And I have written more than once in these columns that the greatest of all his characteristics is composure.

This mighty, restless, fiery fighter against wrong--this stalwart and unconquerable wrestler for right, this Titan--I might even say this Don Quixote--who has gone out with spear and sword to assault the most strongly-entrenched citadels of human wrongs--who has faced a world in arms--this man has, after all, at the centre of his existence, and in the depths of his nature, a gospel which sustains him in the hours of defeat and gloom, and makes him one of the most restless of combatants, and the most tranquil.
[Sidenote: The grand old philosopher.] Devotional, almost pietistic, introspective, accustomed, I have no doubt, from that early training of domestic piety and sacerdotal surroundings, to see all this gay, vast phantasmagoria of life the antechamber to a greater, more enduring, and better world beyond those voices, Mr.Gladstone--at least that is my reading of his character--looks at everything in human existence with the power of self-detachment from its garish moments and its transient interests.
Behind this constant warfare, underneath all this public passion and sweeping resolves, there is a nether and unseen world of thought, emotion, hope, and in that world there is ever calm.

It is a tabernacle in his soul where only holy thoughts may enter.

Outside its impenetrable and echoless walls are left behind the shouts of faction, the noise of battle, the rise and fall of the good and ever-enduring fight between wrong and right.

Within that tabernacle Mr.Gladstone has the power of withdrawing himself at will, just as in the Agora of Athens, and on the last great day when he discoursed on immortality, and drank the mortal hemlock, Socrates could withdraw himself, and listen to the inner whisper of his daemon.