第34章 LATER DAYS, AND DEATH(8)

Towards his old schoolfellow Gladstone he never felt quite cordially, believing, rightly or wrongly, that the great statesman nourished enmity towards himself. He called him, as has been said, "a good man in the worst sense of the term, conscientious with a diseased conscience." He watched with much amusement, as illustrating the moral twist in Gladstone's temperament, the "Colliery explosion," as it was called, when Sir R. Collier, the Attorney-General, was appointed to a Puisne Judgeship, which he held only for a day or two, in order to qualify him for a seat on a new Court of Appeal; together with a very similar trick, by which Ewelme Rectory, tenable only by an Oxonian, was given to a Cambridge man. The responsibility was divided between Gladstone and Lord Hatherley the Chancellor, with the mutual idea apparently that each of the two became thereby individually innocent. But Sir F. Pollock, in his amusing "Reminiscences," recalls the amicable halving ofa wicked word between the Abbess of Andouillet and the Novice Margarita in "Tristram Shandy." It answered in neither case. "'They do not understand us,' cried Margarita. 'BUT THE DEVIL DOES,' said the Abbess of Andouillet." "The Collier scandal narrowly escaped by two votes in the Lords, twenty-seven in the Commons, a Parliamentary vote of censure, and gave unquestionably a downward push to the Gladstone Administration. Mr. Gladstone, on the other hand, cordially admired Kinglake's speeches, saying that few of those he had heard in Parliament could bear so well as his the test of publication.

To the great Prime Minister's absolute fearlessness he did full justice, as one of the finest features in his character; and loved to quote an epigram by Lord Houghton, to whom Gladstone had complained in a moment of weariness that he led the life of a dog. "Yes," said Houghton, "but of a St. Bernard dog, ever busied in saving life." He loved to contrast the twofold biographical paradox in the careers of the two famous rivals, Gladstone and Disraeli; the dreaming Tory mystic, incarnation of Oxford exclusiveness and Puseyite reserve, passing into the Radical iconoclast; the Jew clerk in a city lawyer's office, "bad specimen of an inferior dandy," coming to rule the proudest aristocracy and lead the most fastidious assembly in the world.

He was not above broad farce when the fancy seized him. At the time when a certain kind of nonsense verse was popular, he, with Sir Noel Paton and others, added not a few facetious sonnets to Edward Lear's book, which lay on Madame Novikoff's table. His authorship is betrayed by the introduction of familiar Somersetshire names, Taunton, Wellington, Curry Rivel, Creech, Trull, Wilton:

"There was a young lady of Wilton, Who read all the poems of Milton: And, when she had done, She said, 'What bad fun!' This prosaic young lady of Wilton."There were many more, but this will perhaps suffice; EX UNGUE LEONEM. They were addressed to the "Fair Lady of Claridge's," Madame Novikoff's hotel when in London, and were signed "Peter Paul, Bishop of Claridge's.""There is a fair lady at Claridge's, Whose smile is more charming tome, Than the rapture of ninety-nine marriages Could possibly, possibly, be;- "

is the final dedicatory stanza. It is the gracious fooling of a philosopher who understood his company. "There are folks," says Mr. Counsellor Pleydell, "before whom a man should take care how he plays the fool, because they have either too much malice or too little wit." Kinglake knew his associates, and was not ashamed DESIPERE IN LOCO, to frolic in their presence.

One point there was on which he never touched himself or suffered others to interrogate him, his conception of and attitude towards the Unseen. He wore his religion as Sir William Gull wore the fur of his coat, INSIDE. Outwardly he died as he had lived, a Stoic; that on the most personal and sacred of all topics he should consult the Silences was in keeping with his idiosyncrasy. Another famous man, questioned as to his religious creed, made answer that he believed what all wise men believe. And what do all wise men believe? "That all wise men keep to themselves?"