"You will never know," said Canon Liddon, "none of us will ever know, how great Mr. Gladstone is. We shall never be able to measure him until he is gone."

These words were prophetic; now they are true.

It is impossible even to foreshadow the place that history shall allot to Mr. Gladstone.

"I sometimes think," said Mr. Chamberlain in 1885, "that great men are like great mountains, and that we do not appreciate their magnitude while we are still close to them. You have to go to a distance to see which peak it is that towers above its fellows; and it may be that we shall have to put between us and Mr. Gladstone a space of time before we shall know how much greater he was than any of his competitors for fame and power. I am certain that justice will be done to him in the future; and I am not less certain that there will be a signal condemnation of the men who, moved by motives of party spite, in their eagerness for office, have not hesitated to load with insult and indignity the greatest statesman of our time." And he adds these words, to which recent events have added untold pathos: "He, with his great magnanimity, can afford to forget and forgive these things."

It is impossible to believe that a man who was thirteen times Chancellor of the Exchequer—who found the gross annual national expenditure at fifty-five and a half millions a year, and left it at eighty-five millions—who found the Customs Tariff loaded with nearly five hundred duties, and left it with less than fifty—should not, on this alone, take a high place among financiers of the world.

It is impossible to believe that a man who was four times Prime Minister of England—under whom such tremendous reforms as the Irish Land Act, the Education Act, the Abolition of the Paper Duty, the Franchise and Local Government Acts, were prominent—should not rank with the highest of the world's statesmen.

It is impossible to believe that, as a man alone, in his strong individuality, God-fearing, justice-loving, serious-minded, he should not live long in the hearts of those Englishmen who shall yet succeed William Ewart Gladstone.

His loss to the nation is well described in these lines, which compare him to an old oak in the forest:—