Mr Gladstone at Oxford 1890 Author:Charles Robert Leslie Fletcher 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: time and for months afterwards of the strange things he had said and done; some very ungenerous things were said, among others that he had affected a High Toryis... more »m in order to please people here. Apart from the fact that he was wholly incapable of affectation, I am quite sure that that would be the wrong way to put it. It is true that the Oxford, and even at times the world in which his thoughts seemed to be moving, were not the Oxford or the world of that day; he often genuinely and honestly said that he looked back with regret to " unreformed " Oxford. As C. W. O. says: "He was full of anecdotes and illustrations of the most interesting kind, but I noted that they all bore on the earlier half of his political career. He told us much about such people as Lord Melbourne, Lord Aberdeen, and Lord Palmerston, but practically chapter{Section 4nothing of what happened after 1866; he never in my hearing mentioned Disraeli ... of his own Oxford life he was ever ready to speak." But I think any one who has studied Mr. Morley's splendid biography will see this temper of its hero constantly reflected in its pages; while, as for affectation, Mr. Gladstone and affectation within a day's march of each other are inconceivable. His conservatism — that seems to be the best word for it—was by no means merely academic. I never saw any sign, other than his universal courtesy, that he was trying to conciliate, by a display of this mental attitude, his political opponents; but when he came here it was as if he had stepped backwards over a gulf. "He became once more," says T. R., "the Junior Burgess for the University whom Dr. Bullock Marsham had advised to guidehimself by the example of Sir Robert Inglis. I fancy that there were indeed many Liberal principles which he had adopted without assi...« less