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 II GIRLHOOD AND MARRIAGE IT was in November 1838 that William Gladstone, then twenty - eight years of age, met the Glynnes at Naples. Being at Christ Church with the brothers Stephen and Henry Glynne, he had already visited Ha warden Castle. He was one of a brilliant group of undergraduates — Lord Harris, the Duke of Hamilton, Canning, Lord Lincoln, afterwards Duke of Newcastle, Robin Curzon, afterwards Lord Zouche, Sir R. Phillimore, Sir Francis Doyle—who used to meet at Tabley in Cheshire, the young owner, Lord de Tabley, being also neighbour and an intimate friend of the Glynnes. Mr. Gladstone arrived at one of the principal hotels in Naples and found it in a great commotion—" Una gran famiglia Inglese £ arrivata questa sera " ; Lady Glynne and her daughters and suite, as was the fashion in those days, travelling in great state in their own roomy coach, or berline as it was then called. At Naples he dined frequently with theGlynnes and accompanied them on their numerous expeditions, going up Mount Vesuvius with them. He left Naples (he called it " this Circean City") for Rome on December 3; the Glynnes had already gone there. Here the intercourse was more frequent, and his intimacy with the sisters grew in depth and devotion. Nearly every day they met, and he spent Christmas Day with them. There is a conversation recorded in his Diary, that took place in the gorgeous Church of Santa Maria Maggiore. They were speaking of the immense and costly amount of labour lavished on its embellishment. This led Catherine to contrasting our own parsimony in the service 6f God and the extravagance of our secular luxuries. Such speculations are now constantly in the very air we breathe; but at that time, now nearly eighty years ago, they seemed little to trouble the richer...