"Last night I met Gladstone—it will always be a memorable night to me; Stubbs was there, and Goldwin Smith and Humphrey Sandwith and Mackenzie Wallace whose great book on Russia is making such a stir, besides a few other nice people; but one forgets everything in Gladstone himself, in his perfect naturalness and grace of manner, his charming abandon of conversation, his unaffected modesty, his warm ardour for all that is noble and good. I felt so proud of my leader—the chief I have always clung to through good report and ill report—because, wise or unwise as he might seem in this or that, he was always noble of soul. He was very pleasant to me, and talked of the new historic school he hoped we were building up as enlisting his warmest sympathy. I wish you could have seen with what a glow he spoke of the Montenegrins and their struggle for freedom; how he called on us who wrote history to write what we could of that long fight for liberty! And all through the evening not a word to recall his greatness amongst us, simple, natural, an equal among his equals, listening to every one, drawing out every one, with a force and a modesty that touched us more than all his power."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
People from OxfordHistorians from EnglandNon-fiction authors from EnglandAnglicans from the United KingdomLibrarians from England
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Letter to Miss Stopford (21 February 1877), quoted in Letters of John Richard Green, ed. Leslie Stephen (1901), p. 446
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Richard_Green
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
John Richard Green
John Richard Green (12 December 1837 – 7 March 1883) was an English historian chiefly known for his 1874 work A Short History of the English People.
22 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by John Richard Green →
Related Quotes
"The fact is I am a little puzzled with "Liberals" who go in for enslaving Lorraine and turning Elsass, as Bismarck pu…"
"I won't divide by Kings, a system whereby History is made Tory unawares and infants are made to hate History."
"What one really sees on the Continent, if one likes to learn from their statesmen and journals instead of from the ch…"
"As you see in my own Wee-Book, I think moral and intellectual facts as much facts for the historian as military or po…"
"Of course in calling Cromwell a "tyrant" I used the word in its strict sense; and in that sense I don't think he is f…"
"So we are to have a dissolution! I think it would be a good thing for Liberalism if we got a good beating this time a…"
"I am very wretched, really wretched, about Gladstone's retirement. I can't follow him everywhither, but he is my lead…"
"I begin to see that there may be a truer wisdom in the "humanitarianism" of Gladstone than in the purely political vi…"
"Mr. Howard talked politics and told me the passage at the close of Carlyle's letter meant a plan of Lord Beaconsfield…"
"So prodigious has been the store of original documents, charters, rolls, dispatches, memoirs which have of late been …"