He was what in party language is
called a 'Reformer,' from his earliest youth; and never swerved from
that faith, nor could swerve. His luminous sincere intellect laid bare
to him in all its abject incoherency the thing that was untrue, which
thenceforth became for him a thing that was not tenable, that it was
perilous and scandalous to attempt maintaining. Twenty years in
the dreary, weltering lake of parliamentary confusion, with its
disappointments and bewilderments, had not quenched this tendency, in
which, as we say, he persevered as by a law of nature itself, for the
essence of his mind was clearness, healthy purity, incompatibility
with fraud in any of its forms. What he accomplished, therefore,
whether great or little, was all to be _added_ to the sum of good;
none of it to be deducted. There shone mildly in his whole conduct
a beautiful veracity, as if it were unconscious of itself; a perfect
spontaneous absence of all cant, hypocrisy, and hollow pretence,
not in word and act only, but in thought and instinct. To a singular
extent it can be said of him that he was a spontaneous clear man.
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