Gladstone As Man of Letters‪.‬

It is a supreme honor to have been asked to deliver a lecture in memory of Lord Bryce. He was a considerable historian and jurist, a notable ambassador and a great humanitarian. It is fitting that the subject should be Mr. Gladstone, who was Prime Minister when James Bryce was parliamentary under-secretary for foreign affairs (1886) and the Prime Minister who, in 1892, brought him into the cabinet. Gladstone was also something of an historian--his Romanes lecture, the first of the series, was an historical sketch of the University--and as Bulgarians and Armenians to this day know, a great humanitarian. Sir Adolphus Ward, the historian, wrote of Gladstone's scholarship and of his love of classical and Italian literature, "But," continues he, "he could not be called ... a man of letters." (1) I am encouraged to demur because James Bryce himself was "forcibly struck" by "the source of strength as well as enjoyment" which Gladstone "found in cherishing the love of letters ... among the occupations of practical life." (2) I am emboldened in my demurrer because the published Diaries and unpublished letters and papers, none of them accessible to Ward, have told us now what books he read--the number is beyond that of reading men, let alone of men with full public lives--how thoroughly he read and remembered them, and how and why he wrote his many review articles and established himself as an authority on Homer; have brought us, in short, closer than Ward was, to the imagination, to the musical ear and to the intellect of a good and constant writer in the quarterlies and monthlies, of a man with a universal curiosity and a life-long book-lover.