honorable commercial enterprises; but now, under the auspices of the
noble lord, that flag is hoisted to protect an infamous contraband
traffic, and if it were never to be hoisted except as it is now hoisted
on the coast of China, we should recoil from its sight with horror, and
should never again feel our hearts thrill, as they now thrill with
emotion, when it floats proudly and magnificently on the breeze." The
ministry escaped censure when the vote was taken by a bare majority.

In the summer of 1840 Mr. Gladstone, accompanied by Lord Lyttleton, went
to Eton to examine candidates of the Newcastle Scholarship, founded by
his political friend, the Duke of Newcastle. Mr. Gladstone had the
pleasure in this examination of awarding the Newcastle medal to Henry
Fitzmaurice Hallam, the youngest brother of his own beloved friend and
son of the historian Hallam. One of the scholars he examined writes: "I
have a vivid and delightful impression of Mr. Gladstone sitting in what
was then called the library, on an _estrade_ on which the head master
habitually sate, above which was placed, about 1840, the bust of the
Duke of Newcastle and the names of the Newcastle scholars.... When he
gave me a Virgil and asked me to translate Georg. ii, 475, _seq_., I was
pleasantly surprised by the beautiful eye turning on me with the
question, 'What is the meaning of _sacra fero_?' and his look of
approval when I said, 'Carry the sacred vessels in the procession.'"

"I wish you to understand that Mr. Gladstone appeared not to me only,
but to others, as a gentleman wholly unlike other examiners or school
people. It was not as _a politician_ that we admired him, but as a
refined Churchman, deep also in political philosophy (so we conjectured
from his quoting Burke on the Continual State retaining its identity
though made up of passing individuals), deep also in lofty poetry, as we
guessed from his giving us, as a theme for original Latin verse, 'the