EVIDENCE AND EXAMPLES. 79 



if latent, poetic feeling all the stronger perhaps be- 

 cause it is not wasted in the struggle for expression 

 which sweetens their lives mysteriously and almost 

 unawares. John Bright had immense poetic feeling. 

 Mr. Gladstone is not only devoid of any one of the 

 three elements, but even religion, which takes to itself 

 the poetry of so many excellent souls, seems to assume 

 in him the form of dogmatic finesse rather than of 

 spiritual aspiration. 



The negative aspects of character are not necessarily 

 faults. Nerve force is a sum -total and all high quali- 

 ties cannot be found in one nerve organisation. 



Truthful and good as they are, neither Mr. Glad- 

 stone nor Mr. Bright put search for truth in the first 

 place. Coleridge remarked that of the men he met, 

 nine out of ten preferred goodness to truth. A few rare 

 natures, differing in many things but agreeing in one 

 a Stuart Mill, a George Eliot, a Clifford (not to 

 speak of the living) have put the resolve to obtain 

 true views of life in the first place. Voltaire laboured 

 hard in the cause of truth, but he strove still more 

 earnestly to make odious the curses of injustice and in- 

 tolerance, succeeding too, as Mr. Lecky well says, in 

 greater degree " than any other of the sons of men." 

 John Bright sought first of all the good of his fellow- 

 creatures. Chalmers declared that Thomas Carlyle 

 worshipped earnestness (it was his ideal of good) in 

 preference to truth. Matthew Arnold, whose foremost 

 propensity was art literary art was content if truth 

 was not far off; Mrs. Truth might be useful in the 

 kitchen while he flirted with Miss Lucidity and Miss 

 Urbanity in the drawing-room. 



Another striking contrast between Gladstone and 

 Bright between the types of character they represent 



