Willian Eward Gladstone

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: CHAPTER m. MEMORIES OF EARLY DAYS. O, years, gone down into the past, What pleasant memories come to me. ?Phoebe Gary. Strange to me are the forms I meet, When I visit the dear old town, But the native air is pure and sweet And the trees that o'ershadow each well-known street, As they balance up and down, Are singing the beautiful song: A boy's will is the wind's will, And the thoughts of youth are long. ?H. W. Longfellow. Mr. Gladstone was possessed of a most wonderful memory. It was perfectly phenomenal in its scope and reten- tiveness. It served the great statesman and scholar as a sacred treasure house, to which he has committed ten thousand facts in compact and orderly arrangement. It is said of Mr. Gladstone that he never forgets. After he had reached his eighty-fourth year, he, at the wish of some friends, began recalling the memory of early days. He went back to the days of his boyhood and bid the dead past reappear. So pleasant and interesting are these reminiscences that we can not resist the temptation of presenting a few of them here, seeing that they refer to events and impressions of his very early years. Mr. Gladstone called to mind the grand old coaching days, when the Tony Wellers of the time were men of very considerable importance. The system was raised, he said, '' to the highest degree of perfection, far exceeding that of anything of the kind to be met with on the Continent.When a boy, going to school at Eton, between the years 1820 and 1830, he went from Liverpool to Eton by coach. The coach changed at Birmingham. He gives this graphic description of the scene, after the lapse of three score years and ten: Our coach used to arrive at Birmingham about 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning, when we were turned out into the street till ...