Gladstone's
health, and then after receiving the loving wife's report of her
William, to have rejoined in his most dulcet tones, "Ah! take care
of him, for he is very VERY precious." He always attributed
Dizzy's popularity to the feeling of Englishmen that he had "shown
them sport," an instinct, he thought, supreme in all departments of
the English mind.
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.
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