Excerpt from William Ewart Gladstone: Statesman and Scholar Lord rosebery once remarked that if an adequate biography of Mr. Gladstone were ever written, it would be the work of a Limited Liability Company. Certainly, the marvellous variety of interests which absorbed Mr. Gladstone during his long life has made the task of recording his multifarious achievements, and of appreciating their value, well-nigh impossible. Yet it is a task which is all the more fascinating by its very greatness and difficulty. Mr. Gladstone has given his own opinions on the subject of biography What we want in a biography, and what, despite the etymology of the title, we very seldom find, is life. The very best transcript is a failure, if it be a transcript only. To fulfil its idea, it must have in it the essential quality of movement must realise the lofty fiction of the divine shield of Achilles, where the up turning earth, though wrought in metal, darkened as the plough went on and the figures of the battle-pieces dealt their blows and parried them, and dragged out from the turmoil the bodies of their dead. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.