er method; but he believed that Russia in reality was
still less desirous of a rupture, and that, if he played his game with
sufficient boldness and adroitness, she would yield, when it came to the
point, all that he required without a blow. It was clear that the
course he had marked out for himself was full of hazard, and demanded
an extraordinary nerve; a single false step, and either himself, or
England, might be plunged in disaster. But nerve he had never lacked;
he began his diplomatic egg-dance with high assurance; and then he
discovered that, besides the Russian Government, besides the Liberals
and Mr. Gladstone, there were two additional sources of perilous
embarrassment with which he would have to reckon. In the first place
there was a strong party in the Cabinet, headed by Lord Derby, the
Foreign Secretary, which was unwilling to take the risk of war; but his
culminating anxiety was the Faery.

From the first, her attitude was uncompromising. The old hatred of
Russia, which had been engendered by the Crimean War, surged up again
within her; she remembered Albert's prolonged animosity; she felt the
prickings of her own greatness; and she flung herself into the turmoil
with passionate heat. Her indignation with the Opposition--with anyone
who ventured to sympathise with the Russians in their quarrel with the
Turks--was unbounded. When anti-Turkish meetings were held in London,
presided over by the Duke of Westminster and Lord Shaftesbury, and
attended by Mr. Gladstone and other prominent Radicals, she considered
that "the Attorney-General ought to be set at these men;" "it can't,"
she exclaimed, "be constitutional." Never in her life, not even in the
crisis over the Ladies of the Bedchamber, did she show herself a more
furious partisan. But her displeasure was not reserved for the Radicals;
the backsliding Conservatives equally felt its force. She was even
discontented with Lord Beaconsfield himself. Failing entirely to
appreciate the delicate complexity of his policy, she constantly
assailed him with demands for vigorous action, interpreted each finesse
as a sign of weakness, and was ready at every juncture to let slip the
dogs of war. As the situation developed, her anxiety grew feverish. "The
Queen," she wrote, "is feeling terribly anxious lest delay should cause
us to be too late and lose our prestige for ever! It worries her night
and day." "The Faery," Beaconsfield told Lady Bradford, "writes every
day and