Personal Studies Author:Henry Scott Holland Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE "ALL I believed is true." This line from Robert Browning comes back and back on the memory, as I pass through the pages of this admira... more »ble book. " All I believed is true." We petty men, who trotted in and out of the great man's shadow, during the last twenty-five years of his life, believed so much in what we felt to be true under the pressure of that amazing presence. It was irresistible. Its abounding vitality made everyone else within its range seem so thin and cheap. Its high passion was fed out of sources beyond the plumb-line of habitual experience. Its freedom and spontaneity of output was like nothing else in the whole wide world. And, then, a most touching candour and simplicity placed all these unmeasured resources at the service of any one who was ready to draw upon them, however limited his powers might be for drawing upon these deep wells. The youngest and humblest were accepted as if they had really some intrinsic value, and were completely worthy to receive all the best he had to give. This fine and unfailing courtesy almost bewildered us. It seemed so remote from the rougher assumptions which govern the hurry-scurry of modern social competition. How had thevehemence of a personality which would, naturally, have swept everyone out of its way with the force of an impetuous torrent, brought itself down to this delicate habit of deference, and learned to treat anybody and everybody with such infinite regard ? The Life of Gladstone. By John Morley. London : Macmillan. 1903. And then, again, we felt?we could not but feel?the large, unhampered guilelessness which, in spite of obvious subtleties of intellectual dialectic in talk and discussion, still made itself known as the most radical and elemental characteristic of the man. He was trans...« less