ENTERS PARLIAMENT

1882-1846

(1832-1834)

I may speak of the House of Commons as a school of discipline for those who enter it. In my opinion it is a school of extraordinary power and efficacy. It is a great and noble school for the creation of all the qualities of force, suppleness, and versatility of intellect. And it is also a great moral school. It is a school of temper. It is also a school of patience. It is a school of honour, and it is a school of justice. GLADSTONE (1878).

FOREIGN TRAVEL

Leaving home in the latter part of January (1832), with a Wordsworth for a pocket companion, Mr. Gladstone made his way to Oxford, where he laboured through his packing, settled accounts, ’heard a very able sermon indeed from Newman at St. Mary’s,’ took his bachelor’s degree (Jan 26), and after a day or two with relatives and friends in London, left England along with his brother John at the beginning of February. He did not return until the end of July. He visited Brussels, Paris, Florence, Naples, Rome, Venice, and Milan. Of this long journey he kept a full record, and it contains one entry of no small moment in his mental history. A conception now began to possess him, that according to one religious school kindled a saving illumination, and according to another threw something of a shade upon his future path. In either view it marked a change of spiritual course, a transformation not of religion as the centre of his being, for that it always was, but of the frame and mould within which religion was to expand.

In entering St. Peter’s at Rome (March 31, 1832) he experienced his ‘first conception of unity in the Church,’ and first longed for its visible attainment. Here he felt ’the pain and shame of the schism which separates us from Rome whose guilt surely rests not upon the venerable fathers of the English Reformed Church but upon Rome itself, yet whose melancholy effects the mind is doomed to feel when you enter this magnificent temple and behold in its walls the images of Christian saints and the words of everlasting truth; yet such is the mass of intervening encumbrances that you scarcely own, and can yet more scantily realise, any bond of sympathy or union.’ This was no fleeting impression of a traveller. It had been preceded by a disenchantment, for he had made his way from Turin to Pinerol, and seen one of the Vaudois valleys. He had framed a lofty conception of the people as ideal Christians, and he underwent a chill of disappointment on finding them apparently much like other men. Even the pastor, though a quiet, inoffensive man, gave no sign of energy or of what would have been called in England vital religion. With this chill at his heart he came upon the atmosphere of gorgeous Rome. It was, however, in the words of Clough’s fine line from Easter Day, ’through the great sinful streets of Naples as he passed,’ that a great mutation overtook him.

One Sunday (May 13) something, I know not what, set me on examining the occasional offices of the church in the prayer book. They made a strong impression upon me on that very day, and the impression has never been effaced. I had previously taken a great deal of teaching direct from the Bible, as best I could, but now the figure of the Church arose before me as a teacher too, and I gradually found in how incomplete and fragmentary a manner I had drawn divine truth from the sacred volume, as indeed I had also missed in the thirty-nine articles some things which ought to have taught me better. Such, for I believe that I have given the fact as it occurred, in its silence and its solitude, was my first introduction to the august conception of the Church of Christ. It presented to me Christianity under an aspect in which I had not yet known it: its ministry of symbols, its channels of grace, its unending line of teachers joining from the Head: a sublime construction, based throughout upon historic fact, uplifting the idea of the community in which we live, and of the access which it enjoys through the new and living way to the presence of the Most High. From this time I began to feel my way by decrees into or towards a true notion of the Church. It became a definite and organised idea when, at the suggestion of James Hope, I read the just published and remarkable work of Palmer. But the charm of freshness lay upon that first disclosure of 1832.

This mighty question: what is the nature of a church and what the duties, titles, and symbols of faithful membership, which in divers forms had shaken the world for so many ages and now first dawned upon his ardent mind, was the germ of a deep and lasting pre-occupation of which we shall speedily and without cessation find abundant traces.

II

OFFER OF A SEAT

A few weeks later, the great rival interest in Mr. Gladstone’s life, if rival we may call it, was forced into startling prominence before him. At Milan he received a letter from Lord Lincoln, saying that he was commissioned by his father, the Duke of Newcastle, to inform him that his influence in the borough of Newark was at Mr. Gladstone’s disposal if he should be ready to enter parliamentary life. This was the fruit of his famous anti-reform speech at the Oxford Union. No wonder that such an offer made him giddy. ‘This stunning and overpowering proposal,’ he says to his father (July 8), ’naturally left me the whole of the evening on which I received it, in a flutter of confusion. Since that evening there has been time to reflect, and to see that it is not of so intoxicating a character as it seemed at first. First, because the Duke of Newcastle’s offer must have been made at the instance of a single person (Lincoln), that person young and sanguine, and I may say in such a matter partial.... This much at least became clear to me by the time I had recovered my breath: that decidedly more than mere permission from my dear father would be necessary to authorise my entering on the consideration of particulars at all.’ And then he falls into a vein of devout reflection, almost as if this sudden destination of his life were some irrevocable priesthood or vow of monastic profession, and not the mere stringent secularity of labour in a parliament. It would be thin and narrow to count all this an overstrain. To a nature like his, of such eager strength of equipment; conscious of life as a battle and not a parade; apt for all external action yet with a burning glow of light and fire in the internal spirit; resolute from the first in small things and in great against aimless drift and eddy, to such an one the moment of fixing alike the goal and the track may well have been grave.

Then points of doubt arose. ’It is, I daresay, in your recollection,’ this to his father, ’that at the time when Mr. Canning came to power, the Duke of Newcastle, in the House of Lords, declared him the most profligate minister the country had ever had. Now it struck me to inquire of myself, does the duke know the feelings I happen to entertain towards Mr. Canning? Does he know, or can he have had in his mind, my father’s connection with Mr. Canning?’ The duke had in fact been one of the busiest and bitterest of Canning’s enemies, and had afterwards in the same spirit striven with might and main to keep Huskisson out of the Wellington cabinet. Another awkwardness appeared. The duke had offered a handsome contribution towards expenses. Would not this tend to abridge the member’s independence? What was the footing on which patron and member were to stand? Mr. Gladstone was informed by his brother that the duke had neither heretofore asked for pledges, nor now demanded them.

After a very brief correspondence with his shrewd and generous father, the plunge was taken, and on his return to England, after a fortnight spent ’in an amphibious state between that of a candidate and [Greek: idiotes] or private person,’ he issued his address to the electors of Newark (August 4, 1832). He did not go actually on to the ground until the end of September. The intervening weeks he spent with his family at Torquay, where he varied electioneering correspondence and yachting with plenty of sufficiently serious reading from Blackstone and Plato and the Excursion down to Corinne. One Sunday morning (September 23), his father burst into his bedroom, with the news that his presence was urgently needed at Newark. ’I rose, dressed, and breakfasted speedily, with infinite disgust. I left Torquay at 83/4 and devoted my Sunday to the journey. Was I right?... My father drove me to Newton; chaise to Exeter. There near an hour; went to the cathedral and heard a part of the prayers. Mail to London. Conversation with a tory countryman who got in for a few miles, on Sunday travelling, which we agreed in disapproving. Gave him some tracts. Excellent mail. Dined at Yeovil; read a little of the Christian Year [published 1827]. At 61/2 A.M. arrived at Piccadilly, 181/2 hours from Exeter. Went to Fetter Lane, washed and breakfasted, and came off at 8 o’clock by a High Flyer for Newark. The sun hovered red and cold through the heavy fog of London sky, but in the country the day was fine. Tea at Stamford; arrived at Newark at midnight.’ Such in forty hours was the first of Mr. Gladstone’s countless political pilgrimages.

His two election addresses are a curious starting-point for so memorable a journey. Thrown into the form of a modern programme, the points are these: union of church and state, the defence in particular of our Irish establishments; correction of the poor laws; allotment of cottage grounds; adequate remuneration of labour; a system of Christian instruction for the West Indian slaves, but no emancipation until that instruction had fitted them for it; a dignified and impartial foreign policy. The duke was much startled by the passage about labour receiving adequate remuneration, ’which unhappily among several classes of our fellow countrymen is not now the case.’ He did not, however, interfere. The whig newspaper said roundly of the first of Mr. Gladstone’s two addresses, that a more jumbled collection of words had seldom been sent from the press. The tory paper, on the contrary, congratulated the constituency on a candidate of considerable commercial experience and talent. The anti-slavery men fought him stoutly. They put his name into their black schedule with nine-and-twenty other candidates, they harried him with posers from a pamphlet of his father’s, and they met his doctrine that if slavery were sinful the Bible would not have commended the regulation of it, by bluntly asking him on the hustings whether he knew a text in Exodus declaring that ’he that stealeth a man and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death.’ His father’s pamphlets undoubtedly exposed a good deal of surface. We cannot be surprised that any adherent of these standard sophistries should be placed on the black list of the zealous soldiers of humanity. The candidate held to the ground he had taken at Oxford and in his election address, and apparently made converts. He had an interview with forty voters of abolitionist complexion at his hotel, and according to the friendly narrative of his brother, who was present, ’he shone not only in his powers of conversation, but by the tact, quickness, and talent with which he made his replies, to the thorough and complete satisfaction of baptists, wesleyan methodists, and I may say even, of almost every religious sect! Not one refused their vote: they came forward, and enrolled their names, though before, I believe, they never supported any one on the duke’s interest!’

ISSUES ADDRESS AT NEWARK

The humours of an election of the ancient sort are a very old story, and Newark had its full share of them. The register contained rather under sixteen hundred voters on a scot and lot qualification, to elect a couple of members. The principal influence over about one quarter of them was exercised by the Duke of Newcastle, who three years before had punished the whigs of the borough for the outrage of voting against his nominee, by serving, in concert with another proprietor, forty of them with notice to quit. Then the trodden worm turned. The notices were framed, affixed to poles, and carried with bands of music through the streets. Even the audacity of a petition to parliament was projected. The duke, whose chief fault was not to know that time had brought him into a novel age, defended himself with the haughty truism, then just ceasing to be true, that he had a right to do as he liked with his own. This clear-cut enunciation of a vanishing principle became a sort of landmark, and gave to his name an unpleasing immortality in our political history. In the high tide of agitation for reform the whigs gave the duke a beating, and brought their man to the top of the poll, a tory being his colleague. Handley, the tory, on our present occasion seemed safe, and the fight lay between Mr. Gladstone and Sergeant Wilde, the sitting whig, a lawyer of merit and eminence, who eighteen years later went to the woolsack as Lord Truro. Reform at Newark was already on the ebb. Mr. Gladstone, though mocked as a mere schoolboy, and fiercely assailed as a slavery man, exhibited from the first hour of the fight tremendous gifts of speech and skill of fence. His Red club worked valiantly; the sergeant did not play his cards skilfully; and pretty early in the long struggle it was felt that the duke would this time come into his own again. The young student soon showed that his double first class, his love of books, his religious preoccupations, had not unfitted him by a single jot for one of the most arduous of all forms of the battle of life. He proved a diligent and prepossessing canvasser, an untiring combatant, and of course the readiest and most fluent of speakers. Wilde after hearing him said sententiously to one of his own supporters, ‘There is a great future before this young man.’ The rather rotten borough became suffused with the radiant atmosphere of Olympus. The ladies presented their hero with a banner of red silk, and an address expressive of their conviction that the good old Red cause was the salvation of their ancient borough. The young candidate in reply speedily put it in far more glowing colours. It was no trivial banner of a party club, it was the red flag of England that he saw before him, the symbol of national moderation and national power, under which, when every throne on the continent had crumbled into dust beneath the tyrannous strength of France, mankind had found sure refuge and triumphant hope, and the blast that tore every other ensign to tatters served only to unfold their own and display its beauty and its glory. Amid these oratorical splendours the old hands of the club silently supplemented eloquence and argument by darker agencies, of which happily the candidate knew little until after. There was a red band and each musician received fifteen shillings a day, there happening accidentally to be among them no fewer than ten patriotic red plumpers. Large tea-parties attracted red ladies. The inns great and small were thrown joyously open on one side or other, and when the time came, our national heroes from Robin Hood to Lord Nelson and the Duke of Wellington, as well as half the animal kingdom, the swan and salmon, horses, bulls, boars, lions, and eagles, of all the colours of the rainbow and in every kind of strange partnership, sent in bills for meat and liquor supplied to free and independent electors to the tune of a couple of thousand pounds. Apart from these black arts, and apart from the duke’s interest, there was a good force of the staunch and honest type, the life-blood of electioneering and the salvation of party government, who cried stoutly, ’I was born Red, I live Red, and I will die Red.’ ‘We started on the canvass,’ says one who was with Mr. Gladstone, ’at eight in the morning and worked at it for about nine hours, with a great crowd, band and flags, and innumerable glasses of beer and wine all jumbled together; then a dinner of 30 or 40, with speeches and songs until say ten o’clock; then he always played a rubber of whist, and about twelve or one I got to bed and not to sleep.’

HUMOURS OF AN OLD ELECTION

At length the end came. At the nomination the show of hands was against the reds, but when the poll was taken and closed on the second day, Gladstone appeared at the head of it with 887 votes, against 798 for his colleague Handley, and 726 for the fallen Wilde. ‘Yesterday’ (Dec 13, 1832), he tells his father, ’we went to the town hall at 9 A.M., when the mayor cast up the numbers and declared the poll. While he was doing this the popular wrath vented itself for the most part upon Handley.... The sergeant obtained me a hearing, and I spoke for perhaps an hour or more, but it was flat work, as they were no more than patient, and agreed with but little that I said. The sergeant then spoke for an hour and a half.... He went into matters connected with his own adieu to Newark, besought the people most energetically to bear with their disappointment like men, and expressed his farewell with great depth of feeling. Affected to tears himself, he affected others also. In the evening near fifty dined here [Clinton Arms] and the utmost enthusiasm was manifested.’ The new member began his first speech as a member of parliament as follows:

Gentlemen: In looking forward to the field which is now opened before me, I cannot but conceive that I shall often be reproached with being not your representative but the representative of the Duke of Newcastle. Now I should rather incline to exaggerate than to extenuate such connection as does exist between me and that nobleman: and for my part should have no reluctance to see every sentiment which ever passed between us, whether by letter or by word of mouth, exposed to the view of the world. I met the Duke of Newcastle upon the broad ground of public principle, and upon that ground alone. I own no other bond of union with him than this, that he in his exalted sphere, and I in my humble one, entertained the same persuasion, that the institutions of this country are to be defended against those who threaten their destruction, at all hazards, and to all extremities. Why do you return me to parliament? Not because I am the Duke of Newcastle’s man, simply: but because, coinciding with the duke in political sentiment, you likewise admit that one possessing so large a property here, and faithfully discharging the duties which the possession of that property entails, ought in the natural course of things to exercise a certain influence. You return me to parliament, not merely because I am the Duke of Newcastle’s man: but because both the man whom the duke has sent, and the duke himself, are your men.

RETURNED FOR NEWARK

The election was of course pointed to by rejoicing conservatives as a proof the more of that reaction which the ministerial and radical press was audacious enough to laugh at. This borough, says the local journalist, was led away by the bubble reform, to support those who by specious and showy qualification had dazzled their eyes; delusion had vanished, shadows satisfied no longer, Newark was restored to its high place in the esteem of the friends of order and good government. Of course the intimates of the days of his youth were delighted. We want such a man as Gladstone, wrote Hallam to Gaskell (October 1, 1832); ’in some things he is likely to be obstinate and prejudiced; but he has a fine fund of high chivalrous tory sentiment, and a tongue, moreover, to let it loose with. I think he may do a great deal.’

In the course of his three months of sojourn at Newark Mr. Gladstone paid his first visit to the great man at Clumber.

The duke received me, he tells his father, with the greatest kindness, and conversed with such ease and familiarity of manner as speedily to dispel a certain degree of awe which I had previously entertained, and to throw me perhaps more off my guard than I ought to have been in company with a man of his age and rank.... The utmost regularity and subordination appears to prevail in the family, and no doubt it is in many respects a good specimen of the old English style. He is apparently a most affectionate father, but still the sons and daughters are under a certain degree of restraint in his presence.... A man, be his station of life what it may, more entirely divested of personal pride and arrogance, more single-minded and disinterested in his views, or more courageous and resolute in determination to adhere to them as the dictates of his own conscience, I cannot conceive.

From this frigid interior Mr. Gladstone made his way to the genial company of Milnes Gaskell at Thornes and had a delightful week. Thence he proceeded to spend some days with his sick mother at Leamington. ’We have been singularly dealt with as a family,’ he observes, ’once snatched from a position where we were what is called entering society, and sent to comparative seclusion as regards family establishment and now again prevented from assuming the situation that seems the natural termination of a career like my father’s. Here is a noble trial for me personally to exercise a kindly and unselfish feeling, if amid the excitements and allurements now near me, I am enabled duly to realise the bond of consanguinity and suffer with those whom Providence has ordained to suffer.’ And this assuredly was no mere entry in a journal. In betrothals, marriages, deaths, on all the great occasions of life in his circle, his letters under old-fashioned formalities of phrase yet beat with a marked and living pulse of genuine interest, solicitude, sympathy, unselfishness, and union.

III

As always, he sought refreshment from turmoil that was only moderately congenial to him, in reading and writing. Among much else he learns Shelley by heart, but his devotion to Wordsworth is unshaken. ’One remarkable similarity prevails between Wordsworth and Shelley; the quality of combining and connecting everywhere external nature with internal and unseen mind. But how different are they in applications. It frets and irritates the one, it is the key to the peacefulness of the other.’ Two books of Paradise Regained, he finds ’very objectionable on religious grounds,’ the books presumably where Milton has been convicted of Arian heresy. He still has energy enough left for more mundane things, to write a succession of articles for the Liverpool Standard, and he finds time to record his joy (December 7) ’over five Eton first classes’ at Oxford. Then, by and by, the election accounts come in. The arrangement had been made that the expenses were not to exceed a thousand pounds, of which the duke was to contribute one half, and John Gladstone the other half. It now appeared that twice as much would not suffice. The new member flung himself with all his soul into a struggle with his committee against the practice of opening public houses and the exorbitant demands that came of it. Open houses, he protested, meant profligate expenditure and organised drunkenness; they were not a pecuniary question, but a question of right and wrong. In the afternoon of the second day of polling, his agent had said to him, speaking about special constables, that he scarcely knew how they could be got if wanted, for he thought nearly every man in the town was drunk. It was in vain that the committee assured him of the discouraging truth that a certain proportion of the voters could not be got to the poll without a breakfast; and an observer from another planet might perhaps have asked himself whether all this was so remarkable an improvement on the duke doing what he liked with his own. Mr. Gladstone still stood to it that a system of entertainment that ended in producing a state of general intoxication, was the most demoralising and vicious of all forms of outlay, and the Newark worthies were bewildered and confounded by the gigantic dialectical and rhetorical resources of their incensed representative. The fierce battle lasted, with moments of mitigation, over many of the thirteen years of the connection. Of all the measures that Mr. Gladstone was destined in days to come to place upon the statute book, none was more salutary than the law that purified corrupt practices at elections.

HIS BIRTHDAY

On his birthday at the close of this eventful year, here is his entry in his diary: ’On this day I have completed my twenty-third year.... The exertions of the year have been smaller than those of the last, but in some respects the diminution has been unavoidable. In future I hope circumstances will bind me down to work with a rigour which my natural sluggishness will find it impossible to elude. I wish that I could hope my frame of mind had been in any degree removed from earth and brought nearer to heaven, that the habit of my mind had been imbued with something of that spirit which is not of this world. I have now familiarised myself with maxims sanctioning and encouraging a degree of intercourse with society, perhaps attended with much risk.... Nor do I now think myself warranted in withdrawing from the practices of my fellow men except when they really involve an encouragement of sin, in which case I do certainly rank races and theatres....’ ’Periods like these,’ he writes to his friend Gaskell (January 3, 1833), ’grievous generally in many of their results, are by no means unfavourable to the due growth and progress of individual character. I remember a very wise saying of Archidamus in Thucydides, that the being educated [Greek: en tois anankaiotatois] brings strength and efficacy to the character.’

In one of his letters to his father at this exciting epoch Mr. Gladstone says, that before the sudden opening now made for him, what he had marked out for himself was ’a good many years of silent reading and inquiry.’ That blessed dream was over; his own temperament and outer circumstances, both of them made its realisation impossible; but in a sense he clung to it all his days. He entered at Lincoln’s Inn (January 25), and he dined pretty frequently in hall down to 1839, meeting many old Eton and Oxford acquaintances, more genuine law students than himself. He kept thirteen terms but was never called to the bar. If he had intended to undergo a legal training, the design was ended by Newark. After residing for a short time in lodgings in Jermyn Street, he took quarters at the Albany (March 1833), which remained his London home for six years. ‘I am getting on rapidly with my furnishing,’ he tells his father, ’and I shall be able, I feel confident, to do it all, including plate, within the liberal limits which you allow. I cannot warmly enough thank you for the terms and footing on which you propose to place me in the chambers, but I really fear that after this year my allowance in all will be greater not only than I have any title to, but than I ought to accept without blushing.’ He became a member of the Oxford and Cambridge Club the previous month, and now was ’elected without my will (but not more than without it) a member of the Carlton Club.’ He would not go to dinner parties on Sundays, not even with Sir Robert Peel. He was closely attentive to the minor duties of social life, if duties they be; he was a strict observer of the etiquette of calls, and on some afternoons he notes that he made a dozen or fourteen of them. He frequented musical parties, where his fine voice, now reasonably well trained, made him a welcome guest, and he goes to public concerts where he finds Pasta and Schroeder splendid. His irrepressible desire to expand himself in writing or in speech found a vent in constant articles in the Liverpool Standard, neither better nor worse than the ordinary juvenilia of a keen young college politician. He was confident that, whether estimated by their numbers, their wealth, or their respectability, the conservatives indubitably held in their hands the means and elements of permanent power. He discharges a fusillade from Roman history against the bare idea of vote by ballot, quotes Cicero as its determined enemy, and ascribes to secret suffrage the fall of the republic. He quotes with much zest a sentence from an ultra-radical journal that the life of the West Indian negro is happiness itself compared with that of the poor inmate of our spinning-mills. He scores a good point for the patron of Newark, by an eloquent article on the one man who had laboured to retrieve the miserable condition of the factory children, and ends with a taunting reminder to the reformers that this one man, Sadler, was the nominee of a borough-monger, and that borough-monger the Duke of Newcastle.

LONDON LIFE

It need not be said that his church-going never flagged. In 1840 his friend, the elder Acland, interested himself in forming a small brotherhood, with rules for systematic exercises of devotion and works of mercy. Mr. Gladstone was one of the number. The names were not published, nor did any one but the treasurer know the amounts given. The pledge to personal and active benevolence seems not to have been strongly operative, for at the end of 1845 (Dec 7) Mr. Gladstone writes to Hope in reference to Acland’s scheme: ’The desire we then both felt passed off, as far as I am concerned, into a plan of asking only a donation and subscription. Now it is very difficult to satisfy the demands of duty to the poor by money alone. On the other hand, it is extremely hard for me and I suppose possibly for you to give them much in the shape of time and thought, for both with me are already tasked up to and beyond their powers.... I much wish we could execute some plan which without demanding much time would entail the discharge of some humble and humbling office.... If you thought with me and I do not see why you should not, except to assume the reverse is paying myself a compliment let us go to work, as in the young days of the college plan but with a more direct and less ambitious purpose.’ Of this we may see something later. At a great service at St. Paul’s, he notes the glory alike of sight and sound as ’possessing that remarkable criterion of the sublime, a grand result from a combination of simple elements.’ Edward Irving did not attract; ‘a scene pregnant with melancholy instruction.’ He was immensely struck by Melvill, whom some of us have heard pronounced by the generation before us to be the most puissant of all the men in his calling. ‘His sentiments,’ says Mr. Gladstone, ’are manly in tone; he deals powerfully with all his subjects; his language is flowing and unbounded; his imagery varied and intensely strong. Vigorous and lofty as are his conceptions, he is not, I think, less remarkable for soundness and healthiness of mind.’ Such a passage shows among other things how the diarist was already teaching himself to analyse the art of oratory. I may note one rather curious habit, no doubt practised with a view to training in the art of speech. Besides listening to as many sermons as possible, he was also for a long time fond of reading them aloud, especially Dr. Arnold’s, in rather a peculiar way. ‘My plan is,’ he says, ‘to strengthen or qualify or omit expressions as I go along.’

IV

HOUSE OF COMMONS

In an autobiographical note, written in the late days of his life, when he had become the only commoner left who had sat in the old burned House of Commons, he says:

I took my seat at the opening of 1833, provided unquestionably with, a large stock of schoolboy bashfulness. The first time that business required me to go to the arm of the chair to say something to the Speaker, Manners Sutton the first of seven whose subject I have been who was something of a Keate, I remember the revival in me bodily of the frame of mind in which a schoolboy stands before his master. But apart from an incidental recollection of this kind, I found it most difficult to believe with, any reality of belief, that such a poor and insignificant creature as I, could really belong to, really form a part of, an assembly which, notwithstanding the prosaic character of its entire visible equipment, I felt to be so august. What I may term its corporeal conveniences were, I may observe in passing, marvellously small. I do not think that in any part of the building it afforded the means of so much as washing the hands. The residences of members were at that time less distant: but they were principally reached on foot. When a large House broke up after a considerable division, a copious dark stream found its way up Parliament Street, Whitehall, and Charing Cross.

I remember that there occurred some case in which a constituent (probably a maltster) at Newark sent me a communication which made oral communication with the treasury, or with the chancellor of the exchequer (then Lord Althorp), convenient. As to the means of bringing this about, I was puzzled and abashed. Some experienced friend on the opposition bench, probably Mr. Goulburn, said to me, There is Lord Althorp sitting alone on the treasury bench, go to him and tell him your business. With such encouragement I did it. Lord Althorp received me in the kindest manner possible, alike to my pleasure and my surprise.

The exact composition of the first reformed House of Commons was usually analysed as tories 144; reformers 395; English and Scotch radicals 76; Irish repealers 43. Mr. Gladstone was for counting the decided conservatives as 160 and reckoning as a separate group a small party who had once been tories and now ranked between conservative opposition and whig ministers. The Irish representatives he divided between 28 tories, and a body of 50 who were made up of ministerialists, conditional repealers, and tithe extinguishers. He heard Joseph Hume, the most effective of the leading radicals, get the first word in the reformed parliament, speaking for an hour and perhaps justifying O’Connell’s witty saying that Hume would have been an excellent speaker, if only he would finish a sentence before beginning the next but one after it.

No more diligent member of parliament than Mr. Gladstone ever sat upon the green benches. He read his blue-books, did his duty by election committees, and on the first occasion when, in consequence of staying a little too long at a dinner at the Duke of Hamilton’s, he missed a division, his self-reproach was almost as sharp as if he had fallen into mortal sin. This is often enough the way with virtuous young members, but Mr. Gladstone’s zealous ideal of parliamentary duty lasted, and both at first and always he was a singular union of deep meditative seriousness with untiring animation, assiduity, and practical energy and force working over a wide field definitely mapped.

MAIDEN SPEECH

In the assembly where he was one day to rank among the most powerful orators ever inscribed upon its golden roll, he first opened his lips in a few words on a Newark petition (April 30) and shortly after (May 21) he spoke two or three minutes on an Edinburgh petition. A little later the question of slavery, where he knew every inch of the ground, brought him to a serious ordeal. In May, Stanley as colonial secretary introduced the proposals of the government for the gradual abolition of colonial slavery. Abolition was to be preceded by an intermediate stage, designated as apprenticeship, to last for twelve years; and the planters were to be helped through the difficulties of the transition by a loan of fifteen millions. In the course of the proceedings, the intermediate period was shortened from twelve years to seven, and the loan of fifteen millions was transformed into a free gift of twenty. To this scheme John Gladstone, whose indomitable energy made him the leading spirit of the West Indian interest, was consistently opposed, and he naturally became the mark of abolitionist attack. The occasion of Mr. Gladstone’s first speech was an attack by Lord Howick on the manager of John Gladstone’s Demerara estates, whom he denounced as ’the murderer of slaves,’ an attack made without notice to the two sons of the incriminated proprietor sitting in front of him. He declared that the slaves on the Vreedenhoop sugar plantations were systematically worked to death in order to increase the crop. Mr. Gladstone tried in vain to catch the eye of the Chairman on May 30, and the next day he wished to speak but saw no good opportunity. ’The emotions through which one passes, at least through which I pass, in anticipating such an effort as this, are painful and humiliating. The utter prostration and depression of spirit; the deep sincerity, the burdensome and overpowering reality of the feeling of mere feebleness and incapacity, felt in the inmost heart, yet not to find relief by expression, because the expression of such things goes for affectation, these things I am unequal to describe, yet I have experienced them now.’ On June 3, the chance came. Here is his story of the day: ’Began lé miei Prigioni. West India meeting of members at one at Lord Sandon’s. Resolutions discussed and agreed upon; ... dined early. Re-arranged my notes for the debate. Rode. House 5 to 1. Spoke my first time, for 50 minutes. My leading desire was to benefit the cause of those who are now so sorely beset. The House heard me very kindly, and my friends were satisfied. Tea afterwards at the Carlton.’ The speech was an uncommon success. Stanley, the minister mainly concerned, congratulated him with more than those conventional compliments which the good nature of the House of Commons expects to be paid to any decent beginner. ‘I never listened to any speech with greater pleasure,’ said Stanley, himself the prince of debaters and then in the most brilliant part of his career; ’the member for Newark argued his case with a temper, an ability, and a fairness which may well be cited as a good model to many older members of this House.’ His own leader, though he spoke later, said nothing in his speech about the new recruit, but two days after Mr. Gladstone mentioned that Sir R. Peel came up to him and praised Monday night’s affair. King William wrote to Althorp: ’he rejoices that a young member has come forward in so promising a manner, as Viscount Althorp states Mr. W. E. Gladstone to have done.’

Apart from its special vindication in close detail of the state of things at Vreedenhoop as being no worse than others, the points of the speech on this great issue of the time were familiar ones. He confessed with shame and pain that cases of cruelty had existed, and would always exist, under the system of slavery, and that this was ’a substantial reason why the British legislature and public should set themselves in good earnest to provide for its extinction.’ He admitted, too, that we had not fulfilled our Christian obligations by communicating the inestimable benefits of our religion to the slaves in our colonies, and that the belief among the early English planters, that if you made a man a Christian you could not keep him a slave, had led them to the monstrous conclusion that they ought not to impart Christianity to their slaves. Its extinction was a consummation devoutly to be desired, and in good earnest to be forwarded, but immediate and unconditioned emancipation, without a previous advance in character, must place the negro in a state where he would be his own worst enemy, and so must crown all the wrongs already done to him by cutting off the last hope of rising to a higher level in social existence. At some later period of his life Mr. Gladstone read a corrected report of his first speech, and found its tone much less than satisfactory. ‘But of course,’ he adds, ’allowance must be made for the enormous and most blessed change of opinion since that day on the subject of negro slavery. I must say, however, that even before this time I had come to entertain little or no confidence in the proceedings of the resident agents in the West Indies.’ ‘I can now see plainly enough,’ he said sixty years later, ’the sad defects, the real illiberalism of my opinions on that subject. Yet they were not illiberal as compared with the ideas of the times, and as declared in parliament in 1833 they obtained the commendation of the liberal leaders.’

COMMON OPINIONS ON SLAVERY

It is fair to remember that Pitt, Fox, Grenville, and Grey, while eager to bring the slave trade to an instant end, habitually disclaimed as a calumny any intention of emancipating the blacks on the sugar islands. In 1807, when the foul blot of the trade was abolished, even Wilberforce himself discouraged attempts to abolish slavery, though the noble philanthropist soon advanced to the full length of his own principles. Peel in 1833 would have nothing to do with either immediate emancipation or gradual. Disraeli has put his view on deliberate record that ’the movement of the middle class for the abolition of slavery was virtuous, but it was not wise. It was an ignorant movement. The history of the abolition of slavery by the English, and its consequences, would be a narrative of ignorance, injustice, blundering, waste, and havoc, not easily paralleled in the history of mankind.’

A week later Lord Howick proposed to move for papers relating to Vreedenhoop. Lord Althorp did not refuse to grant them, but recommended him to drop his motion, as Mr. Gladstone insisted on the equal necessity of a similar return for all neighbouring plantations. Howick withdrew his motion, though he afterwards asserted that ministers had declined the return, which was not true. When Buxton moved to reduce the term of apprenticeship, Mr. Gladstone voted against him. On the following day Stanley, without previous intimation, announced the change from twelve years to seven. ‘I spoke a few sentences,’ Mr. Gladstone enters in his diary, ’in much confusion: for I could not easily recover from the sensation caused by the sudden overthrow of an entire and undoubting alliance.’

The question of electoral scandals at Liverpool, which naturally excited lively interest in a family with local ties so strong, came up in various forms during the session, and on one of these occasions (July 4) Mr. Gladstone spoke upon it, ’for twenty minutes or more, anything but satisfactorily to myself.’ Nor can the speech now be called satisfactory by any one else, except for the enunciation of the sound maxim that the giver of a bribe deserves punishment quite as richly as the receiver. Four days later he spoke for something less than half an hour on the third reading of the Irish Church Reform bill. ‘I was heard,’ he tells his father, ’with kindness and indulgence, but it is, after all, uphill work to address an assembly so much estranged in feeling from one’s self.’ Peel’s speech was described as temporising, and the deliverance of his young lieutenant was temporising too, though firm on the necessary principle, as he called it, of which the world was before long to hear so much from him, that the nation should be taxed for the support of a national church.

Besides his speeches he gave a full number of party votes, some of them interesting enough in view of the vast career before him. I think the first of them all was in the majority of 428 against 40 upon O’Connell’s amendment for repeal, an occasion that came vividly to his memory on the eve of his momentous change of policy in 1886. He voted for the worst clauses of the Irish Coercion bill, including the court-martial clause. He fought steadily against the admission of Jews to parliament. He fought against the admission of dissenters without a test to the universities, which he described as seminaries for the established church. He supported the existing corn law. He said ‘No’ to the property tax and ‘Aye’ for retaining the house and window taxes. He resisted a motion of Hume’s for the abolition of military and naval sinécures (February 14), and another motion of the same excellent man’s for the abolition of all flogging in the army save for mutiny and drunkenness. He voted against the publication of the division lists. He voted with ministers both against shorter parliaments and (April 25) against the ballot, a cardinal reform carried by his own government forty years later. On the other hand he voted (July 5) with Lord Ashley against postponing his beneficent policy of factory legislation; but he did not vote either way a fortnight later when Althorp sensibly reduced the limit of ten hours’ work in factories from the impracticable age of eighteen proposed by Ashley, to the age of thirteen. He supported a bill against work on Sundays.

V

PURCHASE OF FASQUE

A page or two from his diary will carry us succinctly enough over the rest of the first and second years of his parliamentary life.

July 21, 1833, Sunday. ... Wrote some lines and prose also. Finished Strype. Read Abbott and Sumner aloud. Thought for some hours on my own future destiny, and took a solitary walk to and about Kensington Gardens. July 23. Read L’Allemagne, Rape of the Lock, and finished factory report. July 25. Went to breakfast with old Mr. Wilberforce, introduced by his son. He is cheerful and serene, a beautiful picture of old age in sight of immortality. Heard him pray with his family. Blessing and honour are upon his head. July 30. L’Allemagne. Bulwer’s England. Parnell. Looked at my Plato. Rode. House. July 31. Hallam breakfasted with me.... Committee on West India bill finished.... German lesson. August 2. Worked German several hours. Head half of the Bride of Lammermoor. L’Allemagne. Rode. House. August 3. German lesson and worked alone.... Attended Mr. Wilberforce’s funeral; it brought solemn thoughts, particularly about the slaves. This a burdensome question. [German kept up steadily for many days.] August 9. House ... voted in 48 to 87 against legal tender clause.... Read Tasso. August 11. St. James’s morning and afternoon. Read Bible. Abbott (finished) and a sermon of Blomfield’s aloud. Wrote a paraphrase of part of chapter 8 of Romans. August 15. Committee 1-31/4. Rode. Plato. Finished Tasso, canto 1. Anti-slavery observations on bill. German vocabulary and exercise. August 16. 23/4-31/2 Committee finished. German lesson. Finished Plato, Republic, bk. v. Preparing to pack. August 17. Started for Aberdeen on board Queen of Scotland at 12. August 18th. Rose to breakfast, but uneasily. Attempted reading, and read most of Baxter’s narrative. Not too unwell to reflect. August 19th. Remained in bed. Read Goethe and translated a few lines. Also Beauties of Shakespeare. In the evening it blew: very ill though in bed. Could not help admiring the crests of the waves even as I stood at cabin window. August 20. Arrived 81/2 A./2 hours.

His father met him, and in the evening he and his brother found themselves at the new paternal seat. In 1829 John Gladstone, after much negotiation, had bought the estate of Fasque in Kincardineshire for, L80,000, to which and to other Scotch affairs he devoted his special and personal attention pretty exclusively. The home at Seaforth was broken up, though relatives remained there or in the neighbourhood. For some time he had a house in Edinburgh for private residence the centre house in Atholl Crescent. They used for three or four years to come in from Kincardineshire, and spend the winter months in Edinburgh. Fasque was his home for the rest of his days. This was W. E. Gladstone’s first visit, followed by at least one long annual spell for the remaining eighteen years of his father’s life.

On the morning of his arrival, he notes, ’I rode to the mill of Kincairn to see Mackay who was shot last night. He was suffering much and seemed near death. Read the Holy Scriptures to him (Psalms 51, 69, 71, Isaiah 55, Joh 14, Col 3). Left my prayer book.’ The visit was repeated daily until the poor man’s death a week later. Apart from such calls of duty, books are his main interest. He is greatly delighted with Hamilton’s Men and Manners in America. Alfieri’s Antigone he dislikes as having the faults of both ancient and modern drama. He grinds away through Gifford’s Pitt, and reads Hallam’s Middle Ages. ’My method has usually been, 1, to read over regularly; 2, to glance again over all I have read, and analyse.’ He was just as little of the lounger in his lighter reading. Schiller’s plays he went through with attention, finding it ’a good plan to read along with history, historical plays of the same events for material illustration, as well as aid to the memory.’ He read Scott’s chapters on Mary Stuart in his history of Scotland, ’to enable me better to appreciate the admirable judgment of Schiller (in Maria Stuart) both where he has adhered to history and where he has gone beyond it.’ He finds fault with the Temistocle of Metastasio, as ‘too humane.’ ’History should not be violated without a reason. It may be set aside to fill up poetical verisimilitude. If history assigns a cause inadequate to its effect, or an effect inadequate to its cause, poetry may supply the deficiency for the sake of an impressive whole. But it is too much to overset a narrative and call it a historical play.’ Then came a tragic stroke in real life.

DAYS IN SCOTLAND

October 6, 1833. Post hour to-day brought me a melancholy announcement the death of Arthur Hallam. This intelligence was deeply oppressive even to my selfish disposition. I mourn in him, for myself, my earliest near friend; for my fellow creatures, one who would have adorned his age and country, a mind full of beauty and of power, attaining almost to that ideal standard of which it is presumption to expect an example. When shall I see his like? Yet this dispensation is not all pain, for there is a hope and not (in my mind) a bare or rash hope that his soul rests with God in Jesus Christ.... I walked upon the hills to muse upon this very mournful event, which cuts me to the heart. Alas for his family and his intended bride. October 7th. My usual occupations, but not without many thoughts upon my departed friend. Bible. Alfieri, Wallenstein, Plato, Gifford’s Pitt, Biographia Literaria. Rode with my father and Helen. All objects lay deep in the softness and solemnity of autumnal decay. Alas, my poor friend was cut off in the spring of his bright existence.

December 13, Edinburgh. Breakfast with Dr. Chalmers. His modesty is so extreme that it is oppressive to those who are in his company, especially his juniors, since it is impossible for them to keep their behaviour in due proportion to his. He was on his own subject, the Poor Laws, very eloquent, earnest, and impressive. Perhaps he may have been hasty in applying maxims drawn from Scotland to a more advanced stage of society in England. December 17. Robertson’s Charles V., Plato, began book 10. Chalmers. Singing-lesson and practice. Whist. Walked on the Glasgow road, first milestone to fourth and back in 70 minutes the returning three miles in about 333/4. Ground in some places rather muddy and slippery. December 26. A feeble day. Three successive callers and conversation with my father occupied the morning. Read a good allowance of Robertson, an historian who leads his reader on, I think, more pleasantly than any I know. The style most attractive, but the mind of the writer does not set forth the loftiest principles. December 29th, Sunday. Twenty-four years have I lived.... Where is the continuous work which ought to fill up the life of a Christian without intermission?... I have been growing, that is certain; in good or evil? Much fluctuation; often a supposed progress, terminating in finding myself at, or short of, the point which I deemed I had left behind me. Business and political excitement a tremendous trial, not so much alleviating as forcibly dragging down the soul from that temper which is fit to inhale the air of heaven. Ja, 1834, Edinburgh. Breakfast with Dr. Chalmers. Attended his lecture 2-3.... More than ever struck with the superabundance of Dr. C.’s gorgeous language, which leads him into repetitions, until the stores of our tongue be exhausted on each particular point. Yet the variety and magnificence of his expositions must fix them very strongly in the minds of his hearers. In ordinary works great attention would be excited by the very infrequent occurrence of the very brilliant expressions and illustrations with which he cloys the palate. His gems lie like paving stones. He does indeed seem to be an admirable man.

Of Edinburgh his knowledge soon became intimate. His father and mother took him to that city, as we have seen, in 1814. He spent a spring there in 1828 just before going to Oxford, and he recollected to the end of his life a sermon of Dr. Andrew Thomson’s on the Repentance of Judas, ’a great and striking subject.’ Some circumstance or another brought him into relations with Chalmers, that ripened into friendship. ’We used to have walks together,’ Mr. Gladstone remembered, ’chiefly out of the town by the Dean Bridge and along the Queensferry road. On one of our walks together, Chalmers took me down to see one of his districts by the water of Leith, and I remember we went into one or more of the cottages. He went in with smiling countenance, greeting and being greeted by the people, and sat down. But he had nothing to say. He was exactly like the Duke of Wellington, who said of himself that he had no small talk. His whole mind was always full of some great subject and he could not deviate from it. He sat smiling among the people, but he had no small talk for them and they had no large talk. So after some time we came away, he pleased to have been with the people, and they proud to have had the Doctor with them. For Chalmers he never lost a warm appreciation, often expressed in admirable words ’one of nature’s nobles; his warrior grandeur, his rich and glowing eloquence, his absorbed and absorbing earnestness, above all his singular simplicity and detachment from the world.’ Among other memories, ’There was a quaint old shop at the Bowhead which used to interest me very much. It was kept by a bookseller, Mr. Thomas Nelson. I remember being amused by a reply he made to me one day when I went in and asked for Booth’s Reign of Grace. He half turned his head towards me, and remarked with a peculiar twinkle in his eye, “Ay, man, but ye’re a young chiel to be askin’ after a book like that."’

RELATIONS WITH CHALMERS

On his way south in January 1834, Mr. Gladstone stays with relatives at Seaforth, ’where even the wind howling upon the window at night was dear and familiar;’ and a few days later finds himself once more within the ever congenial walls of Oxford.

January 19, Sunday. Read the first lesson in morning chapel. A most masterly sermon of Pusey’s preached by Clarke. Lancaster in the afternoon on the Sacrament. Good walk. Wrote [family letters]. Read Whyte. Three of Girdlestone’s Sermons. Pickering on adult baptism (some clever and singularly insufficient reasoning). Episcopal pastoral letter for 1832. Doane’s Ordination sermon, 1833, admirable, Wrote some thoughts. Jan 20. Sismondi’s Italian Republics. Dined at Merton, and spent all the evening there in interesting conversation. I was Hamilton’s guest [afterwards Bishop of Salisbury]. It was delightful, it wrings joy even from the most unfeeling heart, to see religion on the increase as it is here. Jan 23rd. Much of to-day, it fell out, spent in conversation of an interesting kind, with Brandreth and Pearson on eternal punishment; with Williams on baptism; with Churton on faith and religion in the university; with Harrison on prophecy and the papacy.... Jan 24. Began Essay on Saving Faith, and wrote thereon. Jan 29th. Dined at Oriel. Conversation with Newman chiefly on church matters.... I excuse some idleness to myself by the fear of doing some real injury to my eyes. [After a flight of three or four days to London, he again returns for a Sunday in Oxford.] Feb 9. Two university sermons and St. Peter’s. Round the meadows with Williams. Dined with him, common room. Tea and a pleasant conversation with Harrison. Began Chrysostom de Sacerdotio, and Cecil’s Friendly Visit. [Then he goes back to town for the rest of the session.] Feb 12, London. Finished Friendly Visit, beautiful little book. Finished Tennyson’s poems. Wrote a paper on [Greek: ethike pistis] in poetry. Recollections of Robert Hall 13th. With Doyle, long and solemn conversation on the doctrine of the Trinity.... Began Wardlaw’s Christian Ethics. 26th, London. A busy day, yet of little palpable profit.... Read two important Demerara papers.... Rode. At the levee. House 51/2 11. Wished to speak, but deterred by the extremely ill disposition to hear. Much sickened by their unfairness in the judicial character, more still at my own wretched feebleness and fears. April 1. Dined at Sir R. Peel’s. Herries, Sir G. Murray, Chantrey, etc. Sir R. Peel very kind in his manner to us. May 29. Mignet’s Introduction [to ’the History of the Spanish succession,’ one of the masterpieces of historical literature]. June 4. Bruce to breakfast. Paper. Mignet and analysis. Burke. Harvey committee. Ancient music concert. Dined at Lincoln’s Inn. House 111/4-123/4. Rode. June 6. Paradise Lost. Began Leibnitz’s Tentamina Theodiceae. June 11. Read Pitt’s speeches on the Union in January, 1799, and Grattan on Catholic petition in 1805. 15th. Read some passages in the latter part of Corinne, which always work strongly on me. 18th. Coming home to dine, found Remains of A. H. H. Yesterday a bridal at a friend’s, to-day a sad memorial of death. ’Tis a sad subject, a very sad one to me. I have not seen his like. The memory of him reposes gently in my inmost heart, a fountain of tears which soften and fertilise it in the midst of pursuits whose tendency is to dry up the sources of emotion by the fever of excitement. I read his memoir. His father had done me much and undeserved kindness there. 20th. Most of my time went in thinking confusedly over the university question. Very anxious to speak, tortured with nervous anticipations; could not get an opportunity. Certainly my inward experience on these occasions ought to make me humble. Herbert’s maiden speech very successful. I ought to be thankful for my miss; perhaps also because my mind was so much oppressed that I could not, I fear, have unfolded my inward convictions. What a world it is, and how does it require the Divine power and aid to clothe in words the profound and mysterious thoughts on those subjects most connected with the human soul thoughts which the mind does not command as a mistress, but entertains reverentially as honoured guests ... content with only a partial comprehension, hoping to render it a progressive one, but how difficult to define in words a conception, many of whose parts are still in a nascent state with no fixed outline or palpable substance. July 2. ... Guizot. Cousin. Bossuet (Hist. Univ.). Rode. Committee and House. Curious detail from O’Connell of his interview with Littleton. 10th. 71/4 A.M.-71/2 in an open chaise to Coggeshall and back with O’Connell and Sir G. Sinclair, to examine Skingley [a proceeding arising from the Harvey committee], which was done with little success.

THE UNIVERSITY QUESTION

The conversation of the great Liberator was never wholly forgotten, and it was probably his earliest chance of a glimpse of the Irish point of view at first hand.

July 11. No news till the afternoon and then heard on very good authority that the Grey government is definitely broken up, and that attempts at reconstruction have failed. Cousin, Sismondi, Education evidence. Letters. House. 21st. To-day not for the first time felt a great want of courage to express feelings strongly awakened on hearing a speech of O’Connell. To have so strong an impulse and not obey it seems unnatural; it seems like an inflicted dumbness. 28th. Spoke 30 to 35 minutes on University bill, with more ease than I had hoped, having been more mindful or less unmindful of Divine aid. Divided in 75 v 164. [To his father next day.] You will see by your Post that I held forth last night on the Universities bill. The House I am glad to say heard me with the utmost kindness, for they had been listening previously to an Indian discussion in which very few people took any interest, though indeed it was both curious and interesting. But the change of subject was no doubt felt as a relief, and their disposition to listen set me infinitely more at my ease than I should otherwise have been. 29th. Pleasant house dinner at Carlton. Lincoln got up the party. Sir R. Peel was in good spirits and very agreeable.

It was on this occasion that he wrote to his mother, ’Sir Robert Peel caused me much gratification by the way in which he spoke to me of my speech, and particularly the great warmth of his manner. He told me he cheered me loudly, and I said in return that I had heard his voice under me while speaking, and was much encouraged thereby.’ He ends the note already cited (Sept 6, 1897) on the old House of Commons, which was burned down this year, with what he calls a curious incident concerning Sir Robert Peel, and with a sentence or two upon the government of Lord Grey:

Cobbett made a motion alike wordy and absurd, praying the king to remove him [Peel] from the privy council as the author of the act for the re-establishment of the gold standard in 1819. The entire House was against him, except his colleague Fielden of Oldham, who made a second teller. After the division I think Lord Althorp at once rose and moved the expunction of the proceedings from the votes or journals; a severe rebuke to the mover. Sir Robert in his speech said, ’I am at a loss, sir, to conceive what can be the cause of the strong hostility to me which the honourable gentleman exhibits. I never conferred on him an obligation.’ This stroke was not original. But what struck me at the time as singular was this, that notwithstanding the state of feeling which I have described, Sir R. Peel was greatly excited in dealing with one who at the time was little more than a contemptible antagonist. At that period shirt collars were made with ‘gills’ which came up upon the cheek; and Peel’s gills were so soaked with perspiration that they actually lay down upon his neck-cloth.

In one of these years, I think 1833, a motion was made by some political economist for the abolition of the corn laws. I (an absolute and literal ignoramus) was much struck and staggered with it. But Sir James Graham who knew more of economic and trade matters, I think, than the rest of the cabinet of 1841 all put together made a reply in the sense of protection, whether high or low I cannot now say. But I remember perfectly well that this speech of his built me up again for the moment and enabled me (I believe) to vote with the government.

A YEAR OF SPLENDID LEGISLATION

The year 1833 was, as measured by quantity and in part by quality, a splendid year of legislation. In 1834 the Government and Lord Althorp far beyond all others did themselves high honour by the new Poor Law Act, which rescued the English peasantry from the total loss of their independence. Of the 658 members of Parliament about 480 must have been their general supporters. Much gratitude ought to have been felt for this great administration. But from a variety of causes, at the close of the session 1834 the House of Commons had fallen into a state of cold indifference about it.

He was himself destined one day to feel how soon parliamentary reaction may follow a sweeping popular triumph.