Books: To the Last Man

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THE THREE LIVES OF HARRIET HUBBARD AYER (284 pp.)—Margaret Hubbard Ayer & Isabella Taves — Lippincott ($3.95).

MRS. GLADSTONE (251 pp.)—Georgina Battiscombe—Houghfon Mifflin ($5).

Before these two books, the male reader's heart is likely to shrink within him like a salted snail. They tell the stories of two overpowering women, different largely in the type of power they used. Harriet Hubbard Ayer carried culture between her dazzling teeth like a cutlass; Catherine Glynne Gladstone wielded a feather duster of a featherbrain. Both weapons were equally effective.

The P.M.'s Lady. "What a comfort to know there is One above who is able to tell us!" a lady once said in Catherine Gladstone's drawing room after discussing a theological point. "Yes," answered Catherine, "I think William will be down in a few minutes."

William Ewart Gladstone, his more ardent admirers were to become convinced, had been sent to earth to trounce the foul Tory fiend Benjamin Disraeli, to be four times Liberal Prime Minister of Britain and, finally, to translate God's blunt, muttered injunctions into eloquent sentences of interminable length. History records William's success in all these spheres, but it bypasses his extraordinary wife. Catherine was such an attractive woman that even Queen Victoria, who came to loathe Gladstone, almost forgave her for being his wife. Every morning, when they were at their favorite country house, the Gladstones walked uphill one mile to church, William throwing sticks for the dog, Catherine reading the morning mail and dropping most of it on the road. William was exact and businesslike. Catherine was inexact and totally haphazard. Visitors were often startled to find her wandering about on the way to her bath draped in nothing but a large towel. She conducted her charitable works with disarming inefficiency and brilliant success. One convalescent home received from her the gifts of a packet of seeds, a canary, a piano; another, a cow ("animals are first-rate to interest people").

Like most of the distinguished Glynne family Catherine was devoted to "Glynnese," a private language whose proper use was once demonstrated in a speech supposedly to be delivered by Gladstone in Parliament: "Sir, the Noble Lord opposite is such a phantod* and the Honourable Gentleman next to him such a daundering† and wizzy** old totterton,††" etc.

Catherine's Glynnese was often far less daundering than her normal English. Her description of William's reaction to the Turkish atrocities in Bulgaria is a case in point: "A pamphlet nearly written he has been boiling over at the horrors and at the conduct of the Government very proud that England's voice is speaking its great heart throbbing and in this pumped-out moment with no backing it speaks."