded and helpless, stumbling along after the porters so laden with hand-baggage that but little of the human is visible beneath the burden; hotel-runners, guides, couriers, and harpies of all descriptions, shouting at the top of their discordant voices; horses neighing and mules braying; railway officials arguing in tones of high indignation with travellers who complain that their luggage is lost; such is my impression of an early morning arrival in Seville, whilst the Spanish soldier propped against his musket drowsily consumes the end of a ragged cigarette.

I have spent Passion Week in many Catholic towns in Europe, and have been haunted by the austere silence that pervades them during the holy octave. Penance and devotion are the prevailing notes in Dresden and Munich, in Florence and Vienna and Rome. But in Seville the passing of Palm Sunday is the sign that the holidays have begun ; and if the haughty Spaniard (as the guide-books call him) is ever roused from his delightful indolence it is during the week that precedes and that which follows Easter Sunday. One cannot say that he becomes business-like, for that would be no compliment to the integrity of commerce, but he becomes keenly alive to the value of ready money, which he extracts with consummate ease from the unsuspecting alien. The hotels treble their prices without enlarging their accommodation or improving their primitive systems; the couriers make a little fortune in a fortnight out of commissions from the various shops, together with lucrative speculations in seats for the bull-fights and processions and the xorbitant prices which they charge for quite moderate services;