LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
"MR GLADSTONE A STUDY."
[To ran liorror Oraw 4.Eirsereros.".1
Sus,—With the greater part of your review of my book, I have no reason to quarrel. The weakness of your case sufficiently attests the strength of mine. The facts that I have brought forward are much too strong to be shaken by sophistry or equivo- cation, and although you attempt to wrest those facts from their plain and clear interpretation, every unprejudiced mind will perceive that you have failed. I had not, indeed, fully realised the overwhelming nature of the evidence I have pro- duced until I read your article.
There is one point on which, in the interests of truth and justice, and as a matter of permanent public interest, I desire to offer a remark. You say that it is "extremely im- proper" for me to attribute the now famous Quarterly Review articles to Mr. Gladstone. Are you, then, ignorant of the fact that most of these articles have been attributed to him by many who stood, as it were, behind the scenes,—by contemporary writers, by Sir George Cornewall Lewis, and by Grevifle, among others ? Have you not read, in the third part of Greville's "Diary " (Vol. II., p. 190), the following entry, dated April 29E11,1858 ?—" Gladstone will probably be no party to any arrangement, and he has recently evinced his extreme antipathy to Palmerston by a bitter, though able, review in the Quarterly on France and the late Ministry, in which he attacks Palmerston with extraordinary asperity." Are you also ignorant of the fact that Mr. Gladstone himself supplied the clue to the date of his contributions to the Quarterly, by republish- ing one of the series in his "Gleanings of Past Years." He merely took care to select the only article of the set in which his hatred of Radicalism, and his attachment to Tory principles, were not avowed.
But you are well informed on the subject. Your review is
the product of many consultations and inquiries, and of three weeks' anxious reflection. You dare not deny that Mr. Glad- stone was the author of the Quarterly Review articles. You know that your principal is equally unable to deny it. But you try to open a side-door of escape for him by suggesting that though the Quarterly articles "were in some sense Mr. Glad- stone's," it is "possible that the then editor of that Review may be more or less responsible for many of the passages."
It is "extremely improper," it seems, for me to attribute to Mr. Gladstone articles which he actually wrote ; but it is not improper for you to attempt to palm them off, "more or less," upon the editor of the publication in which they appeared. You have searched the articles, and your critical judgment tells you that they are the work of one man ; that being so, you proceed to ascribe them, by innuendo, to another.
What does your supposition involve ? That the editor of the
Quarterly Review inserted in Mr. Gladstone's articles not merely a sentence here and there, but whole pages, and that he kept on doing this time after time, Mr. Gladstone consenting, and never once disavowing the interpolated pages, any more than he ventures in his own name to disavow them now. Mr. Gladstone, a man of great eminence in public life, allowed his articles to be turned inside out and upside down, and patiently saw introduced into them long arguments and emphatic state- ments which were at deadly issue with his own convictions ; and yet, from that day to this, he never uttered a word of remonstrance or protest. That is your theory, and I say that
it is without a precedent in the whole annals of literature. Do you think you can get "the then" editor of the Quarterly Review to lend it any countenance ? Try him, and let us hear of the result.
What it all comes to is this. There is nothing improper in Mr. Gladstone condemning, down to his fiftieth year, certain well-defined principles as destructive of the best interests of his country, and then, when those principles pointed the way to- power, turning suddenly round, adopting them as his own, and embodying them in legislation. And there is nothing improper in insinuating that Mr. Gladstone did not write the whole of the articles which are known to be his, but that one of the
of editors foisted into them sentiments and arguments of his own, as the cuckoo lays its egg in the hedge-sparrow's neat. But it is "extremely improper" to bring home to Mr. Gladstone his own words and deeds, and to insist upon holding him accountable for them.
These new illustrations of the Gladstonian system of ethics I will take care to include in the next edition of my book.—I am,
[This is hardly the kind of letter that we should think it right to publish, if it did not reveal so plainly the virulence of the- writer. But it is well that that virulence should be made known to the public. Mr. Jennings has not quoted our remark correctly.. What we said was that it seemed to us "extremely improper to quote a number of anonymous articles the authorship of which Mr. Jennings may or may not have the right to attribute to Mr. Gladstone, without Mr. Gladstone's permission, and without giving any evidence as to the sources of his knowledge."' This is true, and Mr. Jennings knows it to be true. We added our own belief that Mr. Gladstone was in all probability the writer, simply because we supposed Mr. Jennings to be- in possession of information of which he does not choose to explain the origin, and because the style of many of the articles resembles Mr. Gladstone's. But knowing as we do- how often the editors of the great Quarterlies used to engraft passages of their own on articles by even very influential writers, we felt and feel no confidence that Mr. Gladstone's contributions to the Quarterly may not have been similarly dealt with. We know that this has happened again and again in the Edinburgh Rel717421). We have not the least idea who" the- then editor of the Quarterly" was. It is quite untrue that our review was the product of many consultations and inquiries, and of" three weeks' anxious reflection." Before we thought of reading the book, we addressed an inquiry to the publisher of the
as we thought ourselves bound to do, as to the author- ship and authenticity of the articles quoted, but received no in- formation,—only, indeed, a rebuff,—in answer, and we addressed no other inquiry at all to anybody, and know nothing more on the subject. Does Mr. Jennings really suppose that the delay in reviewing his book was due to anxiety of any kind ? It was- simply due to the fact that till the day before the review was written, the book had only just been glanced at. And probably it might have been better not to review it at all. It hardly deserved serious notice.—En. Spectator.]
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