16 JUNE 1900, Page 2

We regret deeply to record the death of Mrs. Gladstone,

who expired at Hawarden on Thursday in the eighty-ninth year of her age. Mrs. Gladstone was in no sense one of the political women who have even in our own time influenced Premiers and Cabinets, but there can be no doubt that her lifelong devotion to her great husband smoothed his path, and enabled him to give public affairs the full benefit of his long- enduring strength. He was not, we think, a man of deep affections, certainly not for his colleagues, whom he shed as a tree sheds leaves, but his devotion to his wife, which began when he was still only an aspirant for distinction, never wavered or grew less.