English Liberal statesman who was friend and official biographer of W.E. Gladstone and who gained fame as a man of letters, particularly as a biographer. As a long-time member of Parliament (1883–95; 1896–1908), he was chief secretary for Ireland (1886; 1892–95) and secretary of state for India (1905–10), and was raised to the peerage in 1908. Among his published works are Edmund Burke (1867), Voltaire (1872), Rousseau (1873), Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (1878), The Life of Richard Cobden (1881), Ralph Waldo Emerson (1884), Studies in Literature (1891), Oliver Cromwell (1900), Life of Gladstone (1903), Critical Miscellanies (1908), and Recollections (1917).