THE "UNFORESEEN RESULT."
(To sae Renee or sae "lerscr■roo."]
plead guilty to having been once a hero-worshipper of Mr. Gladstone ; his almost unrivalled brilliancy of intellect and his purity of character seemed to carry one by storm. I am speaking of a period now more than forty years gone by. lean still see those qualities in his character, but I am frightened by his want of backbone. He can stir up passion, but he cannot form or guide a healthy public opinion. Your correspondent, Mr. R. St. J. Corbet, has expressed this want in his own rather forcible way ; but it is a want foreseen long ago by one who was the best able to judge—the late Sir John Gladstone.
His words were these My son William is a very brilliant young man ; but, mark my words, he is the most unstable man within the four seas." It was a prophecy, and it was repeated to me by the friend to whom it was spoken, and repeated as a corrective of my very enthusiastic confidence in the then Member for Newark, a confidence which he had till then enter. tamed as fully as myself. It seems to me that Mr. Glad. stone's stumbling-block is his unbounded self-reliance. I am not speaking of qualities so vulgar as vanity or conceit, It has been publicly stated, and not contradicted, that he is fully persuaded that he is the only man who can govern England.* The impression which he has left on my own mind, as well as on the minds of many others of his admirers, wiser men than myself, is that, with all his magnificent genius, he lacks the governing faculty. Lord Palmerston possessed this faculty ; so did. Sir Robert Peel ; but then they were not, like Mr. Gladstone, the children of passion.—I am, * [We doubt Mr. Gladstone's entertaining any idea of the kind. The secret of his weakness, so far as he is weak, is that be elevates representative government into a moral dogma, and cannot even conceive that a nation can go mad.—En. Spectatera
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