nd more. A
politician of secondary rank had been accused of bribery at Derby, and a
band of tory friends thought the moment opportune to give him a banquet
at the Carlton. Mr. Gladstone in another room was harmlessly reading the
paper. Presently in came the revellers, began to use insulting language,
and finally vowed that he ought to be pitched headlong out of the window
into the Reform. Mr. Gladstone made some courteous reply, but as the
reporter truly says, courtesy to gentry in this humour was the casting
of pearls before swine. Eventually they ordered candles in another room,
and left him to himself.[276] 'You will perhaps,' he wrote to his wife,
'see an account of a row at the Carlton in which I have taken no harm.'
The affair indeed was trivial, but it illustrates a well-known and
striking reflection of Cornewall Lewis upon the assault perpetrated on
Sumner in the Senate at Washington by Brooks. 'That outrage,' he said,
'is no proof of brutal manners or low morality in Americans; it is the
first blow in a civil war.... If Peel had proposed a law not only
reducing rents, but annihilating them, instead of being attacked by a
man of words like Disraeli, he would have been attacked with physical
arguments by some man of blows.'[277]

In point of numbers the stroke given to protection was not tremendous,
but as the history of half a century has shown, it was adequate and
sufficient, and Lord Derby at once resigned. He did not take his defeat
well. 'Strange to say,' Mr. Gladstone wrote to his wife, 'Lord Derby has
been making a most petulant and intemperate speech in the House of Lords
on his resignation; such that Newcastle was obliged to rise after him
and contradict the charge of combination; while nothing could be better
in temper, feeling, and judgment than Disraeli's farewell.' Derby
angrily divided the combination that had overthrown him into, first,
various gradations of liberalism from 'high aristocratic and exclusive
whigs down to the extremest radical theorists'; second, Irish
ultramontanes; and lastly, a party of some thirty or thirty-five
gentlemen 'of great personal worth, of great eminence and
respectability, possessing considerable official experience and a large
amount of talent--who once professed, and I believe do still profess,
conservative opinions.'

Mr. Disraeli, on the contrary, with infinite polish and grace asked
pardon for the flying words of debate, and drew easy forgiveness from
the membe