the credulous Burke traces from Robert Bruce, the patriot King of Scotland. Be this as it may, Mr. Gladstone is of pure Scottish blood,—a fact of which he has oftener than once expressed himself proud. Indeed, the perfervidum ingenium Scotorum is his in a remarkable degree; and it has its influence on public opinion across the border, notwithstanding his English training and his antipathetic High-Churchism. However England may abase herself before the gorgeous Lord Benjingo, Scotland will never turn her back on the undecorated Gladstone. There lives not a Scotsman that is not inwardly proud of him; for blood is, after all, thicker than water. Evicted from one English constituency after another for his devotion to Liberal principles, there is a sort of "fitness of things," not without a certain pathos, in the gallant and successful effort which the country of his forefathers has made to seize a seat for him from between the teeth of the great feudal despot of the North, "the bold Buccleuch," From a very tender age young Gladstone exhibited a wonderful aptitude for learning, and an almost superhuman industry, which age, instead of abating, seemingly increases. His daily autograph correspondence with high and low, rich and poor, conducted chiefly by the much-derided post-card, would afford ample employment for about six Somerset House clerks working at their usual pace. He possesses, I should say, without exception, the most omnivorous and untiring brain in England,—possibly in the whole world. No wonder that his course at Eton and at Oxford was marked by the highest distinction. A student of Christ Church, he graduated "double first" in his twenty-second year, a superlative master of the language and literature of
